it's right there http://botfii.armadafleetcommand.com/in ... pic&t=1731

Hi all

(Testing alpha 4 eng)

CAn we change the empire fleet marker back to the early one and as i am having diffi with the new one's like the omegan one is the hardest

Kingy6

Great looking game!

Think I found a bug. If you have a system with two or more habital planets to terraform, then terraform one planet that doesn't have titanium as a resource. If you colonize the planet you will not start out with any tinanium mines and can't build any as you would expect. However, if you later terraform the other planets with titanium as a resource, you still can not build any basic titanium mines.

it's no bug, if you look closer the other terraformed planet is white, not green. that means you need to colonize that one again (we kinda added this "intermediate step" in so it gets more realistic, also you have a 4 billion influx of population in that turn which can be quite useful on an class C or N planet which otherwise grows rather slowly..).

Possible bug, depending on any changes you might have made to the diplomatic system.

I'd made contact with the Heyoun, offered a non-aggression treaty which they accepted. Then after giving them... uh, whatever it was they asked me to give them, they offered a trade agreement, which I accepted. (On the turn I accepted they offered it again, so I just accepted it agian.)

I was terraforming a system between our borders, and the Heyoun parked a few scouts and a frigate there too; when the non-aggression treaty expired, they wiped out my colony and scout ships.

Are the non-aggression and trade treaties supposed to be separate?

Heard good things about this version of botf so gona give it ago. 74 megs worth of game, impressive.

Will have a go tomorrow tho as dling now but am tired. Congrats getting so far peeps.

glad to hear the word spreads around skeet

anyway trahern, nope, no bug. these are meant to be separate. friendship treaty is what combines them both but the other two are the separate components of it!

Hey guys, I downloaded BoTE English. Currently running it on a 1,4 GHz laptop. I've only played one game so far but here's what I've found. BTW, I lost the game.

- The Rotharians had declared war on me and sent a whole two ships to the nearest colonized star system (two BoPs). They destroyed 8 of my ships; 1 basic Farscape, five AT-classes (two basic and three with Type 5 Phasers, 2nd Class Photons, and type 3 shields), and two maxed out Peraines.

- Since I'm on an older laptop, I can only put my screen res to 1024x768. Typically, what will happen is that horizontal and vertical scroll bars will appear so I can scroll. This will only occur when I you end a turn and it returns directly to the Galaxy screen. If you end the turn and the Empire/Info screen appears the scroll bars will not return when you return to the Galaxy screen. This also occurs if you have the scroll bars and move from the Galaxy screen to another screen and then back.

- A weird issue, the Rotharian attitude towards me at that point seemed to flucuate wildly. One turn it was neutral, the next it was higher and they accepted a non-aggression treaty. Two turns later they were Angry and a few turns after that they were declaring War on me.

- I think I noticed someone else experienced this also, I won a battle (against a mighty Colony Ship) but while the colony ship showed as destroyed the next turn, the news showed that I lost the battle.

- Also the menu titles are still in German too.

- I also noticed a couple of news reports that are still in German and saw one report that there wasn't a space between two words at the end. I'll try and copy them down next time, but I was really tired last night.

- Mercury is still in German. I didn't happen to check anyother ones but will next time.

Requests for the Game:
- We DO need Orbital Batteries.
- I'm thinking more population and maybe the ability to terraform any planet that is not a gas giant. I noticed that I couldn't terraform Mercury. I'm also thinking that a moon can be terraformed for population growth.
- I'm thinking that the game board is a little small (I like the larger boards with more resoruces). Perhaps a way of changing the size in the config menu.

Will continue to test.

diplomacy is not as straight as in botf. the AI is handling it quite well though (for its own purposes, e.g. you lost ).

those rots had more ships, you just couldn't see them since they were all cloaked. generally a few higher tech cruiser beat 5 times lower tech destroyers. make saves each turn and log in as romulans the turn before they hit you. then you can see their full fleet! if you wonder how they could amass a relatively large fleet at the beginning, try have a look at how the AI is doing via the savegames. the first 75 turns are crucial in the whole development. granted, the AI gets some resource bonusses, but nothing else and if you look closer at what she's doing, you'll see it expands rather wildly and quick-buys a lot of colony ships (build space dock immediately after colonization). also it terraforms later, first make sure, you get the colony and there's titanium on the terraformed planets!

