I also posted a similar feedback for supremacy but thought it unfair to feedback one and not the other

WOW! Just fricking WOW!

It has been forever (late 06 early 07) since I have checked on the progress of supremacy and BotE. I am really impressed with the progress.

I am hosting a lan 5 man (well 4 man 1 girl) lan party at my house and in discussing what games to be on the list with my brother BOTF came up. I mentioned we should give these two a try. I was testing it out a bit last night. Did not get much into it before bed time came.

I wanted to come on here with some constructive criticism but to be honest I got so into the gameplay that I was not really paying much attention. I am not sure if bugs were just overlooked or not existant but I found none so far. I did find the tongue in cheek race names to avoid TM infringement hillarious.

For the most part the game feels really pollished and obviously attentive to detail even for an alpha/beta. It feels like a major production game. I especially appreciate that not only are you making a cloned version based on modern tech but that you are improving gameplay and adding features as well.

I am eager to start reporting bugs. Is there a logging or debuging function that would make it easier for you to track and fix bugs?

Once again bravo and keep it up we all appreciate what is being done here.

there are a couple of mostly random bugs that affect screen display, for example after some 200 turns straight play it's probable depending on your machine that your RAM is filled (ironically isn't it what botf also had..? ) and then graphic elements start to disappear when you move your mouse over them. On a handful computers, the game cause heavy screen flickering right at the beginning and is unplayable (strangely enough it only happens on high-level dual and quad cores, i.e. high-end machines) but as said, it's pretty much non-discernible. Nevertheless if anyone experiences the flickering just tell us. So far we weren't able to track down the problem at all.

I'm glad you're that impressed with the game. We really put a lot of effort in it. Currently there are some programming stops due to real-life stuff but it is expected to pick up steam again in the first months next year.

yeah, the names are quite funny. If you noticed, they are all alphabetically in-line with the ST ones (but of course with 'proper' unique description and new name) so it's not that hard to 'read' a race's name right and know what to expect from her.

Well if you got a bug to report, have a look at our bug reports subforum here. Otherwise you can just use this thread to talk about things you like or dislike about the way we handled things. Btw. there's even a manual for everything you can do in the game (don't know if you already noticed the "blockade" command for special blockade ships or the way to set-up AI difficulty levels in the bote.ini file). Bad side though, it's in german . Link is: preliminary manual pdf file or a Wiki-version: http://star-trek-games.com/wiki/index.p ... he_Empires

one thing though, you wrote "TM infringement". well, it's not so much about TM since we don't wanna commercialize the game, but about general copyright issues but I guess I should stop the nitpicking for now .

Hello all,

Yesterday I got another frustrating crash at tactical in BOT Federation... Several clicks and landed here. So I downloaded and tried BOTE...

First of all - great project and my bows to the creators for their remarkable work! I'm impressed with what you created without commercial budget. Great.

But...

At first contact with the game I got straightly knocked off. No, no, not by bug or thing like that, but by the unfriendliness of the interface. Yes, I understand that it is a game under development, and as mentioned before, I praise and appreciate the work. Still, things that I would humbly like to point out seems basic to me and virtually prevent me from playing (in random order).

1. Fonts. Are. Terrible. Or even worse. Of four of available empires only the Romul... oops, Rotharians have interface I can read. Coalition is complete rubbish (too narrow) and the rest is to strange. This is major (MAJOR) issue for me. (For the record, I'm using 1024x768 resolution, is that wrong?)

2. Colours. Hell, I know the functionality is most important, but Coalition and Rotharian interfaces have too many colorful elements. I miss standard Federation interface from BOTF (two or three colors, no very small objects, etc.)

3. Right button. God, how many times did I clicked it to get main navigation from BOTF. I know what I want is on the left part of the screen (using space for more important things like lists of fleets in system), but I got used, and would very much like it back...

4. Setting percent values (like research). Run BOTF, hold left button on percent gauge and move it. Observe how percentages change. Now try doing the same in BOTE. I could not. Setting research to 100% is somewhat tricky. Could be better.

