Beta3 - first comments on long term play

from Stardock Forums
great improvement. Light years better, especially like the way culture is going to play a main role in gameplay this is very original
following are not all pedantic bug pointers some are gameplay suggestions:-

1. Constructors - not showing as shields on planets when only vessel
2. It would be useful to see Influence values of proposed build items
3. useful if the starbase options screen opended directly after starbase build - to see the type of benefits gained
4.Useful in starbase pop-up to see benefits of trade and on planets in starbase location sector.
5. Xeno XXX - Xeno seems to have a big gap between X an eno on most info screens
6. This game REALY needs a money value slider on the foreign policy screen the manual input is a fag.
7. Really useful to have a galactic map button to 'show discovered anomolies and resources'.
8. Nice if influence circles on mini map were transparent?
9. Very special resources would be nice! (very rare)
10. When auto-surveying and select new location for the ship it ignores new location and carries on on auto. I think it should cancel autosurvey when a new manual location is selected.
11. Very cool if you could have an option to select a directoon for a research vessel but allow it to divert to pick up anomolies on the way.
12. I would like a bigger galaxy option than Gigantic!! (no wthe code is quicker this would be ok on my machine which is only 950mhz)
13. The guard button for ships annoyingly calls up the rename ship option often.
14. Survey ships get to tough
15. Fleet name for group selects so that you can click on fleet name and issue directions to a pre-selected group/fleet.
16. zoom says 100.0% ?
17. Spacebar would be nice to close info pop up's rather than always have to mouse click
18. An indicator on the main galactic screen showing the time (bar?) till next technology achievement would be cool
19. On ship select panel please say name of location planet rather than just 'in orbit'
20. Repair bay on starbase upgrade says 'string not found'
21. How do upgrades on starbases work - not clear which ones increase resource production actually on the starbase and which on the planets in the sector.
22. mini-map locator for starbase construction and upgrades as you need to see if on a traderoute or how many planets in sector will be affected by upgrade options.
23. On starbase screen say how many planets and how much upgrade will benefit them.
24. Somehow more 3-look to galactic map (sorry!!)

25. my saved games won't load on beta three - may be my pc as at the time of saving I got a 'delayed write error (whatever that is) on XP.

26. Superb strategy game


steevo

301 views 9 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top
my saved game file has the time of save but is only 1k in size - which may be right if it only saves config data but i can send if anyone is interested.

i need to start and save another game but i saved between turns - i notice other erros on crashes between turns on beta3 - certainly this game i have now lost saved for me at least once before and re-loaded ok more than once. This time however it didnt crash but failed to restore the save. I wonder if the auto save is causing an error?

s
Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top
there should be a sub directory underneath the saved game file.
TouchTasks - Access tasks with ease on Windows touchscreens.
Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top
Oh, one quick thing, the Esc key will dismiss most popups.
Reply #4 from Stardock Forums Top
Yea sorry Brad,

inside the 'saved game folder there are 92 files totaling 1.98mb from anomolies.galaxy to tributes.civ8.

In previous autosave there are 93 items 1.95mb starting and ending with the same filenames.

I have emailed you the SmartEx log file here is ythe bit I can open and read in notepad:

Stardock SmartException Logging Information
-------------------------------------------

OS Version : Windows XP
Video Card : NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200
Application Exception code: C0000005 ACCESS_VIOLATION
Crash Addr: 0040EF7F 01:0000DF7F D:\games\Drengin.net\galciv\galciv.exe

Processor Registers (x86):
EAX:FFFFFFFF
EBX:00000000
ECX:FFFFFFFF
EDX:05803A38
ESI:00002D00
EDI:00BFFD1C
CS:EIP:001B:0040EF7F
SS:ESP:0023:00BFAD94 EBP:00BFADE4
DS:0023 ES:0023 FS:003B GS:0000
Flags:00010206


Current Application Call Stack:

