Welp, missed that, apologizes to you Drala2k!

Since this patch, been unable to load into multiplayer using custom factions...

fix sensor stacking

Yeah I already made a post about this... u are not alone ;/

That may differ per faction based on ideology personality too though. Are you seeing it all over?

Quoting Arumba,

reply 83

Nice patch!  There are few items that I was hoping might get some attention in the future, if you don't mind receiving a bit of feedback!

 

1 )  Production Related

A )  Stored production tooltip took me 34 hours of playtime to *notice*.  It is very obscure, but very important information.  Could this be brought out of a tooltip and put in the planet UI?  Also note that this tooltip is inaccessible if you have a full queue of tiles or ships.

B )  Turns to complete a project doesn't account for stored production

C )  Buying out a planet tile doesn't store production for next turn even though the production was already paid for with credits

D )  Buying out a ship doesn't have its cost reduced by currently invested production, though planet tiles do

E )  Could the "Total Production" value of a planet be more transparent as a mechanic/value?  Can we see the raw value listed as a summation of its parts, and then a list of the multipliers and then the resultant "Total Production" as a tooltip somewhere?  I know how to do the math to figure it out but it sure took a lot of study to do so.

F )  Tooltips for the total cost a planet tile do not correctly factor in discounts.  For example, as the Thalans if you rush hive specialization to reduce all tile costs by 20%, they will still show '30', or whatever the normal total cost is.  The only way to confirm that the discount is actually working is to math out the turns remaining vs production, or to look at the buyout cost and confirm that it costs less to buy out.

 

2 )  Interface Related

A )  Please allow for the escape key to close the shipyard screens, it works on planets but not shipyards

B )  Please allow a shortcut to cycle between planets, the arrow keys would be great for this

C )  If the production wheel could 'snap to' pure research, pure wealth, or pure production when clicking on the icon itself (instead of inside the wheel) it would be a lot easier to specialize a planet.

D )  Please show total approval on a planet as a value, not just the approval %.  Preferably show both values.  Often times when looking at a planet I check how much food it has, how much pop is has (and therefore I know how much room it has to grow) and then I have to hover over the approval value to access the approval total in the tooltip.  Tooltips should show more information about something, like how the value was calculated, or why it is what it is.  They shouldn't *hide* information you want to know all the time.  (see previous section about the stored production tooltip as another example)

E )  When deleting a ship design from the custom ships tab of the ship designer, please stay on the custom ship tab, don't go back to the 'all ships tab'.  Sometimes I want to play with *no ships but those I design my own*.  But the game constantly forces me to look at a *massive* list of ships that I don't care about.

F )  Add an option to not save a ship design permanently, sometimes you only want to build one and only in this one game

G )  Add an option to only store ships in the current save file, not the global ship database.  I have no problem with the AI taking my ship designs, but I don't want to have tons of ships with similiar names pop up (all with slightly different configurations) simply because I've played the same race a few times.

H )  Custom ships don't properly increment their name when you "Use design" on a current model.  Also, you cannot use the 'upgrade to newest version of this design" button on custom ships.  

I )  It would be really fantastic if we could apply filters to the ship designer or shipyard screens.  For example, hide ships of a certain size, or hide ships that have civilian modules.  Or alternatively, allow us to create our own 'tabs' at the top, and assign a ship to a tab when designing it (or even after its designed).  So I could organize my 'support ships', and my 'defensive ships', and my 'offensive ships'.  

3 )  Settings Related

A )  Please allow an option to permit the application to play sound while not 'focused'

B )  Please add information (preferably in tooltips) about what the various settings do.  For example, when changing the game research rate, tell the user *there* what each setting does.  I figured it out by loading the game up 5 times and comparing, but why should I have to do that?  Just tell me in the game creation screen please.  Also why is research +25% on normal but production is +0%?

C )  Please add a global settings option to disable 'auto-upgrade improvements' by default.  Having to turn it off manually on every planet is a bit tedious.

 

 

Thanks again for reading these suggestions/feedback.  I want to express how much I have enjoyed playing this game, and how I excited I am for the future of the game as it continues being developed.  This is truly the best sequel to GalCiv2 we could have hoped for (as a framework), it just needs some adjustments to bring it in line with the interface expectations I have for a 2015 game  Thanks for your hard work and I hope some of this can help you!

Amazing post. You put together all things that ever bothered me in this game

I will add my little bit. 3) C) This should be really considered. People who play GC III love numbers, adjusting of everything and we really hate ambiguous words when we cant get info that is behind that word or we have to research it on our own. Another example would be how often United Planets council meets. I got big map that I wanted, 100+ turns into game and I find out that council will meet every 25 turns! So bloody long. I was so sad because I planned to use council to my benefit (with that much vote power I had) and had no idea what "common" (or whatever it was) actually means.

4 ) Ideology Related

A ) Relentless got applied to other planet than homeworld as well. Not an issue but it should do what it says.

B ) Cautious and Bloodthirsty with big maps = instantly massive army for zero cost out of nowhere completely destroying galactic balance. It is annoying for players as you need to click to get further in ideology tree and those ships are most likely with inferior ship design than you are using. For AI this is annoying because suddenly you compared to them are ripe for conquest, weak etc. Please cap this, give fixed number of ships or change completely. Also if you sell that massive number of ships, you get massive number of credits which is also crazy.

