Anyone hear the status of the latest patch?

[Adam_Smith]

Those are RTS games. I don't know much about programming, but it seems to me that those games would be much more simple since there are less aspects to the game.

[Garth Vader]

To me as a programmer RTS would seem harder as you have to worry about timing. While in TBS everything is user driven. I have worked on both timing critical industrial programs and office type user programs and timing can be tough especially if it has to expect periodic user input.

[Q_tip1976]

Mongoose and others,

I just checked my SMAC box and you are correct. I guess when I bought the game I had the mistaken impression PBEM was included. For that false accusation I am very sorry.

I admit perhaps I am being hard on Firaxis. I still feel many of the complaints conveyed here are valid, however. Bugs are not an unavoidable phenomenon. I have seen many complex console games that are a virtually bug free. On the rare occasion there is a bug the problem will be fixed and the defective copies of the game replaced. The Internet has provided the computer gaming industry with a crutch (in the form of patches) that allows them to rush software to market before it's ready to be released. Many consumer goods are very complex. There are few industries where the production of defective products and poor customer support (EA did not do a good job. Ever been to their costomer support page for SMAC?) are rewarded with customer loyalty. The only way the quality of computer games will improve is if companies that don't produce buggy software are rewarded with repeat customers and ones who do are not.

I cought some of the bugs in SMAC the third time I played the game. I mean companies should at leat make an honest effort to ship programs as bug-free as possible.

[MarkG]

quote: Originally posted by Alinestra Covelia on 06-20-2000 05:21 PM Well, at least SMAC and SMAX were in considerably better final states than Call to Power was. Hell, even the original buggy state for SMAC was a lot better than the original state of CtP.

please define the "original state of SMAC". the first demo? the second demo? the game in the box? or the game with the first patch that came 2 days after?

[Basil]

MarkG: I wasn't around for the first version of SMAC. But I did buy CtP when it first came out, and sold it as a used game after 3 or 4 attempts to play it, simply because version 1.0.0 - and I emphasize v. 1.0.0 - was so buggy (so many random crashes) that I found it impossible to play.

Regarding SMAC, I'm surprised by what people are saying in this thread. Like most of the rest of the people here, I'd like a patch to fix the remaining bugs. But I find the bugs a nuisance, not a game-killer: if it were just the bugs I wouldn't much care about another patch.

The thing that I really want, that I think should have come in the original game and whose lack I think greatly reduces the quality of the game, is better AI. 4 major faults in the AI (that the AI doesn't know how to terraform effectively, that the AI doesn't know when to build facilities, that the AI doesn't know how to run an air war, and that the AI doesn't understand that effiency in SE settings is more important when you have more bases) mean that solitaire games basically end when you get Doctrine: Air Power. As a result, everything past that is just SimCity Centauri. It's as if you bought a chess program that had no idea how to play once you got out of the opening moves. And the really frustrating part is that they did 99% of the necessary work, but just didn't put in that last 1% which would have made a very interesting game into a very interesting and challenging game. And that there's little to nothing you can do about it.

Now I can see why it makes commercial sense for Firaxis, and other companies that produce closed-source games, to spend far more time on the art than they do on the AI. They get their $whatever whether you play the game for 3 hours or 300, the art does more to make the sale while the AI just makes for better value to the customer - which in the closed-source game model doesn't bring the developer any money. But this conclusion doesn't make me any likelier to buy Civ III, which I expect (given the trend line of Sid Meier's games) to have an AI that's completely out of its depth. Instead, I'll go to FreeCiv when the time comes.

What I dream about (I hardly dare say this because it's just my dreams, not in any way connected to reality), would be Firaxis making SMAC open source after its commercial life is over. Not likely! But that would be much better than any patch.

- Basil

[Ned]

Basil, As to the AI, making it more "thoughtful" could quickly make the game unplayable. With most chess games I have played, after the opening moves, the AI seems to play all possible moves to a varying depth depending on skill level, etc., and give each resulting position a score. If the SMAC AI did something similar, the game would quickly bog down while the human player waited minutes, hours for the AI to complete its turn.

In my view, there are only two things that can make the AI better and keep playability. The first is to have the AI continuously calcuate "strategy" while the human is playing so that it can add the current game situation as a whole to the rules-based decisions when it is its turn to move.

The second is teach it how to provide a coordinated attack. For example, I rarely see the AI land more than one or two, usually inferior, combat troups as its invasion force. This mimics its land combat pattern of uncordinated individual tatics. The AI needs to know to "wait" until it has amassed sufficient resources to prevail against a normally prepared opponent.

I still fondly remember CIV I. This game seemed to have a much better AI from this latter point of view.

[Helium Pond]

Do you think it would be effective to press for a very, very limited patch? Like, what if we came up with the top five bugs, and made a valiant lobbying effort to Firaxis? Do you think we could get them to do it? I mean, they did promise "a quick incomplete patch, and a later patch that fixes everything else". Well it's pretty obvious that was an outright lie, and we'll never see another major patch. But if we made a really small demand--c'mon Firaxis, just these five bugs, just fix these teeny little bugs for us, pleeeeeeeze? do you think we might be able to sway them? Surely five bugs couldn't take more than a month?

What would be the top five? We would have to make them actual fixes--nothing like "better AI" or "more balanced factions." Off the top of my head:

1) Disappearing factions. I've never had this happen, but I've seen people report it, and it's a doozy of a bug.
2) Fake drones.
3) MP: Probe team notifications sent to wrong player.
4) MP: Demanding withdrawal from a human player via a right-click menu gives the request to the AI instead of opening the diplomacy screen.
5) The crash that happens during automatic aircraft interceptions (this also doesn't happen to me, so I hope I've described it correctly; it also seems pretty major).

It's farfetched to hope they'll ever look at the huge bug list. But what if we sent them a really really tiny one? Is it too much to hope they might do a mini-patch, of just the most game-breaking bugs?

[Ned]

HeliumPond, Good idea on a limited list. Since I am affected by the Terran.exe crash, I would keep this on the list. I would add the right click airdrop bug. I would drop the disappearing factions. This does not seem to be a major problem. Finally, I would consider dealing with the extra energy one receives when Stockpile is expressly or implicity in the queue.