Feedback from a long time gamer, first time freeorioner

[cseraphi]

I've played FreeOrion a few times now (MacOSX; 4.4 SV 7641) and had fun doing it. Here's some feedback.

All this is in my opinion as someone who has been playing TBS games since Pax Imperia and MOO 1, so just assume that "IMHO" is sprinkled into every line of my post. I'm also not very up on the current discussion/design/politics/whatever of the game, so forgive me if some of this has been hashed out or touches on a controversial issue.

Building Stuff

• The way construction queues work (it takes time to build stuff, not just resource points) is great. Far better than the old Civ or MOO way.
• I didn't see much difference between big, established planets and new colonies in terms of how much stuff I could pump into it. Seems strange that a newly conquered planet could jam out as much junk as my capital.
• I spent a lot of unenjoyable time trying to figure out where my wasted points were going. It would be helpful if clicking on the "wasted industry" button took me to any one arbitrary system where some wasted points were available to be spent; I can easily figure out what is happening from there.
• At least until custom artwork becomes available for every building, you might want to consider colorcoding the icons or allowing them to be replaced with text. I spent a *lot* of time mousing around one pixel at a time trying to figure out "does this planet have a lighthouse, or a sensor array?"
• The 'unavailable' tabs confused me at first, but once I figured out what they were for it became one of my favorite features. "Oh, I can't build that because I can't get to the Neutronium Extractor anymore, got it!" So much better than having things just vanish from the options.
• It would be glorious if the ship-building queue had the attack/defense/speed/shield numbers visible in it.
• Could the planetary defense techs unlock buildings (minefields, garrison, defenses) rather than just giving everything a bump? I like the planets fighting as a nice simple whole, but it would be fun to be able to feel like you are fortifying a critical planet rather than just clicking 'defense focus' and magic happens.

General UI

• I do know you guys are moving away from OGRE, so hopefully that will address this point-- the game is so, soo slow. I know very little about the frameworks involved, but as a player I just can't get my head around why a static map where nothing is happening should max out my CPUs, why I have to type at about 1 character per 5 seconds (making a fleet rename a real ordeal), etc. This is the number one complaint about the game.
• This is probably just a Mac thing, but I could not find a good way to background the game when in full-screen mode. This meant I had to quit or go to hamburger->options->fullscreen every time I received an IM or something.
• If there is a keyboard shortcut to toggle fullscreen I couldn't find it. Given how hard it is to mouse around (see first bullet in this section), not having to visit the options menu would have been a blessing.
• The game really didn't like monitors changing sizes. If I ran the game on a big external display, then restarted it on my laptop when it was untethered, I had to visit config.xml to kill the fullscreen setting because there was no way to get to the Options menu (since it was draw off-screen).

Main Map

• I found the 'clouds' ('molecular clouds', etc) to be interesting but frustrating. It's not clear which systems are impacted, especially if you have most of the graphics options cranked down to improve performance. It would be nice if a little warning popped up in the star-system's menu, or it changed color or something.
• I've played this game over 100 hours and I still don't know why some star systems are italicized and some are not. That sort of information would be great if it was readily explained in-game somehow.
• What's the point of systems that have stars/blackholes but no planets? Other than making me waste a lot of time clicking, it seems pointless. Looking at the main map should help you understand the strategic situation, and putting stars in empty-space sectors just muddles things.
• If isolated supply grids could have a different color (or something) than your main grid it would be GREAT. Maybe assign each race two colors, one for the grid containing the capital and an alternate color for all others? That would make it possible to look at the galaxy and immediately diagnose most supply problems.
• Speaking of which, I never did figure out what 'supply points' and 'infrastructure points' really do. I stopped building Space Elevators because they didn't seem to actually do anything obvious, but suspect I was missing something. It'd be great if the cyclopedia explained this a little better; it is rich in in-universe flavor text but sometimes lacking in actual game information.

Objects Window
Like a lot of TBS gamers, I find much of the fun to be in designing efficient systems, and much of the fail to be in clicking around looking for stuff.

• The available columns in the objects (3 circles button) window seem to have many things I don't need and few of what I do. For instance, if I want to see if any of my former frontier planets were still erroneously left in 'defense' focus, I find that I can sort by "turns since focus change" but not the actual focus itself. Frustrating! Some columns that really ought to be available: Focus, Planet Type (swamp/desert/etc), presence of friendly or hostile ships in system, in supply or not, population, defense, industry.
• I could not figure out how to do more than one filter at a time, which severely curtails the usefulness. If that feature exists, it should probably be made more intuitive to use.

Sitrep
The sitrep is awesome! Here are a few things that I think would make it even better:

• Add a filter for 'Foreign ship/fleet arrived in a sector containing or adjacent to an object you own'. I care a lot about enemy ships moving up to attack me next turn, but don't care at all about the guys in their rear areas. Most turns 2/3 of my sit rep was "empire X moved a ship somewhere you don't care about".
• Make the repair messages collapse by fleet, so instead of 50 "ship X was repaired by Orbital Drydock...." messages I get "50 ships in fleet X were repaired by ...".
• Can ship names contain a parenthetical class name? After a certain point I don't remember all my ship names any more, and a message like "The Foobar II (Self-Gravitating I) was damaged...." would save me a lot of clicking as I try to figure out if it is a ship I care about or not.

Fleets
The fleet management is very well done.

