Opt-in is updated!

= Balance/Gameplay =

• Hot springs nerfed from giving 3 morale to 1.
• Xenophobes get twice the research and social construction but only half the military construction.
• Beam weapon space usage reduced from 5% to 3%
• Kinetic weapons cost reduced substantially.
• Entrepreneurs now provide a trade route to their civ as well
• General comes with Xeno Combat techniques
• Colonizer Ability changed such that every time they colonize a planet, they get their administrative point back.  This will need a tooltip tweak for the admin resource tooltip.
• Xeno Combat Techniques now unlocks the General. Combined with Station Garrison, player can protect  planets without having to research invasion.
• Port of Call tourism improvement moved to only require Universal translator
• Capital city now allows up to 16 population
• Computer Core cost reduced from 35 to 16 so that players that don't want to rush it don't wait too long
• Port of Call cost decreased from 150 to 32
• Port of Call benefit changed from a 10% tourism income boost to a flat 3 with each level adding another 1
• Starport now military production increased from 1 to 2
• Space Elevator general production decreased from 2 to 1
• City population cap increased from 8 to 16
•  Silicon city population cap increased from 8 to 9
•  Military Academy improvement now requires planetary invasion to eliminate confusion in which players thought they had to train legions to invade.
•  Station Garrison cost reduced from 75 to 50
• AI is more chatty
• Easy AI no longer rushes defensive units
• Easy AI is no longer capable of rushing colony ships
• AI no longer tries to reinforce planets with individual defender units if they are far away (this is the cause of lone ships streaming to their death in far off places)
• Influence specialization now provides a flat 1 influence to every colony instead of a 10% boost.
• Majesty Tech now quires the diplomatic ability
•  Master Trade now requires the entrepreneur ability
• Other high-level biz/trade techs now require entrepreneur race ability
• Robots can't have cruise lines

= Bugs =

•  Ship Icons on the Civ builder are no longer missing (fix from the previous opt-in)
• Fix for some desyncs in MP

I think the Xenophobes might now be OP. I played a race with them on the previous settings, and they were damn good. Now they have been buffed (doubled their ship production!).

I feel like v2.14 is processing turns slower than release-day Crusade did.

When i watch the turn processing messages in the lower right corner, it seems to hang up for several seconds on specific empires. It does this regardless of my zoom level.

I have no quantifiable evidence to support that claim, so can anyone confirm or deny?

Another issue I have noticed is that the ai will absolutely refuse to trade even one resource with you, even if you offer them your entire empire on a platter. The "barter bar" won't move even a pixel if there a resource involved. 

What map size are you playing?  How many AIs?

I figured this out. There is a magic number in the evaluation function (*tsk* *tsk* !). It isn't strictly a bug, but it's a bit hackish and feels sloppy for the player, even folks like myself who have not spent more than 10 hours playing yet.

The code works like this when trading resources: if ( amount_requested / amount_total >= 0.25 ) { ai_valuation_of_resource += some_huge_number; }

So 0.25 is the magic number.

This seems to hold true regardless of the amount the AI has. Examples: If AI has 4 resources and you ask for 1, you won't get anything. If AI has 5 and you ask for 1, they will happily trade. If AI has 100 and you ask for 24, no problem. If you insist on 25, you get nothing.

I have not tested to see if different resources are weighted differently, but it does not appear to be so.

Is that the thing where the ships shoot out more ships? It's hilarious to watch. If not, well, that's another issue and i'll get you some screenshots.

I think it was, I was having that problem yesterday and after the patch I'm not having it today.

Not really. Been messing around with synthetic (aka Yor) and you get 100 cap at start. The difference is really all the big.

Lol more changes to the Tech tree and Buildings - some of which seem good - it has taken me several days to plow through the combining old custom race techs into the "standard" tech tree (another numerous fixes / updates to tech tree note mentioned on 5/14 update note - 95% of which I am fine with) so maybe I can use my modded 2.13 XML files again lol.  I found some Farm techs that were deleted in 2.14 I missed earlier today.  Looks like some of the late game life support techs were also deleted on the 14th.  CAN NOT wait to see what else has changed.  Although looks mainly Improvements.  I have even reorganized the MasterTechDefs.XML file so it supports the more "in order" organization of the file in 2.14. 

Now keep up the changes as you make this patch more like the Tech Tree that should been released with Crusade.  My only issue is lacking any detailed notes about these changes, it is frustrating to keep up with the technology tree changes but that is my problem.

