Testing Reports

Describe your experience with the latest version of FreeOrion to help us improve it.

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Geoff the Medio
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Re: Testing Reports

#46 Post by Geoff the Medio »

LienRag wrote: Wed May 12, 2021 10:57 pmI have two Mu Ursh planets [and the one on a black hole] is having stability problems, again for apparently no reason.
There is a Mu Ursh colony building on the turn (360) of the save on Balder II in a black hole system. I don't see any other Mu Ursh at black holes. On turn 361, the colony is established and starts with 3 target stability and 0 stability with predicted +1 growth by the next turn. On turn 362, the colony building disappears, target stability is 3.6 and stability is 1 with +1 growth predicted. Seems fine...?
LienRag wrote: Wed May 12, 2021 10:57 pmone with Raagh
The independent planet Almaak β I has Raaagh, but I can't see if / why it went independent now...
LienRag wrote: Wed May 12, 2021 10:57 pmone with Chato
There are 6 planets with Chato but all are owned by the dark red empire, not your empire.
LienRag wrote: Wed May 12, 2021 10:57 pm one with Silexians
Already indepenent.
LienRag wrote: Wed May 12, 2021 10:57 pm one with Eaxaw went from being perfectly fine (apparently Eaxaw have a +2 Stability bonus from Xenophobic Frenzy) to generating rebels, without any clear reason.
Regor α I has Eaxaw and no rebels. Zomg γ I has Eaxaw and is independent. I can't tell why it would have gone independent after it's already happened.

I need a save to demonstrate things going wrong, not a save that has a bunch of stuff that already happened that I can't investigate now...

Edit: Actually, Regor α I does appear to have decreasing stability when an increase is predicted, so perhaps that will work for testing...

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LienRag
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Re: Testing Reports

#47 Post by LienRag »

Sorry, I thought it was a later save.
Anyway have you tried the Crays ? I believe that at this stage they're the biggest concern.

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LienRag
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Re: Testing Reports

#48 Post by LienRag »

Also, from what I remember, there were planets going independent after losing troops turn after turn (which is to be expected).
But on the ones that had Stability going down while it was expected to go up, again IIRC, they became independent even though there was still a lot of troops in them.

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LienRag
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Re: Testing Reports

#49 Post by LienRag »

Geoff the Medio wrote: Thu May 13, 2021 12:34 pm There is a Mu Ursh colony building on the turn (360) of the save on Balder II in a black hole system. I don't see any other Mu Ursh at black holes. On turn 361, the colony is established and starts with 3 target stability and 0 stability with predicted +1 growth by the next turn. On turn 362, the colony building disappears, target stability is 3.6 and stability is 1 with +1 growth predicted. Seems fine...?
Yep, this very colony was fine for a while then started producing rebels without any discernible reason after some time.

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Geoff the Medio
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Re: Testing Reports

#50 Post by Geoff the Medio »

There seems to be an issue with meter calculations done when opening the sidepanel. If I end the turn with system open, I get one set of meter estimates. If I close and reopen the sidepanel without changing anything else, a bunch of the like / dislike factors for the planet's stability disappear, somewhat drastically altering the resulting meter totals.

This explains the incorrect change estimates...
Attachments
at start of turn
at start of turn
start of turn.png (964.09 KiB) Viewed 1040 times
after closing and reopening sidepanel
after closing and reopening sidepanel
after close and reopen.png (963.4 KiB) Viewed 1040 times

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LienRag
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Re: Testing Reports

#51 Post by LienRag »

Weird...

Side panel, you mean the one that shows the planets of the selected system ?

Also, which are the correct calculations : the one that takes into account only one of the distant buildings, or the one that takes all of them into account ?

The screenshot you posted reminded me of an old question : why do we get "unknown star type" in the Objects panel ?

Especially when the star type could be so important, as with Laenfas or other phototropic species.

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Geoff the Medio
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Re: Testing Reports

#52 Post by Geoff the Medio »

LienRag wrote: Fri May 14, 2021 1:48 pmSide panel, you mean the one that shows the planets of the selected system ?
Yes, it's called the system sidepanel because it shows the planets in a system and is at the side of the screen / window.
Also, which are the correct calculations : the one that takes into account only one of the distant buildings, or the one that takes all of them into account ?
All. The script includes any building the empire controls. This is why the number is dropping when the UI says it should go up: the target meter is much lower than it appears.
The screenshot you posted reminded me of an old question : why do we get "unknown star type" in the Objects panel ?
Because there is no star type associated with a planet, and it defaults to returning the INVALID_STAR_TYPE enumeration value, which the list interprets as "unknown", because it's what is set for systems your empire doesn't know the star type of.
Especially when the star type could be so important, as with Laenfas or other phototropic species.
What the UI displays in the objects list columns has no effect on gameplay.

