Bug reports

[Sirian]

I had an instance where my news list contained a LOT of items. Like approaching twenty. More than seven combat items, so whatever that bug is that I reported earlier with the news items, it is not a simple one that always occurs.


BTW... The graphics on the space battles are really good! You should be hyping those more. I suppose there are shots of it in with those big batches of shots, but I honestly didn't look at any of those. "I'll be getting the game anyway; why look at the screenshots?"

I found myself wishing for more camera options. There are a lot of them in there, but the only "free cam" item is top-down only. I wish that I could "fly" the camera. (I thought the flying camera in Civ4 was irrelevant eye candy, too, but I've changed my mind.)


- Sirian

[bonscott]

Originally posted by Sirian
I found myself wishing for more camera options. There are a lot of them in there, but the only "free cam" item is top-down only. I wish that I could "fly" the camera. (I thought the flying camera in Civ4 was irrelevant eye candy, too, but I've changed my mind.)


- Sirian

Actually it's not just top down. Use the same type of rotation controls available on the main map or in the ship builder. I use the free cam and the first thing I do in the first battle of that session is press the scroll wheel and rotate to about a 20 degree or so angle (it will remember your angle during your current session). During the battle I will often rotate around to get a better look as well as zoom in or out using the scroll wheel. You've never seen a more awesome battle then when attacking a ringed planet. Rotate that view so you get the rotating planet in view and you're fighting right above or below the rings. I thought by now I'd be just clicking done with the space battle but I never get tired of watching them. Great feature.

[Sirian]

CLUNKY FEATURE: I remember this from GalCiv1. Unfortunately, it's back.

The AIs declare war on you for "parking" a transport next to one of their planets -- WHEN THE TRANSPORT IS ON GOTO TO ATTACK SOMEBODY ELSE.



The Terrans just declared on me for this fleet passing their world on the way to attack the last of the Minors.


1. The intent of the feature is to "detect" imminent or planned invasions and not have the AI just sit and wait, but... IT DOESN'T DO THAT. Or rather, it may work once, but then you figure out a way around it and then it's useless again. You can simply park your transports two plots away, or three, or five, or seven. (My troopships have speed 7.)

2. Legitimate players not planning any hostility are hit with wars trumped up on nonsense. To avoid these wars, YOU MUST AVOID SENDING ANY FLEETS WITH TRANSPORTS IN THEM ON GOTO ORDERS THROUGH ALIEN SPACE.

3. Rehabilitate the rule by fixing point #2 or better yet, just drop the rule (see point #1).


I'm off now to go reload from autosave and babysit my transport on its way through Terran space.


- Sirian


PS: Thanks bonscott. I'll see if I can figure it out.)

[Sirian]

Uh oh. Major strangeness is occurring in my main map view.

This is a Gigantic galaxy:



I just started my first war, taking two Torian worlds.

After emerging from fleet on fleet combat at the second world, I came back out to a main map view that looks like this. It's as if a "different" camera mode is still engaged. It came out at a weird angle. I looked up how to rotate the map and that enabled me to get rid of the weird angle, but the camera is still misbehaving.

I looked all through the pdf manual as well as trying all of the options and controls that I could find, but no cure. I have not yet tried quitting and restarting because:
1. The first turn after any reload is wacky, so I prefer to have as few of those as possible, and...
2. In GC1, IIRC, the AIs would go through a round of diplomacy on game launch, to discourage too much reloading. (Such an item penalizes those whose games crash, or who have less time per session to play, but that's another story.)
3. I'm not positive that restarting the game will fix it. If I were, I'd go ahead and try it, because THIS is not really playable at the moment.

The thick morass of background stars are the worst, but so the lack of "tactical" view at a reasonable zoom level. The graphics won't change in to the icons until I zoom so far out I can see the entire galaxy on the screen at the same time. (Look at the screenie above. I repeat, that is a Gigantic galaxy, and look how far I'm zoomed out with the graphics still showing!)


Anybody have any ideas how to reset the view to default camera and behavior? That's all I want, to get back to normal.

I believe I was watching the space battle in Cinematic view right before this oddness started, but I had paused the action a couple of times and cycled through all the combat camera angles looking for a better one.


- Sirian

[Sirian]

I quit and reloaded, eventually, and that cleared up the problem.

