Hey guys. We're looking at ramping into Rebellion development now that 1.2 is out, and I'm looking at core work we could do while simultaneously working on Rebellion specific features. These would be things we could look into patching into Diplomacy while we go forward with Rebellion, so this isn't a feature request thread. There are really 2 types of things I'm looking for.
1. Long standing complaints, bugs, and glitches: Anything that's existed in Diplomacy, or previous versions that we might be able to fix between major tasks. I know many of these have likely been posted or reported, but combing through all the threads seems rather daunting in addition to actually getting some programming done.
2. Realistic concerns and mechanic suggestions: I can't make the game multi-threaded or 64-bit, and I can't make the AI scriptable in Lua, python, XML, or legos, I want to get that out of the way first. What I can say is that if you think a certain part of the game is a real mire or CPU bottleneck (like say the empire tree) I can focus some attention on that and see if there are any optimizations the team might be able to make now that we have some memory to play around with. I can also see if there are design or balance concerns we might address, though these are harder to deal with as they require a certain amount of bureaucratic process to actually be implemented.
I won't guarantee we get most, many, or even any of your suggestions in, but in a perfect world I would love to give you guys as much as we can in terms of the products you want and deserve, and if I can pluck a few cherry suggestions from the community then I will certainly do so.
ya. AI need to be like "hey, my capital ships is getting raped. maybe i should do something aboutit"
bahhh.
Well for Advent at least, making repulsion on autocast by default does help a bit...and vasari do have overseers that help the first capital ship you try to kill...
Quoted for truth. Especially the Z-Axis bit... surely you can make all starbases able to rotate on their axises?
I have Sins of a Solar Empire on two computers. I originally purchased it on a disk and I was wondering if I could transfer the expansion pack digital copy between the two. I dont want to spend 40 dollars on each computer individually and you can't buy the Diplomacy+Entrenchment pack on a disk form.
What the hell should I do?
Yes
Sins, and presumably all expansions thereof, is licensed in such a manner as to allow you to install on up to 2 different computers, so long as one is solely yours and the other is primarily yours, legally-speaking.
Practically-speaking, however, you could put it on 2 (two) different computers, and use them to play LAN games. I see nothing wrong (legally speaking especially) with having Sins on say, a desktop and a laptop, so you can still play it while your on a business trip or vacation or something.
Not hatin, just sayin: Do anything, just fix the frikin empire tree. That is the biggest oversight letting that thing continue as an unstable overlay that hops up and down during large conflicts, rendering it almost useless as a targeting tool And isn't that the point of the damn thing; to provide unit targeting and command control? With large fleets in a grav well and reinforcing ships jump in, you might as well close your eyes and pin the tail on the focus fire! Even if you have designated ship types grouped, you can forget about any coherent target selection with it.
All the new features sound great but by far the thing I would love to see the most would be a way to turn off mines. Not only do they add more (bloody well insanely more) aggravation than tactical depth but make the game too slow to enjoy playing with higher numbers of AI on larger maps. Would be nice to play again, mines are the reason I stopped.
The one thing I want to see is the AI use and counter things like starbases and mines better than blind suiciding and poor placement.
Hello ! I know I'm late but I would like to add my little contribution :
First, the empire tree jumping around thing, this I remember, some time ago when I was playing on a kinda small screen pc, was really the one thing I found the most annoying about this game. Well maybe the lag was more annoying, but you could somehow avoid it by not playing too big games... I remember I stopped some games because I just couldn't manage to play with this thing jumping around at each click on a ship.
Now that I have a bigger screen, it is better really, but is still one of the most annoying things for me. SageWon said it comes from ships jumping between planets, I don't think this is the main problem. The main problem is simply when you click on something, the whole tree scrolls up or down, to place at the top the planet where the thing you clicked is at. Which is generally nice at the start of games and when you click on something outside the empire tree so it "highlights" where the thing is.
But then it becomes a problem when you have many things at a planet, well you can use stacked icons, but that way you can't really select things precisely... And for people with laptops or small screens it quickly becomes difficult to play.
Maybe it would be great to simply allow the player to toggle an in-game option like "prevent the empire from jumping". Keeping the default behavior until the player explicitly tells the game he wants it otherwise... And it seems so much of an easy fix, compared to other long standing complaints like the AI suiciding on starbases etc...
Then I also find it would be great to find some way so scouts don't blindly cross pirate bases, or more generally that the pathfinder avoids them if possible, but that's more of a feature request...
Also, a very minor 'bug' : sometimes I want a scout to go back and forth between two planets, A and B, so I queue move orders. Generally when you do that you want the scout to just appear at the planet and then return nearly immediately. It appears that when you queue the orders, if the scout was somewhere else than A or B (jumping or at another planet), then it does that great, but if it was at A for example, then each time it goes back to A, it insists on going all the way to the center of the gravwell, and then continues the queue, which is kind of a waste of time and can be dangerous if A is hostile... But this is really minor^^ just a thing I was thinking about that hasn't already been said.
Small consideration...add an option that allows the user to toggle whether SBs automatically are pinned to the empire tree or not....
Ditto for Superweapons.
Thinking about it, why are the health bar indicators on the empire tree and when you press down Alt always proportioned something like 3/4 hull and 1/4 shields ? It seems strange to me that they don't represent the actual proportion of hull and shields of the particular ship.
Especially for Advent ships, that generally have at least as much shield points as hull points (and the Guardian's shields are something like 3 times its hull), I think it would be more readable.