-
-
..
- all known issues, fix them later.

all the "special" planets, i.e. all homesystem planets, are still in german. also a hard-coding issue.

i added orbital batteries in my latest file. check the boards here. i posted the link somewhere. but it's highly experimental and in order to mod the file with the buildings editor, you need to wait for an updated version of it. version 1.05 will not work with the file.

game board will - maybe - get larger or "adaptable in size" in the final version. you come to hate huge maps btw. I'm sure cause they just are tidious to play with so many systems to keep an eye on, even with auto-build.

Been looking at the intel screen, and I see there's a lot more than had been in BotF. Not quite sure how it all works. How about a quick rundown before I find out if the Rotharians are still my preferred race?

Edited to add: Just discovered I sometimes get the 'incoming treaty suggestion' voice message when I'm actually sending one out.

I haven't used intel myself yet (except for inner security) but it works with depot points which you can amass during turns and then "gamble" with it later on when you have enough of them in your depot. Try espionage first and then go to sabotage. that way you can even select specific targets. i have yet to do that myself. when that happened, i can help you more. of all i heard, it's very useful and can - in case of rots and carts - even decide a game!

Played a couple more games today. There's BIG problem with the AI. Even on Baby level, after 100 turns the AI has 10 or more star systems all colonized and massive fleets. I'm barely able to have three to five systems colonized and have more than eight ships for defense.

did you type the BABY in capital letters? if not, NORMAL will be used as default (case-sensitive).

the AI ain't the problem, maybe the buildings.data is a bit too much favoring the expansion-willing-type of player (you can change that for example if you make the early space dock much more expensive (titanium! see buildings editor!), that building is the key building for early expansion!) but elseway it just doesn't cheat so either it had way better starting point (if you got only <20 bn. planets around you, it's a bad start ; still you can win the game but only as a minor affiliate to another AI-empire) or you need to adapt your tactics a little, i.e. buy colos (5-7 are enough till turn 60), buy scouts (2-3 should be enough till turn 80). Also, the AI ships are mostly scouts and destroyers at the beginning which can easily be fought off with some early cruiser(s), check that out (even via the combat simulator, see other topic).

as i said, don't try to sit docks and upgrade sol or romulus or whatever to the max but see that you get to know your wider surroundings early in game in order to find as many minors as possible and get good trade contacts with them.

granted, one could think of other gameplay, i.e. more stressing on building up your homeworld first and expand later but then we would have to change all the minors attitudes so that they won't join you unless you are really much superior to them. this will be possible at later alphas since we already have such a developer tool called minor race extended editor where you can change that attitudes.

for now, minors are most important, and so are the credits you get out of trade contracts with them.

another hint, don't try to max out relationships with them. get a trade treaty, set your trade route and let the minor be for another 50 turns and don't spend anymore credits on it except the minor is worth it and is currently being "gifted" by another major empire next to it. By that trade route, the relationships get automatically and steadily better so the minor comes to you by himself .

anyway, keep testing and if nothing helps, i do have uploaded some savegames of my own (nearly saved every turn) so you can check what i do to be actually superior to an impossible AI at turn 125 e.g. topic is here somewhere with link to the files if i ain't convincing you we may have a little multiplayer match next weekend and I'll show you it's possible without any possible cheating

I guess I've been getting some real craptacular starts then. All I've had around my homeworlds are the max 20 billion systems so far. Normally I've found that all I get is two or three in the immediate area.
I normally try for a balanced star, especially when I don't have a whole lot of star systems that can support a lot of population.
I'll have to try editing the cost of Shipyards to see if that has any affect.
Yeah I checked the level. I noticed the other defined variables where in caps so I assumed that the values were case sensitive.
Wish I could have the multiplayer just for the heck of it anyway. Back a year ago it wouldn't have been a problem, but now a days I have an eight month old who likes to play with daddy. It's the most fun ever though.

hey ive been playin alot but i was wondering is there a way to make the game evolve slower? like the research i mean ok its fun to play a fast game but i think it would me fun if we could adjut the technology development for the game slower to fully enjoy the star trek era like enterprise era

Yes it is, but it is some little work to do. You only have to decrease the research points output of all research buildings in the building editor. Maybe you want it only to do for the race you want to play. But the AI would have an advantage then.

