Eliminating Spending

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that all planets are showing No Resources for Military but it's still costing me 6 BC per turn. Something is not right. This game may end up going the way of Space Empires IV: a nice idea but the execution was lacking.

~SDC~

I believe the 6BCs here are used to maintain your fleet. Fleet maintainance is accounted under military; planet improvements show up under 'maintainance' if I recall correctly.

~SDC~

Where did you find that information? I'm going on the basis that all Maintenance is accounted for under Maintenance, as it doesn't specify Planetary Maintenance.

~SDC~

1: Some of us enjoy the challenge of managing the budget; that it is difficult for you doesn't mean others don't enjoy it. Blaming beta testers won't change anything.

2: It might be a rounding function you're experiencing if it's not your military upkeep you're talking about, and if your GNP is sufficiently large.

3: If you want no spending, you must still spend on upkeep and tribute regardless of your wishes.

4: If it's not any of those move your tax slider up and down a bit to see if it won't get it to 0.

~SDC~

The remaining military spending is upkeep. I agree it should be seperated from regular spending so we can examine military and social maintenance clearly. Maybe we can remove that "GIA" slot or whatever to make room for military maintenance. Does anyone know what that entry represents anyway?

[Jeff George said] "Where did you find that information?" -- RTFM, p. 25 at the bottom of the page.

~SDC~

Hey, something's actually in the "manual"! Thanks, Skank!
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#4 by Diplomat Dearmad - 4/15/2003 1:15:29 PM
1: Some of us enjoy the challenge of managing the budget; that it is difficult for you doesn't mean others don't enjoy it. Blaming beta testers won't change anything.
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What are you going on about, Dearmad? Who said anything about enjoyment? I wanted clarification on game mechanics. As far as beta testers, are you saying that they should not have caught obvious bugs that people experienced in the very first game they played? What were the beta testers doing all that time they had the game? Ignoring issues? I dare you to state that they shouldn't have noticed the duplicate Trade Goods/Wonders bug.



~SDC~

There are a plethora of bugs that you will never see as the beta testers and developers squashed them, yet there is also no doubt that there will be a long list of bugs you will encounter because there were only so many of them with so much time to do their jobs. The bottom line is, GalCiv is not a horribly bug ridden game like some others out there. Could it be better? Perhaps, but it certainly does not help the situation by starting to assign blame now. You could have gotten your point across without taking a stab at the beta testers, so let's just leave it at that, alright?

Za H,

I place responsibility where responsibility lies. Making excuses is just that. I'm not concerned about offending people if speaking the truth offends. I'd just like to know why something as obvious as my example wasn't caught. No one can seem to give a legitimate answer.

~SDC~

What you have encountered is something that would normally be filed under the "confusing UI" department; it is not a horrendous game ending bug as the undertone of your original post implied. If the developers had a long list of items to tackle, I think it is fair to say that this issue would not be at the top of the list. For all we know, the beta testers could have reported this issue a million times, or none at all if it didn't bother them. While you were quick to assume that they were simply incompetent, you never considered the alternatives at all. That is why you are getting some negative responses from others on this forum, and I am simply trying to point that out. It's good to place responsibility where responsibility lies, but it is not very helpful to do when you cannot be certain where it lies.

In developer-speak it would be refered to as a Class C bug. To oversimplify:

Class A bugs are major problems, frequently involving either crashes, or _major_ gameplay problems. The really extreme ones in this category are refered to as "show stoppers."

Class B bugs are usually fairly serious problems, major graphical glitches, things that don't behave as they should, etc. These are distinct from Class A bugs in that they don't actually stop play, the game doesn't crash, or there are some annoying gameplay/graphic issues but you can continue on playing.

Class C bugs are minor things. There's a flicker when you switch from one screen to another, if you enter and exit the menu ten times the cursor changes color, or mispellings in the text.

The problem being described here is definitely a C bug. The programmers were probably walking into the office in the morning, and seeing a stack of ten or twenty A bugs, fifty or so B bugs, and quite likely 100 or more C bugs. Which do you think they're going to start on? (And this is _every_ day, fix two A bugs and a dozen B bugs today, and QA will have found just as many new ones for the next day)

Occasionally the head programmer or someone probably sorted through the bugs and assigned any class C bugs that would have been trivially easy to fix, but i don't think that rearanging a fair portion of the economics screen to fit that bit of information in would be judged very cost effective. Better to spend the time fixing one of the A class bugs.

Jeff George,

I'm so glad the truth and offense don't worry you. Here's some truth:

You mentioned enjoyment by way of implication. You declared your frustration; unless you enjoy frustration it would be typical for anyone to infer you were not enjoying something that frustrated you.

I was responding to only *your* issue with the game (not duplicated trade goods) and *your* blaming beta testers about it, when *you* are probably (in this case) just not informed enough about the game. There is a very good chance *your* bug here is simply because of *your* not understanding something. Place the blame squarely between the asterisks.

You said:
"This game is quickly devolving into an exercise in frustration and either the beta testers dropped the ball or it was prematurely released." or (I add) Jeff George didn't bother to try to figure out where his money was going in the game. It's not a bug, in this case, but the way something was done that you're having problems with.

~SDC~

Military Maint. is under your Military budget.

Not only does it make it easier for people to know whether it's heir planets sucking up their money but by lowering spending to 0, they can see how much their ships are using.

This is, as has been mentioned, in the manual.

You may disagree with the UI but that doesn't make it a bug.

Frogboy:

Any word on what the "GIA" or whatever entry in the same location is? I have never seen it rise above 0. If it's an obsolete item, perhaps we can replace it with an independent military maintenance figure instead?

If you think this game is buggy, go pick up an old copy of Daggerfall. Unpatched, it's unplayable.

~SDC~

Oh, it's *playable*. It's just not *fun* that way.

~SDC~