• Some sort of damage indicator would be very helpful. I often find myself hovering over all the structural points trying to figure out if a ship is hurt or not, if I don't have that classes max-structure memorized. Maybe just turning it another color if it is not at full strength?
• The hovertext for offense does not have the sort of detail the other fields have. It'd be nice to see that the reason this ship X damage is because it has 3 Plasma-4s modified by the exobot crew.
• When the ship names and the class names are long the detail gets very crowded and the text overlaps. The class name is much more important than the ship name-- how about we put the class first, and instead of overlapping you just truncate the ship names? People who are interested in the ship names can widen the window, but the more gameplay-impacting class name will be always readable.

Misc Mechanics
Generally speaking these are great, very well thought out.

• I could find nothing in the cyclopedia telling me if stealth/perception actually has an impact on tactical combat or not. Stealth crops up everywhere in the interface so I assume it's important, but since lasers never seem to miss I have no idea if it actually does anything (other than make things harder to interact with on the strategic map).
• I exhausted the research tree very quickly; I'd suggest making the mid and especially late-game techs much more expensive. Not only does that keep research in the game longer, but it avoids the frustrating phenomenon of a technology being superceeded before you really get a chance to play with it.
• Just a feature suggestion: I'd like to see the defense focus provide large modifiers for fights that take place in the system; this would have the interesting effect of making a surprise attack more successful than an attack on a prepared location.

Overall: A solid game. The performance issue is the only reason I'm not playing it all the time. Good work!

[Geoff the Medio]

...I can sort [the objects list] by "turns since focus change" but not the actual focus itself.

In the latest test builds, this works fine.

[MatGB]

I've played FreeOrion a few times now (MacOSX; 4.4 SV 7641) and had fun doing it. Here's some feedback.

All this is in my opinion as someone who has been playing TBS games since Pax Imperia and MOO 1, so just assume that "IMHO" is sprinkled into every line of my post. I'm also not very up on the current discussion/design/politics/whatever of the game, so forgive me if some of this has been hashed out or touches on a controversial issue.

This is a nice set of feedback, thank you. For what it's worth, some of your suggestions have already been implemented in Trunk and will be in teh next stable release, but you can if you like try the most recent Test releases which are available for Mac, given we have dumped Ogre and made a few other refinements you may find the lag problem is lessened (it is a problem and there have been various projects to reduce it over time, most of which go way over my head).

As I'm a Windows user, I'm going to only respond to the stuff I can, not the Mac specific UI stuff.

Building Stuff

• The way construction queues work (it takes time to build stuff, not just resource points) is great. Far better than the old Civ or MOO way.
• I didn't see much difference between big, established planets and new colonies in terms of how much stuff I could pump into it. Seems strange that a newly conquered planet could jam out as much junk as my capital.

We're working on ways of changing that, especially for churning out ships quickly, but how far we want to go restriction wise is a difficult balance, there have already been some changes (you'll have noticed the unused "Happiness" mechanic, in the most recent tests newly conquered planets go to zero happiness and can't do certain things until they reach a certain point)

[*] I spent a lot of unenjoyable time trying to figure out where my wasted points were going. It would be helpful if clicking on the "wasted industry" button took me to any one arbitrary system where some wasted points were available to be spent; I can easily figure out what is happening from there.

Theoretically, this should happen, if it doesn't there may have been a bug, it definitely works that way in Windows and has done for as long as I can remember. Also, not clearly explained, the thick starlanes change colour within the Resource Groups that aren't using all their production as a visual map key.

[*] At least until custom artwork becomes available for every building, you might want to consider colorcoding the icons or allowing them to be replaced with text. I spent a *lot* of time mousing around one pixel at a time trying to figure out "does this planet have a lighthouse, or a sensor array?"

I've recently gone in and changed a lot of the buildings that were using the generic building to be using specific stuff, in some cases I reused old art that wasn't as ideal, I have to be honest and admit I forgot the Lighthouse and the Scanner used the same art, that ought to change, at the very least someone could colour swap one of them. Ideally every building has unique art, however if you just hold the mouse steady you should get a tooltip telling you what it is.

[*] The 'unavailable' tabs confused me at first, but once I figured out what they were for it became one of my favorite features. "Oh, I can't build that because I can't get to the Neutronium Extractor anymore, got it!" So much better than having things just vanish from the options.

Agreed, I rarely use it, but when I do it's very useful.

[*] It would be glorious if the ship-building queue had the attack/defense/speed/shield numbers visible in it.

You can click the item and it'll call up the design pedia entry, which has recently been expanded to have a lot more detail within it, I suspect displaying it in the queue itself would require more processing than it's worth, and lag's already a problem.

[*] Could the planetary defense techs unlock buildings (minefields, garrison, defenses) rather than just giving everything a bump? I like the planets fighting as a nice simple whole, but it would be fun to be able to feel like you are fortifying a critical planet rather than just clicking 'defense focus' and magic happens. [/list]

There's been discussion of some specific buildings, but the general design goal is we don't want too many buildings, the fewer the better and they should be strategic, empire affecting buildings not per-planet, it's meant to be a game about galactic conquest, not small scale colonising (however, the game engine could easily be adapted for a much smaller scale but more detailed game as things stand). I, personally, really like that you don't need to worry too much about a specific planet, merely about strategic locations or resources, and I really don't want to have a setup where once you conquer a planet you feel you have to spend ages queuing the same old buildings in every place, when I want to play Civ I play Civ

• I do know you guys are moving away from OGRE, so hopefully that will address this point-- the game is so, soo slow. I know very little about the frameworks involved, but as a player I just can't get my head around why a static map where nothing is happening should max out my CPUs, why I have to type at about 1 character per 5 seconds (making a fleet rename a real ordeal), etc. This is the number one complaint about the game.

I'm using a 4 year old laptop that was low spec when I got it, I feel your pain. Yes, it's a problem, and it's been getting better over time (seriously, try the Test release, there's a thread linking to the download), but it's still not great, the drawback of having a really nice looking game...

