Bug reports

[Daz]

Please enter your bug reports in this thread. Include your PC configuration and what exactly happened.

PLEASE, no discussions, opinions or reviews.

Hopefully someone from Stardock finds it useful.

[Daz]

Bug:
In ship design window, I cannot save the design. Clicking on the SAVE button does nothing. After clicking DONE (and loosing my unsaved ship design) and exiting the planet screen I do get a save new design window (the name of the design is "NEW DESIGN"). After exiting, GC2 crashes....


Config:
IBM Thinkpad R51, no extras...

[bonscott]

Originally posted by Daz
Bug:
In ship design window, I cannot save the design. Clicking on the SAVE button does nothing. After clicking DONE (and loosing my unsaved ship design) and exiting the planet screen I do get a save new design window (the name of the design is "NEW DESIGN"). After exiting, GC2 crashes....


Config:
IBM Thinkpad R51, no extras...

This will be fixed in the update today.

You should check out the latest entry on the GalCiv 2 website by Frogboy. It lists out all the things going into today's update.

[peyoan]

can't even load

hey, my computer just churns the CD drive and the launcher locks up.

What a great way to start off.... after having to wait nearly a week longer than expected to get the game.

I'll keep working on it, but so far can't even load'r up. (it's done this on both my desktops and my laptop... starting to think it's the disks).

-peyoan

[peyoan]

oh, and also i wouldn't care so much since they have it available to download... BUT...

the stardock websites for galciv2 and the download site seem overloaded. I can load any website i go to, with the exception of the stardock pages.

guess they weren't prepared for the amount of sales they'd be getting or something...

[Sirian]

Originally posted by peyoan

the stardock websites for galciv2 and the download site seem overloaded. I can load any website i go to, with the exception of the stardock pages.

guess they weren't prepared for the amount of sales they'd be getting or something...

The website is just CRAWLING. Some forum threads refuse to open (I tried one a couple of dozen times!)

Time to call the ISP and upgrade the package again.


FEATURE REQUEST: Ability to set formed fleets on Sentry, Guard, etc, without having to break them up and send them to different plots as individual ships.

FEATURE REQUEST: When I choose a ship to build at a planet, send me back to the planet, not out in to space. (I have had to reclick on planets an awful lot.) ... Or, if not this, then allow me to CHOOSE a ship type without exiting the ship chooser screen and then I can click on Back to Planet. (Hitting Back to Planet takes me back to the planet, but without changing the ship to be built! )

GENERAL GAMEPLAY COMPLAINT: Economic waste (spending that goes up in smoke, doing nothing, because a planet lacks a shipyard or has no more social projects to build) is so 2004. Can we get some COMPETENT local govt officials in there. Ones who, like, on your RESEARCH PLANET, automatically recognize that an order from central command to emphasis shipbuilding empire wide doesn't and shouldn't apply to them? Way too much of my attention is being spent on babysitting and gaming the economic system, instead of on strategy and fun stuff. ... Thanks for listening.


- Sirian

[Sirian]

With the website being all but totally unresponsive, I have not been able to "create a character" to get the Metaverse running.

- Sirian

[bonscott]

Originally posted by Sirian

FEATURE REQUEST: Ability to set formed fleets on Sentry, Guard, etc, without having to break them up and send them to different plots as individual ships.

You can do this by double-clicking on the fleet which brings up an options/details screen. You can select to guard, sentry, etc. from there. You can do this with normal ships as well.

FEATURE REQUEST: When I choose a ship to build at a planet, send me back to the planet, not out in to space. (I have had to reclick on planets an awful lot.) ... Or, if not this, then allow me to CHOOSE a ship type without exiting the ship chooser screen and then I can click on Back to Planet. (Hitting Back to Planet takes me back to the planet, but without changing the ship to be built! )

Hmmm, actually I never go into the ship yard to set what ship to build. I actually just click the planet once and the details of that planet appear in the information display on the bottom. Click the build button to quick a small popup to choose what ship to build.

Also you can click on the planets info screen which shows all your planets in the list. Click the bar that show how long your ship will complete and you'll get a popup to choose the ship you want to build there. I use that all the time to make various quick changes empire wide. If you want to change all building of contructors to something else for example you can also use the governor in the stats report to easily switch production of all planets with a couple clicks.