Really, I want the ability to customize everything that gets autopinned to the Empire tree or not. Its a highly useful tool, but even on medium maps it gets too full of stuff (and I always use stacking). Thus I only use it for two things, planet upgrade/ship production orders and capitalship orders.
Another useful option would be to have an option to have one stack per entity (instead of 10), so that way you can order say all your LRFs to focus fire on a capital ship on the fly, whether you have 7 or 300. That way I might actually use it for frigate orders as well.
You actually can do that GoaFan...
I agree with you it should be an option in-game...however you can change how many units there are per stack in the user settings txt file...
MaxEmpireWindowStackSize 10
That's the line you want to mess with...you might have already known that though...still, would be very nice to have an option making it "all" instead of simply putting a really big number there...
Thanks Seleuceia. I did know that, but I use the Developer.exe a lot and since it resets your settings its a bit of a pain to change that every time. And we really should be able to change that from the settings menu anyways.
Another small thing, I would like to be able to see the time of the game without having to deduce from the autosaves or watching the save list... Or maybe I missed something, please tell me if it's the case...
Technically you can from the Developer.exe, but that's not something most players use.
Here's one I keep forgetting about:
Make trade vessels invalid targets for a "follow" command. I can't tell you how many times I've told my units to move to a gravity well, but a trade ship jumped at that exact moment so I ended up clicking on its icon instead and my units end up following a random trade ship.
As mentioned by Yarlen, reply #71, 9/27/11
Short List of New Rebellion Features:
On top of everything that's already been added to the game, much of which is also being tweaked in some fashion.
--------------------------
But no mention there of Empire tree/sidebar improvements as repeatedly suggested in this thread! I'm distraught.
Plz, at least make the sidebar wider (that alone will reduce jumping)! Or lets us change the width (drag the window border), especially for those of us with wide screen monitors. Or a hybrid collapse.
See replies #15 or #41 and on, or #107 easily found on this page.
Edit: I just learned that turning off auto-pinning of frigates helps tremendously. But I still think the sidebar could be enhanced.
Maybe this has already been mentioned before but please get the TAB key to work for sub-selections in the empire window. Would be invaluable for certain micro tasks (like subverters, guardians, etc.) imo ...
I think the best thing that could be done for the empire tree would be more options.
Starbases are auto-pinned, lets get an option for that. I'm sure that Titans should also get a toggle. I wouldnt mind sort of a combination thing, where maybe a neutral/contested planet that I have ships at is added to the tree. But if I retreat back to my planets, it is removed (and the ships arent pinned either). Make an option to default new planets to minimized or even one that maximizing one minimizes all others. I would also recommend that these options be changable mid-game without having to go to the options menu.
Now, there will still be times when things ramp up too fast and start jumping around too much for you to use the tree. For that, theres the possiblity of freezing the tree on mouseover. The worst part about the jumping tree, imho, is that it resets so much. Why does it have to go to the top of the list? When the tree updates, can't it check what planets are maximized, and which are most towards the middle of the screen and use that information to keep them where they are supposed to be?
The other possiblity is to drop the auto-sorting of the list (or make it an option). Right now, if I have ships at Planet A and move them to Planet C by moving through Planet B (in this examplet Planet A and Planet C are pinned, but Planet B is not), the list will encounter a problem when I arrive on Planet B, and so it inserts Planet B between Planet A and Planet C (alphabetically). There is no reason it has to work this way. It can be tacked onto the end. This still leaves a problem when my ships leave Planet B, as it could cause a jump when Planet B is removed from the list. Simple fix for this is to have it slowly fill in that gap instead of the instant jump (the auto-center bit should handle the rest). Maybe make a way of instantly removing the gaps at the request of the user (my thinking: possiblity of there being large gaps in the list, and might have a hard time finding a planet. hit a button, boom: gaps removed, list reordered alphabetically).
Now, planets are one thing, ships are something else. I think the answer here is a smarter stacking option. First, why is there only 10 ships per stack? With enough stuff on the table, you'll need to stack the stacks. Just make the stacks hold all of that ship type whether its 5 or 500 (or let the user change the ships per stack amount). I would also like to add in that bit of slowly filling gaps and tacking new stuff to the end of the list instead of sorting it everytime. And as mentioned by the above poster, make it so that you can sub-select ships within each stack (and remove resorting each stack).
The other thing that could help the empire tree is re-designing the fleet option. As it currently stands, its counter-productive as you cant control very well what joins your fleet. The nice thing about them though is that they have their own spot on the tree where you wont be bothered by your opponents ships coming and going. Fix fleets (would recommend more options for them as well) and even if all else fails with the fixing the empire tree, at least there will be another way to work around the problem (current way is to turn off all auto-pinning).
How about improving the manual?
In particular, a section on DIPLOMATIC VICTORY would be nice -- as in, what is it and how do you win it? Nobody seems to know and most people apparently just turn it off. My experience with it to date was a game where I'm playing against a bunch of AIs, doing pretty well, and suddenly a screen pops up announcing I lost because "Another player has won a diplomatic victory. Ha ha." Um, what?
As long as we're on the subject, warnings that enemies are getting close to a diplomatic victory and ways that you can prevent that victory would be good.
Otherwise, I don't think anyone is going to use that feature.
It's already been said that rebellion will change the diplomatic victory option. How much and how, we do not yet know. And hopefully, if it's a good implementation, it will be back-ported to diplomacy.
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