But, there's still a lot of rendering in every frame, I strongly recommend reducing the FPS max in Options, it doesn't do what it says it does but does reduce some of the load.

Main Map

• I found the 'clouds' ('molecular clouds', etc) to be interesting but frustrating. It's not clear which systems are impacted, especially if you have most of the graphics options cranked down to improve performance. It would be nice if a little warning popped up in the star-system's menu, or it changed color or something.

I, personally, find them easier to spot when I've turned off gas rendering, they're clearly there, but I agree the edges can be a bit vague (plus they move when you think you've got a route around them). Changing the system colour or markign it in some way is an idea, beyond my skills, anyone?

[*]I've played this game over 100 hours and I still don't know why some star systems are italicized and some are not. That sort of information would be great if it was readily explained in-game somehow.

I'll make sure to add it. It denotes a homeworld, if an imperial species or a native species has their homeworld there (or had, in some cases) then the name is italicised. It's worth looking out for italics on the map therefore as sometimes the natives are hiding from you

[*]What's the point of systems that have stars/blackholes but no planets? Other than making me waste a lot of time clicking, it seems pointless. Looking at the main map should help you understand the strategic situation, and putting stars in empty-space sectors just muddles things.

I, personally, agree with this, I'd like it if all systems with a star had at least an asteroid belt, or simply be empty space, others disagree and I've not argued it too strongly

[*]If isolated supply grids could have a different color (or something) than your main grid it would be GREAT. Maybe assign each race two colors, one for the grid containing the capital and an alternate color for all others? That would make it possible to look at the galaxy and immediately diagnose most supply problems.

Hmm, not sure this would be helpful, it wouldn't help me much, there's already the highlighting of unused production, can you say why you're thinking it would help you? (seriously, UI design is a pain, what's clear and simple to one person is completely opaque to another and sometimes a solution can be found in a completely unrelated way).

[*]Speaking of which, I never did figure out what 'supply points' and 'infrastructure points' really do. I stopped building Space Elevators because they didn't seem to actually do anything obvious, but suspect I was missing something. It'd be great if the cyclopedia explained this a little better; it is rich in in-universe flavor text but sometimes lacking in actual game information.[/list]

We've done a fair bit more with Supply in terms of how it works recently, and I recently rewrote the pedia text

Code: Select all

The supply meter on a planet represents the number of star-lanes supply can extend through. Smaller planets can supply greater distances, large planets reduced distances.

Supply lines are shown by coloring star-lanes with an empire's color. Planets connected by supply lines form a 'Resource Group' and can share physical resources. Production Points created on one planet can be used on any connected planet to build ships or structures. 

A set of core supply starlanes for an empire (the set of least-jump starlanes connecting the resource-producing systems of each Resource Group) will have greater thickness than the non-core starlanes.  If PP is currently being wasted within a Resource Group the outer bands of the core starlanes will be a contrasting color.

Supply lines can also be used to refill the [[encyclopedia FUEL_TITLE]] supply of ships.

does that make it clearer for you? Because if not I need to improve the in game text again, which I'm happy to do, it's one of the more core game concepts so it's important to get right. I probably ought to look at and rework the Space Elevator text a bit, as I said earlier the design concept is that you shouldn't need to build that many buildings, it's meant to be used at key points to expand supply across gulfs of space or to feed an invasion fleet, it really shouldn't be needed on many worlds.

Objects Window

has had SO MANY improvements since the last stable release, including most of your ideas and a few I never thought of even suggesting (mass focus changing, SO NICE)

Sitrep
The sitrep is awesome! Here are a few things that I think would make it even better:

• Add a filter for 'Foreign ship/fleet arrived in a sector containing or adjacent to an object you own'. I care a lot about enemy ships moving up to attack me next turn, but don't care at all about the guys in their rear areas. Most turns 2/3 of my sit rep was "empire X moved a ship somewhere you don't care about".

Ooh, that might be a plan, how about "fleet arrived within your supply lines blocking supply"? I'd want a bit more warning than "they're next door" but I agree that it does get swamped once you've scouted heavily.

[*]Make the repair messages collapse by fleet, so instead of 50 "ship X was repaired by Orbital Drydock...." messages I get "50 ships in fleet X were repaired by ...".

I shall look to see if it's possible to do that when I next rework the Drydock code, that's not likely to happen before the next stable release but is going to happen at some point soon.

[*]Can ship names contain a parenthetical class name? After a certain point I don't remember all my ship names any more, and a message like "The Foobar II (Self-Gravitating I) was damaged...." would save me a lot of clicking as I try to figure out if it is a ship I care about or not.[/list]

the message should tell you both the ship name and the type of ship it is, damage messages definitely should be, can you point to a specific message that isn't so I can look at it in the code? I rarely know what my ships are called, although I have been known to rename colonising ships as a reminder of where they're going...

Fleets
The fleet management is very well done.

• Some sort of damage indicator would be very helpful. I often find myself hovering over all the structural points trying to figure out if a ship is hurt or not, if I don't have that classes max-structure memorized. Maybe just turning it another color if it is not at full strength?

Hmm, that might be useful. If you haven't already noticed you can already right click on a fleet and separate out all damaged ships from a fleet, I find that very handy.

[*]The hovertext for offense does not have the sort of detail the other fields have. It'd be nice to see that the reason this ship X damage than the others is because of 3 Plasma-4s modified by the exobot crew.

Agreed, we're discussing getting that implemented as part of the field refinements thread at the moment, it's something I've wanted for ages (I don't code, I just write content scripts, so have to ask the actual real devs for stuff fairly regularly).

