Beta 2B initial impressions

'1. Starbases are still starting at 100 HP rather than the 500 they are supposed to.'

It's setting at whatever the constructor's HP stats are when it's built.

I know. I've been changing the starbase.ship file but I set it back to the original before updating to 2B to see whether it had been officially "fixed".

Continuing...

5. The sound failed once on me. A save and restore brought it back.

6. The game crashed to the desktop when I clicked on the minor races tab.

7. Occasionally the "production done" sound effect would play but no window would pop up. I then had to hunt through the planet list for the ones that needed tending.

8. Alliances were a diplomatic option before the tech was researched.

9. The game locked up as a ship moved into position to attack. I had to use the Windows 2000 task manager to regain control.

10. The computer is cheating like a bandit with ship movements. While at war with a race I would routinely see ship movements on the enemy side in the form of
-x/N where x was a negative number ranging from 1 to 170 and N was their max movement (in most cases a 5 or 6). Effectively the AI had infinite ship movement in certain circumstances.

This seems to be a side effect of the code that has attacks use movement points. I've noticed it happening with my ships when a ship reaches the end of it's movement points and then attacks.

11. The Altarian were allied with me and while I was at war with the Drengin they gave up and surrendered to them. That seems a bit odd as they weren't even at war with the Drengin. If they felt they couldn't make a go of it why not surrender to your ally?

12. Freighters arrived from the just surrendered Altarians and the trade route completed pop-up came up. That seems sorta pointless. There were also a few "ghost" ships of the Altarians left hanging around after they surrendered.

13. The scroll buttons on the social projects window on the Planet Detail screen still don't work.

14. There are sounds when enemy ships attack my planets but no sounds when my ships attack enemy planets. I do get sound effects when I attack enemy ships.

15. The game crashed to the desktop immediately after a United Planets vote to end all wars.

16. I like the new planets listing but the default sort is by ID, which isn't really generally useful, and the game always reverts to sort by ID when restoring.

17. Morale on high population planets is still a problem. Lucky Jack mentioned that there used to be a floor of around 40% for morale. I've ended up with morale in the 20's on high population planets even with all possible improvements built.

18. One of a kind trade goods that were being traded by a defunct race seem to vanish from the game along with the race.

19. I would very much like to see more improvements for the starbases.

Over all things are looking much better and the game is much more stable.
Cheers
Magus

Spoke too soon...

20. The AI still doesn't seem to grasp when it's in a war situation that it can not make headway in. It will accept a peace treaty if I offer it but it never seems to offer one on it's own.

'13. The scroll buttons on the social projects window on the Planet Detail screen still don't work.'

To add to this, the game doesn't always match the project to the correct project information on the Planet Detail screen. It does appear correctly without fail on the Build list.

What he said: In my last game, I had two Galactic Exhibitions and a Political Capital that, when clicked on, resulted in the planet trying to build an Economic Capital. When it was done, I could click Political Capital again for another planet which would then again begin researching Economic Capital. The first planet's Morale would then collapse back to 36 from 100.

I had also either traded for Avatar but Avatar never showed up in the ship build list (maybe I traded for precursor research subjects and never got Avatar in my Research list).

-Robert

Scratch my last bug--the avatar thing was my error.

-Robert

Any comments from Stardock, especially on items 2,3, and 10 - 18?

I'll ask.

On item 13: I think the comment is about the social projects "completed" list (that is the list on the planet detail screen). This has been a problem for as long as I can remember, and it was reported a long time ago when the list first appeared, long before the first Beta build.

On item 17: I am still playing around with this trying to find something definitive to demonstrate the problem. With my current game I only have one planet with a high population (60.5 but it looks like it has run up against the class population limit (it is a class 31). I have not yet researched Terraforming so I can't boost its class yet. However, here is my current theory on what is happening and what I am looking for: The growth of such a large planet, even at 1%, will be huge (605M people). I am not sure what the morale curve is like, but I suspect it is not up to handling the growth of a huge population. So I would expect my 60.5B at 53% to grow by 4% (up 2.4 B to 62.9 and the morale to plummit. Eventually I expect the morale to drop from above 40% to below 30% in one turn. This is just a theory at this point that seems to bear out what I have been seeing in past games, so I have to run my tests while observing the results to verify or disprove it. This will take some time. Of course, if SD finds my theory worth checking into, so much the better. I have been wrong before and I am not afraid of stating theories like this and having them being shown as wrong. I even sometimes find out I am wrong myself, in which case I say so. But I will share theories from time to time just to try to get help in solving a problem.

Cheers,

1. Actually, the manual is wrong. We may play with the starting value a bit, but 500 HP is a bit insane for a starting value, particularly when you'll be able to upgrade it. I kept forgetting to verify this with Brad, which is why I haven't addressed this earlier.

2-3 are in Brad's realm

5. I still haven't figured out what is causing the sound problems. I thought that maybe it was multiple calls to the play function, but I made it ignore repeated calls, and apparently the problem still exists.

6. I believe that Scott has fixed this.

7. Yeah, we are still having some timing issues with the projects and their messages.

8. Fixed

9. This is probably also being caused by ships having negative movement points.

10. I think that I have this fixed now.

11. I asked Brad about this and he said that it's because it's more realistic. In WW2, France surrendered to Germany instead of Great Britain or the United States to keep the Germans from slaughtering all the French.

12. I'm not sure why this happened, as they're supposed to be scuttled (destroyed) when they surrender.

13. We should have the planet details screen fixed by the end of the week.

14. I'll look into it.

15. I told Scott about this and he's going to look into it

16. I'll have it save the sort in the future. I didn't have time to implement that last week.

17. We still have to tweak the improvements, I think.

18. Added to my list.

19. We'll be putting more work into starbases as soon as we get the resources in.

20. Hmm...I've seen AI players surrender to each other, so maybe it's just not checking for the human player or something...