[[RELEASED]]
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Optimization
AI
Balance
Improvements/Bugs Fixes
If you want to read my Dev Diary full of me complaining and whining and how I worked on the update visit here: https://forums.galciv3.com/480761/ and here: https://forums.galciv3.com/480723
A Thalan trade ship arrived at one of my colonies before I even met them. I also don't think any of their ships saw my planet.
A pirate ship that followed one of my constructors attacked the starbase it created. It failed, but I don't recall seeing them do that. It was interesting.
1.9 SP game feedback part IV
Torian, placed a Solar Plant next to a capitol +2 on a Floodplain where a farm would have benefited the most from this location and a solar plant has very little benefit. Instead placed a farm next to a factory in a different clump followed by a research building.
Another faction built a farm, next to a marketplace, next to a factory & research building, next to a hotsprings, then built another market place on the otherside of the map as well as another research building on the otherside of the map, adjacency doesn't appear to have been the goal here.
Had a 4th AI faction declare war, this time on the opposite side of the other AI's. It didn't matter, however, they were also not ready for war and in fact they were 7th in military power next to my 6th in military power and I was #1 in power ranking where as they weren't even in the top 10.
Turn 145 I've still only met about 15%-20% of the factions and I have 3 x's the power ranking the next closest faction.
AI is starting to build star bases but, at this point I'm just mopping them up.
im not sure i like this
i play a starbase heavy game and the amount of micro that creates for constructor spam is rather annoying ive actually been thinking of increasing this number simply to reduce the amount of constructors you need to send out
From the bits I've played so far I do agree with those saying that influence changes appear too heavy - though in general I do like that it does take more effort to increase influence. Research on normal also a bit too fast, but to me it's kinda secondary as I could always set research rates slower.
Brad has suggested earlier that an administration resource will be introduced to limit the # of starbases for each faction.
Bravo for the return of Brad!! The changes and AI improvements in v1.90 are very positive. The nerfing of colony capital is great because it allows tall strategy to be viable, for example, for Yor.
One area that AI may need a lot of love is the build-order. The AI is building tons of low-yield buildings with return-on-investment 10x lower than the alternative. In 39 turns, I was able to beat the AI by more than 10x in planet production.
AI Manu: 10; Research 22.1; Income: 1.8; Pop 7/16; Approval:100; influence: 53
Human Manu: 227; Research 47; Income: -6.7; Pop 32.5/30; Approval:64; influence: 69
There may be a relatively simple fix, see this post.
Hi,
This would certainly cut down on what has become the rather overwhelming task of optimising starbases but they do need to balance this against tech costs.
After a first iteration of 1.90 in which these became very low - much too cheap really - there's been another one (unless my file set up is faulty and the game is corrupted) in which they've gone the other way and (as I said in another thread) after I got about 100 techs in a huge galaxy at genius level and normal tech cost, the cost of the most expensive tech of all Beyond Mortality, had already inflated to over 200k.
This is certainly doable with unlimited starbases or some reasonable cost for them since you can get 16 or 18 round your top research planets but otherwise would be incredibly hard and so going for conquest - or at least to take a very large number of juicy research planets - would become forced if you wanted to play for a tech win.
Correspondingly, the reduction in culture has mitigated very strongly against going for a culture win and, incidentally, somewhat reduced the effectiveness of the Benevolent ideology tree since "Enticing" previously a potential game changer is now rather less effective (You can arrange to snag minor races but harder to get planets of the major ones).
And indeed the Builder line of the pragmatic tree will greatly reduce in value if you need far fewer constructors because you have far fewer bases.
The reduction in planet capital bonuses has also had an effect on the ideology trees since Malevolent with its early production bonuses is now relatively better than it was before.
Anyway, the point I'm making is that changes to one aspect of the game can affect balance in all sorts of ways and need to be thought about very carefully.
Any thoughts anybody,
Cheers,
Jon
You don't even have to go as far as to do a ROI table. Just fix two issues:
1) Shipyards. A new colony does not need a shipyard, when it is popcapped 5/5 and only has a basic factory and a research laboratory on it.
2) Upgrades. You do not build a Xeno Factory, when you can build a solar power plant. If you have adjacencies, you probably don't even do the upgrade first if you ahve to terraform a tile. 45 prod for +10% vs. 75 prod for 25% + adjacencies (at least three)
2b) Especially with the reduced production from colony capitals, you will possibly even prefer a farm in the above example.
