Hello to all members and the creators of the game. Congratulations to this unbelievable work! Supremacy is wonderful in all aspects. I can't wait until it's finished. I played BotF since i was i child, and it was always my wish to play a successor. And now it becomes true!
I'm not a native english speaker (german), but i'll try to to my very best. I made a list of problems i have with supremacy although it works fine in general. Maybe you already know some things i listed, so don't worry

1. Processing turn takes long time, especially in higher numbers of rounds - i'm in round 150. I don't know if it's bcause of the complexity of the game or because of my three years old computer

2. Some buildings need only 0 rounds to be build . Wow! And often two or more buildings are build in one round in some systems with a high industrial capacity.

3. I have problems to find crews for my fleet. Building a starship goes fast, but it's takes long time to complete the crew. The ship is finished, but i have to wait until the crew is completed. "My" federation is as big as the whole alpha-quadrant, but i have only 25 starships (not colony-ships or construction-ships but "warships" like constitution- and constellation-class which need a large crew) in round 150, although i build ships without interruption. Of course now it goes faster because of the huge population. But i don't want to wait 150 rounds until i have a fleet able to defend me . Possible enemies won't wait. too. . (i know there is no AI implemented)

4. Sometimes the game has problems to follow my commands immediately. It takes some time to change a menu or sector. I have to play a bit slowly, not with the speed of a normal player. And it happens (not often), that the game crashes because i was clicking to fast . Then it does nothing, no reaction, although it still runs. There's no error-notice like "unhandeld exception" or something like this. I have to exit the game via taskmanager and start new. But the games is saved, so it is not necessary to start at piont zero.

5. There are problems with the outpost-contruction. First it works with normal speed, but in higher levels of progress - 90%- the progress stops . Nothing happens for some rounds, then there is a progress of 1%, then nothing happens again, then another percent, and so on.....until the station is finished after much rounds.
Outpost II and science-stations takes very long time to be constructed if you work with only one construction ship. Even with 7 constructions-ships like i did it need much time . Should it be that way?

At least one question: I can imagine that the combat-system is one of the most difficult parts of the game and it spend much time until it can be integrated in the game (although the screenshots are very impressive WOW!!! Looks like armada). But isn't it be possible to create a system in which the computer fights the battles automatically, until the "real" combat-system is ready to be integrated? With a working AI the game would be playable as a whole, without a working combat-system. So waiting time would be a bit shorter

So that's it. Much critiques, but as i said, in general the game works fine, and i love it!!!

Welcome to the forums Gowron. Klingons are most welcome here. There are others here that can answer your questions better than I. They soon will. I am just a ship engineer for the project but we are all glad for fresh input.

Hey Gowron, welcome to the forums! May I ask, are you the same Gowron from the AFC forums?

Don't worry about your English, it's good! There are a couple of people from Germany on the forums, so you never know, your next door neighbour or someone might be here...

If you ever have trouble finding the word that you need, or have difficulty in understanding what we say though, you might find the Babelfish Translator useful.

Anyways, here's your answers:

1) The game takes a long time to process mainly because of the sheer amount of data that is involved with this game. But you also need to remember it is still only in the alpha stages - it hasn't been optimised to run quickly and smoothly yet. This won't occur until the game is near completion, which will likely be years i'm afraid.

2) Some of the buildings are built instantly because they haven't had any build costs set yet. This is purely because the game is a work in progress and is incomplete. I am personally working on a major content update that will fix mistakes like that, but it won't be ready for a while yet.

3) Again, this problem is because the game is incomplete. Once all the buildings are implemented and working, we can play the game and identify problems such as this. The buildings, ships, and their stats will all be adjusted as necessary then. This process is known as "balancing", and we will need imput from the whole community - including yourself - to enable us to do it.

4) If the game crashes, open your Supremacy folder and look for a file called "Error.txt" or "ServerError.txt". Any error mesages are stored in those folders. The files are only created when a crash happens, and wil be deleted the next time you play the game. If your game crashes and you find these files, please post the error message here for us. As for the slowness of the game, it could be any number of reasons and we would need more info to nail it down. Could you post your computer stats for us? We especially need to know your Processor, RAM, Graphics Card, and Operating System.

5) Construction time is slow purely because of the reasons I outlined in points one and three above - it's incomplete and hasn't been balanced yet. I've never noticed it go as slow as you say though. This might be a bug that hasn't been noticed before, could be a problem with your computer, or something else. I'll have to test the game to double-check that.

6) We might make a system like that, but as you noticed yourself, there's no AI at the moment so it would be ointless (At the moment) to have one. It is purely up to Mike (The Developer) to decide what he does with his game, but i'm sure he will keep this idea in mind.

Thanks for the nice welcome and for answering so detailed. And no, I'm not that gowron . This is the only forum in which i'm a member.

@ 4: Windows XP, 2,66 GHz, 502 MB RAM, Intel 82915/GV/910GL Express Chipset (as you can see: not the fastest computer )
I will send you an error message later, when i play supremacy again. Unfortunately the problem with processing becames worse. The step "Creating Player Map Updates" takes to much time. Last time i stopped supremacy with task-manager because after 20! minutes "Creating Player Map Updates" nothing has happened. That means, supremacy is not playable for me now.
All other steps are working with normal speed.

I wonder a bit because you write, it will take years until the game is nearly completed. I found a post in which Mike Strobel guessed in January 2008 that the game will be playable at christmas 2008, that means it will have an AI and victory conditions, but not that it will be complete. Is this still realistic? I know it is difficult for you to answer this kind of questions, and i understand if you are not able or willing to answer.

When I said "complete", I meant ALL programming, writing, game content, balancing, sound effects, 2D graphics, ship models etc would be complete. The game could be in a playable state a long time before this though, so yes, the christmas 2008 deadline is still realistic, but work will continue on it for a long time after that.

The stats on your computer aren't that bad, although your RAM is rather low. I wouldn't go out and get more RAM just for the sake of the game though, as you don't know whether that would solve it. Freezes during turn processing are relatively common though so your game might actually be suffering from a bug or something. We might be able to find out more if you are able to post your error messages.

I have an equally fast/slow computer also with 512 mb RAM and I did not have any performance of freeze problems. Maybe it's the chipset gfx that does not support an important directx feature or something.

Is gowron's chipset an integrated one or a card? I'm not really a hardware guy so I have no idea, but i've heard that integrated ones are considerably less powerful. If this turns out to be the case then we can start thinking about setting hardware requirements or at least some warnings.

Then again, I can't think of a situation where the turn processing would be affected by your graphical processing power. I don't know about programming either though.

Yes, it's an integrated chipset. And it's less powerfull than a card. And it's three years old! This could be one reason for my problems.

I had problems too with my gfx card drivers. they didn't allow for directx mode but used uber-slow software mode which made the planets rotate very slowly and chubby. Maybe some driver update would help?

The game should run pretty snappy with Small or Tiny galaxy configurations. Also, try turning off high-quality scaling and star animations in the Options window.

Mike

Mike, I just managed to solve my problem where Supremacy would load with a blank screen - I reinstalled DirectX. Dxdiag.exe flagged a couple of errors when I ran it just now, but reinstalling solved the problem.

I haven't heard of anyone else suffering from a problem like this, but if anyone does mention it in the future, we can mention it as a possible fix.