I didn't play close attention in .80, but in .81 the battle viewer/results/log seem to be screwy a lot of the time. Sometimes I will get results involving ships that weren't even there.
yeah, none of the weapon dmg or firing rates or tactical speed seem to be working correctly, and dont have accurate descriptions. i really think they need a new weapon system... havn't personally seen ships that weren't there show up in the battle log, but remember the battle viewer just came out, it's gunna take a min to get it working just right. it already looks great though.
the trade issue might be caused by the rounding that the game does instead of showing exact figures. it could be, for example, rounding 3.6 and 3.6, making both show up as 4, but then when you add them together it's 7.2, which rounds down to 7 on the screen. less rounding by the game would give people much more accurate descriptions.
I've never seen the battle viewer work as intended. I haven't watched all of the playthrough videos on YouTube, but the ones I saw were also broken. IMHO, the feature was prematurely promoted out of the TEST build.
There is no reason to be inconsistent. Rounding makes no sense. Either don't round or multiply everything by 100 and make rounding irrelevant.
it's beta... this is still the test build. and best way for them to fix everything is to just throw it out there now and let people find all the problems they can now to help move everything along as fast as possible. anyone who really doesn't like the bugs can still just skip the battle viewer for now. might be a bit of a pain but it helps fix everything quicker.
I agree with Basilisc on this.Its beta, accept it or leave it alone for a while. So far according to Epic I have several weeks ( not hours) of play time. The game runs and plays very well for me and to be honest the viewer is so recent I never use it. It's not at GVIII level of polish so not gonna worry until they spruce it up.
I remember when techpods were needed for everything from Starbase modules to planetary upgrades. It's a good change to how it is now.
cheers!
Thank you for making this post. We appreciate feedback from games dozens, and hundreds, of turns into. Obviously the Battle Viewer is brand new so we're going to be iterating more on that.
That's not how proper software development is done. It is far more efficient to test as part of the development process. I'm fine with Stardock effectively outsourcing their QA department to us early adopters, but it doesn't obviate the need for developers to do their jobs. From someone who does software development for a living, this looks like amateur hour. Also, there are separate TEST and non-TEST builds for a reason. Clearly there was no plan for testing the battle viewer before promoting it out of TEST so why have it? It's not like I can pinpoint an exact test case that is broken. The whole thing is just busted and it looks really bad to the broader gaming community when YouTubers show it in their streams, expecting it to be somewhat polished.
Now that we're in Beta, I really want to be able to evaluate mid and late game play like I did last month. After all, that's what's going to make or break the game. As it stands today, I spent so much time reporting on issues in the first 75 turns that I ran out of time.
Thank you for this feedback. I love the scrrenshots in particular.
I'm not sure what's going on in your video. If you have a save that reproduces I'd love to check it out directly. It isn't an issue I have seen here though I will keep my eyes out for it. (this applies to the issues around the missing ships).
If you win a battle you can click on the battle notification in the upper left to reopen the battle report, rewatch the battle, etc. This applies if you are are the attacker and close the screen or if you are the defender and win the battle.
I checked these to verify and they are currently bundled in the "Your skill in diplomacy" tag in the the diplomacy modifiers. There are a few reasons why this is confusing:
1. "Your skill in diplomacy" can be modified by several things. Including how late in the game you are. In the early game these modifiers are reduced.
2. It can also be modified by the personality of the different AI players. Some AI's give additional weight to diplomatic skill. Some really don't.
3. These factors add up and its easy to forget where they are coming from because there is no breakdown. For example, as the Terrans I adopted the Foreign Dumping policy as them which gives -2 to Diplomacy. And I was unclear as to why I was getting -1 instead of -2. That was because I forgot the Terrans have Civ trait which gives +1 Diplomacy.
So it is work, but it's unclear. To fix I'm going to:
1. Remove the personality trait and turn time modifiers on "Your skill in diplomacy" so it matches the aggregate number.
2. Get a dev to breakout the policy modifiers so that you see "-2 Foreign Dumping" instead of aggregating it all in "your skill in diplomacy".
Im unable to repro this, if anyone ahs a save or knows the steps to repro please let me know.
That tooltip is rounding, which is why you are seeing 0 when its 0.1. Thats a bug.
Techapod Mining Unit doesn't give a bonus to Manufacturing, it gives a bonus to Mining (the amount of Durantium/Elerium/etc collected by that starbace). That part is working correctly, but it shouldnt be a % bonus (10% on 0.1 per turn is so so tiny). I'll switch it to a flat bonus to make it worthwhile.
What are the advisor messages that might be more helpful for new/medium level players?
The Torian fleet is damaged. They are playing it safe and repairing while waiting for a third ship to join them before they head back to Torian space. That part seems normal.
But, your save has blocked tiles in it! And we have been looking for them. Our lead dev got very excited when I showed it to her and she is troubleshooting that problem now.
Yes, those are rounding displays. The question is its better to show decimals everywhere or just round. More casual people want rounding, the more OCD people want decimals.
Interesting, I'll test this.
Derek, Just letting you know that I read this and am placing top priority to answering your follow-ups (above further gameplay). Alas since we are out of the weekend, I'm not sure when this will happen.