GENERAL GAMEPLAY COMPLAINT: Economic waste (spending that goes up in smoke, doing nothing, because a planet lacks a shipyard or has no more social projects to build) is so 2004. Can we get some COMPETENT local govt officials in there. Ones who, like, on your RESEARCH PLANET, automatically recognize that an order from central command to emphasis shipbuilding empire wide doesn't and shouldn't apply to them? Way too much of my attention is being spent on babysitting and gaming the economic system, instead of on strategy and fun stuff. ... Thanks for listening.

I agree here although I think a portion of your unused production goes back into the pool for money. In any case here is a slick thing to do. Open up the planet window and up top you'll see the 3 boxes for military, social and research. If you click the icon in the upper right portion of the box you'll change most of your total economy on that planet to whatever you clicked. Say you have no social projects to build anymore but are building ships. Click military and more of economy will go toward the military projects. No spaceport and done with social projects? Then do that with research to up the researchon that planet. Kinda cool.

[Draginol]

Couple things:

1) Yea, we blew it in the digital release with that Goto button thing. The retail version didn't have it and we added it at the last second and pow. Net result, taking that path to the ship yard caused ships not to save.

We fixed it in the update though so go grab that.

2) Re Economic waste -- you are not charged for military resources on plaents that don't have shipyards, note teh shields on those planets are semi transparent and there's a () around the number.

[Sirian]

Originally posted by Draginol
Re Economic waste -- you are not charged for military resources on plaents that don't have shipyards, note teh shields on those planets are semi transparent and there's a () around the number.

Ah. That's good.

The other person's reply suggested the "emphasize" buttons. I have been using those a lot. However, they beg some more questions. ... I remember being delighted with the economic controls in GC1 because (relative to Civ3 or any other recent game in the genre) there was a lot less micromanagement in play. The entire empire was controlled in one place. I would adjust spending on almost every turn, but it was only one adjustment per turn, so GC played really fast. (Civ3 would provide benefits for messing with your cities a lot, and on many turns I'd end up checking them all and fiddling with half of them.) GalCiv games went a lot faster. (I played some in one day.) I even left the autoturn on.

GC2 is not moving as fast. Social spending has a lot of waste attached. It also adds micro with the various building types -- out with the "one of each building type" and in with "X buildings on this planet, Y buildings on that planet." I think the new way is more interesting and more strategic, but it is also now more painful. ... Or maybe GC1 was SO painful that the only workable choice was to stop all social spending of any kind once your best worlds had maxed out -- and in terms of administrative effort, that was less painful. ... GC1 had a stock formula. Max the colony ship building and send them out like roaches, blind roaches, and not even begin Social spending until you had grabbed all the worlds you were ever going to try to improve, then build them all up together, in a group. The economic controls forced this as the only effective approach. It meant that the expansion phase was always the same and always over very early, and any worlds you grabbed later would never catch up.

GC1 had no local adjustments. Set empire spending to 100% Military, and all the social spending stopped.

GC2's Emphasize buttons allow a planet to do something on Social while everybody else is running Military, but it's clumsy. Even if the military isn't going to waste when there is no starport, the planet is then operating at half speed. It's programmer's logic -- and I can appreciate that -- but it's unintuitive and cumbersome for the user, if they bother to look closely.

The arduous part is that even clumsy micro is mandatory for good performance if it's in there. So we've lost the benefit attached to not having micro at all (speed of play) but without gaining the benefit of effective micro (eliminating waste, getting the planet to do exactly what is desired). So the game moves slower now but the player is still blocked from local control. I'm afraid you've caught a bit of the worst of both worlds with that mix. It's the law of unintended consequences.

I am looking after my planets a lot, having to turn those emphasize buttons on and off. That's bad enough in itself, but this is the kind of squeeze play that MOO3 put on players. They blocked full micro yet the game rewards players for fiddling with the micro. ... If you're going to offer the player the chance to affect the local level, you are already in for a pound and should go all the way.


The math under the hood is another issue. There was a certain logic to the GC1 math, but these Emphasize buttons are off the wagon train.

