I ran across BotE a couple of days ago by accident, downloaded the Alpha 6 version and have spent most of my free time since playing it and reading these forums. This is a fascinating project. BotF holds a nostalgic place in my heart as the last great game published by Microprose before the company's unfortunate demise. I am also a bit of a trekkie so the Star Trek flavor was an added bonus. I have not progresseed all that far in the game yet so there are some parts I have not yet experienced. But I wanted to give the developers the benefit of my first impresssions while they are still fresh in my mind.

First off, as a non-German speaker I found the game somewhat bewildering. Although I downloaded the English version the pdf manual included is in German. Some things I figured out by a tedius process of cutting and pasting the German manual paragraph by paragraph to an online translator program. The lack of in game tech trees explaining what things are available at what tech levels adds to the problem, hopefully this will be added as the project progresses. All in all, if I had not already been familiar with BotF I probably would have found the game so difficult to figure out I would have given up on it.

If I had one complaint about BotF, it was that colonies required excessive micromanagement. This is mostly a perception based on comparing it with Master of Orion II. In MOO2 each colony only builds one of each building, and there is no requirement to produce or allocate energy. Labor distribution is also simpler, each colonist only has 3 possible functions, food, industry or research. BotF's more detailed colony management seemed tedius by comparison. BotE, alas, increases the micromanagement aspect considerably. Now I have six additional resources to worry about in addition to food, labor, and energy.

It feels like the developers tried to compensate for this by giving the player several different ways to move the new resources between planets. Though I haven't experimented with all of them yet, there seem to be 5 different methods: resource routes, transport ships, buying from market, interstellar storage, and distribution center structures. Unfortunately, the considerable array of options seems to make the decision making more complex rather than simpler, as you try to figure out which option is best every time a planet has a shortage of something.

The new resources do make for some interesting strategic decisions. For instance, it seems to be a viable strategy to have some systems specialize in producing one or two specific resources and exporting them to the rest of your empire. But the complexity of the decision making seems to make the game tedious, I spend more of my play time figuring out how to get the right resources to each colony than anything else. I would strongly recommend working on simplifying the resources, maybe dropping a couple, and improving and automating the interface to make colony development easier.

The decision to remove all references to Star Trek and the BotF game seems perfectly reasonable, given the risk of possible copyright infringement litigation. I actually worry that you haven't gone far enough. The BotE interface has a very strong cosmetic resmblance to the BotF interface. The player races are quite recoginizably similar in outlook and special abilities to their Star Trek counterparts. I found the audio introduction to the Heyoun particularly striking; the voice actor seems to speak with exactly the same accent as was used in the BotF Ferengi introduction.

In BotF the star names were mostly the names of real world stars, except for racial home systems. In BotE, the star names have been changed to random sounding names that don't seem to have any real world counterpart. I think this was a bad idea. I find the new names lacking in flavor and hard to remember. I don't see how using real world star names could cause copyright issues, the BotF copyright holders can hardly claim a copyright on Alpha Centauri or Sirius and so on. I can see you needed to change the racial names but I would have preferred to see the real world star names retained.

I was impressed the 2D artwork in the game. The race pictures in particular seem well done.

I want to emphasize that I am very impressed with this project. Hopefully my comments will be taken as the suggestions for improvements I intended, rather than pointless negative ranting. I will certainly continue to play the game and may post additional comments as I get more familiar with it.

for beginners, even for botf veterans, resource management needs some time to get acquainted to and make full use of. There's also an auto-build governor already in-game (how to activate is explained somewhere here on the forums) which will be extended in options and manageability so things get a bit easier there.

we already took care of the ferengi-kind of sound. There are newer files available which come with next version of bote.

about star systems, well you're right of course. They are all listed in starnames.data file (I believe it's the right name, need to look up for myself). You could change them and reupload them here on the forums if you want. Maybe we've shot a bit over the target there .

Thanks for your interest in BotE and your proceeding playing I’m sure you’ll get more familiar with it.

I also found it bewildering on German so I started in November 2010 to do a ‘official’ German Wiki for BotE. Few days ago I posted if anybody would do the same in English. I think this would solve the problem to get into BotE as a newbie. English manual of course would be also necessary. The made translation were done by friendly staff here but understandably they are focused on Supremacy.

micromanagement:
Do not select systems for specialize one or two specific resources and exporting them to the rest of your empire – do avaible resources on every system, and only if there’s a lack, take one of the options.

In the course of time naturally there will be system with more resources in storage and producing – they can give the resources to another system by using one of the options.

And think about:

At first transport ship are slow and with small storage – resource routes are better (for deritium only transport ship is avaible)

distribution center (from the point each is availble) are the best way to do only small resource management

trading is an option for buying resources for quick need or for getting, if you don’t have a produktion yet (cristall eg.). Trading is also good for selling and getting credits.


I personally think the differents to Star Trek are enough and the produzers also seem to think so. We don’t use any original copyrighted Star Trek stuff.

just a differing opinion

First off the bat, I had no problem with the game. I knew what I was doing and failed most horribly and then got better (albeit not much).

Anyone familier with 4X games will get this game; for newcomers to the genre, well . . . (with a little bit info from an experienced player it gets easier)

I was so proud of myself doing well on playing normal (and the ego hit the wall when I found out I was playing easy)

those damn Germans made the AI really hard and the game really fun (without combat too!)

and to answer the post about excessive micromanagement; yes there is at first, but after tech5, there's hardly any

this topic was probably dead already (but b/c of my drunkiness) I had to say something

so you ("damn Germans") keep up the good work

complexity and difficullty adds to game

thanks for the nice words - I'm just since Nov 2010 member of the team, but playing since 2007. Yes, it's a well done follower of BotF even thought ST was eliminated because of copyright reasons. (it's still a fan hobby project just remember! - and the mostly honor goes to SirP)

Well it might be a little old-fashioned, but this turnbased game also has advantages in my opinion:
- no time pressure
- leaving computer is possible all the time (and return soon because of the BotE-desire)
- and so on

Are there any plans to implement countdown timers in this game?

They are useful for multiplayer games, to enforce a uniformly "fast" pace. Otherwise there are often a few slow players who constantly make everybody else wait. It also helps keep the focus of the game on efficient priorities and strategy, instead of sucking people into micromanaging.

I think a chess-clock style would work very well, especially if the initial and per-turn increments on time could be user defined at game start. Yes, there's a little bit of pressure and you can run out of time before you've "finished" your turn, but it's fair because it applies equally to everyone.

there were wishes for a countdown timer because of the reasons you said but plans? Plans are most realized by our chief/chief programmer SirPustekuchen - he will do them if it has priority for him and he finds time to do it.
I'm doing a ToDo-list at http://birth-of-the-empires.de/wiki/ind ... down_timer to collect the miscellaneous topics (your request was added). (The ToDo-list is also a catalog about topics with no other topic in the rest of the wiki)

Thanks for the "to do list" link. I know I'm a noob here, I'm trying not to repeat things which have already been discussed many times.

no problem - and on the other hand: without questions and ideas and discussions this board would die...so go on

reg, we'd need to update the links featuring the old wiki site. just click at the link you gave above and you get to a 404 error page..

I've updated it - thanks for your note