I'm glad I was able to help with the blocked tiles thing, even if it was completely accidental.
> What are the advisor messages that might be more helpful for new/medium level players?
Hard to say, but I wouldn't show that particular message if your diplomacy with them is positive. At this stage in the game, pirates are a bigger problem.
I think global modifiers like that are actually somewhat helpful to cut down on the spam in the tooltip as you stack more and more modifiers. I think it would be good to group more things under an appropriate global modifier and add a screen to your empire summary to let you know what your empire-wide bonuses are and see the source breakdown there.
I can't seem to reproduce it either. I guess if I see it again, I need to make a save immediately and see if it continues occurring. I had a theory that it might be related to Rushing Scientists but no.
Same with the bizarre battle viewer behavior - it is looking a lot better after a reload. I was actually surprised because it was the first time I ever saw it work properly.
I think the only thing that will work is having autosaves every turn.
That tooltip is rounding, which is why you are seeing 0 when its 0.1. Thats a bug.Yes, those are rounding displays. The question is its better to show decimals everywhere or just round. More casual people want rounding, the more OCD people want decimals.
I think that it's better to show decimals. quick pro/con for rounding...
con: if someone sees 4 when it's not 4 it gives them inaccurate info and makes them think there's something wrong with the game. when you start adding up lots of rounding it becomes more and more inaccurate. this will lead more and more people to think that the game is broken somehow and spend time and energy trying to fix the problem, or post about it, or try to look it up. it can be frustrating for them, possibly take up the time of your customer service people. it can also add to more tooltip problems and people wont realize which ones are rounded and which aren't, which will cause frustration, negative feedback, and could take up more time of your customer service people, forcing them to deal with that instead of bigger problems. it makes everything more complex and harder for me to understand when it's all rounded, personally.
pro: 3.6 is somehow too complicated for some people, but inaccurate numbers from rounding is fine with them because they won't need the use of early elementary basic math skills.
Regarding "advisor messages useful to new players", it's definitely useless to just have met another civ and then immediately being told to beware of them - at the beginning of the game when noone has any power to beware of. The "beware" message is fine in itself, but it shouldn't appear before you should actually beware of a civ - like when relations are bad enough to warrant it or they're neighbours of greater power than you.
But as it is, your tutorial system really needs an overhaul. It's pretty much useless and made up of disparate elements like popups, tooltips and that robot that just sends you into the ship builder every time it wants to show you something?
One of the most fundamental changes you've made in the game from earlier versions - colonies and core worlds - have no tutorial explanation anywhere.
Apart from updating some of the early advisor text do you have any ideas of what might improve the new player onboarding experience? Bear in mind that the advisor isn't really a "tutorial" just an assistant designed for the new player experience. A tutorial would be far more involved and frankly arguably useless in today's age of let's plays and guides.
Yeah, I agree. We should not show it at all of diplo is positive. I'll change it.
I'd say you could use tooltips with stuff like colonies increase your nearby core planet's stats - as I said, I missed that pretty big change from Galciv 3. In the old game you went for buildings on planet, in this game (early) buildings on planet aren't that important as getting colonies and asteroids to supply your main planets.
Other than that tooltips hinting that you can change where asteroid mine output goes. And have that robot guide follow you into the shipyard to go through step by step what it wants to tell you - like explaining how to design ships.
Also the first tooltip that pops up when a shipyard isn't producing anything is - "build a colony ship". I think it should be more general - like "your shipyard xxx1 can build a new ship".
Also maybe a tooltip "your capital's population is decreasing" that pops up if the beginning planet population falls below four pop because of building ships faster than growth allows it. It's really important to build colony ships and such around the sweet spot of maybe 6 pop - faster than that and your planet depopulates, slower and you don't expand fast enough.
Getting new players into the game should really be a case of doing an actual tutorial mission - a hand-holding demo, where they get to click stuff and see what it means. I've played Galciv since no. 1 - so there's a lot of stuff I just take for granted...
This is honestly a very difficult question to answer right now because of the current state the game is in. i think that the community would have to wait until more of the proper descriptions and tooltips for everything have been added. right now i think that the best thing that can be done for new/med level players is to add more tooltips and descriptions for how everything works. they should be able to figure out the basics for how most things work without having to take the extra time and energy to look it up on wiki or the forums. if anything needs to be in a tutorial, it will be easier to figure out what that is once we see what is in and not in the basic descriptions when you hover over things.
I do think that there should be some kind of alert for when you have leaders that you're able to recruit. with everything else going on in the game i've often forgot to keep checking for new leaders every turn like i should be. right now it only alerts you when you have an unassigned leader.
I agree. Get rid of the mystery mechanics and you don't need a tutorial. However, if I don't have a great feel for what the game is at this point. Right now it feels pretty binary. Either you get the fourth commander ship before your most aggressive neighbor or you lose. Gifted difficulty + very fast pace seems like the sweet spot for me. With that combination, I have not yet discovered any strategies for overcoming a mediocre race and/or starting position to either hit that mark or defend myself if I don't. Once the AI acquires a death squad, there doesn't seem to be much I can do.
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