In this picture (turn 25, normal) shows everything which wrong with AI build orders. I see a couple of better things to do, than the AI is doing here. It has been wasting 9 turns on this allready.
This is becoming a ceterum censeo of mine.
Could we get confirmation, that this is being looked at? Like soon? It would really put my mind at ease to see, that you are actually reaching for the low hanging fruit.
I picked the ideology trait for 3 constructors instead it gave me a packet ship. I double checked it happened.
Wow, you weren't kidding about "dramatically improve startup times". It takes well under half the time it used to.
Use the following in the steam launch properties: /cheat
Thank you That seems to work with no errors!
This is actually low hanging fruit, too.You don't even have to go as far as to do a ROI table. Just fix two issues:1) Shipyards. A new colony does not need a shipyard, when it is popcapped 5/5 and only has a basic factory and a research laboratory on it.2) Upgrades. You do not build a Xeno Factory, when you can build a solar power plant. If you have adjacencies, you probably don't even do the upgrade first if you ahve to terraform a tile. 45 prod for +10% vs. 75 prod for 25% + adjacencies (at least three)2b) Especially with the reduced production from colony capitals, you will possibly even prefer a farm in the above example.In this picture (turn 25, normal) shows everything which wrong with AI build orders. I see a couple of better things to do, than the AI is doing here. It has been wasting 9 turns on this allready.This is becoming a ceterum censeo of mine.
Agreed that these can be hard-coded into AI behavior.
1) shipyard: do not build until manufacturing exceeds 30 or 40 per turn. the opportunity cost in your example is really high. the AI spent 16 turns building the shipyard, and then will need to spend 10-12 turns before churning out a single constructure/colony ship. It could have spent all the time into building factories instead.
I sent two PMs to you regarding this.
Opt-in updated 12/5
Thanks for the update, pshaw--looking forward to giving this a try this afternoon. I suspect I'll have to start a new galaxy for the changes to take effect?
Yes, most of these changes require a new game.
This is some good stuff.
Many thanks for some wonderful work in this patch but I would say that the AI has now become so good at detecting this particular underhand strategy that it sometimes detects it when you're not intending it! After getting the full culture line in the benevolent tree in my current game, everybody thinks I'm trying to flip them. At least one of them is perfectly correct but in the case of the others it's quite unintentional and I haven't even discovered which planets they think I'm trying to flip.
What are fast alliance strategies btw?
Bugs so far:
-Everyone thinks I am trying to culture flip them, even though I built 2 influence buildings and 2 influence star bases. I only share boarders with one other civilization. I have the -2 diplomacy modifier on every race, even minor factions (who are immune to culture flip), and even civilizations 100 tiles away from my borders.
-Game crashing at loading screen
Gameplay issues so far:
-You cannot disable or skip the "upgrade starbase" prompt. This is annoying for everyone who uses 2 module constructor ships as sometimes you only wanted to upgrade 1 part. I usually just let the ship sit there until the next upgrade is researched. It is especially annoying as even the automated constructors (from the "automatically upgrade starbase parts" do this.
Jeez, I've been looking for this fix for ages. So annoying not being able to use esc in every menu.
Now if you could make the optimization techs easier to figure out in the trading screen so if I want to trade industrial optimization I don't have to read every tooltip for every tech to see which one of those is actually Industrial Optimization.
Why is this? Now how many starbases can I fit around a planet? Managing starbases is one of the more annoying micromanagement tasks. I've always wondered why starbase bonuses stack. Towards the end of the game I have more starbases than planets.
Most likely somewhere between 5-7 times the number of star bases depending on number of multi-planet systems and how close the planets are
So I recently, and quite accidentally, found out that the enter key closes the ship designer--without warning and without asking if you'd really like to cancel without saving. Resulted in no small bit of frustration having to redo what I had done...
Since esc key was added, my assumption is that either the enter key isn't intended to close the ship designer or it was originally and is now obsolete...
In any case... I haven't checked how esc key works in Ship Designer, but for that and for the enter key, could you ensure there is a prompt that makes sure you'd like to cancel in case you accidentally hit the key. That'd be great.
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