FreeOrion

Played about 1100 turns over two games so far. Thoroughly Enjoying it so far. My deepest thanks to all those who are working on this wonderful project. This is a list of notes I have compiled over the time I've played. Some are bugs, some are suggestions, some are me not knowing what to do, and some are just observations I've had. I know there are forums for each, But I figured I'd try to keep it simple. I know some of these have probably been discussed in the past, so you can either ignore those, or point me in the direction of the most productive discussion on that topic. As I said, these are just notes, so read them as somebody scribbling them down as they play.


FO 0.3.15 Notes:

Not fully sure on how the starlane resource distance is calculated. I've been basically been trying to populate a system as fast as possible, hoping to expand it's reach, Haven't found (even in the wiki) a clean explanation.

Occasionally clicking the (X) SitRep button while not having the game window (running in windowed mode) focused first Forces another turn. In fact, clicking most action buttons cause it to jump ahead. Clicking on anything that does something will advance turn.

Cannot figure out how to access Greater (and above) Industrial Center.

20'c+ Spike in GPU temp on average when running FO. No other program does this to my machine. Graphics are very smooth and fluid though. Very professional appearing. Running FO at full graphics, early game I'm getting 30-60 fps, late game 20-30. Windowed mode, Geforce Nividia 7800GTX, C2D 1.66, 4 GB ram, XP, 2tb RAID 5 (3x1 tb)

SitReps for the previous X turns would be nice, to allow for missed events.

The ability to peel off individual ships from a fleet, just not shatter a whole fleet.

Inclusion of Ground troops, Cannot capture a planet without putting men on the ground.

Unable to figure out how to move a planet to an empty system, as the text describes having to place a beacon on an outpost. Impossible if the system is empty.

Can't unselect a focus, ie return to a balanced focus. (Saw recent thread on this, FWIW, my .02 thinks it should be an option, especially for early in the game)

Notification (in the sitrep) when an out of fuel and out of range ship has regained enough fuel to travel again.

Multi-turn advancement. Would Move ahead X turns or until a Sitrep report was generated. Would help early in the game.

Slightly different colored names for explored and unexplored systems.

Some way to display last saved game. (I have stupidly used the same player name for both games)

Heavy mining only seems to have a effect on the focus of the planet the building is on. Other planets have no advantage of HM over regular mining, even though option exists. In fact sometimes it lowers potential output by a large margin. Frequently also lowers output even on planets with the building.

Notification in the SitRep that a terraforming project has completed, old planet -> new planet, and not just completion of the building construction.

On the total resources bar across the top, a mouseover would reveal totals, allowing players to estimate how far ahead/behind they are in mineral production.

Option to have a turn timer. After x seconds, it will auto advance the turn. After X turns, it won't go any farther until a manual advance is hit. I bump over to other windows after I'm done making moves and I forget to advance the turn, a timer would be nice. Just clicking the timer would remove it for this turn. Give 20, 10 and 5 seconds beeps and warnings.

Reverse terraforming, or planet detonation. The ability to destroy a planet to create an asteroid field. May want to include a buff to asteroid fields (similar to mineral rich) to give incentive to destroy Large/huge barrens vs smaller ones. Could also be used if you are forced into a scorched earth retreat.

Don't seem to get subterranean bonuses on hostile planets. You'd think that's where they'd get the most bonus.

Some sort of sortable report screen. Ie, I can search by my planets, w/ farming focus, and show their buildings. I can then form there select multiple planets to build industrial farms on.

Effects of unemployment. When industry is not being used, that means the workers are unemployed, and may riot or something. Health on the planets should decrease on industry focused planets .1 per turn whenever < 50% of industry is being utilized per turn. There should be a researchable that allows 25% to 50% of the under-utilized industry to be applied to research after 5 turns of under-utilization, and negates the health loss, takes 5 turns to return to full usage after being needed.

The ability to sort the Fleet lists, like the production/research queues. Drag and Drop.

Famines should not kill the entire population, just what is unsustainable by food production. Or have a sliding scale. Planet health is reduced by 1-5 points per turn depending on the severity of the famine. Civilizations with orbital farming should never lose an entire population due to famine, there should always be 2 food available. I've lost entire colonies w/ orbital farming due to famine.

BUG: Once (lost the saves, sorry) initiating battle (in a separate system) caused all my orbital farms (in multiple systems) to disappear, losing 3-4 colonies.

Fleet View, lists all fleets everywhere in one window. Sometimes colony ships get lost at planets that have combat fleets stationed at them.

Revolutions and creations of new players if a planet's Health (or some other index) drops below a certain level. Low traffic or distance from capital would increase likelihood of a revolt.

Ability to right-click an item in the research/production queue and instantly promote it to first, after a dropdown menu similar to the fleet right-click menu.

The ability within the fleet window, to slide the internal divider up and down. Sometimes I have a lot of fleets, and sometime I have A lot of ships.

The Bio-terror focus doesn't seem to work as of yet (assuming it's not implemented yet). But as an Idea, if you sense you are being attacked by one (health meter is dropping), and you figure out where it is coming from (ie only moon in range), if you attack it (that system), it brings it's existence into common knowledge of that empire's population, preventing that empire from using bio terror for like 20 turns or so.

