FreeOrion

I've been testing out FreeOrion-4838-Test and I keep getting killed 100 to 150 turns in by something that wipes out all my planets and ships. Planets keep reporting biological attacks and die within two turns. No monsters or ships visible on screen (though I suspect this is some uber monster of some type).

4838 is winnable, but in 4840, I delayed the appearance of those monsters by 110 turns, so it should be reasonable to expect a player to be able to beat the game without using any cheap tricks. Just downloading buildings.txt from that revision and replacing yours with it should do the trick.

Also, there are detection techs. Research them.

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You do realize that this "thing" wipes out 20 -30 ship fleets in a single turn without any feedback to the player. That's about all I can build in 100 turns.

What do you mean by "without any feedback to the player"? You are getting messages to the effect of "A battle occurred at X", and then a list of ships that were lost, right? It's expected that if you don't research detection techs and create effective ship designs that there will be an opponent whom you can't see and whose fleets vastly outpower yours. These space monsters showing up are no different than that. Choose your research options and design ships more effectively next game. Also, by the time those things come around, it should take you far less than 100 turns to build what they can destroy in a single turn. Try to expand and develop your empire more effectively.

Also, as noted above, you have about twice as much time in the latest revision before the bad monsters start attacking, so grab buildings.txt from that revision, as mentioned above.

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Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

Exactly what I said, "NO feedback to the player!" everything just dies. Every other monster or ship in the game is at least visible. The addition of an invisible monster that one has to waste time in a tech race to fend off rather than fighting other players just smacks of bad design.

"Try to expand and develop your empire more effectively.", that comment has to be the most self serving thing I have ever read. This passive-aggressive dribble implies that you have to posses skill, rather than a pre-scripted race to a single tech to save one's self from oblivion; deus ex machina anyone?

Having been instrumental in the development (in a paid capacity I might add) of over 80 games, you might want to have a bit more humility when answering legitimate questions or taking advice.

My suggestion would be to dump the monster and concetrate on a more agressive AI, take it or leave it.

Firstly, you can allegedly disable monsters when starting new game.

Secondly, right now none of the active developers has time to focus on AI development, as there are major changes in game mechanics underway. Even if someone would make a sensible and aggressive AI overnight, by the end of the week changes to game content (ship parts, technologies, etc.) would make the AI mostly obsolete, crippled at best.

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[...] for Man has earned his right to hold this planet against all comers, by virtue of occasionally producing someone totally batshit insane. - xkcd

That's because it isn't the design of the game. It's a premature hack to allow the player to have some competition until there's a real AI. It's purpose is to force the player to make strategic decisions so that we can determine what strategic tradeoffs are fun and interesting. It is not, and was never intended to be the final design of the game.

Also, it's not useful to think of it as "wasting time in a tech race rather than fighting other players" - as it stands, the monsters are your main opponent, and as it's not practical to develop a competent AI with the game in its current state, they will probably need to be taken as such for quite a while. Think of them as the impetus for your empire to expand and develop. In the complete game, the player will constantly be in a "tech race" and an "expansion race" and a "production race" with every other player. Introducing these "races" in some limited, temporary sense, is the purpose of these space monsters.

I deliberately made the monsters so that defeating them would be difficult, and fully aware that it was too difficult without using unreasonable and cheap tactics, I made it much less difficult, a fact which you have now ignored for two successive posts. If you're serious about testing the game, and not simply bashing an old/much more difficult version for being too difficult (which was known to begin with), then please follow my advice and replace your buildings.txt file with the one to which I provided a link.

So to clarify, you're not getting the sitrep messages I described?The monsters are not invisible unless your empire's detection is below a certain level. Increasing your empire's detection level by researching detection techs (Active Radar, Neutron Scanner, Sensors) will allow you to see the monsters. Neutron Scanner will be adequate to see the first monsters that come, but subsequent monsters may not be visible unless you have Sensors, depending on which species you're using.

Had you actually provided any advice, or even posed a single question for that matter, I would have been happy to receive it/answer them with humility. However, all you've done is point out known facts about the difficulty of the game, some of which are no longer current. My response was to inform you that there already exists an adjustment to the game which makes it significantly easier, and that there is in-game content which solves one of your observed problems (that of invisible monsters). If you insist on not taking my advice and continuing to test an outdated version of the game, then "develop more effectively" really is the only response I can give you.

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Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

The game should always give you a sit rep message when your ships are destroyed, even if you can't see the destroyer.
Can you provide the autosave from the turn before the ships disappear?


Your first two posts consisted of a few short sentences. You shouldn't take it too personally if BigJoe, while trying to answer your questions (in an unpaid capacity) jumped to a wrong conclusion.

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[...] for Man has earned his right to hold this planet against all comers, by virtue of occasionally producing someone totally batshit insane. - xkcd