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Oberlus
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Re: Testing Reports

#53 Post by Oberlus »

Probably builing dis/likes should affect only nearby populations. Some could affect the populations that are affected by the building effect (e.g. GGGs would affect populations in the same system, Scanning Facilities could affect populations at 75 uu distance, Solar Orbital Generators could affect all supply-connected populations), others just the populations at less than a certain number of starlane hops. Otherwise it could be crippling for big maps.

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Geoff the Medio
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Re: Testing Reports

#54 Post by Geoff the Medio »

Geoff the Medio wrote: Fri May 14, 2021 1:08 pmIf I close and reopen the sidepanel without changing anything else, a bunch of the like / dislike factors for the planet's stability disappear, somewhat drastically altering the resulting meter totals.
The issue seems to be related to running meter updates on the whole universe vs. a subset of potential target objects or a single target object. It works consistently for the whole universe and a single target, but gives different results with specifying an object and its contained objects...

Edit: Should be fixed in mater. There was a bug with how repeated evaluations of a set the same effects from different source objects was handling reusing the input set of candidate objects to be acted on by the effect when smallish set of candidates was specified.

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Geoff the Medio
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Re: Testing Reports

#55 Post by Geoff the Medio »

LienRag wrote: Mon May 10, 2021 7:18 pmTwo or three times during the game, I had sitreps for battles that were way out of my detection range, like this one :
Screenshot after is of little use. Post a save from the turn before it happens.
LienRag wrote: Mon May 10, 2021 6:34 pmI noticed that there are "there was a ground battle" sitreps even when a planet has been fully evacuated :
For one turn, or persistantly? If persistantly or for several turns, post a save that reproduces it.

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LienRag
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Re: Testing Reports

#56 Post by LienRag »

Oberlus wrote: Fri May 14, 2021 7:26 pm Probably builing dis/likes should affect only nearby populations. Some could affect the populations that are affected by the building effect (e.g. GGGs would affect populations in the same system, Scanning Facilities could affect populations at 75 uu distance, Solar Orbital Generators could affect all supply-connected populations), others just the populations at less than a certain number of starlane hops. Otherwise it could be crippling for big maps.
Well, it really depends on what these likes/dislikes are for...

  1. For buildings, Likes have been removed by Geoff (very reasonably) because they encouraged spamming of unnecessary buildings on every planet that had a Species who liked these buildings.

    I think they could be reinstated for buildings which cannot be spammed, like Interspecies Design Academy, Automatic History Analyzer, ...
  2. Same-planet (and secondarily same-system) likes and dislikes have one goal if I understand correctly, preventing building everything in the same place, and also constraining the location of buildings.

    This goal they achieve well; in single player, too well actually : you will nearly never build a building where a Species dislike it, not with the way Stability became one of most important part of the game and one quite difficult to handle.

    The only exception being Industrial Centers, Solar Orbital Generators and Black Hole Power Generators, if your Species dislikes them and you don't have another one, since usually the global benefit outweighs the stability cost.
    • For the Industrial Center it most usually means you're going to build it on your Homeworld to compensate the stability cost by the Imperial Palace & Homeworld bonus.
    • For the BHPG you're already constrained by the location, since it's quite rare to have many black holes available. So the only thing it changes is that it affects whether one will settle the planet bearing it.

      So for these two buildings, considering the luck factor (Species disliking or not the building) and the fact that where to build them is actually not really a strategic choice for the reasons mentioned above, I'm not certain that having species disliking them really brings something to the game. At least not playable species.
      Probably the same for Military Command and Automatic History Analyzer, that you'll build at your Imperial Palace to benefit from the Stability bonus (so there's not much strategy involved and the Dislike malus is mostly a matter of luck).
      Only if we want some species from being discouraged from building these buildings could we keep the malus, but then balance has to be taken into account. Not having an early Military slot is not really fun, and AHA is the only way non-scientific species can stay relevant, so giving it a Stability malus is not really interesting either imho.
    • For the SOG, there is more leeway, so it brings a little bit more of a choice ; on a settled planet or on an empty outpost, near the core of the Empire or further on its frontier.