Recycling Ships- As ships become obsolete, it would be a cool option to be able to send them to a shipyard with a Recycling Center Building Upgrade, that would return like 75% of the mineral value of the production cost of the ship. Maybe even force decommissioning of ships as they age, say like every 250-300 turns they can be refitted for a couple turns, or decom'd.

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Loving this game, even without the combat system in place yet. The fact you can design your own ships is FANTASTIC. Give's a very mechwarrior type feel to it . On that note, I think the premade (aside from the colony and scout ships you're provided with to start) designs should be removed, to allow/force my innovation/initiative by the player.

Thank you FO team!

Another idea:

Check boxes, or some indicator, on the buildable items list, indicating which items have already been built on the currently selected planet.

Under finished Hull Designs, the base Hull could be listed.

There is a buggy, but functional, FPS limit setting in the video options. Try enabling that and lowering it to 20 FPS. Updating video drivers might also help.


Not sure what you mean by this, but you can drag drop ships onto the new fleet thingie, or into other fleets at the same location.


There is a scrap ship option, that destroys the ship, though doesn't give anything back. Works on buildings as well.

Welcome.

Construction Meter/20, rounded down.

Wow. That sounds like a pretty bad bug that was not there last time I played/tested.

IIRC, your Industrial Centers are upgraded automatically when you research the refinement.

As Geoff mentioned, there is indeed a "new fleet thingie" in the fleet window, into which individual ships can be drag-dropped. Likewise, they can be drag-dropped into an existing fleet to be added to that fleet.

This is a limitation of the game engine and available effects. It's highly unlikely... OK, it's completely impossible that the planetary starlane drive will exist in its current form in the final game.

It's not clear from the tech description, but the bonus from the mining focus is largely independent of population, whereas the bonus from heavy mining is primarily dependent on population. Regular mining is based mostly on planet size, with smaller planets being at an advantage. If you want to mine effectively on larger, more populous planets, you need heavy mining.

If you mean a galactic total for all races, that wouldn't work. The idea in FO is that the player isn't given arbitrary knowledge about enemy empires, but rather has to earn that knowledge through the stealth/detection system, and espionage.

In this case, the idea was that players who focus on the Construction tree would improve the planets that are already good for them, and players who focus on the Growth tree would improve bad planets to the point where they are about as good as their optimal planets.

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Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

Tried, it no-go.



Let's say I have 10 ships in a fleet. In order to seperate them into 2 fleets, I have to disband the whole fleet. It would be nice to be able to seperate a single ship from a fleet so the original fleet still exists, minus a ship or two. I can then drag/drop the seperated ships into a new fleet, or send them off on their own.



Ah.. Ty... makes sense now.




OK.... just saw that now....




No, I mean research and production show the total for your empire, while Food and Minerals show reserves and gain/loss. Having a mouse over show total production for food and minerals would be nice. That way we can see how far ahead or behind minerals is vs production, and food vs population. Maybe including expected change for next turn would help too, as it would help players plan any focus switches they have to make.

Ie if I just switched 2 production planets to mining, it could show the projected change, so I don't "over switch" planets, and then have to reverse the switches in 20 turns when I have way too much mining. Something that would show the "acceleration' of the change meter. Hard to explain my idea here.


Couple other notes I have:

SitRep does not specify WHICH asteroid belt has been Colonized. Maybe renaming the A-belts to something like "Sol Asteroid Belt I". The ability to click on it though, is nice.

Cancelling a colonization won't allow same ship to colonize again that turn. This may be intentional and possibly a good thing to force players to plan ahead better, but misclicks do happen.

Asteroid shipyards can't produce Neutronium parts. Again, possibly intentional, but a major pain.

Enclave's of the void stack to insane bonuses. I have one planet that right now has a max of 22k research. I'm not playing that long though .



And I'm hoping there's various levels of AI's selectable when you do incorporate them, as I'm thoroughly enjoying this game even without AI right now. Hate to get my butt kicked each time I played cause there was only one difficulty setting.

Mm, yeah that would be nice.

Yeah, showing the combined value for all the target meters might be useful as well.

IIRC, the sitrep tells you which system it's in doesn't it? And after that, you have the freedom to rename it to whatever you want.

I noticed that a long time ago... I thought it had been fixed, though. Perhaps it's been fixed post-v.3.15.

I don't see anything in the part descriptions that could account for that. Did you make sure to build a Neutronium Forge at the same location?

That's my bad. I apparently forgot to add a stackinggroup to that building's description. Only one Enclave of the Void should ever be operational in a single empire.

Yeah, I think that's the plan.

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Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

Actualy, it doesn't. It just says Asteroid Belt. So if I settled, or built upon, a bunch of asteroid belts in the same turn, it just spams the same message. But Clicking on it does focus the correct system, so It's not a big deal. Was not aware I could rename.


I don't see anything in the part descriptions that could account for that. Did you make sure to build a Neutronium Forge at the same location?[/quote]

Was not able to as they cannot (IIRC, and I believe I've tried a couple times) build Forges upon outposts.



Again, thanks for all your work!

Odd... apparently it was deliberate, since it's actually written into the in-game textual description, but I don't remember doing it, or why. I doubt it was deliberately to make it so asteroid shipyards can't make Neutronium parts... I'll probably end up changing that.

_________________
Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.