However, after taking two more Torian worlds, I attacked their homeworld and got the problem again. Whatever is triggering it seems to be triggered during attacks specifically on a planet. This time I did not mess with any camera views nor pause, just watched the battle.

When I came OUT of the battle, I discovered the source of the problem. Every time I pressed the Numpad4 key or the Left Arrow key (either) to move a ship one plot to the left, the camera view would "take a step back". This is not the same as using the mousewheel to zoom in and out. In fact, I typically hover near the break between graphics and icons, and my "zoom level" was not changed. Zooming in a tick or two would go from icons to graphics, zooming out would return. The camera itself was moving away from the galaxy without changing zoom level.

I tried to keep playing, but I cannot avoid moving to the left, as the Torians are situated to my left! ARRGH!

Eventually it moved the camera out to infinity and I could no longer see the map at all! Just a jumble of the icons in the center of my screen.



Here's a shot of the "interim stage" from the first incident, where the camera has been pushed back but not yet to infinity. The background stars get really bright!



Am I going to have to save and quit and reload after every few planetary invasions? Or maybe turn off watching fleet battles?


I'm still using 1.0D.1 since I read that moving to 1.0X will "lose custom ship designs" and I'm in position to win on Gigantic on the highest difficulty and don't want to lose the opportunity to finish or have my save jinxed up.


- Sirian

[bonscott]

If you got a smoking rig your video card just might be smoking which is what the X patch fixes so that could be what your're running into. Good luck on getting that game finished!

[Osvon]

Bugs:

- I build Soil Enhancement on a planet and the planet class increases by one, in this case from 11 to 12, but after saving and reloading the game the planet class has reset back to 11 again. This also has the effect of lowering the approval rating (I think). This has happened several times.

- Sometimes I get a planet with really low influence. I'm not sure if it's a bug or a feature though. Last time it was a class 11 planet. When I check the tooltip popup I see that I get 0 influence from the planet. The only contributing factors to total influence are from population, improvements and civilization influence.

- Some other odd behaviors after loading a game, but these have been reported by others.


Hope this get fixed because I really LOVE this game!!!

[Sirian]

Originally posted by bonscott
If you got a smoking rig your video card just might be smoking which is what the X patch fixes so that could be what your're running into.

I do have a smoking rig (for the first time in a decade, just made a jump in December) but this is NOT a heat issue. I fired up the game this morning; computer is not even warmed up yet.

1. I attacked the Torian homeworld and after the battle, pressing the Numpad4 key "pushed my camera away from the map" again.

Whatever that is, it's a bona fide bug in the code.

But wait, it gets worse. TWO MORE bugs poking around in here.

2. If you fight a battle on the first turn after loading up, EACH time you emerge from battle victorious, your ship or fleet GETS A WHOLE TURN'S WORTH OF EXTRA MOVEMENT POINTS TACKED ON!

3. If you group Transports in to a Fleet (and why wouldn't you?) and attack a world, the game only "uses up" Transports that represent your actual combat losses. ... Say for instance that you have 3bil troops on board three transports in a group. If during the fight you lose 1.8bil troops and have 1.2bil left alive, one of your Transports will be preserved. ... So far so good. (This is how it SHOULD be!) ... Now the nasty part: There will be 1.2bil population on the planet! Where did the extra 1bil come from? Transporter accident creates a billion clones or something? (Reminds me of the old Monopoly card, "Bank Error in Your Favor." This is "Math Error in Your Favor, extra billions of citizens created for you out of thin air.")


In the shot below, illustrations of these three bugs.



Pink Arrow shows a fleet that is romping all over the poor Torians. Those Hornets had 18HPs when this turn started. Picked up THIRTEEN MORE from killing stuff, mostly crap Fighters and helpless Constructors and Colony ships. ... I did lose a ship attacking the homeworld, when that fleet was still green. It was a close call, just barely lost one there, but that was it for the Torian resisantance in the area. ... Anyway, after each battle, the fleet would get 4 more movement points. I kept going to see if it was situational, but nope, EVERY battle gave more movement afterward. I've not seen anything like this before, probably because I never quit and save in the middle of a fight (and let's face it, there haven't been many fights yet, this is only my fourth game and I won the first three via culture/diplomacy.)

