Gameplay Feedback (conc. Speed, Descriptions and more)

[Scara]

Running LinuxMint Linux, the LinuxMint 17.1 (rebecca) release.
GNOME: 3.8.4 (Ubuntu 2015-04-02)
Kernel version: 3.13.0-37-generic (#64-Ubuntu SMP Mon Sep 22 21:28:38 UTC 2014)
GCC: 4.8 (x86_64-linux-gnu)
Xorg: 1.15.1 (12 February 2015 02:49:29PM) (12 February 2015 02:49:29PM)

Hello everybody,

First I must say this is an amazing game! Great work!
I recently found out about Freeorion at the Freeciv Forum and since then enjoyed playing it very much.
Few Weeks ago I downloaded the new gitrepository 0.4.4+ and compiled with libboost-1.54.
Now I have enjoyed playing several games, now using libboost-1.57, I like to give gameplay feedback.

Are the Mad Scientists all right?
After getting through how everything works I played my first game to the end. I was very surprised about this mad scientist throwing out lots of mighty monsters! Had to produce lots of ships to get them and it was great fun.
I had a new install of the git repository (date 24.4) played a game, pulled again from git (date 27.4) and played another game, both with Egassem.
These two games the System of the mad scientists appeared, but in both games they won't attack. I played Turn 250+ and the MSSystem apeared around Turn 150 I think. First I don't see their planet and need to develop omni scanner. Then I saw them, but in both games I invaded all enemy players and ended up waiting for the mad scientist to attack but they won't come out nor produce any monsters.

What takes the Production List so long to update in late game?
Played a 200 System game up to Turn 370 and had lots of lagtime at the end, changes in the Productionlist took about 20sec, the Turn calculation 2min. And strangely for me to understand the planet suitability Pedia look up also took centuries.
I guess all these speed issues are somehow connected with the amount of colonized planets.
At the beginning I was building far to many buildings and now realize that I reduced the speed this way even further more.
But it still is relevantly slow at the end.
I have nearly no lag in the ship control as it was mentioned in much earlier Versions.
During my game I figured out that the List of building options on the planet won't freeze when clicking through the elements and more then one time I thought that it would be nice to add more then one Item at once to the Productionlist. There isn't or haven't I be able to find out how? Well anyway here are my suggestions:
There is lots of columns space in producible Items list and I thought of using it for
- a Checkbox on the left side to choose the building,
- (two entry fields for the repeats and count),
- an other Checkbox for lock position (for items to keep them at the highest or lowest Position)
On top above the list and tabs I thought of
- an add button to fire it
- radio buttons with the position to add the chosen items (top, bottom)
This way there would be maybe still some lagtime for updating the production list but i guess less than updating the list with every single item add/change and a lot less click and drag Management, what definitly is a Problem with heavy lag in between.
As a suggestion for future implementation:
- savable production lists

As I had initial problems to understand Building effects, maybe make things clearer for newbies:
Supply Connection == Sunsystem right?
Why not change the entrys for Building effects to something more clearer like (Planetwide, Sunsystemwide, (Radius/Starlanewide), Supplysystemwide and Empirewide)
or define Supply connection somewhere obvious, where beginners come across.
At Enclave of the Void it says 'Multiple copys do not stack'... that's clear, you need to build one for the whole empire right?

Sudden Segfault, maybe a bug?
I experienced a sudden shutdown with segfault when clicking in the fleet selection and trying to selecting more ships with Shift hold. But its not reproducible, I just tried to crash it with the method and I got my segfault. Then i reloaded and tried again and I tried all kind of combinations, it won't happen. I prefer selection with strg, cause it hasn't happen with this variant.

My view to the Gamebalance:
I used to go the Asteroid path in the beginning, it's pretty fast to research and the Scattered Asteroids are in my Opinion long time the mightiest there is to produce for long.
Organic Ships are nice for the beginning cause of the lower costs.
Normally don't build robotic ships although I think they are pretty balanced (good for beginning), saving the research for asteroids and their bigger brother .
I sometimes use the Titanic hull, the Fractal/Quantum Hull and the Logistics Facilitator, Sun Ships at the End.
Sentient Hull has a very similar looking as the Robotic Hull but by Research offspring Organic, I guess this will change some day or is there something special about it?
Maybe insert a kind of "structural" Speedlimit for Scatted Asteroids? I mean they are scattered already, now hold that together cruising between star systems with high speed =)!
I make nearly no use of all the organic types available.

