Hi,
I decided to give this a try again after the patch came out. I started a game in "Extreme" difficulty and found a few peculiar things... For example:
- Units are produced in bulk by default (groups of 4). This includes caravans and settlers
- HP's are nerfed (At 10 constitution, starting hp is 5). A peasant's default hp is also 3.
- There wasn't any recruitable NPC nearby (unless I walk VERY far out). This holds true even when I got the "Recruiting" tech. The merchant master guy also didn't appear.
- Population calculation seems weird. I have a total of 3 cities and already, I have 251 populations in use. The only buildings I have are Market, Merchant, 5-6 Studies, 2 Arcane Laboratories, and some 7-8 houses. The math in the stats also doesn't add up. What I suspect is happening is that the population cost of each city somehow adds up for each subsequent city. This is based on the observation that my capital uses 70 population, my second city with 2 arcane laboratories then uses 81 population, and my third city with nothing uses 82 population. That's a total of 233. Then I have 4 groups of 4 peasants and 2 unsettled settlers which adds up to 251.
Now, this is the first time I play extreme, so I don't actually know if these things are simply part of this difficulty level, but I thought the way population is calculated to be quite dumb.
The population thing is a bug SD hasn't addressed yet. It seems to kick in as soon as you make a third city. I never had a problem with 2, but as soon as I conquer or settle a third, that city takes the Population usage from the capitol.
Why? IDK, but I'm not playing anymore until it's fixed.
Stardock- do NOT release 1.3 with this bug still in place.
ZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzz... I can't believe this game is still so buggy after an extra year of development. I am a programmer myself and I understand programs can take a lot of time to perfect, but these kinds of bugs.... are just...
Other things I want to complain about is the UI. It'd be very nice if there are buttons that highlight creeps, enemies, quests, etc (like in Civ) as well as some rather streamlined controls. As I can see, the bug with city names being scrambled from time to time is still here. It'd be nice if some dev raise that ticket's priority to at least A in trac, since it's pretty annoying.
I fond this issue particularly annoying. Sometimes caravans and settlers were only one pop, and other times they were 4. Annoying figuring out how to change them back and forth.
I started a new game in 1.2c BETA and it is a mess, my population usage jumps as you conquer more cities and possibly as some cities level. I didn't see any caravans or settlers built in 4s but I did play for 50 minutes before I found a 2nd hero to recruit. Did find a wife until nearly 2.5 hours into it.
It looks like the AI has problems with its population usage too as most enemy cities are smallish and poorly defended.
The reduced hit points makes it much harder to stay alive. I do like the increased variety of items you find in huts. And the game seems much more stable than earlier versions but still crashes every 45 minutes or so. Sort of a built in timer to say, go do something else now, your time is up. I think of this feature as a built in wife bot program.
The only way to keep population usage semi manageable is to raze cities and rebuild them with your own settlers. Is still hard to get any free pop to build defensive units. Demolishing a building in a city only frees 1 pop most of the time. I'd abandon this latest attempt at play balancing and just limit the # of a particular building per city. You’re forcing us into building activity specific cities this way (i.e. 1 city to do all the tech research, etc).
1.2c is a beta. As a programmer, I assume you are familiar with this concept?
My last game was on normal and I saw similar population usage numbers. Is the population usage scaling metric something that can be disabled via XML?
To be fair to your fellows, I have no idea of how your code is organized. If it is something buried within layers upon layers of complicated code, then sure it's not something that can easily be fixed. But if it is something simple (like using the wrong variable in an equation), then it probably should be fixed quickly. After all, a motivation of releasing the beta patches is to have volunteers to be part of your QA cycle. Correct me if I am wrong, the population bug seems to be introduced in 1.2b, so that's been a while already.
Anyhow, it's a good thing you guys are still working to patch things up... not every game studio does this.
I noticed in 1.2c BETA that in manual combat the attack happens and then the counter happens even if you kill the attackee. This killed several of my champions before I noticed. Also between the time when the attack happens and the end of the round you can run around with 0 life.
I wonder if you can heal yourself back to 1 or more and survive if you do it before then end of the turn.
I am over 300 turn into this new patch I have and I have not been able to construct a building or train a unit since the first 50 turns. I am finallt at the end of this particular game with one faction left against me and it won't let me delciar war on them and their attitude never goes up. it very annpoying. my population counter has over ten thousand more used than I actually have, you do quite ofter take damage just for dealing it, even for one hit kills. and every now and then I will try and move to a tile and the champion insantly rerouts without comand, like it refuses to move onto that particular tile. the population bug does force you make use of roads and terriforming spells not previosly required by te win a game. which was kind of fun. Aswelly well as taking magic nad mana usage to an entirly different levelm it becam a nessity to defence and attack like never before needed. it forced you to decide on tecj advances by absolut nessity, not just by what would be nice at the moment (considering it still took over 30 turn to reaserch somthing ever that far into the game)
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