5. Galaxy map. Backgrounds are too bright / objectful (most of them). They are supposed to be backgrounds, but they interfere with whats important in the foreground. I would very like see some dimmed stars in a black / blue space. Thank you.

6. If there are spare graphics / creators, I would be delighted to see rotating planets and animated suns (I mean stars). By the way, the background for the system view (star / planets) is something I would like for point [5].

7. Research. I don't know what am I researching, because I see no way to check what will I get when I get there. Am I missing a screen or something? Help would also be nice on other elements (mainly those differing from BOTF).

These as you can see are mainly interface issues. This is because game seems great and quite stable. I haven't run into any problems so far. If only it didn't require so much eye-starring to see anything there... And, by the way... I will inpatiently wait for the Star Trek mod, as this will give something like 1000% sweetness and playability to the game.

Keep on good work, thank you!

1. Fonts will be replaced by a new set of bitmap fonts. That might seem a step backwards in terms of graphical display since they do not scale that good as the truetype fonts but the new ones we chose are copyright-free and better readable. The current narrow font for example is the Federation font aka Helvetica Ultra Condensed. The 1024x768 resolution is a bit smaller than the native one. BotE doesn't require but recommends using 1280x1024 resolution since all graphics are optimised for this resolution.

2. Well it's what we as total graphic beginners were able to produce with Gimp and Paint.NET. I'm sure the paid botf artists had a tuition in creating nice and streamlined graphics although I must say, I personally like our graphics better. They have their own distinct style (safe for the Khaoron one which is a realignment of BotF klingon interface graphics).

3. I know right button is missed by many players. What might replace it are mouse-gestures that you might know from Firefox or Opera browsers. It's pretty much the same as right click menu, just without the menu popping up. The reason behind this is we already use the right-click for aborting orders and other things and it's quite complicated to program it flawlessly for multi-purpose usage.

4. Again, this is a restriction by our use of old Microsoft Foundation Classes for the UI. It's pretty much outdated now (wasn't back then when we started programming in 2004). Coding this behaviour does not seem to be that easy. Maybe it'll be managed later-on somehow, don't know.

5. You can dim the respective graphics yourself with Irfanview or other free graphic tools. Just open bote/graphics/galaxies/*.jpg and reduce brightness or pull down color gradation curves. After that save the file (perhaps make a backup of the old one first) and it should be better. After you found your optimal setting, you can also upload those files here in the forum and offer them to others having the same problem too. Beware of the lossy file format jpg. When you try out settings, always take the original jpg, avoid saving jpgs ten times in a row cause it will lead to visible artifacts in the image.

6. Rotating planets (suns won't be rotating since they rotate too slowly compared to planets ) will definitely come with next alpha version. Our third programmer TrommlBomml is on it right now. If you find a nice background image with the right pixel size (1800x1200; pretty large..), you can insert it in the right place and have it as background. It's pretty easily moddable. Just when you want to upload it for others to use, please check copyrights before, i.e. it shouldn't be taken from commercial games for example.

7. Right now there is no screen for tech trees or something like that. A pretty crude way is to download both our buildings and ship editors and view the tech requirements for each building or ship there. I know manual, tutorial or instant pop-up help would be nice but for now we only got our german manual also located here: http://star-trek-games.com/wiki/index.p ... he_Empires . If someone is good at both languages, he can give it a try I guess.


Since TrommlBomml found time again recently to code on the rotating planets (important because of the copyrights of our current planet images) things look a bit better now for the next release and us asking for st mod permission with that new version. Thank you too for your feedback .

Thanks a lot for answering!

1, 2. I didn't mean to be that critical... I guess my difficulties comes at least partially from the resolution used.

3. Is there a description how to use those gestures?

4. If you are using MFC, then you can be quite doomed at this indeed... How about creating scales with ranges from -10 to 110 and reasigning illegal values to 0 or 100 respectively?