Question to Robot Interface:Shield:
If I have 20 Fighter with a R2-D2 inside together in a fleet, each one of them has 20 Shields? Or do I need a bot and a shield? The Shiptypes it applies for is clear.
I think the Description is a bit difficult to understand...

Strange Planet suitability:
In my latest Game (27.4), I was looking at a radiated Planet with Planet suitability, what told me that Scylior would fluorish on the planet that is actually hostile to them. Maxsize Scylior(hostile) 21, Exobots(adequate) 20
I had 3 population enlargement specials for organic lifeforms, as well as for robotic species. How is that possible?

I like the new Artificial Factory and Paradise Worlds but,
Factory Worlds from asteroids are pointless because having them living on the asteroids them self gives a larger population, lower cost and a space elevator less to build. Paradise Planets from Asteroids could be interesting to get lithic species population enhancer.

I recently got more working with the objects/planets screen. It serves very well in finding new planets to colonize. The newest thing I found out in this view is how to manage the Planets focuses with it.
Great! It took long managing that system by system. A thing that startled me that the focus change of several planets goes instantly. I normally had this lagtime, equal to that of the Productionlist changing anything.
I tried to select one of the world's in the objects list and made sure i have it in the object list selected as well with several other planets. Changing the focus resolves now again in waiting time. So obviously to me it's seems it is a GUI refresh bottleneck somehow... I'm not to deep into the code, so excuse me if I'm on the wrong track, but I thought it might be of interest.

Game CPU usage?
As Freeorion is round based, is it possible to release the CPU between the turns. In idle state it permanently has 50% load on my CPU!
Is there any SETI evaluation stuff going on in the background, I mean finding new alien species

[Dilvish]

Hi, Thanks for the feedback.
I don't have time to respond to all your questions, but will try to cover a couple.

but in both games I invaded all enemy players and ended up waiting for the mad scientist to attack but they won't come out nor produce any monsters.

The Experimentors will not release any monsters at all on the lowest couple AI Aggression settings (in galaxy setup); also for larger galaxies their release may be delayed. And there is a random component as well, though fairly minor.

What takes the Production List so long to update in late game?
Played a 200 System game up to Turn 370 and had lots of lagtime at the end, changes in the Productionlist took about 20sec, the Turn calculation 2min.

Well, how many total PP, and about how many items was your production list dealing with? It's been quite a long time since I've heard anyone having problems with the ProductionList being so slow, it has had some significant improvement over the last couple years. One thing that is likely to help at least some-- the default build type is "Debug" which does noticeably slow the game down. I recommend changing the build type to "Release" and rebuilding FO.

I thought that it would be nice to add more then one Item at once to the Productionlist.

Buildings should nearly never need to be repeated. Ship can be set to blocks of multiple copies and/or to repeat, after they have been added to the queue (little numeric dropdowns on the left of the item panel in ProductionQueue, they should have tooltips to identify themselves)

Supply Connection == Sunsystem right? ... or define Supply connection somewhere obvious, where beginners come across.

That identity is not really right. Have you looked in the Pedia -> *Game Concepts* -> Supply?

I experienced a sudden shutdown with segfault when clicking in the fleet selection and trying to selecting more ships with Shift hold. But its not reproducible, I just tried to crash it with the method and I got my segfault. Then i reloaded and tried again and I tried all kind of combinations, it won't happen. I prefer selection with strg, cause it hasn't happen with this variant.

That is something we used to have trouble with a long long time ago, but have had very little trouble with for some time now, after a few bugfixes. It does sound a bit familiar that perhaps someone else had trouble in past months as well. Whatever bug is lingering has been hard to locate, particularly so since no one has been able to reliably repeat it.

