New player. Impressed!

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fotmfb22
Krill Swarm
Posts: 11
Joined: Sat Jul 02, 2022 12:00 am

New player. Impressed!

#1 Post by fotmfb22 »

Hey, I just discovered this game at version 4.10.2. It takes a little effort to get into it, but once you do, it has that "OK just one more turn... 5 hours pass OK, just a few more turns... suddenly it's 3am" quality. Lots of nice design choices here. I only play 4X once in a while, and did not even know about FreeOrion until last week.

Lots of nice little touches in here. Whoever did the little rotating planet views, they're awesome. It's a small thing but it adds some interest and variety on top of the text names.

I've only encountered one probable bug so far where once in a while, my supply lines will disappear everywhere across the map, all at once. It seemed tied to a single ship being produced. If I even paused production of the ship, supply lines went away. If the ship got produced, they went away. As long as it sat in the production queue, everything was fine. I haven't got around to searching yet to see if it's a known issue.

Aside from that, no crashes, no big issues, and lots of fun.

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LienRag
Cosmic Dragon
Posts: 2148
Joined: Fri May 17, 2019 5:03 pm

Re: New player. Impressed!

#2 Post by LienRag »

I've never seen that bug, maybe you could do a real bug report ?

o01eg
Programmer
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Joined: Sat Dec 10, 2011 5:46 am

Re: New player. Impressed!

#3 Post by o01eg »

Could you try weekly test build to check if it happens too?
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fotmfb22
Krill Swarm
Posts: 11
Joined: Sat Jul 02, 2022 12:00 am

Re: New player. Impressed!

#4 Post by fotmfb22 »

o01eg wrote: Sat Jul 02, 2022 9:30 am Could you try weekly test build to check if it happens too?
Yup, I will do that. I just switched to a ppa (yours I guess? since your user id appears in the PPA name...) and will run a few games on that build to see if I see the same symptom. I had been using the version from the ubuntu repos before.

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LienRag
Cosmic Dragon
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Re: New player. Impressed!

#5 Post by LienRag »

14.10 is before Influence, right ?
The new version is very different, and not entirely documented yet, so don't hesitate to ask questions.

fotmfb22
Krill Swarm
Posts: 11
Joined: Sat Jul 02, 2022 12:00 am

Re: New player. Impressed!

#6 Post by fotmfb22 »

LienRag wrote: Sat Jul 02, 2022 8:33 pm 14.10 is before Influence, right ?
The new version is very different, and not entirely documented yet, so don't hesitate to ask questions.
Yup, I didn't see that system in my first games. I've installed from the PPA now and have played a game and a quarter with influence. It took me a while to understand it, but I think I'm slowly getting there. At first, I was confused about why removing policies didn't lower my influence budget when I was running a deficit. But (I might be waaaaay off base here!) now I think you pay a one-time cost for buying the policies, and after that they do not change your turn-over-turn budget. So you can run a surplus for a while to buy a policy.

I have very little experience with the game yet, but it feels like this should change my strategy I was using with 14.10 of expanding as rapidly as possible. Now, expanding will cause influence deficits.

(Any corrections welcome of course)

fotmfb22
Krill Swarm
Posts: 11
Joined: Sat Jul 02, 2022 12:00 am

Re: New player. Impressed!

#7 Post by fotmfb22 »

o01eg wrote: Sat Jul 02, 2022 9:30 am Could you try weekly test build to check if it happens too?
I'm running the 6/26 build from the PPA now, and I haven't seen that issue yet. I got 450 rounds into one game, and about 150 into another. Normally I would've seen it by then. It appeared in all my prior games by round 2 or 300. So while I can't be certain, signs are good so far.

The more I get into this game the more I like it. There's a lot of depth! But I'm finding it challenging. In my 3 plays before the influence system, I played a game on Turtle with 5 civs + me, where I had 2 enemies, 3 peace, and no allies. I ended up hitting the "disappearing supply" issue above, but I was clearly the dominant civilization at that point and had the 2 enemies on their back foot. I count that as a soft-win.

Now I've played a game and a half on Cautious instead of Turtle. First attempt, 3 enemies, 2 peace, no allies. And I got beat down pretty good :mrgreen: I lasted 450 rounds and could have kept struggling for quite a while more, but I was clearly not keeping up, and I was being attacked by 3 other civs. I might've been a match for any one of them, but I couldn't handle a 3 front fight.

Also, I've quit a few games early (before round 15) because I felt like there was no hope with that random seed due to the layout I got. Nothing good around to colonize, lots of empty space, boxed in by monsters I couldn't defeat for a long time, etc. Some seeds seem hopeless.

I also feel like even when I'm doing "well", I'm still getting out-produced. I normally colonize an initial planet and then switch it to production focus to keep PP/RP in rough balance. I also rush for all the cheap research to boost growth, production, and research. Even with all that, by the time I have a halfway decent military ship, I discover my surrounding enemies have 3X my strength. I can sometimes hang on anyway because the AI is tactically weak, but strategically it overwhelms me. It seems to get way out ahead of me on production. If it ever gets as strong tactically as it is strategically, I'll have no hope!

So far I've been going for asteroid hulls. I I like that the hulls have distinction characteristics. Like the swarm hull with 2 ext slots looks like rubbish at first, but after I tried it, I found they make really solid and inexpensive frigates due to the hull properties, in spite of just having 2 slots.

Fun. Hard, but fun.

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