6. Suns should not rotate indeed, but they could, you know, shine Small flares or something... Still I like current planet icons, because there is quite a lot of them.

7. Outside help like this will do for now, thanks.

3. not yet since it is still to be programmed . Usually mouse gestures work that way that you click right once, then hold the click and move the mouse shortly into any direction releasing the click afterwards. Depending on the angle you moved the program can perform any action. It's quite useful in browsing the web when you click and move left for the "browser-back"-function and move right for forwarding the pages for example.

4. some sort of buffer would indeed be a nice idea. maybe -2 and 102 will suffice though .

6. Flares or even pulsating suns are possible with our new directx-enhanced framework. we could even display some good old sprites if someone wants to create flaring sun sprites for us .

Hello... another small portion of feedback...

8. It looks like I'm having small bug at the galaxy screen. Often when I go there, I have no scrollbars for scrolling the galaxy map. They only appear when I turn mouse whell (which at first move causes to zoom in/out).

9. Could it be possible to implement BOTF-like or similar galaxy scrolling / centering by double-clicking for example? I have mouse with one scrollwheel and can only move map vertically using it. Horizontal movement requires me to use scrollbar which is not really very user-friendly.

10. I would consider adding event info about ship/fleet reaching final waypoint (as optional perhaps). It was always very frustrating to me to send colony ship to a system few turns away and then forget about starting terraforming process, etc. Unless I'm missing a screen, it is no better in BOTE (though one can see fleets status, which is improvement. This however requires me to inspect fleets status every turn.)

I hope my feedback is constructive, not annoying..

the scrollbar issue is known but also unknown . Seems an mfc issue. You can use cursor buttons on your keyboard after you click once into the galaxy map to move around. Cursor buttons are useful for fast system switching for example in buildmenu too.

the last point is actually quite good. one could implement "colony ship in system XY awaits orders" or something for colony (maybe transporters too) ships only. Other ships may be intentionally sitting around so such a message would be annoying. One could think of an additional "sit"-order for those two ship types if you really want to park them somewhere for a longer period of time and not to get annoying awaits orders messages.

no, feedback is always appreciated.

Hmm, what I had in mind was one-time message for ship on going into idle state (this way you would not get every turn messages for fleets sitting on top of outposts, etc.) But your idea of repeating this every turn for colony / transport ships seems even better. Perhaps a combination of both could be possible.

hi

i have played it 2 till 165 turns, it's a good game

i have tryed alpha4refit, and i'm waiting alpha5 in english

there some criticazing, but, please don't be hurted i like this game

building process:

take too much turns, production capacity unused is lost when it could be used to start construction next in the queue.

fleet building:

very expansive or take to much time to build

Morale:

difficult to manage it, nothing to make it grow up or avoid to drop down.
at war when i bomb a star or worst when i take it with troops the morale value drop down so fast that i'm losing the war and i'm forced to make peace
when i build troops the moral drop down, and still drop down after to have builded it and loaded it in ship

Territory:

When i'm at war with an alliance i can't build an outpost on this alliance's territory, neither colonize a neutrale

troops

not very clear because it's not translate in english but take a long time to build enough to take a star

Intel:

i don't see it working

Diplomacy

would be nice to have an option to tell an alliance to stop to brib a star
when a star is bribed several turns i can't do nothing to obstruct it even with the bribe building
would be nice to be able to drop some part of the relations, by example to drop the defense pact without to drop the trading relations


Trade

i have not found how to drop a trade from a star to another one

building process: upgrade cycles have been modified in alpha5, there are no longer type 1-9 for each building but half the types for certain buildings. Transfer production capacity to the next building in queue is something for a modder to code in. Problem is resource requirement checks have to be rewritten according to the need of checking possible multi-builds in one turn. It's a bit complicated with the current architecture. But sure possible.

fleet building: in alpha5 with deritium allocator facility it's easier to build ships on each of your star systems so you can build up a fleet very quickly and do not have to rely on 1 or 2 large shipbuilding systems.