In my latest Game (27.4), I was looking at a radiated Planet with Planet suitability, what told me that Scylior would fluorish on the planet that is actually hostile to them. Maxsize Scylior(hostile) 21, Exobots(adequate) 20

If a planet has just been depopulated (due to Concentration camps, attacks, or whatnot), it seems that can throw off the starting state of the suitability report and make it report excessively large numbers. It also has trouble in a small set of circumstances involving a nearly-inhabitable planet with the Eccentric Orbit special, but that doesn't sound applicable. Other than that it has been very reliable. It sounds like you had max growth specials for both species, but without seeing screenshots & knowing all your tech, etc. I can't offer any more ideas.

Game CPU usage?
As Freeorion is round based, is it possible to release the CPU between the turns. In idle state it permanently has 50% load on my CPU!

Right now I have an early stage game running with 520 Systems, 14 AI, low monsters & planets, medium everything else; it is idling at just 2% CPU and even in late stage games I don't think it has gone past single digits in years. This is on an Ubuntu system I built a couple years ago, medium range components at the time, although I have since then upped my memory to 32 GB. If you are playing on a laptop that relies on the CPU for graphics processing that will make a big difference; our graphics are not very efficient. I do think changing your build type to Release will help a lot; let us know how it goes after that.

[Geoff the Medio]

Game CPU usage?

In the options, one can enable FPS limit, and set it to something like 30. That should limit the CPU use if it's rendering related. It doesn't actually work as advertised, but should help. One can also minimize the window, which should prevent it from doing most of the work of rendering.

[Scara]

Thank you for the quick answer!

The Experimentors will not release any monsters at all on the lowest couple AI Aggression settings (in galaxy setup); also for larger galaxies their release may be delayed. And there is a random component as well, though fairly minor.

Ah ok, in my first version, the latest svn, AI Aggression was on typical by default, later with the latest GIT versions it changed to manical by default and I set it back to typical, but that probly wasn't good if i want the challenge with the Experimentors... I'll try it!

Well, how many total PP, and about how many items was your production list dealing with? It's been quite a long time since I've heard anyone having problems with the ProductionList being so slow, it has had some significant improvement over the last couple years. One thing that is likely to help at least some-- the default build type is "Debug" which does noticeably slow the game down. I recommend changing the build type to "Release" and rebuilding FO.

I have about 80 to 120 Items in the productionlist.
I set build type to Release and rebuild it. Now lots of game elements seem significantly faster, but the CPU load is still pretty high.
I also set maxFramerate down to 30fps it helped a little bit as well. Now I have a CPU load 30-40% with my actual Turn255 game (150 Systems, 4 AI, Fourarm Spiral) and 15% with a new started one.
Forgot my Computer specification the last post:
GenuineIntel, Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E6550 @ 2.33GHz
8 GB RAM
NVIDIA Corporation G84 [GeForce 8600 GTS]
Video RAM: 256 MB
GPU Frequency: 675. MHz
Driver version: NVIDIA UNIX x86_64 Kernel Module 331.113 Mon Dec 1 21:08:13 PST 2014

Right now I have an early stage game running with 520 Systems, 14 AI, low monsters & planets, medium everything else; it is idling at just 2% CPU and even in late stage games I don't think it has gone past single digits in years. This is on an Ubuntu system I built a couple years ago, medium range components at the time, although I have since then upped my memory to 32 GB. If you are playing on a laptop that relies on the CPU for graphics processing that will make a big difference; our graphics are not very efficient. I do think changing your build type to Release will help a lot; let us know how it goes after that.

This sounds like there is something wrong and I'm sort of driving with "pulled handbrake", but why? I'll try to include a Screenshot.

Buildings should nearly never need to be repeated. Ship can be set to blocks of multiple copies and/or to repeat, after they have been added to the queue (little numeric dropdowns on the left of the item panel in ProductionQueue, they should have tooltips to identify themselves)

I got it with the build repeats and multible Items build. I meant something else, for example I come to a new System and colonize on a planet and already have researched alot, then I like to choose for example Genome Bank, Solar Orbital Generator and Industrial Center and send this Request to the Productionlist in one block. That's what I meant.
Even with the newly implemented speed tweaks (release version and maxfps), adding an item to the list (in the Turn 255 game) takes at least one or two seconds (that's much better than before). I can tell that it takes longer to add a ship or outpost to the list, than a building...