[*]When the ship names and the class names are long the detail gets very crowded and the text overlaps. The class name is much more important than the ship name-- how about we put the class first, and instead of overlapping you just truncate the ship names? People who are interested in the ship names can widen the window, but the more gameplay-impacting class name will be always readable.
[*][/list]

I have no opinion on this, most of my fleets are organised by class of ship anyway, might be useful I guess?

Misc Mechanics
Generally speaking these are great, very well thought out.

• I could find nothing in the cyclopedia telling me if stealth/perception actually has an impact on tactical combat or not. Stealth crops up everywhere in the interface so I assume it's important, but since lasers never seem to miss I have no idea if it actually does anything (other than make things harder to interact with on the strategic map).

Stealth is being reworked but does need better in game explanations. Basically, a ship that's undetected remains invisible until it fires, so in theory can't be hit in the first round of a fight (note this can be a drawback as visible ships in your fleet take all the first round fire), beyond that it's a strategic thing not a tactical thing.

[*]I exhausted the research tree very quickly; I'd suggest making the mid and especially late-game techs much more expensive. Not only does that keep research in the game longer, but it avoids the frustrating phenomenon of a technology being superceeded before you really get a chance to play with it.

We definitely need to do more work on the research costs and bonuses area, we're just not sure what, and it'll be a fairly big project as the AI code will need reworking as well, a lot more work is done balancing the early to mid game stuff. I definitely agree about outdated tech sometimes being annoying (or just the "do I start building a new warship this turn, or wait until that tech finishes" choice), exactly what needs doing is goign to take a lot of thrashing out though.

[*]Just a feature suggestion: I'd like to see the defense focus provide large modifiers for fights that take place in the system; this would have the interesting effect of making a surprise attack more successful than an attack on a prepared location.[/list][/list]

Hmm, in the most recent test builds the AI has started using the Defence focus a LOT (possibly slightly too much), and, especially in the mid to late game, it can be incredibly annoying and very powerful, possibly too powerful. I'd not want to increase the power level, but changing what it does might be interesting, were you thinking of anything specific?

Overall: A solid game. The performance issue is the only reason I'm not playing it all the time. Good work!

I play it almost constantly, that's why I ended up writing stuff for it, and I agree completely, it's nowhere near finished but it's a very nice overall work. I hope you find the performance problems are reduced in the most recent test.

Also, I like to play on Low planets, and try to keep my fleets below 200 total ships, the more populated planets you have the longer production and similar takes to be worked out, to an excessive degree, I think 150 total population centres in my empire is about the max before the lag gets too much on this machine, about 200 if I can borrow the kid's (far better) laptop, so about 300-350 systems on Low is about right.

[cseraphi]

Italics denotes a homeworld...

Ah, gotcha. Good to know. How about bold planet names?

[*]If isolated supply grids could have a different color (or something) than your main grid it would be GREAT. Maybe assign each race two colors, one for the grid containing the capital and an alternate color for all others? That would make it possible to look at the galaxy and immediately diagnose most supply problems.

Hmm, not sure this would be helpful, it wouldn't help me much, there's already the highlighting of unused production, can you say why you're thinking it would help you? (seriously, UI design is a pain, what's clear and simple to one person is completely opaque to another and sometimes a solution can be found in a completely unrelated way).

Completely agree on UI design. Rule of least surprise and consistency are about the only real universal truths in UI.

If clicking the "wasted industry" button is supposed to take you to a pain point, then the suggestion I made is not very important.

We've done a fair bit more with Supply in terms of how it works recently, and I recently rewrote the pedia text

Code: Select all

The supply meter on a planet represents the number of star-lanes supply can extend through. Smaller planets can supply greater distances, large planets reduced distances.....

Great, that makes it much clearer. (Not sure I follow the reasoning that smaller, less populous planets can support more far-flung fleets, but the mechanic is well-explained in the snippet you quoted. Thanks!)

does that make it clearer for you? Because if not I need to improve the in game text again, which I'm happy to do, it's one of the more core game concepts so it's important to get right.

I think that description is quite good. You might want to amplify the bit about refueling-- saying it "can be used" to refuel ships makes me think there is some hidden refuel button I need to be clicking on. My immediate thought upon reading that is "so is fuel automagically refilled when I'm in a supply-connected sector? Or does it mean something else?"

I probably ought to look at and rework the Space Elevator text a bit, as I said earlier the design concept is that you shouldn't need to build that many buildings, it's meant to be used at key points to expand supply across gulfs of space or to feed an invasion fleet, it really shouldn't be needed on many worlds.

That'd be great. I was building them everywhere because I wasn't sure what supply did so I figured it might be a good idea, then I experimentally stopped building them and everything still seemed fine, so I figured 'meh'.

Objects Window

has had SO MANY improvements since the last stable release, including most of your ideas and a few I never thought of even suggesting (mass focus changing, SO NICE)

Oh good! My inner geek loves all reporting frameworks. I look forward to checking out newer versions.

[*]Add a filter for 'Foreign ship/fleet arrived in a sector containing or adjacent to an object you own'. I care a lot about enemy ships moving up to attack me next turn, but don't care at all about the guys in their rear areas. Most turns 2/3 of my sit rep was "empire X moved a ship somewhere you don't care about".

Ooh, that might be a plan, how about "fleet arrived within your supply lines blocking supply"? I'd want a bit more warning than "they're next door" but I agree that it does get swamped once you've scouted heavily.

How about a checkbox for "within 1 hop" and another for "within 2 hops"?