Addr Frame Logical addr Module Name
---------------------------------------------
0040EF7F 00BFADE4 0001:0000DF7F D:\games\Drengin.net\galciv\galciv.exe
004C4E7C 00BFAE40 0001:000C3E7C D:\games\Drengin.net\galciv\galciv.exe
004D2037 00BFB308 0001:000D1037 D:\games\Drengin.net\galciv\galciv.exe
004AD501 00BFF5F4 0001:000AC501 D:\games\Drengin.net\galciv\galciv.exe
0047BE1B 00BFFA5C 0001:0007AE1B D:\games\Drengin.net\galciv\galciv.exe
0045DF48 00BFFAE0 0001:0005CF48 D:\games\Drengin.net\galciv\galciv.exe
0050111D 00BFFB48 0001:0010011D D:\games\Drengin.net\galciv\galciv.exe
005013B7 00BFFBB0 0001:001003B7 D:\games\Drengin.net\galciv\galciv.exe
004FCF1B 00BFFC28 0001:000FBF1B D:\games\Drengin.net\galciv\galciv.exe
005211A4 00BFFCA8 0001:001201A4 D:\games\Drengin.net\galciv\galciv.exe
77D43A68 00BFFCD4 0001:00002A68 C:\WINDOWS\system32\USER32.dll
77D43B37 00BFFD3C 0001:00002B37 C:\WINDOWS\system32\USER32.dll
77D45B40 00BFFD6C 0001:00004B40 C:\WINDOWS\system32\USER32.dll
77D45F87 00BFFD8C 0001:00004F87 C:\WINDOWS\system32\USER32.dll
7377DF68 00BFFDB8 0001:0001CF68 C:\WINDOWS\System32\DDRAW.dll
77D43A68 00BFFDE4 0001:00002A68 C:\WINDOWS\system32\USER32.dll
77D43B37 00BFFE4C 0001:00002B37 C:\WINDOWS\system32\USER32.dll
77D43D91 00BFFEAC 0001:00002D91 C:\WINDOWS\system32\USER32.dll
77D4438C 00BFFF30 0001:0000338C C:\WINDOWS\system32\USER32.dll
0055D6C6 00BFFFC0 0001:0015C6C6 D:\games\Drengin.net\galciv\galciv.exe
77E814C7 00BFFFF0 0001:000204C7 C:\WINDOWS\system32\kernel32.dll


Debug information for each stardock app follows ....

Reply #5 from Stardock Forums Top
thanks
Reply #6 from Stardock Forums Top
1. Only ships with defense values will make the shield icon appear.

2. Star prestige contributes to the influence, and that is listed on the info in the project data window on the planet data screen. So you should be able to figure out how much the project will increase the influence that the star has by multiplying that value by the current influence rating.

3. It would be useful the first time, but after you've played it for awhile, it would probably get annoying, since you can't do anything unless you have another constructor there.

4.That's a good idea. Adding it to my list of suggestions.

5. Yeah, there's a bug in that font (I think that it's Arial12) that makes the spacing on the X weird.

6. Do you mean the popup that appears when you go to offer money or influence on the trade screen?

7. Really useful to have a galactic map button to 'show discovered anomolies and resources'.

8. The circles on the minimap are to show either population or production, not influence.

9. Like what kind of very special resources?

10. Good point.

11. Hmmm...not sure how we would implement this...also, what if you were playing a saved game and you wanted to avoid an anomaly that you knew was a wormhole, but this code hijacked your ship and made it go into the wormhole?

12.We've still got a lot of optimization to do before we can feasibly have larger maps.

13. Probably a hit detection problem with the buttons, etc. I'll check it out.

15. The select multiple ships feature isn't really a fleet, it's a one time thing. I think that we are planning on having real fleets at some time in the future.

16. 100% is the actual size of the minimap.

17. Brad answered, but as a note, the space bar sets your selected ship to having 0 moves left and finds the next one to move.

18. This has been suggested before, but our current problem is, where would we put it?

19. The ship list is not in its final stage by any means. I just made it so that it's not getting shifted down and covering up the turn button anymore. The ship list has been completely re-designed but not implemented, and its new design is much better.

21. Under mining, if it says that it will upgrade one of your abilities as opposed to the production, it increases the bonus you get from the resource rather than affecting any planets. The other ones specifically mention an increase to military and social production.

22-23. We've already added the request for a screen showing how your starbase affects the nearby star systems. We will be changing the starbases on the minimap to look like a + instead of a triangle on the minimap.

25. OOoh, now that's odd. There was a bug in the save games, but I think that Iv'e got it fixed now.

26. Thanks.
Reply #7 from Stardock Forums Top
3. Agree
6. yea, I think so (cant think where else I offer money?) its the only bit where you interface with the system in the 'good ole' fasioned way - click type-click. The wost bit is when they say no you cant go back and tweak it up a bit, you have to re-type from scratch - as i like to save my Credits ;) i like to tweak this up in small increments till they accept which makes it a bit of a drag
8. yea i mean population - minor cosmetic point wold be to blend them back a bit.
9. double value? triple value?
11. You can tell I play em' not code em' ;p I was just thinking allow them to divert no wider than 0.5 sectors either way en route to pick up 'prestige' artifacts (i.e not wormholes)
16. point zero?
18. Just a tiny little bar
21. thanks
26. you are welcome
Reply #8 from Stardock Forums Top
6) There isn't another place, but I thought that I should check since you said Foreign Policy screen.

9) if it's just increasing the value, you can do that with constructors.

11) Only constructors can use resources, by building starbases on them. The resources should block all other ships.

16) Say you select a medium size galaxy. The minimap defaults to showing 6 sectors across, which is the size of the galaxy. So you click on the + (zoom in). Now it only shows 4, so the area that you're seeing is being drawn at 150% of what it would normally be drawn at.

18)
Reply #9 from Stardock Forums Top
oops, hit submit too soon...

If we can find a good way to show the research progress on the main screen then we will.