That identity is not really right. Have you looked in the Pedia -> *Game Concepts* -> Supply?

I had a closer look at the game concept of Supply, I think I understand the Supply thing... but I'm still confused, all I wanted to know is what it means when it says 'Multiple copies in the same supply connection do not stack'. All buildings are build on planets or similar, these are in Starsystems and they have connections between each other, and when the planets in the sytems produce these connections are used as supply connections. Now it could mean multiple copies in the same Resource Group, because all the supply connections are connected or it means on one of both sides of a supply connection (that would be rather weird) or it means the starsystem itself that is at the end of a supply connection, but it even can be understood as the planet in a connected system. The last choice gets closest to what I read out of the Pedia entry but I’m just not sure. The simple problem that i have in my understanding, on supply connections itself can not actually be build only at the ends on it. Sorry my stubbornes in this thing, but I really couldn't get over thinking about this and I like it to stop

If a planet has just been depopulated (due to Concentration camps, attacks, or whatnot), it seems that can throw off the starting state of the suitability report and make it report excessively large numbers. It also has trouble in a small set of circumstances involving a nearly-inhabitable planet with the Eccentric Orbit special, but that doesn't sound applicable. Other than that it has been very reliable. It sounds like you had max growth specials for both species, but without seeing screenshots & knowing all your tech, etc. I can't offer any more ideas.

Well, no its a fresh planet and my techtree is complete. I checked a radiated with eccentric orbit, it's the same there. Could it be that the (+) 125% good population has such a large impact? I'll try to add a screenshot, hope it works out. Thanx again for the great game and the support!

[MatGB]

I'll come back to this thread for more detailed stuff, in the current Git build the Experimentor base will have a shields bonus equal to the turn they start launching monsters, and a defenses bonus equal to a fifth that. I used to like the certainty that they launch at turn 200, now I want to know how long I have to wait (and sometimes go in hack the files and reload the game if I've beaten everything else).

That's due to change at some point, Sloth's done some work on them I need to test, but it works as a stopgap.

[Dilvish]

for example I come to a new System and colonize on a planet and already have researched alot, then I like to choose for example Genome Bank, Solar Orbital Generator and Industrial Center and send this Request to the Productionlist in one block.

There should normally be no reason to repeat those buildings in a new system, except on rare-ish occasions as a backup for your main one, or if your empire gets blockaded and split.

I think I understand the Supply thing... but I'm still confused, all I wanted to know is what it means when it says 'Multiple copies in the same supply connection do not stack'.

It does sound like you are confused about Supply. The most important thing about Supply is connecting different systems together, which FO indicates with supply lines the color of your empire (and makes them thick if they are connecting systems that are actually producing resources). Ideally your whole empire is supply connected together, one big ResourceGroup. So you would normally only need one Solar Generator for your entire empire (or maybe a backup someplace in case an enemy blockades you and splits up your empire or even captures the planet with your solar generator.

I'll try to add a screenshot, hope it works out.

I think the link did not work because your hosting site redirects the link, either just post it as a URL, or else upload the file as an attachment and then you can also indicate to put it "inline" so it is not just attached but actually shows in the post. Anyway, the issue there is that once you have all the growth techs, there is (currently) essentially no difference between Adequate, Poor and Hostile (Good is still a little bit better).

[MatGB]

I just read the Supply entry of the Pedia. Ouch. I'll rework that sooner rather than later, it's a rather large chunk of text that isn't as clear as it could be.

Opinions: is the "resource group" terminology useful? It's only used in this entry, better to either expand it for use elsewhere or dump it I think.

[Scara]

I think the link did not work because your hosting site redirects the link, either just post it as a URL, or else upload the file as an attachment and then you can also indicate to put it "inline" so it is not just attached but actually shows in the post. Anyway, the issue there is that once you have all the growth techs, there is (currently) essentially no difference between Adequate, Poor and Hostile (Good is still a little bit better).

Strange, in Preview and when opening the Forum I see the shots, well try way you suggested, but only the CPU shot, cause the other question with the scylior on the radiated planet is well explained, thanks!

Screenshot with CPU load

Screenshot_load.png (922.64 KiB) Viewed 1059 times

Opinions: is the "resource group" terminology useful? It's only used in this entry, better to either expand it for use elsewhere or dump it I think.