== Updates 5/19 ==

= Balance/Gameplay =

•  
• Hot Springs moved to require Planetology (for frog races)
• Hot Springs benefit increased from 3 to 2.

Might still need to look at Morale buildings as they didn't line up completely with the "standard" morale buildings ie disable for now Amphibious ability and DeoutAbility races as noted in my latest notes.

= Bugs =

• Numerous fixes/updates to the new master tech tree

Hopefully these changes are more clear than the over two dozen techs you either removed completely (old techs that were abandoned in 2.1 )  or deleted and moved the corresponding improvements into the "standard" tech tree in the 2.14 

         Resource upgrades improvements are no longer flagged as one per planet.

Good fix for when you randomly get two of the same planetary special resource on the same planet.

@barrybeal have you tried my Tech Tree Viewer / Editor

https://forums.galciv3.com/477456/

It may be of use to you.

The problem with the 2.14 Patch is that there are a lot of numerous fixes and updates in the 5/14 update.  And from 2.13 they rearranged the flow of techs in MasterTechDefs.XML so they are now more organized in order (generally a good thing for parsing the game code depending how they build the research tree internally.  So unless you rearrange your version of  the 2.13 XML file you can't just compare side by side the 2.14 and 2.13 versions.  Later I did eventually to help with the secondary passes of checking the differences.  Firstly there are a lot o changes to 2.14 that are not entirely obviously and since they deleted Specialization techs the old version of the MasterTechDefs.XML won't even run now - Tech tree creation crashes due to not being able to handle the abandoned Tech Specializations because I didn't keep a copy of the old MasterTechSpecializationsDef.XML file in my mod.  Then there is that in additional to deleting three dozen or more tech definitions - some abandoned - they removed some and then changed the previous functioning definitions in ImprovementDefs.XML so that custom races now use the equivalent "standard" techs (not necessarily a bad thing with possibility that you loose ability to change the AI research weighting system differences between those races).

I have found all the deletions now which for 2.14 are the following:

Slaver (ZealotsAbility) manufacturing, research, and morale techs were deleted and the improvements associated with each with converted to use the existing equivalent "standard" techs in the tech tree.  Note that the "standard" tech tree has some inconsistency in how it works in Crusade verses how it used to work before Crusade.

Synthetic manufacturing and research techs were deleted and the improvements associated with each with converted to use the existing equivalent "standard" techs in the tech tree.

Amphibious (Aquatic) Ability research (missing from Crusade) and morale techs (were in Crusasde)  were deleted and the improvements associated with each with converted to use the existing equivalent "standard" techs in the tech tree.

Certain Ability (Altarian) morale techs  (were in Crusasde)  were deleted and the improvements associated with each with converted to use the existing equivalent "standard" techs in the tech tree.

I think it is three of the late game Life Support Specialization techs were deleted and the "base" Life Support techs reconnected to each other.

One farming tech XenoAgricultureTech and its associated Specialization techs AgriculturalOptimization1/2/3 were deleted and the tech tree rearranged.

Then there is about dozen "abandoned" techs that were deleted and I had to research whether that was good or bad since there was no explanation of why they were gone.

So mostly my post was me "Venting" about all the changes Stardock keeps making.  A lot of which is good but some apparently just to "make the game easier and simpler" by removing techs that originally had some purpose.  Along with the general difference in gaming philosophy, Crusade introduces a lot of changes to the way things work before.  Some of that discovery of "what is different" is good in that it brings new challenges to the users familiar with the previous game design.  Other changes seem haphazard and poorly thought out and implemented.  We already have to spend considerable time learning or figuring out how the old technology tree is now split up and given piece meal to Races based on chosen Racial Abilities and Life Style choices.  Again without explanation of the differences and in some cases finding that they are implemented wrong or poorly.  I was hoping for a somewhat more detailed explanation of what is changing - probably hoping that Stardock might make general statements like above about what was deleted or changed to help learn how Crusade is evolving.  Certainly most people including me look at CHANGE as not something that you rush to embrace or enjoy experiencing.  It would help my frustrations at least to attempt to lessen the impact by Explaining and PROACTIVELY justifying the changes so I understand that there is a plan and that the change is not necessarily bad for me in the long run.

Aren't you so glad that I responded I know I feel better already !!!!  Must be a woman thing lol.   I don't need you to reply just listen to what I wrote. 

Now I have come back to mention that I appreciate you trying to help by posting the above but it doesn't help directly address the intent for the post.