And while at it, what exactly are those numbers?
Is that the _amount_ of pop the planet generates each turn? Doesn't make much sense, since it's a constant number, and the amount of pop should increase with time (as pop grows).
Is it a % growth rate (comma instead of decimal point)?
It's a bit confusing.


--

The Military Outpost, since it increases troop recruitment by +2 per turn, shouldn't it be One Per System instead of One Per Planet? And maybe called Military Academy instead?




How about making labs have a high industry upkeep? That way it gets increasingly harder to build loads of them. Also, you could have a structure, say Research Center, only buildable when you have X labs (in a _planet_?), that increases research output (% increase?); decreasing output of labs (from 50 to 40?) could help with the fast research thing, and the Research Center would help with system specialization.
Not sure if the output of factories shouldn't be lowered too. Shipyard systems should require lots of factories. The research upkeep of factories (and other structures for that matter) bothers me though. If you want to have a system with no labs, how does that work? These upkeeps in general give a nice touch, but in some situations get weird.



Oops, didn't notice there were fewer planets per system already... I still got the usual 9~12 planets. 4 terrans is a Hehe. Do you have any code generating planet types according to orbit?
I don't think I'd raise outputs. You're still going to add the special power and food structures, right? Those will help, and with 4~5 planets per systems they'll make them different I guess.
If only you had asteroids in systems, you could make them increase industry (shipbuilding only?) output That'd be a strategic system. The bonus could even be given by a structure, contributing to diversity in system development.




I'm probably used to having games last for 300~400 turns, not 1000+. The slow speed of ships and the fast turns contribute to those 1000+ turns of course, I guess it's a matter of perception. Research seems to be more oriented to those 300~400 turns though [labs become useless after the techtree is fully researched], provided you play constantly. Of course, given the nature of the game, it's hard to play constantly. Night time is a problem, and different time zones don't help. But I guess the MP game will be mostly played by a reduced number of people on the same TZ.

Minor WIBN's (Wouldn't It Be Nice) ...

• When the GUI updates, if you are in the middle allocating buildings, the planet scroll-down stays where it was, while the facility scroll-down jumps back up to the top. I figure this is due to the program checking to see if there is anything new to add to the dropdown facility list (due to research). It would be nice if the scroll-down didn't jump back.
• Similarly, if you have the cursor focus on a fleet and the update hits, focus jumps back to the last system you highlighted (though the "highlight box" will remain at the location you were trying to manipulate). It would be nice if the focus and cursor followed the last object you clicked on (thus, if it were a ship that's moving, the focus and "highlight box" follow the object, not locked to a map location.
• If one is in the middle of naming a fleet, if the update hits and oddly enough, the name is one that you have not used before, then the name snaps back to what the fleet was previously named and looses focus. It would be nice to not loose focus, only refreshing the program object itself and not the user's current action (the act of renaming a dynamically updated object).

That's all I can think of at the moment.

A couple more observations:
1) Impulse drive selection in Ship Designer is way up the scale on energy requirements (intended?) level 1 is 1000, level 2 is 2000, level 3 is 3500
2) Bussard collectors level 1 in Ship Designer is 150 energy req'd- likely should be 15. Next level is 22
3) Transfer of cargo- I don't really like a number of ships from different fleets in the same transfer window. It's handy if you can transfer from one ship to another...
4) I had to determine why I couldn't transfer ore to a planet- seems you have to have an ore refinery first! (silo too? unknown)
5) I was able to transfer deuterium to a planet that didn't have a deut plant or a silo. It just disappeared...

Yes, you do have to have both a refinery and a silo. My question is, "What does one refine the ore into?" I thought it was for fuel. Since almost all my non-deuterium producing systems were adjacent to asteroid fields, I was in excellent shape to test this out and I can state for the record that the ore refineries did not produce fuel. (I even checked to see if they were turned on.) So what is ore used for?

Impulse drive + bussard collectors price has been fixed.

To transfer Ore to a system, the system needs a Ore refinery. A ore silo will provide the system with additional storage for the processed ore.
When a system has ore stored up you can left click stuff in the build queue in the system manager window and click "hurry production", it will then use some of the ore to boost construction of the structure/ship you are making.

Ore has nothing to do with fuel, both are stored and handled separately.

Another thing that kept confusing me with Ship Designer was building in cargo modules vs deut tanks, namely for freighter ships. Deut tanks are strictly for vessel fuel consumption, while cargo is used for transport of either deut or ore. Miners or deut collectors are useless without the cargo! Once I figured out that aspect, both worked quite well

I'm still pecking away on the fast server- I'm up to almost level 9 in research, have explored almost 1/2 the map, and have built a Galaxy class ship

One thing I'd really like to see, now that I have so many ships available- a way to select a specific ship from a list. Presently, you have to remember what you have, and where they are, in order to find them. Very time consuming...