Ah! How about a news event for a colony/outpost/ship falling out of supply would be very welcome. You probably don't need to report on the enemy action that caused the blocking (that might be hard to code?) but just the change in status. "Your sector Foobarius is no longer in the same resource group as your capital world." That would also make it a lot easier to figure out the 'wasted points' scenario we discussed earlier.

[*]Make the repair messages collapse by fleet, so instead of 50 "ship X was repaired by Orbital Drydock...." messages I get "50 ships in fleet X were repaired by ...".

I shall look to see if it's possible to do that when I next rework the Drydock code, that's not likely to happen before the next stable release but is going to happen at some point soon.

Excellent, thank you.

[*]Can ship names contain a parenthetical class name? After a certain point I don't remember all my ship names any more, and a message like "The Foobar II (Self-Gravitating I) was damaged...." would save me a lot of clicking as I try to figure out if it is a ship I care about or not.[/list]

the message should tell you both the ship name and the type of ship it is, damage messages definitely should be, can you point to a specific message that isn't so I can look at it in the code?

Apologies! I was thinking of the message in the expanded 'combat' link in the Sitrep. Whenever I click in it I'll see that the HMS Foobar III took a hit, or did some damage, or died, or whatever and I'm always thinking "Uh, is that one of those expendable fodder ships? Or was that one I care about?" There are probably better ways to determine that information, but I like to manage my combat from within the detailed combat report. Downgrade this one to "very minor nuisance."

I rarely know what my ships are called, although I have been known to rename colonising ships as a reminder of where they're going...

That's a good idea, I'll have to remember that one. (Assuming unnecessary typing is not a prohibitively painful exercise in the post-OGRE world.)

Fleets
The fleet management is very well done.

• Some sort of damage indicator would be very helpful. I often find myself hovering over all the structural points trying to figure out if a ship is hurt or not, if I don't have that classes max-structure memorized. Maybe just turning it another color if it is not at full strength?

Hmm, that might be useful. If you haven't already noticed you can already right click on a fleet and separate out all damaged ships from a fleet, I find that very handy.

I hadn't noticed, although I don't think I'd normally do that- I'm usually looking for ships that are severely damaged (i.e. can't survive another mine strike), and leave the lightly damaged ones in the fight.

[*]When the ship names and the class names are long the detail gets very crowded and the text overlaps. The class name is much more important than the ship name-- how about we put the class first, and instead of overlapping you just truncate the ship names? People who are interested in the ship names can widen the window, but the more gameplay-impacting class name will be always readable.

I have no opinion on this, most of my fleets are organised by class of ship anyway, might be useful I guess?

The lag made me try to make my fleets few and large, so as to minimize clicking. If the lag is less now then your strategy might be viable. That being said, overlapping text is almost never the right way to handle a space problem, since it makes *both* strings unreadable. It's also an issue in the production menu (maybe some of the messages could be moved to overlay the progress meter instead of other text).

Stealth is being reworked but does need better in game explanations. Basically, ...

Thank you for the explanation, that is indeed useful. Makes me think that a Distortion Modulator is actually of negative use to me-- I'd *prefer* some of his ships to be hard to see in the first round so as to concentrate fire.

We definitely need to do more work on the research costs and bonuses area, we're just not sure what, and it'll be a fairly big project as the AI code will need reworking as well, a lot more work is done balancing the early to mid game stuff. I definitely agree about outdated tech sometimes being annoying (or just the "do I start building a new warship this turn, or wait until that tech finishes" choice), exactly what needs doing is goign to take a lot of thrashing out though.

Yep, it's the sort of thing that could be worked on endlessly. But I think it's a reasonable starting point to say technological change should generally be slow compared to production change. (At least, I *think* that isn't controversial.)

[*]Just a feature suggestion: I'd like to see the defense focus provide large modifiers for fights that take place in the system; this would have the interesting effect of making a surprise attack more successful than an attack on a prepared location.

Hmm, in the most recent test builds the AI has started using the Defence focus a LOT (possibly slightly too much), and, especially in the mid to late game, it can be incredibly annoying and very powerful, possibly too powerful. I'd not want to increase the power level, but changing what it does might be interesting, were you thinking of anything specific?

I was thinking more in terms of changing what it does than the relative power of the thing. Imagine something like this:

[Warning: This is the part where the newbie who has played a few times thinks he is qualified to propose major changes]
Systems have an additional attribute, call it Command. This basically reflects the military preparedness of the sector in terms of discipline, training, skill, morale, planning etc. Essentially, their readiness level. The Command level translates as a bonus to friendly ships operating in the sector (chance of an extra attack each round, chance of a received hit doing reduced damage, bonuses to shields/structure/damage, etc). Anyway, baseline Command would be some negligible amount (varying for race?) but in the case of a Defense focus it could become large enough to make a defending fleet substantially more powerful. The idea is to multiply the value of a defending fleet, rather than to give it a flat offset. (Right now a planet is basically just an extra ship.)

In my mind, this has a few advantages-- it automatically scales with tech since you are multiplying a capability rather than adding a ship, and it reduces the attractiveness of the rather odd 'one weak ship just to let the planet shoot' defense.

[MatGB]

Ah, gotcha. Good to know. How about bold planet names?

Imperial Capital, build a new Palace or a Megalith and the capital moves, it means a lot less than it used to (we used to have resource stockpiles that were confusing, we're planning resource stockpiles that aren't annoying, possibly, but not in the immediate future.

If clicking the "wasted industry" button is supposed to take you to a pain point, then the suggestion I made is not very important.

Yeah, try that with the new test releases, if it's not working then there's a bug that might be system specific (I assume it normally works for Macs, Vezzra?)

Great, that makes it much clearer. (Not sure I follow the reasoning that smaller, less populous planets can support more far-flung fleets, but the mechanic is well-explained in the snippet you quoted. Thanks!)