Wanting to kick start the BotE section of the forums I though to write about bugs and issues with the new Alpha 4 Refit.
However, after playing several games it became apparent that there really isn't too many problems with it.

There are still a few areas where text is in German rather than English but I suspect these are know about and will be resolved with Alpha 5.

In previous threads improvements and ideas have been susgested which are still to appear, but again I suspect these will appear in Alpha 5.

I like the new resource route feature, it's a shame you can't ship Deritium using this method but you can still use transports.

Any tentative release date for Alpha 5?

Probably October. There are some really nice UI improvements already done right now making galaxy map a lot smoother to handle and be navigated on, so you can look forward to it .

Deritium will be autotransported when the "Patrol"-order is implemented. Then you can send them back and forth a route.

I can remember suggesting auto shipping of goods some time ago and being told it wasn't going to be implemented. I'm glad that it has made it into the game but I think it is less important now that you can setup resource routes. Perhaps the resource routes function could be toned down. My vision for patrol route was a vital shipping lane that had to be protected to get the resources through to your uber ship producing systems. Hence attacking these patrols would form a major strategical aspect of the game.

Anyway, it's all good. Shame we have to wait until October though.

We want to implement a sector-malus to resource routes, i.e. 10% of total needed additional resources as IP cost modifier for each sector the route is long. that means a 5 sector route carrying 500 Titanium for a project to the routed system will have the building/ship/upgrade/whatever to be built have a 250 IP additional cost simulating the extra cost and time for longer routes. So there'll be a penalty there .

Attacking those routes will be possible with the "Raid"-order, that is especially successful in a dense resource and trade route sector or whole 9-sector area .

Yeah, we thought your idea would pretty much add up nicely to those resource routes since Deritium or Dilithium as it was/is called in ST, should be treated specially and those transports should be directly interceptable by enemy scouts/fleets. Also, everyone who does not want IP penalties but can live with the longer transport turn times a regular patrol-like transport requires, can do so or choose between the two possibilities where it fits best.

Progress on the coding part has been slowed down significiantly since the last st alpha4 release, that has mainly to do with the usual suspects of life: end of student life, job, new town/city, etc.pp.. But nevertheless it's still on a decent path and pace and updates can be looked forward to, especially since we got a new UI artist since then and a structure/building artist that's working on replacing old botf buildings. So hopefully, next or the alpha after the next will be completely copyright-free and able to made public to everyone who likes such types of games without the fear of being shut-down or anything .

Anyway, because of that, we recently opened some doors for additional developers on the coding part (all other doors are wide open anyway ), mainly for smaller tasks like getting planets to rotate using a similar model like FreeOrion with their GDI+/OpenGL solution, or helping with the AI or combat system to implement better and more diverse algorithms for strategies and decisions like when to defend the empire and when to expand wildly or take a step back and only observe the rest of the folks on the map and so on. Fleet maneuvers in combat are also a thing where experienced C++ programmers get help and already coded source to work with from us. If you happen to know someone who might want to help resp. got time for that first-off , just shoot. Maybe I open an extra announcement-thread for that sometime.

The cost modifier sounds like a good way to reduce reliance on the trade routes.
I don't know that 'patrol' routes is the best term to use for transporting goods.
'Shipping' routes would seem like a more logical choice.
I see 'Patrol' routes as seting a fleet of ships on a predetermined route with perhaps intercept orders to act as a deterant for other races ships from exploring your space.

Is there a thread already running somewhere to suggest improvements to the language/grammer of existing game text.

yeah, the order for transport ships will be called "Shipping" on the button, but the technique behind it comes from the Patrol order resp. the implementation is nearly the same. So I was just referring to the underlying order.

Here's a thread for reporting grammar issues (I suspect there are a lot in the game, especially in ship and minor race description cause I made nearly all of them by myself): http://www.star-trek-games.com/forum/in ... 070#p46070

OK,

So any chance I can get my hands on Alpha 4?
(since Alpha 5 is not out till October)

I did a lot of testing/playing on the older version (not sure of the version number), and left a long list of thoughts & suggestions.

Would like to try out the newest version.