Yeah, "resource group" is well defined in the Supply entry, use it in the buildings pedia for buildings, from witch you only need one copy in your supply connected system. I think that would help to understand how far building effects go.

It does sound like you are confused about Supply. The most important thing about Supply is connecting different systems together, which FO indicates with supply lines the color of your empire (and makes them thick if they are connecting systems that are actually producing resources). Ideally your whole empire is supply connected together, one big ResourceGroup. So you would normally only need one Solar Generator for your entire empire (or maybe a backup someplace in case an enemy blockades you and splits up your empire or even captures the planet with your solar generator.

Well, in the beginning with my first two games I was really confused about the Productionlist especially, when I didn't care about the Supplything and settled everywhere, so I had two or more ResourceGroups. Looking at the Productionlist with it's activated and deactivated items, playing around with them I soon figured out what it had to do with the supply lines and how to use them strategically.
I think my problem is/was that I couldn't imagine that something that decentralized like Solar Generation on Earth, would in FO be necessary only ONE time in the galaxy (if the whole system is connected by supply connections).
In the beginning I build Solar Orbital Generators on all planets with brighter suns.
Looking around for this supply connection thing from the building pedia, I read somewhere in the forum that you only need to build one copy each star system, so I tried that. It was going fine aswell...
In fact I need to look out for a blue Star and put one there and good is, right?
I have another question to Supply:
Space Elevators do not give PP Bonus, only Supply bonus, that makes the Supply connection reach farther out? Is there a way to see the supply malus/bonus of a planet and is there a way to relate suppy bonus to UU?

[Dilvish]

the CPU shot

Having 100+ items on the build queue will slow it down, but shouldn't lead to perpetual CPU churn while FO is idle. The stats on your machine sound plenty fine to handle FO without trouble. If you do a search on our boards here for XFCE you will see that people have run into trouble with it, most commonly flickering, but someone having poor performance tracked it down to xscreensaver adding too many keyboard events, and their FO performance cleared up if they killed the xscreensaver process. Although they also asserted they did not have a solution to the problem (I guess they did not consider killing xscreensaver when playing FO to be a solution). So you could try that. Or try KDE instead of XFCE, it's Grrrrrreat!

I think my problem is/was that I couldn't imagine that something that decentralized like Solar Generation on Earth, would in FO be necessary only ONE time in the galaxy (if the whole system is connected by supply connections).

We heartily choose gameplay considerations (especially avoidance of micromanagement) to trump realism.

In fact I need to look out for a blue Star and put one there and good is, right?

Blue or White, yes.

I have another question to Supply: Space Elevators do not give PP Bonus, only Supply bonus, that makes the Supply connection reach farther out? Is there a way to see the supply malus/bonus of a planet and is there a way to relate suppy bonus to UU?

Yes on elevators giving only supply bonus. Supply bonuses are number of starlane jumps, totally independent of UU. To see the supply detail for a planet, expand the line of icons with the defenses to see the supply icon, and then mouse-hover:

supply_meter_detail.png (32.29 KiB) Viewed 1050 times

[Vezzra]

The stats on your machine sound plenty fine to handle FO without trouble.

Well... Core 2 Duo sounds pretty ancient to me? While it should be able to handle FO reasonably well, it still could explain the higher CPU load even when FO idles, couldn't it?

[Scara]

the CPU shot

Having 100+ items on the build queue will slow it down, but shouldn't lead to perpetual CPU churn while FO is idle. The stats on your machine sound plenty fine to handle FO without trouble. If you do a search on our boards here for XFCE you will see that people have run into trouble with it, most commonly flickering, but someone having poor performance tracked it down to xscreensaver adding too many keyboard events, and their FO performance cleared up if they killed the xscreensaver process. Although they also asserted they did not have a solution to the problem (I guess they did not consider killing xscreensaver when playing FO to be a solution). So you could try that. Or try KDE instead of XFCE, it's Grrrrrreat!

The stats on your machine sound plenty fine to handle FO without trouble.

Well... Core 2 Duo sounds pretty ancient to me? While it should be able to handle FO reasonably well, it still could explain the higher CPU load even when FO idles, couldn't it?