Two reasons, one made up for the benefit of the other. Basically, big planets get more population and thus are more useful in terms of production and similar, giving smaller planets a benefit and large planets a drawback on a core game mechanic was a partial balancing of that. So it's gravity well based, hence the Space Elevator gives a bigger bonus on large worlds which find it harder to launch supply ships and similar (it's meant to represent the merchant fleet &c)

I think that description is quite good. You might want to amplify the bit about refueling-- saying it "can be used" to refuel ships makes me think there is some hidden refuel button I need to be clicking on. My immediate thought upon reading that is "so is fuel automagically refilled when I'm in a supply-connected sector? Or does it mean something else?"

I made it a link, the fuel section should be clearer now as well, but I was partially concerned in that fuel doesn't work the way some of the devs thought it did so it's a bit vaguer while we work out how we want it to work. You don't use fuel while moving in supply or on the turn immediately after leaving supply. You refuel completely if you stop at a location within supply (if you fly through from one side to another you don't refuel, as I keep forgetting myself).

That'd be great. I was building them everywhere because I wasn't sure what supply did so I figured it might be a good idea, then I experimentally stopped building them and everything still seemed fine, so I figured 'meh'.

Yeah, buildings everywhere seems to be common for players coming to this game from other 4X games like Civ where building up each settlement is supposedly part of the fun, I like the game as it deliberately took a different approach.

[*]Add a filter for 'Foreign ship/fleet arrived in a sector containing or adjacent to an object you own'. I care a lot about enemy ships moving up to attack me next turn, but don't care at all about the guys in their rear areas. Most turns 2/3 of my sit rep was "empire X moved a ship somewhere you don't care about".

Ooh, that might be a plan, how about "fleet arrived within your supply lines blocking supply"? I'd want a bit more warning than "they're next door" but I agree that it does get swamped once you've scouted heavily.

How about a checkbox for "within 1 hop" and another for "within 2 hops"?

Ah! How about a news event for a colony/outpost/ship falling out of supply would be very welcome. You probably don't need to report on the enemy action that caused the blocking (that might be hard to code?) but just the change in status. "Your sector Foobarius is no longer in the same resource group as your capital world." That would also make it a lot easier to figure out the 'wasted points' scenario we discussed earlier.

Actually, I REALLY like that idea, I recently introduced a sitrep for when Dyson Forests spawn, partially as them cutting supply was always annoying (I also updated the game text to make it clear that Floaters are their seed pods), havign a generic X is no longer in Supply message might be handy for a lot of reasons.

But, I suspect it'd need a backend code change, anyone? If it can be done in FOCS I'll work it out but I like the idea.

Apologies! I was thinking of the message in the expanded 'combat' link in the Sitrep. Whenever I click in it I'll see that the HMS Foobar III took a hit, or did some damage, or died, or whatever and I'm always thinking "Uh, is that one of those expendable fodder ships? Or was that one I care about?" There are probably better ways to determine that information, but I like to manage my combat from within the detailed combat report. Downgrade this one to "very minor nuisance."

Ah, yeah, the combat summary gives different info and needs to be ship specific—when you get the test release running, enjoy the improvements recently added, the graphs are lovely.

That's a good idea, I'll have to remember that one. (Assuming unnecessary typing is not a prohibitively painful exercise in the post-OGRE world.)

It shouldn't be a major headache, it has been for me in Windows in the past but we think we squashed those bugs, plus there are options now to stop repeat keypresses and similar.

I hadn't noticed, although I don't think I'd normally do that- I'm usually looking for ships that are severely damaged (i.e. can't survive another mine strike), and leave the lightly damaged ones in the fight.

Yeah, I tend to split all the damaged ships then go through and select the "nearly dead" ones from just that group, it's easier to look througha smaller list for me.

That being said, overlapping text is almost never the right way to handle a space problem, since it makes *both* strings unreadable. It's also an issue in the production menu (maybe some of the messages could be moved to overlay the progress meter instead of other text).

There should be less of it now, but yeah, always annoying, at some point the plan is for someone to go over all the UI elements but, well, someone has to do it

Makes me think that a Distortion Modulator is actually of negative use to me-- I'd *prefer* some of his ships to be hard to see in the first round so as to concentrate fire.

Sometimes, yes, depends on circumstances, the modulator is more useful for finding hidden planets and launching invasions into same.

I was thinking more in terms of changing what it does than the relative power of the thing. Imagine something like this:

[Warning: This is the part where the newbie who has played a few times thinks he is qualified to propose major changes]
Systems have an additional attribute, call it Command. This basically reflects the military preparedness of the sector in terms of discipline, training, skill, morale, planning etc. Essentially, their readiness level. The Command level translates as a bonus to friendly ships operating in the sector (chance of an extra attack each round, chance of a received hit doing reduced damage, bonuses to shields/structure/damage, etc). Anyway, baseline Command would be some negligible amount (varying for race?) but in the case of a Defense focus it could become large enough to make a defending fleet substantially more powerful. The idea is to multiply the value of a defending fleet, rather than to give it a flat offset. (Right now a planet is basically just an extra ship.)

In my mind, this has a few advantages-- it automatically scales with tech since you are multiplying a capability rather than adding a ship, and it reduces the attractiveness of the rather odd 'one weak ship just to let the planet shoot' defense.

I intensely dislike the need to have ships in system to obliterate non-aggressive enemies, but, well, it might get fixed, I'm thinking Starbases

Beyond that, there's the potential there for something to be done, possibly Infrastructure based bonuses or similar (so they'd be reduced if the attacker does well enough to get through planetary shields). Would need more thrashing through for details.