Let's take Mars, for instance. Size 4 world, one slot eaten up by the colony center. So let's look at two cases. One is three factories in the open slots, the other is three labs. If spending is split 50/50 between research and production, everything looks normal. If spending is 100% production, the factory version of Mars is humming, but the lab version is anemic. If spending is 100% Research, then the lab version is humming.

So far so good.

BUT... If military spending is 100% and the Emphasize research button is clicked, which version of the colony will produce more research? (Answer: NOT the Labs.)

The emphasize buttons are siphoning off of the primary spending function, in a contortion of math that only a mathlete could possibly comprehend or appreciate. The average user is going to build Labs and expect them to affect research rates all the time. But in fact, they only affect spending that channels in through the global research budget. When using Emphasize buttons, the behavior is backward and confusing. If you would have these buttons channel spending in the normal way, (so that the Mars with Labs would be doing more research than the one with factories, in my example above) it would not only make more sense to users but reduce micromanagement, too.


Another thing that has always been weird about GalCiv math is the ability to flip spending all over the map. Say you've got four factories and two labs (and assorted other goings-on). Your sliders at 33/33/34. So, each building is running at 100% capacity, yes? ... No. The factories are running at 66% and the labs are running at 34%.

The intuitive thing for players is to assume that a planet has N resources at its disposal and will spend them toward whatever the player directs. But that isn't the case in GC. The math is much simpler than that from a programmer's perspective. The spending sliders do not represent a sum that gets divided, but instead represent a SPEED at which the local buildings are set to operate. 34% research spending means all buildings that can spend money on research will do so at a third of their maximum output. ... Just try and pull a stranger off the street and start explaining this math to them, and watch their eyes start bugging out. It gives me a headache and I actually enjoy pure mathematics.

Now take a planet with nine factories and no labs. If you are running 100% research spending, this planet is almost 100% unemployed. Those factories are running at 0%, because that is the current "production speed". The planet's research spenders will run at 100% of their maximum possible research spending, but only the colony center can spend on research, and it can't spend very much. So it's as if this whole planet shuts down while the empire is in research mode. And both types of spending are divorced from the planet's income, it's "economy" math.

There's one channel of math for income generation, a second channel for production expenditure, and a third channel for research expenditure, and the values attached to each can be wildly, irrationally out of synch with one another. ... It's a very abstract type of gameplay with a steep learning curve.

These relationships between math systems do offer a unique blend of gameplay and strategic options, but wow. If you get more income than you have the ability to spend, it accumulates in your treasury and just sits there. If you have more spending capacity than income, the extra capacity sits idle. In GC1, you could only choose whether or not to build the allowed buildings, one of each. Now in GC2 you can build multiple types of one building and neglect the others, making for even wilder desynchronization between income and spending. The planets are begging for specialization yet the underlying mechanics still require balance, so that the promise of being able to strategize and specialize is somewhat of an illusion, at least as regards the three components of the Spending Slider mechanism. (Other stuff like Influence and Diplomacy rating are independent and make more sense.)


Your expert players are going to deconstruct the math and figure out how to maximize the output, while your casual users are going to expect real-world logic to apply -- and it's not even close. The wider the gap between casual and expert play, in the things you have to do to be successful, the more intimidating the game will be to new users who look to experts for insights and advice.

Closing that gap will expand the audience.

You're committed to that core mathematical model and all of its abstractions, but you can close a significant chunk of that gap by preserving overflows and eliminating waste. The savings for no starport is going in the right direction, but I'm afraid Civ4 has moved the bar on you. (Casual users don't know this yet, though, so there is time to catch up before it bites you hard.) Have the game look after the pennies instead of asking the player to do it, so that player's attention stays focused on the dollars and the games are more rewarding per hour played and will move faster.


- Sirian

[Sirian]

Oh One More Thing(TM)...

On a hunch, I tried using Internet Explorer to access the GC2 website and I was able to get the Metaverse to work. ... Metaverse and the forum are giving Opera (my preferred browser) a total fit at the moment.


- Sirian

[Sirian]

I've figured out that the research overflow isn't lost (which is good), but it -is- assigned automatically, and I don't see a way to control it (which is less than good).

