I recently picked up TA, and decided to replay all of the campaigns from the beginning. I don't know if you're still doing patches for this game, but here are some issues I've found:
1) The DL scenarios have the asteroid mining and hostile planet colonization techs from TA available for research, but those techs have no function in a DL scenario, and could cause new players to waste effort researching them.
2) Computer players appear to be able to observe events that should not be within their field of view. For example, if I build a starbase near my homeworld, the Dread Lords immediately dispatch ships to destroy it, even though they have no ship anywhere nearby that could have seen it.
3) When one of my ships is destroyed, the fog of war usually (though not always) does not return to the area it was seeing when it died. I've been able to exploit this bug by building a small ship with a huge sensor radius, flying it into a strategic area, and letting it be destroyed.
Edit: This also seems to also happen when I destroy an enemy ship. Essentially, having a ship battle of any sort seems to permanently remove the fog from the area of battle. I am using full battles, if it makes a difference.
4) After trading some race-exclusive tech to a computer player, it later tried to trade that same tech back to me. I was playing a customized race based off the Terrans.
Edit: Further testing shows this happening even without race-exclusive techs. Perhaps the AI doesn't know that I already have the tech they're offering, and thus tries to trade it to me?
5) The Military/Social/Research allocation sliders do not move smoothly. With one slider locked, moving either unlocked slider should cause the other to move in an equal and opposite manner. Also, IMHO, locking a slider when one is already locked should unlock the prior one, since there's no point in ever having two sliders locked (but that's a minor nit).
(Additional information incorporated into main post)
I'll continue to list issues that I find...perhaps they'll come in useful someday...
6) Ship routes displayed on the minimap are not updated until the minimap is redrawn by a zoom or other action.
7) Anomalies giving bonuses to espionage success should not occur in games where sabotage is disabled (unless there's some other benefit from it).
Edit: Further reading indicates that +% espionage is actually a cost discount on buying spies. If that's the case, then these anomalies are still useful.
8) Not necessarily a bug, but the computer players habitually leave their transports unguarded in hostile territory, even on maximum intelligence. I doubt a human opponent would make that mistake.
9) I think that auto-survey should ignore wormholes. Getting my survey ship teleported into enemy territory isn't something that should happen without my say-so.
10) The AI players do not appear to value ships or starbases rationally. I've offered them trades that were massively tilted in their favor, and they never accepted them. The explanatory text says that some ships, such as constructors, are not tradeable. If that's the case, then they should not be selectable in the trade lists.
11) Influence Points should not be tradeable in games with no United Planets, unless they still do something useful.
Not that I don't agree with you on many of these points, but they're not really "bugs" so much as they are tweaks or changes that would make for a smoother game. If there's ever another update released, some of these could/should make it in, but they aren't really "bugs" per se.
True, but rather than try to maintain a separate "tweaks" list in another forum, I figured I'd keep them all together in this thread. The dividing line between a bug and a tweak is fuzzy in many cases anyway.
12) I just saw a computer player design ships (transports) with defenses, but no weapons.
Edit: This appears to have been due to the presence of Orbital Defense on the planet below.
13) In Dread Lords campaign mission 10 (the one where it's just you and the Dread Lords), the game crashed when I went to the (blank) Foreign Policy Report tab.
Not necessarily. If it has sufficient defense, it could be impervious to damage from fighters with attack of 1 or 2. Battles will end after a set amount of rounds (55, I think, but don't take my word), so those transports would be able to slip past if you didn't have sufficient firepower.
Not saying it's a great tactic or anything, only that it's not entirely worthless. I do agree that even a single weapon would improve the design. Knowing how to use escorts would be best.
If by not moving smoothly you mean that it's hard to adjust by 1% at a time, it's because the sliders are too far to the left. If all 3 are far left and equal (maybe 33% apiece), then each unit of movement to the right must equal a higher percentage. Make sense?
Otherwise, the sliders have always worked just fine for me.
14) In Dread Lords campaign mission 10, the Dread Lords planet never did anything. I ran the game out 300 turns, and when I finally invaded, they hadn't built a single building. This was on "Tough" difficulty.
Regarding #12 (transports with defenses):
According to https://www.galciv.wikia.com/wiki/Ship_combat, if a battle ends in a draw, the winner is chosen by a formula using a function of attack*2, defense*1, and HP/2, so an unarmed transport has pretty slim odds of surviving. But in any case, I later figured out that the defense stats I saw were imparted by an orbital defense on the planet, so I'm withdrawing this issue.Regarding #5 (sliders):
My point is that it shouldn't be possible to move all three sliders to the left at the same time; the position of the slider should always match its percentage. Since the three numbers must add up to 100%, moving one slider to the left should simultaneously move the other unlocked slider(s) to the right.
Tried complaining about the sliders ages ago, nothing was ever done. It would be easy enough to just dump them and go with up-down controls with the percentages in boxes, like you have for selecting an amount of bc to give to/get from another empire. Plus, you'd have the novelty of being able to manually enter a percentage with the keyboard!
15) When governors auto-upgrade the structures on a planet, they should upgrade the structures on bonus tiles first, starting with the best ones.