[AndrewW]

Yeah, buildings everywhere seems to be common for players coming to this game from other 4X games like Civ where building up each settlement is supposedly part of the fun, I like the game as it deliberately took a different approach.

One of the complaints about Master of Orion 2 was all the buildings, unlike the approached used in Master of Orion.

[cseraphi]

Mat, I'm playing with 'Version 0.4.4+ (build 2015-06-01.87b435c) (0.4.4+ (build 2015-06-01.87b435c))' and wow, you weren't kidding. The performance is tremendously improved (at turn 86 and no lag yet), and I'm pleased with many of the changes. I'll write up a full reply after I've finished a long game here, but so far this is great.

[cseraphi]

OK, finished a large game with the snapshot 'Version 0.4.4+ (build 2015-06-01.87b435c) (0.4.4+ (build 2015-06-01.87b435c))' and, as you guys told me earlier, many of my earlier concerns were addressed. I had a few crashes, but the game was generally much more playable. Performance did get sluggish late in the game but it was manageable.

Some specifics:

The kudos:
* Ran into Experimentors for the first time, and that was a very fun battle. A real challenge, and a very interesting puzzle.
* Love the new 'construct colony of type X at outpost' model. Very reasonable, very intuitive, very useful.
* Just generally a blast to play!


The large gripes:
* Performance-wise, the only playce where it really hurt was that late in the game I found myself using my production queue inefficiently just because it was too tedious to move things around into the optimal configuration. (That's frustrating because it's counterintuitive-- I wouldn't expect a modern computer to freeze for several seconds just to recalculate a build queue.)
* App switching is still a problem on the Mac. Toggling the 'fake' checkbox caused it to fail differently, but still fail. I basically played the whole game in a window because otherwise I had to save and quit in order to, say, check my email.
* Several times the production queue or fleet info windows got stuck in a 'scroll up' mode-- they constantly scrolled to the top, making the window unusable. Quitting and restarting cleared the issue.

The nitpicks:
* I found that a Scattered Asteroid ship was just massively powerful, such that not using one wherever possible was unthinkable. Anytime something is a no-brainer I suspect it might be unbalanced; perhaps the shield bonus should be reduced a tad or the hull be given some sort of defect to compensate for the gigantic +5 bonus (maybe slow it down a lot, so a fleet enjoying the shield bonus must pay the price strategically?).
* The AI seems to have trouble synchronizing his fleets. Several times I was attacked by waves a turn apart by ships launched at the same time. This makes planets on the end of long starlanes to be very powerful indeed.... it would be great if the AI could stagger its launches based on arrival time of other attacking fleets.
* After the tech levels ramp up, it begins to take an absurdly long time to get a planetary shield up; it doesn't seem to be correct for some of the techs I've researched. (And even if I'm just misunderstanding the tech, a building I could slap on a planet to increase the shield regen rate would be a welcome thing.)
* Some sort of disambiguation between the Lighthouse and the Scanning Station would be a blessing. Those are two items that tend to be built with great frequency, and I found myself actually building both at places I didn't need it just so I wouldn't have to keep checking the hovertext to see which one of them a given planet had.

Wishlist:
* It would be marvelous if selecting an 'unavailable' ship or building automatically added the dependencies to the production queue, similar to how picking a locked research item works. I feel like I spent a lot of time rushing to colonies that had just finished their basic shipyard so that I could start up the Orbital Drydock.
* If I could have a way of attaching colored flags to my star systems I'd be thrilled. (Bonus points if the flags have a customizable comment.) I could use this for so many things-- check back later, send a colony ship here when I get one, this system has no planets so stop clicking on it, etc etc.
* Renaming stars would be wonderful, especially if that implicitly renamed the planets inside it (or at least, those planets that still have the default names). I can rename the planets right now, but that just makes them harder to find.
* How about a 'continue' button on the title screen that loads the newest save file in the save dir? I'd imagine that is what people are doing 80% of the time when they fire up the game.

[Geoff the Medio]

...selecting an 'unavailable' ship or building automatically added the dependencies to the production queue...

Trouble with that is that buildings need a specific location, which may not be possible or preferable at the same location as the ship is being produced, so another location would need to be chosen, and how to do that isn't clear, and it wouldn't be clear to the player would happen.

[MatGB]

Some specifics:

The kudos:
* Ran into Experimentors for the first time, and that was a very fun battle. A real challenge, and a very interesting puzzle.
* Love the new 'construct colony of type X at outpost' model. Very reasonable, very intuitive, very useful.
* Just generally a blast to play!

That's very cool to read, several of us have put a lot of effort into the Experimentors in the last few years and getting a positive first reaction is heartening.

The large gripes:
* Performance-wise, the only playce where it really hurt was that late in the game I found myself using my production queue inefficiently just because it was too tedious to move things around into the optimal configuration. (That's frustrating because it's counterintuitive-- I wouldn't expect a modern computer to freeze for several seconds just to recalculate a build queue.)

Yup, still happens, mostly when you've got a lot of populated planets in your empire, for what it's worth I tend to play on Low planets which reduces the effect of the problem but doesn't actually solve the problem (although the most recent test build has some changes that seem to speed things up a fair bit overall)

* Several times the production queue or fleet info windows got stuck in a 'scroll up' mode-- they constantly scrolled to the top, making the window unusable. Quitting and restarting cleared the issue.

Yeah, known issue, it doesn't like it if you drop something you're dragging 'off' the screen, you can, if you're lucky, drag and drop something the other way to stop it happening but I can't do it reliably. For what it's worth, the many problems with drag/drop in production was why we got the right click/move to top/bottom options implemented, which is all I tend to use unless I've no choice these days.

