Final Frontier: Problems & Issues

[Jon Shafer]

I suppose I should be all "patriotic" and put this here in addition to CFC so that Solver doesn't get upset.

Please post any problems or issues you've had with Final Frontier in this thread. Putting everything in one place will make it easier for me to fix things. Please be specific in your feedback (e.g. "the AI sucks" doesn't help me much).

Thanks.

Jon

Known Critical Bugs & Fixes:

- If you end up being unable to construct any Buildings in any of your cities after capturing an opponent's city, please go to this thread to find the fix: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=234228

List of Changes Made for Next Patch:

- Fixed bug where capturing Star System (with a Starport) would cause player to be unable to construct any further Buildings in any of his cities
- Added Screen to show data on a System's Planets when player clicks on an uncolonized Star on the map
- Greatly increased cost of later technologies
- Players can no longer adjust enemy Star Systems' population & building allocation through Espionage
- Can now cash-rush things with the Democracy civic
- Pirates will now use more advanced ships later in the game
- Raging "Barbarians" now more spawns more Pirates
- The "Enable" Tutorial option is now "Disable" so that when players install it begins enabled
- Pop-up help text for Planets in city screen now always shows Planet yield (even when Tutorial is off)
- Can no longer construct multiple Star Fortresses in a System
- Setting city avoid growth now prevents the game from auto-placing population at the end of every turn
- Increased cost of Stealth Ships
- Players can now form Permanent Alliances after researching Environmentalism
- Removed Great Generals from the game
- Removed reference to Great Spy
- Increased # of turns for each game speed to match increase in tech cost

[Solver]

I'm already upset because this thread is hours after the CFC one

[7EA]

The 'Paradise' civilization uses the same banner for its units as the 'Halis Planned State'.

[CreepyD]

Anything about the AI at all?
The biggest downer for me is that the AI doesn't use stealth ships at all
Or maybe they do but just don't use them to attack/pillage?
My stealth ships are also never challenged.

It would be nice to queue up buildings on different planets in the same system.
E.g. queue up a sports arena on 1 planet, then another on a different planet.
Need an overall queue instead of a per planet queue.

[Will9]

I've had a scout get attacked by a Stealth Ship as it was passing by someones territory.

[ayronis]

Hi Jon -
First impression of this Mod is amazing... it is immediately clear that you have done something fresh and original here. Unfortunately, I am getting the same error as these guys were getting. Each time the leaderhead for the Brotherhood(?) of Knowledge appears on my screen, I crash to desktop. I thought it may have something to do with the staging Play Now! screen, but it happened in-game as well. My computer (a Thinkpad T-30) is pretty weak but it can successfully play the epic game without any serious problems.

Graphics: ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 (w/recommended driver: 6.14.10.6525)
System: Mobile CPU 1.8 GHz (1.19 GHz), 1.0 GB RAM
OS: Win XP SP2

[Runner]

Price increases for units are way overdone. Doubling the price for 50% increase in combat strength and maybe a movement point is a little much, especially in the slower game modes. If it is going to stay this way, at least allow the building of "obsolete" units. It makes the least sense for fighters and bombers by the way, since the higher level ones don't seem to do any more damage, they can just take more.

It is also just as ridiculous for buildings. I don't believe there should be any increase at all for the same type of building on different planets in a star system. Does the AI even take advantage of being able to do this? I haven't seen it yet. If it doesn't perhaps you should consider making the buildings as system wide, rather than planetary based(even though the bonus applies to the whole system when built on another world already), and just have additional tiers of the buildings available(no more doubling of the cost unless you're doubling the benefit :P). This would probably also end up easier for the AI to deal with.

[Silver880]

Multiplayer team game hangs on initialization. MP game with human players on different teams works ok.

[ben04]

I'm really impressed by this mod. It's far beond what I had expected. It still needs a few balancing fixes but otherwise it's fun to play.

Here are a few more specific "problems" I have with it:

• I find it hard to know which tiles are unexplored, in the fog and visible. It's all black. Perhaps make the unexplored tiles white and the other light gray. Dark blue could also be an option.
• In Black's AI mod for Warlords there was an options to set airplanes on auto explore. It would then every turn randomly fly over some tile it can reach (but not rebase) and lift the fog. Placed in border cities this allowed for pretty strong fog busting. It is still possible but requires way too much micro management. As planes are available pretty early in this mod it would significantly reduce micro management.
• I've found that the AI doesn't build enough workers. One AI had build one and nearly finished a road connecting 2 solar systems but on the last tile a pirate came and destroyed the worker. The AI only finished the road when the next worker was finished, a hundred turns later. The best fix probably is give the AI some sense of how many workers it needs (perhaps max(unconnected cities, (total city count)/2) is a good value) and if it has less bump the importance greatly. This would also make the AI also replace workers consumed by starbases.
• The AI does not connect it's roads to other civs with open borders and therefore doesn't get any trade routes. A quick fix would probably be to tell the workers that the cities of civs with open border are their own civ's cities. As there are no resources (or only very rarely) in the direct neighborhood of solar cities it wont go and improve those (as there are none).
• The AI puts much too much weight on border pops. In the main game especially the first pop is very important. In FF it is only important once the city has grown a bit. A fix would be to make the city manager only value culture if there are only 3 or less free working spots left on the accessible planets and there still are planets left outside of the influence. I've seen AIs pop their borders like mad and all planets were accessible right away, meaning without any border pop.
• I've found that the between turn time is really long compared to the main game.