Quick Start seems to be impossible

[Hustin]

I tried several tries using the official 0.43 release and the Quick Start, and it seems that no matter what I do I get pounded into atoms. The instant the purple guys to the north see you they go all out to kill you, and the Yellow guys to the southeast do the same. I tried a balanced approach and an all-out seek-and-destroy approach against the purple guys, and it seems that there's no way to keep up. If you sit in your boundaries and build ships like crazy the purple guys eventually outstrip you, and if you go after them you can't quite wipe them out. I actually managed to capture their home system, but the game wouldn't let me colonize their home desert planet (it lets you click colonize, but it never actually works).

The best I managed to do was bottle up the purple guys in their home system for 200 turns, then I had to back away because they were *still* outstripping my ship production! I had to retreat and let them loose to fight the yellow guys, but eventually the yellow guys overwhelmed me (even though my fleet had four times the damage capacity and comparable shields and health).

(shrug) If anyone has managed to beat it, they're smarter than I am...

[Geoff the Medio]

Perhaps you should try a regular single player game, and adjust some of the settings such as the random seed or AI aggressiveness?

[Dilvish]

I actually managed to capture their home system, but the game wouldn't let me colonize their home desert planet (it lets you click colonize, but it never actually works).

It sounds like their home planet was stealthed to you, which makes capture of a planet *nearly* impossible until you get enough detection. For one thing, your UI viewed it as an empty planet (even if you could see the orbitals in place) but the Server will not let you colonize into an already populated planet. Once you had participated in at least one battle in that system the stealthed planet would often be revealed, but it may or may not have gotten its shields knocked out during said battle, which would be necessary to be able to invade (they might look like zero shields, and you might get an invade button, but if it's stealthed and actually has nonzero shields that invade attempt would fail). So in that situation you need to research detection strength, in the SPY category. Building a lighthouse in the system would also help.

[MatGB]

Aye, if their homeworld is desert odds are good they're Etty, who get a stealth bonus.

Haven't tried quickstart for ages, might do it on fresh install and see how I do, assuming it'll always give the same seed on first play. If there is a problem with difficulty for a new player on the quickstart on fresh install settings, then we might want to assign a different seed as it'll be the thing most new players do I suspect, and the UI for "you can't see this planet yet" isn't incredibly obvious to a brand new player.

[Bigjoe5]

Is the player supposed to be able to (try to) colonize a planet he can't see yet? If so, there should be a very clear sitrep message provided to the player when colonization fails.

[BraveSirKevin]

Is the player supposed to be able to (try to) colonize a planet he can't see yet? If so, there should be a very clear sitrep message provided to the player when colonization fails.

I had some stealthy natives at a particularly nice planet a couple star jumps from my starting system so I sent my starting colony ship there and was very confused when nothing happened. The next turn I still had the ship but no button to colonise that planet so I colonised the neighbouring one and only then did it reveal why I couldn't colonise.

Could a planet not havesome sort of indicator to show that it is occupied, but that nothing's known about the occupants? Perhaps a question mark where the race indicator goes?

[MatGB]

It sorta does, but it's not at all clear (see my comment about the UI above), if the planet itself is blurred with scanlines but the rest of the system is visible, then either there's a stealth special on the planet (clouds, etc) which should itself be visible or the natives there have a stealth bonus, or both.

Agree completely it needs a sitrep, and while I don't think the current UI is clear, I have no clue how to improve it, it definitely confused me the first few times, it was only experience plus digging here that I figured out what was happening.

FWIW, if there are planets with scnalines but no clouds, etc I sometimes park troop ships in orbit for the time when I get enough scanning tech to see, it's normally something like Furthest but can be useful critters like Fifty Seven or Setinon.