Green Arrow shows the Torian homeworld. It's got 2.2bil population on it, as I lost only one of three Transports in the invasion, yet I have two transports left. So, when I started the invasion, I had 3bil total population, and now that it's over, I've taken 800mil casualties but now have 4.2bil people left over -- 2bil on the ships and 2.2bil on the planet. ... Unless this is a bug very recently introduced, it's a pretty nasty thing to miss during the beta. (For that matter, the planetary production upgrade cost reduction bug was a blockbuster, too. Unless that was recent, all the "big picture" balance testing done so far is wiped out and you're starting over in figuring out what the actual game balance is, human vs AIs).

The Torian homeworld is also the one that I got the camera glitch from after the battle, but I go ahead and invade the other planet you see in the shot up there and THAT fight may have stopped the camera bug. ... I'll look in to it some more and see.

Really, though, this whole "oddball turn" mechanism upon reloading is fraught with problems. I don't understand why the game can't be managed to resume normally upon reload, instead of having to go through that wacky first turn with Influence, Production and Movement jacked up. ... I remember the explanation for this from GC1, that the game has to go through complex calculations for the Influence system, but seriously. Isn't there a way to just "do that behind the curtain" as part of the loadup process? This is a bad corner to be cutting.


- Sirian

[EternalSpark]

Not sure if this is the right thread to do it, but since someone requested something:

Request: Free Units. Build more than X ships, then you start paying. I didn't play Morgan in SMAC cuz I had to pay out the ass for ships.

[Sirian]

Does the (Evil Alignment Only) "Mind Control Center" wonder actually work?

According to the description, I expected planets to start flipping to me en masse, as I had several with the "rebellion" marker on them. Instead, since I built the thing, NOT ONE FLIP ANYWHERE. It's as if the effect is opposite of what it claims, harming flip chances or even halting all flips.


- Sirian

[Sirian]

Arrgh. The game is screwing up on me now. The GNN reports won't come up at all, and the game crashes every time I try to land troops. I've three times now, all crashing, error reports sent off to MS.

I wonder if this has to with producing too many ships on the same turn. (I had weirdness with that a couple of turns ago.)

I hope I can finish this game. I've already put a LOT of hours in to the mop up.

It could possibly also pertain to ship upgrades, as I did a lot of those right before this problem appeared.


- Sirian

[Sirian]

I managed to get past that hangup by starting my war "a turn early", in which my target then surrendered about eight or ten planets to Terrans. So I then attacked the Terrans, took all but two of those unguarded planets plus half the Terran Empire, including all their military resources, and I seem to be OK for the moment.

- Sirian

[Sirian]

There are ALL KINDS of interface nastiness and horrors of tedium associated with disbanding fleets or removing ships from a fleet. The ones I am growing to loathe are the ones where it moves the wrong ship or moves ships that are not selected. There are even worse monsters in that dark hole, though. Exploitable ones that can reset fleet movement, giving you additional moves or taking away moves or in some cases granting repeatable doses of extra moves, resulting in unlimited moves. I'm not even looking for exploits; they are just dropping in to my lap one after the next. The worst ones are associated with ships of different speeds, but ALL interactions of fleet dispersal are painful.

I'm down to 2.4 civs left out of the original nine, but sadly, the last of them are in opposite corners, both far from my civ's core.

Markos, are you out there? Can we get a new smiley? One standing next to a bucket and pushing a mop?


There is also some schizophrenia in the diplomacy. On the one hand, AIs will surrender their last X planets to a different AI just to drag things out; yet these same AIs will give planets to you at the diplomatic table after you beat on them for a while. ... They stop doing that after a couple of times but by then they're out of the game anyway. ... Now which is it? Do we want to drag out the end game? Or speed it up?

Also, someone correct me if I'm wrong, but the game is rated as HARDER for adding more AIs, and yet in fact the game gets EASIER on most maps the more AIs you pile in there, because there are that many more tech trading permutations and customers, and that much more likelihood of a stunted AI who will be easy to pick on and swallow, all the while training your fleets to make them stronger for the next fight. ... Talk about warmongering snowball! The Metaverse is going to demand that its top scorers always play with all the civs enabled because the points will come a lot faster that way.