Switching to the Release-version was a good decision for a much faster game. My new game is at Turn 122 and it runs just fine .
I uninstalled xscreensaver but that didn't do anything at the load.
I must admit my PC is not the newest and I had a look at the CPU load of other programs... even Videoplayback has 10%.
So the reduction to 20% is great! I'll try KDE the next time I install my System, I just had a install...

I think my problem is/was that I couldn't imagine that something that decentralized like Solar Generation on Earth, would in FO be necessary only ONE time in the galaxy (if the whole system is connected by supply connections).

We heartily choose gameplay considerations (especially avoidance of micromanagement) to trump realism.

You have a point there! I just experience a much more straightforward gameexperience and it's fun!
Thanx for the help!

[Dilvish]

Well... Core 2 Duo sounds pretty ancient to me? While it should be able to handle FO reasonably well, it still could explain the higher CPU load even when FO idles, couldn't it?

From these benchmarks, it doesn't look to me like it should make more than a modest portion of the difference he is seeing. I think the xscreensaver is the problem.

[MatGB]

Are the Mad Scientists all right?
After getting through how everything works I played my first game to the end. I was very surprised about this mad scientist throwing out lots of mighty monsters! Had to produce lots of ships to get them and it was great fun.

This is good to read, a lot of the feedback we get on those guys is "I'm getting destroyed help help they're too powerful" which I've never felt was really the case, it's good to see the flip side (they are getting more work done on them but they remain very cool.

What takes the Production List so long to update in late game?
Played a 200 System game up to Turn 370 and had lots of lagtime at the end, changes in the Productionlist took about 20sec, the Turn calculation 2min. And strangely for me to understand the planet suitability Pedia look up also took centuries.
I guess all these speed issues are somehow connected with the amount of colonized planets.

Lag, specifically effects processing, is an ongoing issue that's improving over time. Basically, especially in the production window, the game has to process every effect that can change production whenever you do something. That's a lot of work, I'm sure it could be made more efficient but the code is way over my head and the drawbacks could be worse.

- savable production lists

As has been said, we don't want this sort of feature because we don't want this to be a game where it would be useful

It shouldn't be the case that you build much on any specific colony once it's established. Strategic, empire wide buildings get built in the best place(s) for them, shipyards get built in strategically useful locations or for species that have useful abilities, beyond that most colonies shouldn't have much built except outpost bases for the rest of their system, and that's not always needed.

As I had initial problems to understand Building effects, maybe make things clearer for newbies:
Supply Connection == Sunsystem right?
Why not change the entrys for Building effects to something more clearer like (Planetwide, Sunsystemwide, (Radius/Starlanewide), Supplysystemwide and Empirewide)
or define Supply connection somewhere obvious, where beginners come across.
At Enclave of the Void it says 'Multiple copys do not stack'... that's clear, you need to build one for the whole empire right?

We're working on making that more clear, the Enclave text you reference was only added very recently, and more obviously needs to be done to make this clearer, it will be.

Sudden Segfault, maybe a bug?
I experienced a sudden shutdown with segfault when clicking in the fleet selection and trying to selecting more ships with Shift hold. But its not reproducible, I just tried to crash it with the method and I got my segfault. Then i reloaded and tried again and I tried all kind of combinations, it won't happen. I prefer selection with strg, cause it hasn't happen with this variant.

I get crashes on occasions (including Blue Screens on Windows sometimes), it only ever seems to happen once I've been playing for a long time, I'm guessing there's a memory leak, I've never been able to replicate a specific cause for myself, let alone get it so others can do it, so we know there's something weird, but have no clue what, more data is good.

My view to the Gamebalance:
I used to go the Asteroid path in the beginning, it's pretty fast to research and the Scattered Asteroids are in my Opinion long time the mightiest there is to produce for long.
Organic Ships are nice for the beginning cause of the lower costs.
Normally don't build robotic ships although I think they are pretty balanced (good for beginning), saving the research for asteroids and their bigger brother .
I sometimes use the Titanic hull, the Fractal/Quantum Hull and the Logistics Facilitator, Sun Ships at the End.
Maybe insert a kind of "structural" Speedlimit for Scatted Asteroids? I mean they are scattered already, now hold that together cruising between star systems with high speed =)!
I make nearly no use of all the organic types available.