[Dilvish]

A partial visibility requirement used to be part of the colonization process, but at the time (& until quite recently) most Etty ships were so blind they couldn't see a planet beneath them & so the Etty couldn't colonize with that condition. I think I had persuaded Geoff to remove the requirement for that reason, with the code comment 'pending further investigation'. Because such excessive blindness had continued to plague Etty's with respect to invasions, they've been revamped so that their ships have a smidgen of detection & I think it makes sense to go ahead and impose the visibility requirement for colonization again. Some players will probably still be confused as to why they're not getting a colonize button, but overall the situation should be an improvement.

A patch of the changes is attached; I did some testing and it seemed fine so I've gone ahead and put in a commit with the visibility requirement enforced again.

[MatGB]

Having now done a playthrough.

They're not Etty, they're Trith, Trith get a minor stealth bonus that's disregarded by researching Active Rader, to get to turn 200 and not research one of the very very early game techs is an interesting approach but not one that's going to let you win many games.

Used the map twice, once with full default as humans, where it was the blue player below that caused me too many problems, not the Trith, and once with anew species I'm working on, both times, no real issues, game's perfectly playable as long as you do some basic research.

It might be better to have a UI flash over stuff you can't see perhaps saying "you can't see this, improve your scanning tech"?

Also, you want troop ships to take an enemy planet, not colony ships. Both would have the same issue though.

[Bigjoe5]

It might be better to have a UI flash over stuff you can't see perhaps saying "you can't see this, improve your scanning tech"?

A tooltip for stealthy objects that displays their stealth (and perhaps your empire's detection strenght, for immediate comparison?) would be magnificent, actually. That's a good idea.

[Dilvish]

Could a planet not havesome sort of indicator to show that it is occupied, but that nothing's known about the occupants? Perhaps a question mark where the race indicator goes?

There are a few potential indicators. The easiest to notice, but less specific, is scanlines being displayed across the planet surface even when you have a ship in the same system or otherwise have current visibility of the system -- that's a definitive indicator that the planet is stealthed beyond your detection capabilities. That can occasionally be done by 'natural' factors, but most often indicates a stealthy species present. If there are any orbitals visible then currently that means it' populated (though in the future I suppose someone could do something involving orbitals at a dead planet). If the planet was populated by a stealthy species at galaxy creation, then the planet name, and system name on the galaxy map will be printed in italics.

I agree that Matt's suggestion of a tooltip providing the relevant stealth & detection info would be a great addition.

[Bigjoe5]

The stealth doesn't seem to be available to the player in this case (because the planet is too stealthy... go figure). How about a tooltip that just says "The stealth of this planet exceeds the Imperial Detection Strength" or something to that effect (perhaps shorter)?

[Bigjoe5]

Sure, the simplest in this case might just be to say, if the empire Detection is D, "Planet X Stealth: > Imperial Detection D". But sometimes the actual stealth meter will be revealed during combat, so if the stealth meter reads a number S, higher than D, we could write "Planet X Stealth (apparently S): > Imperial Detection D" Since it is a relatively rare event for S to increase, the apparent value in that case should be valid for a fair while.

Good call - How about 2 strings, one when the apparent stealth is higher than the empire's detection strength, and one when it's less (but visibility is still <= basic):

Code: Select all

Latest known stealth (%1%) exceeds empire detection strength (%2%).

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Stealth (value unknown) exceeds empire detection strength (%1%).

But there's a third case as well - the object could be basically visible or less just because it's not in range of a detector. In that case, a third message might be appropriate:

Code: Select all

Out of detector range.

[Dilvish]

Code: Select all

Latest known stealth (%1%) exceeds empire detection strength (%2%).

Code: Select all

Stealth (value unknown) exceeds empire detection strength (%1%).

Those sound good, sure.

But there's a third case as well - the object could be basically visible or less just because it's not in range of a detector. In that case, a third message might be appropriate:

Code: Select all

Out of detector range.

ah, yes. I normally play with detection circles on so that's a non-issue, but for everyone who doesn't, such a tooltip would very helpfully round out the set of possibilities.