testing [build 2015-05-28.5ff4329]

[Scara]

Now I had a game with 4 MS Outposts (circled them red) and it was great fun.

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I took out the modifier for big systems, but kept the one for low planet density.
Playing with 1000 Systems and 8 AI's in an randomly chosen galaxy shape (guess it's some irregular). Low everything but monsters and specials with maniacal AI.
The galaxy shape was perfect for spreading the nodes over a wide area. Haven't made any contact with the two big AI's green and yellow, before around Turn 300.
After conquering the MS Outpost in my sector and the second at my Trith neighbours close to my border, I sent out some big sun fleets to look for the other two outposts, finding them in the sector of the green AI.
I was interested to see how the AI reacts on the monster spawning outpost. When I invaded my second outpost one ship of my brown Trith AI neighbours came with in to the outpost, from a other side. It probably wouldn't have survived anyway, but interesting to think of a AI player strong enough to invade the outpost. PC wins

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There was different behaviour in the spawned monsters at the two observed MS outposts. At one outpost they where roaming around, at the other the monsters build up huge stack for some reason I don't know over 60 enhanced space monster in one node (a green AI planet), launching small attacks on green from time to time. Probably some Experimentor experiments
I offer from time to time peace to the AI, I had to laugh as I finally got to peace with the blue trith I already had completely invaded. Very mercyfull of them!
At Turn400 the green were getting a bit lazy on shielding, throwing fractal energy ships with xentronium armor and deathrays4 against the spawned monsters, at Turn 415 I saw one of their ships with black shield but it seems they didn't produce any more, I could see around their MS Outposts at my final Turn 440. The yellow were further developed and had more ships using blackshield. I also saw a yellow AI fleet using different ship types including a sentient hull making use of the features I guess, that's good. I prefer the logistics facilitator for now.
I didn't experience this game much harder than my other games, but I'm getting more and more into it ... ok the beginning was a little bit difficult, but I survived with a bit of luck finding MS shield. I lastly found good species like scylior, mu ursh and kobuntura pretty late, myself playing lanfera I was a bit behind with research. When the MS started spawning around Turn 270, I almost was finished with my preparation building up fleets (had Earxaw at that point as fleet species and catched up research with scylior), so I had a good timing. Their start time of spawning was shifted a bit at the different outposts.
It's really a 'nice to have' feature with multiple Outposts settable, maybe it can be integrated some day in a way like, you need to play a normal game up to winning condition to unlock the option to choose multiple max MS Outposts, how about that?
Well, this was a awesome game, I'll note the settings.

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Maybe some smaller Bugs I noticed this round:
- Ship icon direction error on star lanes that are very vertical.
- Warning Message telling monsters spawned at Experimentor Outpost, the link pointing to the system doesn't work
- Crossed Space routes, funny thing I haven't seen yet... has it anything to do with adding more MS Outposts? Three occurrences in one game.

I'm looking forward to the next release step 0.4.5 and will be gladly testing, great work, thanx!

[MatGB]

Their start time of spawning was shifted a bit at the different outposts.
It's really a 'nice to have' feature with multiple Outposts settable, maybe it can be integrated some day in a way like, you need to play a normal game up to winning condition to unlock the option to choose multiple max MS Outposts, how about that?

Definitely in favour of extra "difficulty" settings for the Experimentors, they are a victory condition afterall.

Well, this was a awesome game

Really glad you enjoyed it, I wish I had a machine with the specs to run that sort of thing, it's good the game can be adapted to preference as easily as it can.

Maybe some smaller Bugs I noticed this round:
- Ship icon direction error on star lanes that are very vertical.

I've noticed this a few times, no idea about fixes though.

- Warning Message telling monsters spawned at Experimentor Outpost, the link pointing to the system doesn't work

I'd noticed that recently, I'm not sure why, I'll try to have another look at the code generating it, might be possible to improve it due to recent backend changes. Of course, it doesn't matter in a standard game but if you've multiple outposts you want to know where they are.

- Crossed Space routes, funny thing I haven't seen yet... has it anything to do with adding more MS Outposts? Three occurrences in one game.

Yeah, normal generation doesn't allow for crossed lines, but the outposts remove and add them in a mostly random fashion picking any system within 100, because it's not really a problem it just looks wrong it's not something we've worried about trying to stop, not sure we need to to be honest.

I'm looking forward to the next release step 0.4.5 and will be gladly testing, great work, thanx!

Please do use the most recent test versions and report any weird bugs you find, better to have them squashed before the stable release than just after , but thanks for this report, good to read (even if the screenshots do stretch way past my poor laptop screen)

[Scara]

Please do use the most recent test versions and report any weird bugs you find, better to have them squashed before the stable release than just after , but thanks for this report, good to read (even if the screenshots do stretch way past my poor laptop screen)

Yeah, that's what I'm doing for weeks now, playing a game, for next game I get a new git pull and look out for changes, improvements and bugs.
Compiling the changes luckily doesn't take that long.
I have some time right now, so you can count me in, for some more prerelease testing
What screen resolution are you using? I might be able to scale the screenshots smaller for the readability of the site.

Low everything but monsters and specials with maniacal AI.

Small edit, I used monster medium and everything else low

[Geoff the Medio]

- Crossed Space routes, funny thing I haven't seen yet... has it anything to do with adding more MS Outposts? Three occurrences in one game.

Yeah, normal generation doesn't allow for crossed lines, but the outposts remove and add them in a mostly random fashion picking any system within 100, because it's not really a problem it just looks wrong it's not something we've worried about trying to stop, not sure we need to to be honest.

The CanAddStarlanesTo condition should be usable to select starlane destinations that don't cross existing lanes, and have various other geometrical restrictions similar to (but not the same as) what is done during galaxy generation. Make the subcondition match the system from which the lanes are being generated, and the condition should match other systems that can have lanes added to the subcondition system. Additional filtering based on distance should also be retained to pre- or post-filter the possible connection (not sure which would be faster).