The nitpicks:
* I found that a Scattered Asteroid ship was just massively powerful, such that not using one wherever possible was unthinkable. Anytime something is a no-brainer I suspect it might be unbalanced; perhaps the shield bonus should be reduced a tad or the hull be given some sort of defect to compensate for the gigantic +5 bonus (maybe slow it down a lot, so a fleet enjoying the shield bonus must pay the price strategically?).

We had a long thread on that very recently, since your current build I've gone in and reduced the bonus they give (to +3), added more research dependencies (the flagship hull should onbly be researchable when you've researched the whole line) and increased the cost a bit.

It's still a very powerful hull, and I'm not certain I've done enough, but it's not as overpowering as before. Plus, the AI has also, in the same time period, been taught how to use Gravitic and Titanic hulls, which should, I hope, be roughly on the same power level as them.

Getting the balance on the cool-but-powerful hulls right is harder work than I thought it would be, feedback like this is always welcome.

* The AI seems to have trouble synchronizing his fleets. Several times I was attacked by waves a turn apart by ships launched at the same time. This makes planets on the end of long starlanes to be very powerful indeed.... it would be great if the AI could stagger its launches based on arrival time of other attacking fleets.

Yeah, the AI is constantly improving but it does, sometimes, do some very dumb things.

* After the tech levels ramp up, it begins to take an absurdly long time to get a planetary shield up; it doesn't seem to be correct for some of the techs I've researched. (And even if I'm just misunderstanding the tech, a building I could slap on a planet to increase the shield regen rate would be a welcome thing.)

I suspect the Infrastructure penalty given by Drydocks is what's causing the issue here, it's certainly something we plan to look at again relatively soon, but some tweaks have been made to the defence techs recently which should, hopefully, improve regeneration rates, especially at outposts.

* Some sort of disambiguation between the Lighthouse and the Scanning Station would be a blessing. Those are two items that tend to be built with great frequency, and I found myself actually building both at places I didn't need it just so I wouldn't have to keep checking the hovertext to see which one of them a given planet had.

Yup, I rarely build lighthouses, and dislike that we have two buildings that people feel "have" to be built, but differing art would be a good thing, I'll have a look see if we've got something currently unused else someone needs to draw something.

Wishlist:
* It would be marvelous if selecting an 'unavailable' ship or building automatically added the dependencies to the production queue, similar to how picking a locked research item works. I feel like I spent a lot of time rushing to colonies that had just finished their basic shipyard so that I could start up the Orbital Drydock.

I would like it if you could select a 'queue' of buildings of that nature, in my current game I'm playing with Organic hulls, you need so many different things built to get the best ships. Wouldn't want it for selecting a ship, would quite like to be able to queue a drydock to start building after the shipyard.

* If I could have a way of attaching colored flags to my star systems I'd be thrilled. (Bonus points if the flags have a customizable comment.) I could use this for so many things-- check back later, send a colony ship here when I get one, this system has no planets so stop clicking on it, etc etc.

That's a UI idea worth expanding on, if you could start a thread for this specific idea explained in more detail in the Game Design section then it would get more attention from people that have the skills to code such things.

* Renaming stars would be wonderful, especially if that implicitly renamed the planets inside it (or at least, those planets that still have the default names). I can rename the planets right now, but that just makes them harder to find.

I think the problem with that is multiplayer more than anything else, tehre isn't really a balance issue, but I have no opinion, I rarely rename anything these days.

* How about a 'continue' button on the title screen that loads the newest save file in the save dir? I'd imagine that is what people are doing 80% of the time when they fire up the game.

I quite like that idea, Geoff?

[Vezzra]

* App switching is still a problem on the Mac. Toggling the 'fake' checkbox caused it to fail differently, but still fail. I basically played the whole game in a window because otherwise I had to save and quit in order to, say, check my email.

That's odd. I'm on 10.9, and app switching works fine for me when I run FO in fullscreen mode. What version of OSX are you on, and how exactly are you trying to switch apps? The only method that does not work is CMD+TAB.

[vincele]

Here is a PR for some new hotkeys.

CTRL-q : quit to desktop, for when your boss arrives
F4 : quit current game, back to the intro screen
F5 : toggle fullscreen

The key bindings are up for discussion, I choose those almost randomly...

[Geoff the Medio]

F5 : toggle fullscreen

Should be Alt + Enter...?

[Dilvish]

F4 : quit current game, back to the intro screen

having a single-key touch quit the current game without any further dialog is not something I'd like to see as a default setting -- I too often hit the wrong keys. The ctrl-Q thing, being a multi-key combo, is far less likely to done by accident. So instead of populating this hotkey with F4, could you please leave it unset or at least make it multi-key.

On a somewhat related note (since leaving the key unset might require you to often redo the setting, given how easily config.xml can be automatically reset), I am thinking of enabling a auxiliary "persistent_config.xml" or somesuch where a person could manually copy over some config items that they want to ensure persist.

[vincele]

having a single-key touch quit the current game without any further dialog is not something I'd like to see as a default setting -- I too often hit the wrong keys. The ctrl-Q thing, being a multi-key combo, is far less likely to done by accident. So instead of populating this hotkey with F4, could you please leave it unset or at least make it multi-key.

I initially had CTRL-F4, but that was one of my window manager shortcut... Maybe CTRL-w...

On a somewhat related note (since leaving the key unset might require you to often redo the setting, given how easily config.xml can be automatically reset), I am thinking of enabling a auxiliary "persistent_config.xml" or somesuch where a person could manually copy over some config items that they want to ensure persist.

That would be cool to have.