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).
33) Another AI issue (or two): The AI does not seem to understand how to deal with a speed deficit; if I send a small, fast ship into its space, it will happily send its entire fleet after it in an futile tail chase. Any one of those ships could kill mine, if they could catch it. I think it needs two changes:
- First, it needs to understand the concept of a ship's threat radius, and how to spread out multiple slower ships in order to corner and kill a fast ship.
- Second, it needs some concept of strategic priority, so it's not so easily distracted. That fleet could have crushed several of my outlying worlds if it hadn't gone off chasing my gadfly.
34) The Dread Lords do not seem to be capable of counterespionage. Once I put saboteurs on their improvements, they seem to be out of commission for the rest of the game.
35) It is possible to load a saved game while the AI is taking its turns. If you do, you will not be able to move your ships until you restart the game, or let the AI take its normal turns.
Might work better to plot circles on top of the fog to show star locations. The idea is to make it easier to send scouts in to check out the local habitability, right?
Right. More generally, I think that any information available on the minimap should be displayable on the main map. Otherwise, it forces the player to visually correlate the two.
Stellar Cartography
36) The "Eyes of the Universe" does not seem to show ships on the minimap anymore. I know it used to do this, and the tech description says it does.
37) The tech description for "Slaughtertoriums" implies that it's a 1/planet improvement, but this does not seem to be the case.
38) If you have no spare agents, it's impossible to go to a planet's espionage screen to move or remove an agent (though you can still remove an agent from the Domestic Stats espionage tab, and then it will let you use the planet screen to place it).
39) On very large maps, you can't zoom out far enough to actually see the whole map on the screen. The minimap helps, but it's still more awkward than it would be if I could just zoom the main map out a bit more.
40) The "Automate" algorithm for miners seems less than ideal; it seems to prefer starting new mines to improving existing ones...which is fine, except that it doesn't take distance into account properly. It just tried to fly halfway across the galaxy to start a new mine, when there was an existing mine that could have been improved in the same system.
Edit:
A possible heuristic for picking the next mining destination might be:
1) Disqualify all mines within another empire's influence.
2) Disqualify any mines that already have a miner from this empire en route to them.
3) If there are any improvable mines within the same system, disqualify all mines outside that system.
4) If there are any improvable mines within the owner's influence, disqualify all mines outside the owner's influence.
5a) For each remaining candidate mine, calculate the points of production that improving it to the next level will actually add to its assigned destination (or the one it will be assigned, for undeveloped asteroids), taking the distance modifier into account.
5b) Divide that production improvement by the number of turns needed for the miner to reach and improve the mine to the next level.
6) Travel to the mine with the best score.
A similiar issue occurs with many of the other automated abilities. When you have multiple survey ships, auto-survey will often send one to an anomaly that another is closer to, and auto-attack seems to pick targets entirely at random.
41) The places that show what a colony is building should have some kind of visual indicator (an icon, or a color change) to denote when an item has already been fast-built there that turn, so that the user can tell without having to actually click there to see if the Buy button is enabled.
42) When upgrading a starbase, "Defense assist" modules show the colored icons for attack, not defense.
43) More of an annoyance than a bug, but the fact that surplus production isn't carried over between turns leads to otherwise unnecessary micromanagement.
44) The "set launch direction" is very difficult to use when zoomed out very far; it often seems to have no effect.
45) Minor, non-gameplay bug. It seems like troop transports can be double-counted on the stats screen. In my current game I have five transports grouped into two fleets, but the stats screen says I have seven transports. I didn't build them, I bought them from the Altairans because I don't have Planetary Invasion yet. When I disband the fleets, the stats screen correctly reports five transports. Fleet them again, the count is back up to 7.
46) When looking at the ships in a multi-ship stack, the details shown are always for the last ship clicked in the group. That sounds good, but if the last click made was to *deselect* a ship, that's probably not what the user would expect; with two ships, that means that you can have one selected, but the details shown be for the unselected one.
Suggestion: Highlight the border of the ship icon whose details are currently displayed, regardless of whether it's selected or not.
47) This might or might not be a bug, but some of the higher powered starbase weapon modules do not require their lower-power counterparts to be installed first.
48) A small nice-to-have tweak: The ability to add a short note to each colony that can be viewed and edited from the civ manager report screen. When I've got a lot of colonies, I sometimes want to note things like "Build nav center here when possible", or somesuch.
48a) For bonus points, have the population column on this report show the maximum population as well as the current population.
48b) For more bonus points, add hover text to the columns of the report, showing the same breakdowns of approval and other values that you can get from the planet's detail page.
48c) For yet more bonus points, allow the columns of this report to be resized and selected from a larger list of available columns, to show things like intrinsic bonus, starbase bonus, influence generated, rally point, enemy agent presence, etc...basically any info available on the planet. A column showing the icons for any bonus tiles on the planet would also be great.
48d) For a final bit of extra credit, merge in some functionality from the planet list, so that you can see information on enemy and unowned worlds, to the extent available given current intel levels, etc.
49) When setting module build priorities for a starbase, there should be a way to specify that modules of certain types should not be auto-built at all.
50) When you're in TA and you are in the colony governor. When you have the governor change planets constructing ships of type X and you want to change the construction to another type, if you double click on the ship you now want to design instead of single-clicking on it, it will crash the game. (Un-caught exception).
51) Tweak: In the combat viewer, add left and right arrows to the buttons for speed and viewpoint, so that if you overshoot, you don't need to cycle all the way through to get back to the one you want. Speed might actually be even better as a slider.
52) The description for the Spin Control center says that ships appear 5 times mightier, and then says that ships appear twice as strong.
- When an empire disappears, occasionally some ships will remain loyal to that vanished empire. In my last two game this happened with the Krynn and the Altarians. If I attack the ship I get a warning that it will mean declaring war on that empire.
- In my last game, I simultaneously achieved a Diplomatic victory and Influence victory. An event forced a war when I was 1 step from my influence victory. When I beat my opponent, the only major civ left was my ally. The end screen I got was for the dimplomatic victory only. In the victory tab, it said that I would achieve both the Diplomatic and Influence victory next move.
- In the end game stats, for version 2.03, the lines are no longer displayed for the timelines of military, technological, population etc.
- The AI of alien races sometimes contacts me to trade for technologies I have by offering in exchange technologies that I already have.
- The star base modules are supposed to increase tech and research for the planets in its influence however I've never seen the number of days needed for a research reduced when adding these modules.
53) When you order a fleet of constructors to 'Construct', and the second-to-last constructor finishes and is expended (thereby disbanding the fleet), the final constructor doesn't remember what the fleet was doing, and needs to be re-ordered to Construct.
54) Elections are very easy to rig by turning down the tax rate for a single turn. There should be some hysteresis added, either so that changes in the tax rate take some time to have their impact on approval, or (less drastic) so that changes to approval take some time to have their impact on the vote calculations.
55) It would be nice if the population counts (both planetary and empire) had color-coding and hover text the way the treasury does, so that one could see population growth/loss trends.
56) On the planet view screen, Military production, Influence, and Approval have hover text breaking down the calculations. Social production, Research production, Food production, Income, Spending, and Maintenance do not.
Suggestion: The icons for bonus production that the empire is not charged for should appear slightly differently than the normal ones.
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:
Sign in or Create Account
