FreeOrion

Just wanted to write down a few things here, skip over the parts that you already know about or are already covered in another topic.

First of all, I'd like to say this game is coming along quite nicely . This last months release has seen some great improvements. But here are a few things I've noticed that need looking at.

Enclave of the Mind- I'm not sure if the effect of this structure was SUPPOSED to be accumilative but all you need to do is build 4-5 of these and your research potential goes to the thousands. Kinda like a "cheat" button for researching for players.

The AI is branching out and putting outposts nicely, however that's all it's doing. The AI uses troop ships to take over neutral settlement(it even took over one of mine!). But aside from the initial colony ship you start out with, all the AI does is create outposts on asteroids and gas giants, it doesn't settle any actual new planets.

The combat is what is troubling me right now. When one of your ships is over an enemy settlement, your situation report says "A battle was fought HERE". But the only damage that seems to be done to the planet at all is on the construction value. Not the population or heath or any defenses. Is this supposed to happen?

The new planetary defense is good, but right now its WAY too strong. I'm not sure how combat is resolved at this point and time, but it seems to me that two outposts with a population of 1 and a defense of 5 should NOT be able to wipe out a fleet of 4 ships with 40 HP and 40 shields.

The AI is building ships, ALOT of them in fact. But the problem is that they can't seem to be able to build anything beyond a Mark II. This is because the AI isn't building any new structures yet. The Mark III and IV both take a new hull that takes a new structure to make it from. Can the AI switch out parts yet to use new tech? Maybe a whole slew of new premade ships like the Mark series can be introduced to help this along.

Is there gonna be an "engine" ship part coming soon to help with improve starlane and combat speed? My heavy asteroid ships take forever to get anywhere......

Does stealth effect combat at all? Or is it just something to effect travel on the map screen.

Any feedback would be appreciated. Thanks for all your work and effort.

That sounds like it's working as intended.
There have been several similar reports of weird combat results, but despite repeated requests for saves that reproduce the situation, no-one has yet provided one.
This has already been done in the SVN version.
No; hulls have built-in engines. If you want faster ships, build ships with faster hulls.
No (not yet).

Well, i added designs that include all of the first eight weapons.
What happens if i add a bunch more? Does the AI have a way to choose the best available design, or is it random?

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I'm not sure how the AI decides what ships to build... From skimming the code, it looks like it will try to build one of each ship design that has weapons when its top priority is to build military ships.

I also note that the ship designs for exploration, colonization, scouting, and troops are being identified by their english names, which will probably cause problems on other translations. It should be looking at their stringtable entry labels, which are translation-independent.

I believe you can't even mod them in (yet). The SetStarlaneSpeed effect doesn't appear to do anything, and SetSpeed causes an error. If memory serves me well the latter wasn't recognized by the interpreter as an effect name at all (while ships have both a speed and a starlaneSpeed attribute).

SetStarlaneSpeed is presently nonfunctional because of how ship speeds are determined from the ship design; rather than creating effects to set the ship's starlane speed meter, the speed is instead taken directly from the stat specified in the hull type definition. This means any SetStarlaneSpeed effect, which modifies the meter, won't actually function, despite being accepted by the effects parser.

SetSpeed is not a valid effect, and should be causing errors if you attempt to use one. The Speed property probably doesn't work as you expect it to; Ships's don't actually have a speed meter, but "Speed" will be recognized as one and it will attempt to look up the ship's speed meter value, and not finding one, it should return 0. The Speed meter is actually just there to be used as a property of ship parts like missiles or fighters that will have a speed they move around the battle map.

Speed should probably be referencable to get the current speed of a ship or fleets on the galaxy map, and doing so shouldn't be difficult, but it doesn't look like it will presently work that way.

Why is that, by the way? After all, there is current and max value for planetary defense, and I don't think it was ever the plan to make planetary defenses invincible...

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I didn't want to deal with any potential game-breaking issues or (more likely) extreme annoyances with having battles reduce planet meters.

Also, it might be better to have orbital bombardment be an explicit order, rather than having ships automatically do so when in a battle with a planet. In the specific case of the defense meter, it probably makes sense to do so without an order, but for the general case, probably not.

It seems that the AIs prefer grinding defense techs, and neglect weaponry in favour of growth or production ability (perhaps affected by the fact that they attack/raid with one ship at a time, and they will learn techs that improve production over weapons since they think they absolutely need to replace a ship. The fact that they don't have a battle odds estimator means they will stubbornly attack monsters like Krakens with their Mark I's until they have control of the vicinity doesn't help either). There's a chance they somehow haven't learned the techs (in my most recent playtest, over the course of 200 turns, they still don't have mass driver 3...? no Mark III's ever). They still have the major problem of producing Mark I's when they have Mark II's, and I haven't seen them create Mark III's or better yet. As of now I think they will randomly choose a design and build it. Do save files keep track of the techs the AIs have learned? Maybe implementing a code that forces the AI to improve its weaponry at certain points could help them out (say learn a certain weapon tech once the turn count hits a certain number; this number is different for all weapons and their refinements).

The techs necessary to unlock Mark III's weren't in the list of AI's techs worth researching. I've added them, and then saw a Mark III in game. Later ship designs should also be available.
I think the AIs presently just enqueue one of each design they know, or possibly pick a design randomly from the available combat designs. They don't know how to decide which is better.
Yes... It wouldn't be a very useful save file if player tech research wasn't recorded.
There's a bunch of AI prioritization code in place, though it's based on the AIs evaluation of its situation and what it most needs to do, not a particular turn number.

New Observastion for newer Version Posted Feb 5

Things are moving along nicely . I can tell you guys are putting tons of hours into this game. As a fan of MOO2 I'm getting into this game.

AI is now making newer and bigger version ships as the tech becomes available to them. Still no new structures though but I suppose you already know that.

AI is now using Colony Ship and Colonizing new planets. But from what I've seen that's all it's doing. No Outpost ships at all now, kinda a reverse of what it was before. Also AI has only been colonizing "Good" planets to it's species, no adequate or poor at all from what I've seen.

I played a game at maximum stars and max AI opponents just to see how the lag between turns was(it was horrible before), and I found it to be much improved. Awesome

I'd like to see some tech that improves weapon damage, shields and other mods. Much like there's tech to make small improvements to farming and ind and research.

Is there going to be a "Victory Message" soon? If you kill all the AI or research the last tech nothing special happends. It just goes to the next turn.

Non-aggresive monsters shouldn't disrupt supply lines. After all, it seems that planetary defenses don't fire at floaters and trees because they don't attack at all. That gets really annoying.

Thanks for all your time and attention.

A reasonable suggestion. I'll try modifying the supply obstruction code to only consider armed enemy ships and monsters as able to disrupt supply lines. That should prevent monsters that don't attack planets / get attacked by planets from disrupting supply lines.

That sort of defeats the purpose of having those monsters at all, doesn't it...?

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Not necessarily; some of them spawn monsters that do attack things.

Yeah. Weaponless krill spawn weaponed krill, but weaponless floaters spawn weaponless forests.
The concept of the dyson forest for instance was that it made routine travel hazardous, but didn't attack. Thus stopped supply but didn't harm military ships. The same thing for the smaller krill. I think I put that in the pedia descriptions.

I don't really understand what about the current situation was "annoying". The weaponless monsters didn't enjoy any sort of immunity did they? Since they are now pointless most/all of them will need to be given weapons-- so this just increases the danger of monsters overall.
Opinions may differ, but I liked having a nuisance class of monsters that couldn't hurt your ships, but could disrupt unguarded supply.

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