Hi!

Here comes my first impression about Supremacy:

Pros:
- The look and feel is great!
- I like the colony management very much.
- The Empire Info on the left in the galaxy-view is cool, but i don't think my number of research points is that important. (instead maybe number of ships of my empire or a notice about starving population on a planet or or or )

Cons:
- the updater gives no information about progress of checking for updates. Once I was in the middle of starting a game, when I was notified about an update.
- Ship building progress information is confusing: At first your ships build very fast, up to about 98% and then nothing happens, if you lack of officers to man your ship.
- New workforces gained by population growth should be automatically applied to a job (especially food production) (at least I'd prefer working on a farm rather than starving )
- I strongly miss an overview about my colonies. Particularly on the huge map it seems hard to keep track over every colony and I don't want to check each one every turn.

Now my questions about the source code of Supremacy. Some where here I found the following link to some source code which ist nearly up to date: http://supremacy.codeplex.com/SourceCon ... mmits.aspx

- Is there any more up to date source code?
- I downloaded the source and tried to build the game, but only got myself more than 40 error messages. Did I forget something or is the source code (intendently) not complete?

Welcome to the forums saibot. mstrobel is writing the code and I suggest you contact him directly by PM (above.) He can best answer your questions about the code. He also works for a living at a real job writing code so give him time to get back to you. You have good ideas and he will be interested in that as well.

Contacting Mike was the first thing I tried after having played supremacy for the first time. However I'm a can be very impatient so I started to read more through the forums. And finally posted here.
How long do you think I should wait for his answer before maybe bothering him again?

The resources to build ships are taken on a turn basis, instead of all when construction is started. It might be confusing when you ar building several ships at the same time.
(Stations, IIRC, take ~16% on the first turn, and then are spread evenly for the remaining turns)

It might be that he is on a business trip at this point. I know he will want to talk to you but we can not say when he will be online.

Hey saibot, welcome to the forums.

Mike is actually on MSN at the moment, but seeing as he's 8 hours behind me in the UK, that means he's in the middle of work at the moment. I try to avoid talking to him when he's working.

I might be able to answer some of your questions though.

The updater starts working from the exact moment the game loads. It checks every game file you have against those on the server, and only notifies you of an update if there are differences. This process can be quite time consuming, especially if multiple files are in need of an update. The game only told you of the update mid-game because that was the earliest point that it could do so. If this happens again, say no to the update, save your game, then return to the game menu, go into the options and force an update. It won't interupt your current game then. Unfortunately, an update *may* render your existing save files incompatible, so this isn't a real solution. You'll just have to cross your fingers.

Mike is always open to comments on such things, so if you have suggestions let him know about them. I believe .Iceman is right about the system though. By taking resources gradually instead of at once, it means you don't have sudden big drops in your resource stockpile (As this would potentially stop projects dead in their tracks if not enough was available). By taking them gradually, your projects will continue as the resources are available to them, speeding up cosntruction during times of shortage. It also avoids the need to refund resources from cancelled build orders, removing the need to calculate those amounts in the first place.

The game does automatically apply new workforces into food production. If this isn't happening for you, it's either a new bug or a random glitch.

Many people have asked for this, and Mike is working on implementing such a screen. I have no idea how far along in develpment this new screen is though. It could be part of the next update, it could be months away. Please just be patient.

Codeplex is where Mike uploads all game updates and holds the source code. I'm not entirely sure what source code actually is (I'm not the programming type lol), but if it is crashing on you then the cause is likely because of one of two reasons; the most recent update might be buggy, or it is incompatible with your current computer software (I know that Mike often works with software that hasn't actually been released to the masses yet, for instance I know he is already working on some game aspects with the next version of .Net, so once that is released people will need to install it). Mike has always been proud of the fact that he's released the source code, and in fact welcomes people that take the time to look at it, so I seriously doubt he would purposely render it unusable.

Actually, I'm not really sure this is a good thing. It might mean you may start building 10 ships at the same time, and none will actually be built. Big drops in your stockpiles actually convey relevant info to the player. He has reliable info about is construction capability. I can't recall any other game where all the required resources are *not* taken at the construction order. I mean, you can't realy on what you *think* you'll get the next turn (attacks, events, etc), but on what you have currently.



Hmm, no it doesn't. On the contrary, instead of refunding the whole cost, it has to calculate the % of resources already spent, which is time- and resource-consuming.

Thank you for explaining the features so detailed to me. But those comments weren't actually questions, I merely described my first impression of the game.
Anyway let's discuss them!

updater:
I see the problem and my suggestion is: Either display the update process an let the user decide whether he wants to wait or not or load the update in the background (like it is now) and store the files somewhere. Later when the current games comes to an end a dialog could come up and ask to appy the update or the dialog comes up at the next game start. Now the problem would be that you likely play with a game version one update behind, so it would be prudent to notify the player during the game about the new update but let him only apply it when no game is running. Long story short: modify the update dialog to a more userfrendly one.

ship building:
It is cool with me and makes sense to take the resources gradually from your stockpile. My point was the progress information is confusing. On the screen it says something like "1 Turn/ 98%" and I wait 10 turns for my ship. My advice to make the turn number an estimation of the rounds needed under the current circumstances (I know the number would change the instance I decide to build a second ship in another system).


That could be solved by prioritising the building processes. The first started process takes all resources it needs, the others have to get on with what is left.

workforces:
You are right, I am not able to reproduce the problem. Sorry! Even better! The game decides whether to place the new workforces on the farms or in the industry sector. Cool!

Source code:
Okay, than I'll have to wait for Mike explaining me what I need to build his source code. I can code but my experiences with .Net are too poor to do it alone.

I've sent Mike a PM detailing some bugs and suggestions that people have posted on the forums today, saibot. I mentioned your updater, resource problem indicator, and structure prioritization suggestions, and I mentioned the problem with the source code in there as well.

That'd be like spending all the resources with the build order. There's really not much difference. Like I said above, IMO it's actually worse, as you don't really have much control over your stockpiles. If you want to say save some resources to bribe some minor, it'll be more difficult for you to keep tabs on your stockpiles.