FreeOrion

Revision 4261
Reordered tech application descriptions so the concrete effect is listed first. In other words you no longer have to scroll to the bottom of the description to find out what the tech actually does -- if anything.


I think the worst, most enjoyment-destroying "simple thing" left is that you get no notifications when your planet starts starving -- instead you find out after it died. Getting a sit-rep message every turn population shrinks might be a little annoying, but it is certainly less annoying than the status quo.


Speaking of error messages, i get a variable number of this error, sometimes quite a few. Should i, can i, do anything about it?



I'm rather pleased what we've accomplished in playability in the last 5 weeks.

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What do you mean by "get" the error? When / where / how etc? Do things otherwise work as expected?

It appears in the console log, with other error messages. It usually occurs after initiating universe generations, pretty much always. So far as i know it is not associated with anything not working.

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I did some extended playtesting this evening on SVN 4385.

A couple things stood out to me:

* It's really annoying to get attacked and slaughtered by a space monster without even a chance to find out what kind it was

* The game opening really drags with the new slow initial ship speeds. I think we need to try to find a difference balance between detection range, stealth, and initial speed.

* Having a set amount of research production per planet (rather than population based) feels wrong. I'm not going to say one method is more realistic than another. But the resulting strategies feel off. If you want to maximize research you grab a bunch of worlds, it doesn't matter how lousy, or barely surviving the population is: more is better. This is the same thing you do to maximize mineral production. It's very similar to what a war-like or exploratory expansionist would do-- thus tending to blur with many of the other macro-strategies.

As i played MoO or Civ the research centric strategy tended to be one of slower expansion. I think we should aim for the research-centric strategy to be more like that-- and as part of that make research based on population, so that a few healthy, well-developed planets planets works beats a lot of barely settled pioneer colonies for research.

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Starting hull stealth, and particularly monster body stealth, should probably be 1 or 0.01 instead of 5. Then movement speed can be increased a bit without sacrificing the ability to see ships a turn or two before they arrive and start a battle. If this means planets also need to have reduced default stealth, then that's fine with me.

I agree that having less highly populated worlds should be better at research than having many basic low population colonies. Things like autolabs giving +5 research per colony also doesn't help. The bonus should be a fraction of research - more like Ancient Ruins. The Autofactories seems more reasonable to be a bonus per colony for some reason. I'm not sure why.
I also think that all my colonies having the same construction seems a bit boring. Could construction have something to do with population or planet size or even distance from the capital? Or even if some technology gives a bonus to construction only on good worlds (or good and adequete)
I think adequete worlds should be more useful, terraforming should perhaps come later in the Tech-tree. Many techs add bonuses to population for poor and adequete worlds, but I rarely see their effect, since it is easy to terraform worlds. Also once you have one or two extra species in your empire, colonising poor worlds happens less. Also the system sidebar should indicate in some way how good a world is - not just when colonising. Maybe the population or health meters should have this indicated, rather than just giving species +20 or Species +0.1 in the population calculation.

Alternatively, autolabs could give a fixed bonus to research (to the capital, probably), not dependent on number or quality of colonies.

Somewhat related notes:

* If i'm reading it properly "speed" is on a scale 10 times smaller than detection radii. I.E. A ship with a speed of 50 will travel from a detector with the power of 5 to the edge of it's detection in one turn. It would be nice if these numbers were on the same scale-- at least as presented to the player. And there's really no need for the speed numbers to be so large. The difference between a speed of 30 and 31 is hardly noticable.


* A bunch of later game hulls have negative stealth values like -250. Does that matter? I thought anything with a stealth of 0 would be visible anywhere in the galaxy.


* Geoff, BigJoe, etc:
any reasons research shouldn't be switched to work best for smaller, well-developed empires?

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Historically, and as I think of it, and more or less as implemented in code, it's the other way around:The x10 factor can be removed, if you'd like... The reason for having it was to keep the stealth and detection meters in a 0 - 100 range. If things are going to be in consistent units between speed, stealth, and detection, then I'd rather it also be consistent with distances in uu on the map as well (as opposed to keeping the x10 for detect range, and adding an x10 for actual ship speed from ship speed meters).

Having -250 guarantees that even if you add a bunch of +20 stealth parts, the ship will still have stealth < 0 and be detectable everywhere.

That seems logical, and probably preferable to what we have now.

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Make the overview display smaler:
If you build on planets or astroids a shipyard, you can some orbital shipyards, but wath thing you for that.
In fo are all orbital shipyards listed, but that if then only one grafick is to see and in that grafick in a kind of counddown how many time they are build.
For example from the second building that is build, display the count.

Make the overview display better:
Some buildings are request to build some other buildings befor you can build it,
for example the astroid shipyard parts or organic shipyards.
And in that parts a notice, that are is requiet to build them.
"Request to build , .... " or " Required is ..... "

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revision 4386:



Planets now have the same minimal stealth as stars. Monsters and early hulls have stealth between 1 and 2. Minimum hull detection is 3.

It's better i think. Will probably need further tweaking.

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Maybe it is time to consider adding the battle queue interface.
The basic implementation would be to list the forces in conflict, and give the player the choice between "auto-resolve combat" and "attempt retreat".

This would deal with the problem of getting destroyed by an unknown enemy-- at least you have a chance to identify the foe and a chance to retreat. Eventually this queue would have more options including the option to personally lead your fleet in glorious 3D battle.


Keeping the numbers in the 0-100 range is generally a good thing. It's also a good thing to avoid putting useless zeros on the end of numbers. Smaller numbers are easier to deal with and understand -- you don't measure a road-trip in meters or yards, but in kilometers or miles. Since the ship speed and UU numbers show roughly 10x the granularity than the player actually cares about i'd like to see the other associated measures match how detection is currently displayed.

Detection of 100 will encompass a 500 star galaxy if the detector is roughly in the middle, so the high end of that scale works out pretty good.

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If 1 detection AND 1 speed are both going to be 10 uu... then why not change the UU?
what was 10 is now 1... that way no multiplications would be required.

ie 1 detection, 1 speed, 1 uu

The galaxy is just 10x less uu across

That's what i'm saying. I don't claim to know if it would be best to make the change at the code level or the interface level.


EDIT: What's the rational for the multiple shipyard thing? It seems i have to build at least 2 shipyards at any planet before i can build any ships. It's not very clear in some cases what is needed for what and why.

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