And for some reason, I can't get an AI to Close relations to save my life. Is this intentional? Nobody likes the Drengin? I'm going a-conquesting in this game just to say I've climbed that mountain, but in future games (if I'm to keep enjoying the game) the mop up needs to get a LOT shorter. Making allies of nearly half the civs used to reduce a lot of mopping in GC1, but this game is almost over and I've been very friendly with my two Evil civ neighbors, and they just sit parked at Friendly.

This game was indeed over when I first claimed it to be over. The AIs did manage to tech up a bit and develop ships that could wound my designs, but then I just teched up a bit more myself and put Huge ships out there with 2x defenses, took over the rest of the Military Resources, and... Well, I've lost five ships all game long. Two early to the Torians, two on DEFENSE to the Iconians who slipped an attack fleet around the lines and in to my softly defended core (I spent 15k on upgrades of old rustbuckets in the area, though, and that ended that), and one Medium rookie ship that I sacrificed to save a turn on taking out the Terrans. ... I've lost FIVE ships all game long and only had a couple of others wounded majorly. Must have killed thousands of logistical points by now and maybe over a thousand enemy ships. The AIs make an awful lot of tiny and small ships!

Throw in that I've captured multiple Hyperion Logistics centers from AIs, giving me way larger fleet caps than any AI can field. I literally have INVINCIBLE fleets running around the map.



That Mini Ripper is a MEDIUM ship with 105 hit points, and those are base HPs. Combat seems to take off base hit points, though, so I can't tell if that 1437 number on the left is meaningful or not. That number does not match the totals of my ships' listed hit points, so what is up? Which numbers are real? Which ones COUNT?

My medium ships start with like 28 hit points. I have some over 130 HPs! Most of my Huge ships are low level, though. For some reason, smaller hulled ships gain levels faster. Which is kind of wacky, since they end up with more HPs than the larger hulls! They carry less equipment, of course, but each ship can shoot at only one target at a time, so having a bunch of those high level small and medium ships around, who've been through ten or twelve wars and won a couple of hundred battles... Well, the AI ships are all green, and they have fewer HP bonuses and less Logistics and smaller hulls. The math is off the charts.

But wait! IT GETS WORSE! Even if the AI does manage to field a design that can threaten your fleet, you simple pause the fight for a few turns, tech up the applicable defenses, futz with the design (If you boost Miniaturization, you can simply ADD more defense without taking anything away) and then pay 10k to 30k to upgrade your best front line ships. Upgrades are very pricey but it's only about 1500bc per ship for even a significant upgrade of already-modern ships. It's only trying to upgrade old rustbuckets at 4k a pop that really stings. ... Even if the AI counters you, you simply pause and counter them back. They all run practically nil in their treasury, so the upgrade system resides firmly in SMAC Land: it's for Human Players Only!

Thanks to this combined military snowball effect, GC2 games are likely to be over (strategically) at as early of a point as my first max difficulty game was decided, for experienced/elite players. That leaves a lot of mopping. Too much.


- Sirian

[Gufnork]

I know the invincible fleet all too well. I generally play the Dratha that has a 50% defense bonus, which makes it even easier. I've had games without losing a single ship.

I think AI's are less likely to ally with you at higher difficulties, which would explain the lack of close friends. I have managed to win a political victory on Suicidal though, with the Drengin of all races, not the Dratha that I usually play (good races are supposed to get along better than evil ones). I managed to get both Korx and Iconians to ally with me.

The fleet interfaces annoy the hell out of me too. I also hate that you can't do anything to ships if there's more than one fleet on a parsec.

I believe the game is easier with fewer AI's since they can't gang up on you as easily and they suck at colonizing, leaving more planets for you. Most of my tech trading is with minor races anyway, if they exist. If they don't I get them in peace treaties.

One of the dumbest diplomatic thing I've seen was a minor race paying all their tech and most of their money to get a peace with me, then they declared war on me the very next turn because my wars were hurting their economy. Peace treaties needs to be more solid, they shouldn't be breakable for x amount of turns or something. If nothing else but to protect the AI from itself, but also to stop the player from getting all an opponents techs in a peace treaty only to declare again next turn.

In that game you should be able to get a cultural victory with minimal effort. That's a victory condition I love, it saves me all that mopping up efforts.

[Mart]

BUG: minimap shows stars and ownership in unexplored space. That's probably not a feature. I can see empires right from the start