16) In Dark Avatar campaign mission #1, neither the Drath nor the Thalan ever developed any weapons technology. I ran the game out to 400+ turns just to see. Needless to say, this made the scenario kind of a pushover.
17) In Dark Avatar campaign mission #1, the technology "Xeno Brain Washing" is visible in the tech research tree, but can never be selected (it remains a "Hypothetical Technology").
Ah. Thanks for the refresher. It's been awhile. I've also forgotten about the orbital defense.
You are probably experiencing this/these bug(s) with the semi-functional campaign(s) because you're launching them from the ToA starting menu. Simply don't do this.
One of many countless examples where a player finds proof of the non-existant fog-of-war for the AI.
Still, SD's official position is "the AI needs to scout first". Doh...
I am...but the Galciv2 2.0 release notes (https://forums.galciv2.com/329116) say "All game campaigns have been updated to be playable within Twilight of the Arnor", so this should, in theory, work properly.
I haven't really been monitoring the forums closely. So the AI has no fog of war, but just has a hack requirement to scout planets before sending transports to them?
That's disappointing. I'd read that the GalCiv AI was pretty challenging even without an economic bonus. But if it's got no fog-of-war, that's a lot less impressive.
Yes, something along that line. The AI is simply playing out a set pattern of logical rules, and by offering different scenarios one can muster the patterns pretty well. Once you've been sensibilized to these things, you will notice them in every game.
In the past people complained hard about the no-AI-FOG, so SD announced in a patch that the AI needs to scout out new worlds before sending Colony Ships there. But, that doesn't really mean he suddenly has to face the FOG too, but he simply was programmed to build some Scouts in the initial part of the game. But of course, that just to easy a solution, and things can go horribly wrong:
1. In a big map the AI's scouts will usually be destroyed - and he will send whatever ships he has directly to their target w/o scouting. I once played a gigantic all-abundant where the AI was defeated after 24 turns, and had no ships whatsoever cause I simply bought them all of. So, basically he knew his homesystem, and maybe the systems nearby. Then I coerxed most of them into oblivion, but re-routed the last one to a single planets in the opposite corner of the map. However, he had one constructor I couldnt trade for - which pretty much came out of range in this sector due to the homeworld change. Next turn the constructor was headign towards an Influence-crystal 3 sectors away from his new home etc pp.
2. AI scoutships have a "strange" pattern of scouting. Most often I will find one following the other in a trail. What for?
3. Start a battle of the gods scenario where his scouts will have very fast engines. They will fly into a system, then move back-and-forth there at the same spot until the movepoints are drained, and next turn fly directly into the next system? Why not simply heading there at once? Quite easy, the AI didn't got implemented to "re-think" what to do once his goal (fly to one system) is reached, because usually, in a normal game Scouts will be on speed +2-+4.
4. Trade Sensors to the AI very early - the AI will then built Survey Vessels instead - who won't scout planets anymore, but go for anomalies. Once built, he will also not sell his SurveyShips - however, you can easily trade for all his ScoutShips - which is a strange behaviour if one keeps in mind he needs these ships in order to determine if he should built Colonizers and send them en-route.
I like that the AI doesn't play with fog of war. The human player needs a bit of a disadvantage to overcome in the colony rush phase. The way you beat the AI is to get your colony ships cranked out faster and earlier than they do. On most maps your survey ship on automatic will uncover loads of habitable planets, you just need a scout or two to check out the places it hasn't gone, or you can just send colony ships out blindly and hope you get lucky.
But yeah, the AI scouting is not very impressive. At the very least the scouts should all be going in different directions.
As an option, I would dearly love the auto-upgrade option to upgrade one stage at a time. My major reason for not using the governors is that I've found (If I'm not positioned to just buy the heavy factories) it's often useful to buy the cheap factory on the *3 or *7 bonus, then upgrade the factories one level each.
Unfortunately the *Governor* happily sets the cheap factory to upgrade in one move to the most technologically advanced factory, a considerably slower process, often overriding my explicit orders.
Jonnan
Multiple upgrades on the same tile increase the cost of upgrading, increasing the time taken for the next upgrade to be completed.
Upgrading a bunch of cheap factories straight to advanced factories goes slow to begin with, then goes faster with each advanced factory that comes online.
Myself, I never use the Auto Upgrade feature because I will end up with lots of Industrial Sector, which is great when I have the money to support both the maintenance and the cost of the high production, but otherwise isn't so good.
18) In Dark Avatar campaign missions #2 and #3, the Terrans seem to start with multiple "Civilization Capital" worlds.
Edit: I'm seeing this repeated in other missions. It looks like the AI races start with one Civilization Capital, and then when they found their first colony, it /also/ becomes a Civilization Capital (instead of an Initial Colony), and is set as their homeworld.
19) Not a bug, but a minor UI feature that could probably fit in a patch: When I click on a ship, I'd like to see its 1-turn movement range highlighted. For bonus points, as I move the pointer, show the path it will take to get there, with marks indicating where it will end each turn.
20) Similarly, I wish that there was a way to display the effect radii of all starbases at once. When there are multiple military bases, it's tedious to try to find where the overlaps are so that I can avoid them or camp in them, as appropriate.
Suggestion: When a starbase or constructor is selected, display the overlapping radii of all starbases, not just the selected one.
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