Summary: I may have over weakened the Organic ships from their massive dominance in 0.4.3, Scattered Asteroids are far too powerful and we need to work out what to do with them, everything else is probably about right. That agrees with where I'm at currently., but it'll be tweaking from now on I think.

For what it's worth, I'm playing Organics in my current game, I find them more "fun" in many respects, the inbuilt speed is useful and their fragility requires a different mindset, a game of manoeuvre is interesting instead of the blunt edged "have you met all my titans" my games normally end up as".

Sentient Hull has a very similar looking as the Robotic Hull but by Research offspring Organic, I guess this will change some day or is there something special about it?

Yeah, no idea about that one, I'm guessing an early art file, I quite like the art but it doesn't fit with the organic line, basically if an artist does somethign cool we could use instead we could keep the current art for something in a different line.

Question to Robot Interface:Shield:
If I have 20 Fighter with a R2-D2 inside together in a fleet, each one of them has 20 Shields? Or do I need a bot and a shield? The Shiptypes it applies for is clear.
I think the Description is a bit difficult to understand...

Yes, I reread it and it's not as clear as it could be, it's still a nice feature though. RIS counts all ships with the part that also have robotic crew, and works out the total bonus, it maxes out at 20, is roughly one per ship up until about 7 ships then reduces, I forget how many you need to get the max.

Strange Planet suitability:
In my latest Game (27.4), I was looking at a radiated Planet with Planet suitability, what told me that Scylior would fluorish on the planet that is actually hostile to them. Maxsize Scylior(hostile) 21, Exobots(adequate) 20
I had 3 population enlargement specials for organic lifeforms, as well as for robotic species. How is that possible?

If you've got all the Growth techs (especially Cyborgs and Xenologicial Hybridisation) then I can believe that anyway, Scylior have the Good Population trait, this combines with various growth techs in a rather nasty over the top manner, it's something I want to work on at some point, it's currently slihtly too powerful.

I like the new Artificial Factory and Paradise Worlds but,
Factory Worlds from asteroids are pointless because having them living on the asteroids them self gives a larger population, lower cost and a space elevator less to build. Paradise Planets from Asteroids could be interesting to get lithic species population enhancer.

I'm looking at the costs again and possibly increasing it for gas giants and decreasing it for asteroid belts, I also might look at making the cost depend on galaxy settings, in a High planets game they're rarely worth it, on Low planets they're really overpowered. Glad you like them, working out how to do them took a bit of thinking and I'm quite pleased with the result even if I'm not sure on the costs.

As observed, you don't need to build buildings anywhere, and the Space Elevator is completely pointless on Tiny planets (well, not completely, but almost).

I recently got more working with the objects/planets screen. It serves very well in finding new planets to colonize. The newest thing I found out in this view is how to manage the Planets focuses with it.
Great! It took long managing that system by system. A thing that startled me that the focus change of several planets goes instantly. I normally had this lagtime, equal to that of the Productionlist changing anything.

OOOHHHH! I knew that was in the works I'd missed it going live. Yes, that is nice, very nice indeed, and much much faster.

I tried to select one of the world's in the objects list and made sure i have it in the object list selected as well with several other planets. Changing the focus resolves now again in waiting time. So obviously to me it's seems it is a GUI refresh bottleneck somehow... I'm not to deep into the code, so excuse me if I'm on the wrong track, but I thought it might be of interest.

Yeah, vast improvement in process time doing it via Objects instead of clicking on a system, wonder why?

Is there any SETI evaluation stuff going on in the background, I mean finding new alien species

I definitely want to see more species added to the game, as I think to most others, more CantColonise natives definitely, they basically can't really make the game unbalanced and I do get bored conquering another bunch of Trenchers sometimes.

Definitely want to expand on the Imperial/Playable species as well, but that'll require a lot more balancing.

[Kassiopeija]

when hostile planets show more max population than better types it is most likely because of the tech "cyborgs". personally, I find that rather awkward and wonder, if the maxpop might possibly go down after a single terraforming step (?)