Thanks,
Scottster

wb scottster . Do you mean the old ST alpha4? We made a better one since then. You can find the Alpha4 Refit version on www.star-trek-games.com under Game Downloads after registering. Your report back then was really useful. I hope/think we got everything you mentioned in-game .

Excellent,

I am glad to be back.
(Work and school took control of my life for a while)

Yes, was looking for the old ST Alpha4, but I will check out the non-Trek one.
I'll register and go download... and I will be back when I have a new list.

hehehe

Really looking forward to see what you guys have done.

Scottster

The Changelog will give you a short hint at what we were able to implement since the last alpha3 version (0.51e). Basically all intel, AI system bombardment and transporter/outpost building hence possibility of being actually overrun by it, ability to set AI difficulty levels via bote.ine file (BABY, EASY, NORMAL, HARD, IMPOSSIBLE; it's setting a modifier for resource and build time cheat bonusses for the AI, nothing too fancy but with big effects of course), improved english texts and stats, a faster combat simulator that reduces turn times later in-game greatly, rock-solid stability, i.e. we did not have any bug or crash reports since the latest release and still a lot of downloads and people reporting (mostly on our german forums) .

I think it already makes a lot of fun to play, especially in multiplayer. Currently we're in the process of a complete GUI overhaul that builds the game upon DirectX forcing out old MFC which has become more and more impractical and hindering as the game progresses. We got the help of an additional coder on that (it was his idea in the first place) and if everything goes fine then in one of the next alphas we can actually see the difference made by that UI library conversion in terms of visual appearance and nice things like combo boxes and so on which were too tedious to program with the MFC. For example the in-game tech, buildings and ship encyclopedia needs a more complex UI and before we can start with that we need the new directx-based UI. Also for an idea of mine regarding the use of colony ships especially in late turns. I'm in favor of making ship design capable of assigning buildings and building levels to the start buildings a colony gets to that colony ship rendering its IP costs dynamically. In order to do that we also need combo boxes to fit those additional buttons for all 5 ground types of buildings into our ship design menu. Otherwise it'd look blant and weird.

I'm also hoping we can get cdrwolfe's 3D engine working with bote somehow once it is done. That would be another major addition to the game. While we're at it, what would be still lacking then? I guess maintenance costs and AI handling of those, a campaign and tutorial mode, several voice-overs and videos, some graphical skins for the UI, minor race ships (can already be modded in) and so-called medium empires, i.e minors actually expanding and forming little empires.

ask vex xiang for help!
he designs games so far i love them. also he stoped in mid production of broken mirror2

Seeing as how I started this thread It's about time I made a testing report.


Current issues (possibly already reported/known)

1 - I don't seem to be able to shut down a resource route once it has been setup.

2 - The description of troops stationed on a planet is still written in German.

3 - Minor race list is not scrollable in the diplomacy screen.

4 - Sometimes when entering the build list of a system no structure picture is displayed.

5 - It is possible to try and assign a trade route when none are available to be assigned. You get the line appear on screen but obviously can't assign it.


Possible improvements

a - In the system overview screen it would be a nice feature if all of the columns of information could be sorted in accending or decending order for each field (mainly food, storage and industry).

b - Advanced system overview - Troops stationed on planet, Max Population, How many items in current build queue, Unassigned workers, No of planets in system not terraformed. I've mentioned this before, hopefully it will be in the next major update.

c - In the Diplomacy window assign a one colour for minors relationship information if they are affiliated with you and a different colour if they are affilated with another major power.


Is there a post somewhere with detailed instructions on how to use the intel system.

resource routes can be cancelled when they are currently not needed in that turn, i.e. no building/ship/troop construction in target system is using resources from the source planet. So in order to cancel it immediately, you need to cancel construction first.

There is an intel post here somewhere but it's mostly pre-implementation stuff discussed there. Intel is implemented with a race-specific depot system where generated intel points are stored and can be allocated all at once or with a certain percentage each turn to various fields. Special assignments for sabotage are possible when your espionage has located a target for you. So the best use comes from accumulating espionage and sabotage points towards your intended intel enemy and if they reach a high enough number, just start using your depot and actually do something (the accumulating is done under-cover, i.e. no real missions are carried hence no reports; they all come after actually assigning a certain percentage of the depot to either espionage or sabotage resp. both with their given depots).