FreeOrion

It can't, but you can alter the common frequency, and then independently change the spawn rate of all the monster spawn fleets, getting the same effect.

So what does the spawnrate number do, and how does it relate to "life frequency"? My guess is that it doesn't relate to "life frequency."



Also in R 4224, the Ancient ruins dragon tooth sitrep doesn't work.
"... have revealed an ERROR ship."
I looked at it, but the effects seemed OK to me.


EDIT:
Also the fleet move dots on the galaxy map are white for monsters, when if they followed the same good rules that empires did, they would be red except when the fleet was selected.

EDIT2:
I'm trying to get a special that benefits any colonies in the same system. The following doesn't work at all, maybe because it's a planet that contains the source, but i don't see how to refer to any planet in a system that contains a special. Would i need to specify the owning empire to prevent other empires in the same system from benefiting from the special?

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While testing monster stuff, i've also been playtesting. Here's an unelaborated list of the issues i've found that haven't already been fixed, or that i haven't complained about yet. These are especially focused on the early stage of the game.

SHIPS
X Need a few standard hull sizes
- Need Fewer Hull slots
- Need Better ballance between hull & component price
X Need Better default ships designs
X Need Ships parts to make scouts more special
X Make all ships need shipyards
* Fuel takes too long to regenerate
* "Available" build list only things that are buildable at the selected planet.

PLANETS
* Give better detection for planets than ships on average
* Imperial planets generate troops, defence, shields
* Notifications for starvation
* Slower starvation
* Show how habitable planets are even after they are colonized.

FOCUS
* Less uneven focus production
* Faster focus change

TECH
* Elimination of most theories
X List effect first, technobable after.

GROUND COMBAT
* Excess ground troops increase planet's troop meter

SPECIES
* Descriptions for all

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If you mean that after you invade a planet, there should be extra ground troops beyond what was lost fighting the defenders, and those troops should go into initial troop levels on planets... then this already happens. Except that all player planets have a maximum troop meter of 0, so those extra troops after the ground battle don't get used. The real problem is that player planets need a way to increase their max troop levels, such as techs or buildings or species effects that increase the max troop meter. (And shields and defense, as noted...)

R 4246 addresses a lot of things in my previous post as well as tones down monster reproduction rates. This should make the early game more fun.

New smaller, cheaper, weaker basic hulls (small and medium)
New pre-made ship designs that use the new hulls
New +1 jump fuel pod to make scouts more "scouty"
Increased the price of some ship parts (so the parts are not just a negligible portion of the total price.)
New hull graphics (sorta)
Less outrageous monsters
Less "deep space" star-lane nodes
All ships now require shipyards.

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food production or consumption
Also i think food production or consumption is messed up. It doesn't seem to matter what my focus is, i generate large excesses of food.

R 4247
Colonies target construction is increased to 20 so once the meter fills, they create 1 jump supply lines

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That's probably because most species have effectsgroups likeand the Cultural Archives has an always-active effect

No, see this save for instance.
None of the planets attached to the supply network are focused on food. Total population 200+ And food surplus and population continue to grow.


IMPERIAL COLORS
I've ordered the colors in the imperial color list some time ago so that the most distinctive colors were at the top of the list, and the in-between shades were at the end. Currently the AI just pick randomly.

The idea was that after the humans pick their colors, the AIs can get theirs, starting from the top of the list going down, skipping any already taken. This would generally prevent situations were AIs mostly (or all) randomly choose similar colors. For instance in a recent game i got 3 out of 4 empires with blue to blue-green colors. Especially since the detection zones can overlap and blend, the more the empire colors contrast with each other, the better.

Since this is not urgent, made a feature request.

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Could you make sure to leave an endline at the end of the stringtable file? Every time you commit, you've left it off, and this result in error messages in the log file.

Also, when adding description stringtable entries, they need to have _DESC in them. Several times, you've added two strings with the same name, like ABANDONED_COLONY_SPECIAL where it looks like the second one should have _DESC and be the description string.

I can't load that save file, and I'm not sure why. What it created with the OSX version of SVN 4224?

Sorry, i didn't know to avoid that. What's the error message, so i can look out for it?

That i know, but apparently was being sloppy.


Yeah, with all the latest content txt files.

Maybe just have the game put up a dialog "Warning this save was created with a different version. It may not work. Do you want to try? Y/N"

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Sorry, i didn't know to avoid that. What's the error message, so i can look out for it?

That i know, but apparently was being sloppy.


Yeah, with all the latest content txt files.

Maybe just have the game put up a dialog "Warning this save was created with a different version. It may not work and fail weirdly. Do you want to try? Y/N"

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It usually will say something about the stringtable being malformed when the final endline is missing.

Normally it just tries to load the save, and if there's a problem it will show an error message. In this case, it can't even load the header from the save file... the deserialization function is just failing.

... minutes later...

I think the problem is the different versions of Boost being used between the OSX version and the MSVC 2008 version (which is the one I send to pd to upload, and which goes into the releases). I can get further into the loading with the latest SVN version built with MSVC 2010, though it fails later due to a change in the save format due to adding data being tracked.

I never get that message. Another window/mac difference perhaps.


I like how you list the known locations of species, monsters, and ships in the 'Pedia. Could you do the same for specials?

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It already does; there's an Objects with Special: list after the description text for any special the player knows the location of.

Oh, great, i see. Apparently there simply were none of the specials that i randomly chose to look at.

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