      This can bring real strategic complexity in multiplayer, since it adds (for Species that dislike it) a cost to redundancy : is it better to pay the cost to stability twice or to have only one SOG, at the risk of having it cut off or conquered ?
      I'm not sure that these effects of Dislikes on balance have been taken into accounts when designing which Species will dislike what, though.
    • Also Gas Giant Generators; if your Species dislike them there is some arbitrage to be done between the penalty to Stability and the production bonus.
      That may be an interesting feature to keep, and avoid the spamming of GGG on every Gas Giant that has planets on its system, which was usually the best strategy.
  3. For distant Likes/Dislikes if I'm not mistaken, the main goal is making the decision to conquer a new Species and settling it everywhere less of a no-brainer.

    This goal is certainly a reasonable one, and an important part of the new mechanisms.

    How well these distant Likes/Dislikes work towards it though ? It's contrasted imho.

    First, nearly any Empire will want an Industrial Center, a SOG and a BHPG, probably a Automatic Historical Analyzer and a Military Command, most probably also a few Regional Administration Centers; and conquer Natives with Cultural Libraries; and every Empire has an Imperial Palace and a Cultural Archives, and will try to conquer more of the later.

    Making all these less obviously no-brainers may be a good objective, but a very hard to balance one, so having Species disliking them even distantly is not necessarily a good thing : the positive aspect of having more diversity in gameplay is counterbalanced by the fact that these dislikes are mostly a unavoidable constraint, not something over which the player has real agency.
    What will one do if a Species dislike Cultural Archives ? Not conquer enemies ? Scrap Cultural Archives ? Not integrate this Species to the Empire ?
    The last option is a valid choice, but since it will be the same for all Empires, what does it really bring to the game ? How is it really diversifying the gameplay ?

    The one thing these distant dislikes achieve well is preventing the spamming of buildings.

    The thing is, how much do we want to prevent the spamming of buildings ?

    In a way, as a basic design principle, very much so actually.

    And having to choose between redundancy of important buildings and stability is actually quite interesting strategically, as mentioned above.

    Two problems though :
    - It means that conquering enemy planets bearing disliked buildings leads to scraping these buildings. It's both tedious micromanagement that goes against the spirit of the game, and a problem when we'll try to design actually interesting mechanisms for scorched-earth tactics (that is, not so easy scrapping of buildings).
    - The limited stability it brings to some planets could theoretically brings interesting strategic maneuver, by making these planets vulnerable to enemy actions (like cutting them from Palaces and Administrations Centers, and/or to Luxuries). But the +15 bonus from Protection focus means that they wouldn't really be that vulnerable, and that micro-managing these planets would mostly be a PITA to play without much strategic thinking.

    Also, though generally we want to prevent building spamming, the way some building works it's actually more complicated.

    For Gas Giant Generators, it may actually be a good thing to force some players (those who have Species that dislike GGG in their Empire) to think more intensely about where to use them and where not to, rather than putting one on each Gas Giant.

    But for Scanning Facilities, what it will generate will mostly be a lot of micro-management consisting in building SF at the border of the Empire and then scrapping them when the border moves.

    Also for Lighthouses, they work alone only for diminishing Stealth (so yes, limiting their uses can lead to some interesting strategic consequences), but for the speed bonus they mostly work by associating a lot of them in "paths".

    So do we really want to limit their prevalence in the Galaxy ?
Following Oberlus' suggestion means losing this anti-spam feature of these distant Dislikes, so it has to be carefully evaluated.
I am certainly in favor of adopting it for Scanning Facilities, for the reasons mentioned above, but for the rest I believe we mostly need to evaluate carefully what we want.

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Re: Testing Reports

#57 Post by Oberlus »

LienRag wrote: Thu May 20, 2021 7:36 pmSame-planet (and secondarily same-system) likes and dislikes have one goal
Sure, but I was talking about buildings whose dis/likes affect the entire empire, so this has nothing to do with what I commented.
LienRag wrote: Thu May 20, 2021 7:36 pmFor distant Likes/Dislikes if I'm not mistaken, the main goal is making the decision to conquer a new Species and settling it everywhere less of a no-brainer.
The second part, I think, settiling it everywhere. What I suggested is not in conflict with that.

So no, following my suggestion doesn't mean losing the anti-spam feature.

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