Cornflake wrote:Hello,
A new player on version FreeOrion-v0.4.4-7641 with a few observations. Things I would add to my wishlist as they would add to the enjoyment of playing. Some of these may be just the errors of a noob, but still if you are a noob, you are too new to know that.
I remember those times well, for what it's worth, some of the things that killed me horribly in my early games have been rewritten since I started scripting for the game
Space Monsters - i cannot tell if the "space monster" setting in the pre-game setup is for adjusting the quantity or fierceness or toughness of the monsters. my first game out, with 5 AI opponents, i was unable to travel between my systems because space monsters sat on a nearby system. they were too powerful for me to fight ( i had unlocked tech and built ships with something like 30-40 firepower and maybe 50 structure. these single monsters each had 2.2K structure). so i was unable to move ships or supplies. the monsters were too hard to fight. and they were slowly bombing my colonies out of existence. i expanded the map and counted 20 such monsters on the map. i had nearly 10 in my systems. i wound up resigning. next game i set monsters to none. there were 6 in that game. i had to restart the game for the "none" setting to kick in. I would ask for monsters not much higher in tech than the player. and never in such quantity - unless there was a monster hunt scenario ?
There is a monster hunt scenario, to an extent, there are three "win" conditions, tech, conquest and capture-if you capture the Experimentor homeworld you win, but they don't become active until the late game (hidden until turn 200) and don't launch the really scary beasties until the really late game (turn 300+. Impossible to tell but I suspect the monsters you were encountering were Experimentor beasties, Black Kraken, Bloated Juggernauts, etc. They are tough, but if you build some nice big hulls (Heavy Asteroid can do it, Fractals and Quantums are best at it) they can be defeated.
Theoretically, None for monsters now has zero monsters, at all, including Sentry monsters, but it won't stop Acirema natives creating Guard ships. If there were any monsters except Acirema guards on a None setting then there's a bug we need to look into.
Experimentors are going to be redesigned at some point to have a difficulty setting and similar, the problem we have for them is that experienced players (like me) don't find them a challenge at all anymore (but definitely did when we started) but new players can be overwhelmed by them, I think they add a huge amount of flavour to the game, which is why I scripted all the Sitreps that tell you they've launched monsters and give you links to the Pedia entries, were they showing for you?
Worth noting that there are static, non-moving sentries that aren't "monsters" as such and appear in systems with certain specials, but they shouldn't appear at all on Monsters:None, but aren't affected by Low/Medium/High monsters as they're not monsters as such, I hope to improve the text on that soon.
Design Tab - if i create a ship and hit "confirm design" i always get a "incompatible ship design" text near the top where the ship\hull name is. and if i hover the mouse over the now greyed out confirm button it will say "duplicate of ... whatever name i just gave my design". but the ship will usually show in my production options list. so i wasted a lot of time trying to figure out what i was doing wrong. i think what would help me is if the tooltip for a tech you want to research (like Asteroid Processing ) would warn you that you then cannot build certain ship types (like Asteroid hull-based ships).
Ah, new feature, yes, immediately after you've confirmed the design you can't confirm it again as it won't let you have multiples of the same design, perhaps we need a "confirmed" dialogue or something. It's far better than when you'd accidentally build multiples of the same ships tho, work in progress. If it won't let you complete a design, it's almost certainly because that design/part combination exists already, as far as I know that's the only thing that can block one.
Tech\Concentration Camps - why is this in the game ? I unlocked the tech and built one, thinking i could drop one or two on the enemy planets. a few turns later i get a popup saying my colony was destroyed and "depopulation was complete". It wiped out 20 million people and left my empire crippled (loss of production and research points). Why would this ever be used this way ? As a weapon yes, but there are easier ways to throw the game. Just hit the RESIGN button. I just don't understand this tech or how it is supposed to be used.
You don't move them around, you build them on conquered planets or planets with species you don't like in order to empty them by working the population to death.
Many of us thing that they're ridiculously overpowered in many respects, they're especially useful if you're playing one of the Xenophobic species.
AI Cheats - I have resigned a number of games recently because I thought the AI was "cheating". As soon as i get to the home planet of the AI player, a larger more powerful fleet springs up and vanquishes my fleet. Even when there are so few planets in the AI empire that they can not possibly have that many production points (or research points to unlock these Op ships). If i just attack the fringes of the empire I do not see this. But as soon as I orbit the home planet a huge fleet of ships with more firepower and structure than i could hope to face ( or have seen in game so far) appears and decimates my fleet, than goes after my colonies one-by-one. So there does not seem to be a way to win by defeating the AI player. Does not make for a fun game. I dare not try with more thane one AI player because of this. Am I not setting the game up properly before playing ? AI is set to "turtle".
Guarantee, the AI isn't cheating. Unlike in many 4X games, the AI gets exactly the same options as the players.
What I suspect might be happening, and this is a pure guess, is that you're not researching enough detection technologies (in the Intelligence section) so some or all of their fleets may be hidden, especially if they've got Asteroid tech or similar. If you're set to Turtle, then basically the AI won't do much to attack you unless/until you attack it, if you give them time to build up, then they will be undefeatable. I highly recommend a strategy of aggressive conquest in the early to mid game
First week of playing this game and I am a bit frustrated. I understand this is a labor of love from people who loved MOO II as much as I did. And I realize some of the issues I am seeing may be something I am doing wrong. However there is a chance these are thigns that can be addressed by the Devs and fixed for future releases. So I report these with that aim in mind.
Some of it is definitely mistakes your end (concentration camps don't work the way you thought, but are incredibly powerful), other bits are more likely to be unclear in game information which we know we need to work on, especially for the newish features that we playtested but haven't had much feedback on, the design window thing being the most obvious.
Having said that .... THANK YOU for making this game. I can only guess how many hours - after your dayjobs - this takes. Wish I could think of a way to help.
I second this, while I've done a fair bit of scripting and text improvement now, teh backend is way beyond me and I definitely appreciate it, it's one of the few 4X games that are worth repeated playing due to the lack of AI cheating and similar. Shame my laptop isn't really up to running it spec wise.