Morale: there are several ways to influence morale in a system. First of all the system and empire-wide moral buildings like the Heyoun Holo-Cinema or other buildings mostly available at tech 3 or 5. Then Festival of Fun or Martial Law are "buildings" that increase morale very quickly when they have fallen below 85 (+9 per turn). Troops when stationed in a system will have morale go to value 100, no matter which value it has. So troops are good when morale has dropped below let's say 90, but they are getting in the way of empire or system-wide morale buildings (+1 morale or more) cause they bring morale back to 100 all the time, so the +1 or +2 per turn buildings have no or less powerful effect then.

Bombing a star system is never a wise idea for Coalition players. All other races are fine with doing so, the Khaorons even like it and have great morale boosts when doing so (try to bombard a local minor right each turn at the beginning of the game and see what happens (morale will go up to 200 very quickly)).

Territory: good idea!

Troops: in alpha5 you can try to play the Cartare Union. They've got special troops at their homeplanet right from the start with which I even managed to take the Khaoron homeworld with just those 2 troops . Luck plays a great part in those invasions. You'll notice that when you try to reload a save game before the battle and see what happens if you retry it often enough.

Intel:

Is working. You need to allocate Intel points to espionage and sabotage first, then use these stored intel points and allocate them again. Once you got it working you'll understand the procedure, it's not that complicated, just try it out .

Diplomacy: Bribing will be made more difficult in alpha5. There are still several bugs, first of all the communication networks building doesn't work, then bribing does not lead to losing bribing money at a failed try so you can virtually retry it all the time until it works (which is the cause of the AI doing it all the time).
Under Info in the diplomacy menu, there's a button to cancel treaties IIRC. Have a look, should be there.

Trade routes can be dropped by repeating what you did to lay them . Then they get purple colored on map and will end in 5 turns.

thanks for your answer

indeed i'm waiting alpha5 english to try it, i have never studied german so, even if the buttons are the same, it's difficult for me to play a german version
so my feedback is on alpha4refit

about morale i have writed on a paper the morale points turn by turn to understand it

so i'm at war, and i'm attacking(bombing)2 stars

before to bomb i had an average of 135, after 8 turns of bombing it is an average of 105
the 9th turn i have taken a star with troops that had bringed violent protest and the average fail down to 85

yes it's with the coalition but i think the paramaters are too strong and mean coalition can't afford a war
of course i will reload a save game without to take the star with troops but it's not fun^^

about intel

yes i did

i have alocate 50% for internal security so 50% for foreign intel
a minimum to spy carefully each friendly alliance and most to spy agressive the alliance beeing at war
for this one i generate 35 spy/turn, all in spying nothing in sabotage
and i see nothing

about bribing

to obstruct the bribing attack why not to reinforce the intel workers of the star?
more there are more it's difficult to reach a brib attack on the star
it's their job after all ^^

diplomacy

i have verified

cancel button exist only for minor race
but not for the empires, the only way i have found it's to declare war, which is ennoying

Coalition can afford a war, but they have to select their targets and do it rather quick (no long bombing circles but a quick and decisive massive one-turn attack). It's their disadvantage. But there's a moral.data file inside /bote/data/ folder where you can set values for morale losses by bombardments so you can adjust it yourself.

it isn't 35 spies/turn but 35 intel points per turn. and 35 isn't really that much. usually I use 500 Intel points/turn to start spying on one(!) enemy empire. If you are not playing Rotharians or Cartare Union you should concentrate on one enemy empire. Only the other two races usually generate enough IP to potentially spy and sabotage everyone at once. You should see results in 1 or 2 turns if allocated intel is enough so the program gives you instant feedback there. If you see nothing, try to save your generated intel points for some turns and then allocate them all at once. That gives you a bigger chance of success.

About diplomacy, I'm talking to SirP to see what we can do here. Problem with easy cancelling a treaty is that your ships might get stucked in now enemy or unfriendly territory (i.e. when cancelling an alliance) and currently there's no way to retrieve those fleets programmed yet.