Initial thoughts on Beta 3Z (a bit long)
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I'm going to break this into two sections. The first section will be primarily bugs the second will be observations on game play.
Section 1 - Bugs
1. The AI races still aren't using the same tech tree as the player. The AI seems to be able to bypass the "Theory" techs at the start.
2. The Fog of War problem is still around. Whenever my range increases, due to colonizing or trading for a planet the FOW doesn't refresh properly. Ships still vanish beneath the FOW. A Ctrl-R fixes the problem.
3. On the Precursor Tech event - when finding the Corvette ship type...the word Corvette is misspelled as Corevette.
4. On the Yearly Report pop-up: At the bottom, where it summarizes your population growth: "Regardless of the causes, we have X.Y more people than we had before paying taxes." This would be better stated as "Regardless of the cause, we have X.Y more people paying taxes than this time last year."
5. If a research anomoly puts you past the completion point for the current tech there is no pop-up that notifies you of the completion. The game silently starts to research the first tech on the list.
6. At one point all planetary "Construction Complete" messages stopped showing up in an end-of-turn pop-up. The summary window in the lower right did still update.
Saving and reloading the game got things working correctly.
7. There is a "string not found" error on the planetary election pop-up. It showed up only once, when my party lost the election for the second time. All subsequent elections worked just fine. The "string not found" bit showed up just above where the summary of what losing the election translated to in game terms: -X to Y etc...
8. Morphing technology states that it improves combat ability but all the particulars regarding what it improves or what techs Morphing is a precursor for are missing from the technology display window.
9. Overlord technology - The descriptive text visible after researching the tech still refers to "Overlord" class ships as "Excalibur" class.
10. Terror Stars appear to have some work yet needed. Upon completion the graphic changed and it gained a movement of 2 but attack was 0 and defense was minimal.
Section 2 - Observations
a) The end of turn summary screens are very handy.
The new random events are interesting, especially the Precursor techs.
c) Beta 3Z is, so far, very stable. I had no crashes to the desktop.
d) The ship pathfinding problems seem to have been solved. Yeah!
e) We _really_ need some mechanism to assist in keeping track of where interesting planets and resources are in the galaxy.
f) I'm unable to tell whether the morale boosting resource is actually doing anything. Is it a civilization wide boost or only on planets in the sector, or something else?
g) Turn processing speed is much improved but there are still times when it's hard to tell whether the game is still processing something.
All in all this is a very solid piece of work. Thanks to all at Stardock who put 3Z together.
Section 1 - Bugs
1. The AI races still aren't using the same tech tree as the player. The AI seems to be able to bypass the "Theory" techs at the start.
2. The Fog of War problem is still around. Whenever my range increases, due to colonizing or trading for a planet the FOW doesn't refresh properly. Ships still vanish beneath the FOW. A Ctrl-R fixes the problem.
3. On the Precursor Tech event - when finding the Corvette ship type...the word Corvette is misspelled as Corevette.
4. On the Yearly Report pop-up: At the bottom, where it summarizes your population growth: "Regardless of the causes, we have X.Y more people than we had before paying taxes." This would be better stated as "Regardless of the cause, we have X.Y more people paying taxes than this time last year."
5. If a research anomoly puts you past the completion point for the current tech there is no pop-up that notifies you of the completion. The game silently starts to research the first tech on the list.
6. At one point all planetary "Construction Complete" messages stopped showing up in an end-of-turn pop-up. The summary window in the lower right did still update.
Saving and reloading the game got things working correctly.
7. There is a "string not found" error on the planetary election pop-up. It showed up only once, when my party lost the election for the second time. All subsequent elections worked just fine. The "string not found" bit showed up just above where the summary of what losing the election translated to in game terms: -X to Y etc...
8. Morphing technology states that it improves combat ability but all the particulars regarding what it improves or what techs Morphing is a precursor for are missing from the technology display window.
9. Overlord technology - The descriptive text visible after researching the tech still refers to "Overlord" class ships as "Excalibur" class.
10. Terror Stars appear to have some work yet needed. Upon completion the graphic changed and it gained a movement of 2 but attack was 0 and defense was minimal.
Section 2 - Observations
a) The end of turn summary screens are very handy.
The new random events are interesting, especially the Precursor techs.c) Beta 3Z is, so far, very stable. I had no crashes to the desktop.
d) The ship pathfinding problems seem to have been solved. Yeah!
e) We _really_ need some mechanism to assist in keeping track of where interesting planets and resources are in the galaxy.
f) I'm unable to tell whether the morale boosting resource is actually doing anything. Is it a civilization wide boost or only on planets in the sector, or something else?
g) Turn processing speed is much improved but there are still times when it's hard to tell whether the game is still processing something.
All in all this is a very solid piece of work. Thanks to all at Stardock who put 3Z together.