5 ) Diplomacy

A ) "We give you a gift of x specialization" and we have just locked up your research option in there. You can't deny gifts so there is no way to prevent this from happening and could actually be annoying strategy for multiplayer.

B ) Could there be some clear explanation what research/military/culture treaty do? I am lost there. Do both sides get bonus? Where can I see bonus applied, is it in case of economic treaty for all planets, or just one. It is so obscure.

I've seen both the Iridians and Drengi spam the ever living heck out of star bases, to the point where I've seen 63 and I think even 90 before. Giving the AI access to cheaper constructors helps a ton.

I've been an avid fan since GalCiv1, and I'm loving the game in its current state even with some of its present quirks.  I absolutely do not agree with the sentiment that 'the customer is always right.'  I've worked in positions where people feel that because they paid $10 for a movie theater ticket or some such, they are entitled to abuse you.  Seriously.  It's kind of crazy.  I do get frustrated with the gaming industry overall, because I do think there are a lot of companies putting out sub-par products, and gamers generally are unable to get a refund or have any real recourse.  However, SD is definitely NOT one of those companies--not even close!

I think the main things I would love are being able to create a queue of techs to research, because when you get down to researching 1 tech (or more) per turn, it gets kind of tedious having to continually going back to the screen.  I'd also love to have a fleet tab somewhere (if there is one, I must have missed it).  I'm also not sure if it's because I'm playing the higher difficulties, but it (still) seems impossible to culture flip the AI.  I was putting so much influence pressure on planets, and they just seem to be completely immune to flipping. 

Keep up the great work!

Nope, they nerfed the culture flipping. It's pretty much near to impossible to flip planets now, independent from the difficulty settings.

I literally let a game run in the background with AI mode on for the player and it took like 500 turns or something to flip a planet where my faction had like 1.9x the Influence compared to the enemy.

While I agree that is was a little bit too easy to flip with 1.0.1, the rebalancing rendered it an almost NON-EXISTENT feature that only happens if you are lucky.

In my opinion the culture flipping should be a chance based thing.

Like if your faction has 60% of the total influence and the opponent has 40% of the total influence then with each turn you have a 60% chance that the population will start a rebellion, but only with a 60% chance of succeeding, because 40% of the population is hypothetically still loyal to the opponent. After either the rebellion succeeded or failed there's a cooldown phase (something like state of emergency, surpressing the habitants) for like 50 turns or something or which might also be based on how strong the influence is because it might render the government on the planet quite unstable... at least a cooldown phase after which there's another chance for another rebellion, of course with different percentages because the influence will surely have changed ever since.

I think the lower cap at which there might start a rebellion should be 30% or something. That would make for quite interesting experiences, because if you manage to gain control over a planet by only having 30% influence the planet might fall back to the enemy after the cooldown because he might still have the greater influence after all. Also on border planets where 3 factions meet, everyone having about 30% influence then it's a free for all, the population will be splitted in 3 groups, anybody having a decent chance of winning over the other two.

But of course this is just a thought of mine and balancing would be of course up the the devs and what the community feels is right.

Where there are multiple different factions sharing a zone of influence to great extent, like 30% for example, there should be something like a shared border indicated by colored stripes/patterns... since you never have 100% influence on the border and it would be quite nice to see at the first glimpse how far the opponents influence reaches into your territory or your influence into his territory.

The 30% cap might help with that too. It should fade betweeen 30%-50%. So at the exact borderline it is 50:50 striped/color intensity, and at the maximum distance 30:70 striped/color intensity, everything where the opponents influence is lower than 30% is generally undisputed and accepted as your territory and has the solid color of your faction. But everything above 30% is in a constant flow of debate and the striped/patterns would indicate which planets fall into that category.

I'd like a couple of UI tweaks.

1. Can we get the name of a ship when it launches and it prompts you to fill it with people.  Right now I dont know if a transport or a colony ship is asking for people.  

2. When colonizing a planet can we get a list of the planets bonuses in the planet naming screen.  That screen takes you directly into the colony planning screen and i kinda need to know if I have a 50% research or 25% wealth bonus on the planet before i start placing tiles.

3.  Can we place anywhere in the colony screen itself the planetary bonuses we see when we mouse over the planets from the galaxy screen?

atm it does not work at all so...

I have the feeling that the game is not updating a lot of numbers. If you construct a building and your manufacturing points are 0 the project is displayed as N/A and if you change your manufacturing points to >0 the game doesn't update and give you the number of turns the project needs to finish. You have to close the screen and reopen it for the game to display it correctly.

The same kinda happens in the research tree (RT). If you select a tech deeper in the RT, the overflow research points are added to the next tech in queue and you can see it imidiately. But if you select only the next available tech in the tree the project finishes and the points are - i don't know - in the void and not displayed anywhere. Even if you select a new tech, the game just displays the normal time it takes to research. But in fact, the game adds the overflow tech points to the tech in the next turn. I had a project that was to be finished in 2 turns, but it was finished right the next turn. I think that is what happens, the game just doesn't display it right or doesn't update stuff in "real time".

Wow, how cool is that!,  Welcome and i am sure you will find things,   neve know you may be the first so report away.  Enjoy