If you never research that tech, the overflow is effectively lost, and even if you get around to it later, those RPs would have done you more good if put toward something from which you were getting some use.


The tip for using the Planet list to reset ships is good stuff. Thanks, bonscott.


- Sirian

[Sirian]

By the way, what is up with those default map settings? My first two games were sardine cans with only Mars to settle (as Terrans).

One Planet Challenge can be loads of fun as a variant, when you are bored with regular games, but sticking it to players who install and fire up the defaults... The game is not putting its best foot forward.


In GC1, the Scattered Stars setting was harder, because the Clusters would put a bunch of habitables right on top of you and you wouldn't have Range issues. In GC2, the Scattered setting is easier. The civs are spaced better. Plus with the new ship construction minigame, the human can gain advantage by emphasizing propulsion research up front (just like in MOO1, actually) and riding that to faster, wider, better scouting, and faster colony ships to reach more of the juicy worlds.

Given enough breathing room between civs, the opening gameplay is now actually QUITE GOOD but you have to find some map settings that will show this off, because the default settings are a godawful crap shoot.


I changed three things one notch and went from cramped to good times.

Was: Uncommon Habitable Planets / Clustered Stars / Medium Galaxy w/ five civs.
Now: Common Habitable Planets / Scattered Stars / Large Galaxy w/ five civs.

It was like night and day. Went from the frustration of having no planets to settle (and no time to scout, just send out the colony ship in to the fog and pray) to having time to scout around (albeit as a top priority) and identify good systems and settle a fair share of them.

1. I had lots of GalCiv1 experience to draw on.
2. I am a map balance guru, so I could figure out why the defaults were unfun for me and what to change.

Many users will poke around and find something good, but I bet most could use some help via stronger defaults. ... Just a thought.


- Sirian

[Hansolo88]

Sirian, what did you use for settings on number of planets and number of stars?

Also, the research overflow could be a lot worse... at least it isn't lost. Would be nice if the game assigned the overflow to whatever tech you chose to research next.

[Sirian]

I finished that one game and submitted to the Metaverse. I started a new game with same settings on Huge with six opponents, but I got the shaft, stuck in the corner, boxed in by the two most radical AIs (Altarian/Drengin), and they are settling toward me, while the AIs on the opposite side of the map have wide open spaces and tons and tons of star systems.

I think I tripped a "Sirian Detector" or something, because it is bound and determined to smack me down now.

There's a case to be made for the value of extreme map situations. High duress can be a fun challenge. So can wide open cakewalk. I'm a fan of tighter boundaries, though. What good is a difficulty rating if the actual amount of difficulty on one game at that setting is really high, and another game on the same setting is really easy.

I'm sure the maps are statistically fair (with that many planets and dice rolls, you'd have to slant things to get them to be unfair) but the start locations are not. I bet a lucky roll on the default settings would be good, too. I would personally prefer less of a luck swing, though.

I'm debating whether to continue this one. (It's only my third game, after all.) It's not that I mind confronting close neighbors (I did get to grab two good planets close to me, though one was pure luck in sending my initial colony ship blindly in the right direction, beating the Drengin to the only good planet between us by half a turn). It's the AIs on the other side of the galaxy, who alone will have more territory than me and my two neighbors combined, that make me wonder if I want to slog through it.


GC1 had some dud maps, too, as I recall. I think on average, I threw one away for every one that I played. That's really radical for me, as I am one of the most ironman-leaning players that you are likely to find for most games. I want a game to be a good competition, though. If a map is too bad -- or TOO GOOD -- the game's outcome is already decided if playing at a difficulty setting that will give you a fit from a fair position.

Sirian, what did you use for settings on number of planets and number of stars?

I have had all the top row items on Common, with the blue outline. ... Really, though, there will be some duds on any setting, if you get shafted in the start position lottery. The AIs don't seem to have to scout; they beeline right for the habitable worlds. You can design faster ships than theirs to compensate, but you need a bit of breathing room to make it work. YOU do have to scout, and the AIs are advantaged for grabbing stuff close to them, but you can do better than them at grabbing stuff that is outside their initial influence circle.


- Sirian