Do you mean ship or fleet?

There will definitely be a clickable table/list of fleets in a tab under the empire view (click empire button above bottom menu) that will take you to the selected fleet

Good news. I had thought about mentioning this, but I figured it would eventually be added.



Do you need separate cargo holds in order to store _both_ (harvested) deuterium and ore in the same fleet? I guess you should.






I've been meaning to post about the 1st 2 for a while. Couldn't agree more.

I take it no slow server this week?

Sorry, I got held up with real life / work yesterday, so did not have the time to set up the game and start the server.

I'll definitely start the slow server tonight at 16:00 GMT

Server is up now, Turn time = 10 minutes.. In other words I can watch a movie while that factory in my starting system is being built =)

Hehe, that's true, but then again, it's just the 2 of us playing now.

If I put a One Per System structure in the build queue, I can't see its stats until it is finished - clicking on the gray icon doesn't do anything, and neither clicking on its name in the build queue. In this latter situation, clicking on the first option [x. Shipyard (0/5150)] could show the stats]

Excess production doesn't carry over to the next item in the build queue. Is that intended?

WOW! I'm for slow, but 10 minute turns is like watching tectonic plates move. Wonder how this will change the game dynamic?

My prediction, less ships than the 5 minute turns, more research.
My reasoning, though counter intuitive (one minute turns resulted in research speeding thorough due to the game requiring almost constant attention from the player, if they could spare the time) that tech would speed up, I believe that research will take long enough that anyone AFK will see less of a percentage of their time not researching something to be less than the 5 minute turns resulted in.

I just had one turn (131 to 132)begin where no colonization/terraforming happened... (% didn't go up) Shipbuilding was ok, research can't recall. I was actively looking at colonization, hence noticing this.


About colonization modules, having 2 of them in a ship (vs having 1) adds 20 more pop to the system, +1 structure and +1 troop, and terraforms slightly faster. Not terribly useful advantages, for +350 cost and +10 energy. The extra 20 pop are just 4 turns of pop growth rate (+5 per turn initially). Terraforming sped increases from 17% (6 turns) to 24% (5 turns), which is marginal. It costs less than a Warp Core 2, which by increasing speed compensates for the increased pop.
My colony ships have 2 ColMods, 2 Warp Cores and a Fusion Reactor.

Not so keen on slow turns... if you can't keep online to progress, it doesn't take long to fall behind. I didn't even get to colonize 1 planet this time around- got jumped by kenb before I could. Game over for me :/ Looks like pvp planetary assault works!

Not that I have anything against slower turns- I've been playing a game for 3 1/2 years now where you only get 5 a day, & I log on late with the last one.

Sorry bout that Komodo, I would not chalk it up to slow turns as much as bad starting position. I had two active feds on two sides of me, edge of the map on another side, and you sitting a bit too close for comfort on my last side with poor planets in between. Figured it was fight or die since I was boxed in. Your tactic of building Military Outposts however did slow things up a bit for me.

Yep- I had a feeling that I'd find trouble the next time I'd log on. Not only did I have those being built, but I had a few Raptors on the queue as well. I was feeling pretty desperate LOL

I think I killed the server along with sr71's colony. Woops!

In the meantime, here's what I listen to while conquering ...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bZkp7q19f0

I would imagine what killed the server was either both klogd and I bombarded the same planet, or that sr71's colony went negative in population.

If you don't want to worry about restarting the game, that's fine with me. It appeared I was on my way to another blowout, though this time I had almost as much trouble (expansion-wise) from my own team running in front of me a grabbing all the good planets as I did running into opposing players squatting on systems in my only open path to expansion. Between that and me having to go to war so early, I'm equipped more for war than expansion, and I've already killed two of the opposing team. I figure that's enough to know where the game is headed. Better to fix the bug and start over. Everyone concur?

Starting position are completely random now, but I will definitely try and have an option that spaces them out better, and the ability to place them manually as well by server admin.

Server is back up, game progress is backed up every 5 turns for that server. so not much progress should be lost.
Gonna read logs Gangnam style this week, and see if I can find out what is causing the server to become unresponsive.

Guess it's back to the drawing board, lots of bugs to fix and stuff to implement.
Already made lots of tasks based on the feedback already, but will be going over this entire thread again and make sure I didn't miss anything, so even if I haven't responded to every single comment I do read all of them and consider them when deciding what features to implement next and which bugs to fix first.

Big thanks to everyone who participated, and I hope to have an improved version of the game out in a couple of months. And I'll definitely make it a priority to let you guys set up your own servers and try and implement a turn button and stuff like that, so a bunch of people can play the game more like BOTF and not loose any turns and stuff like that.

About random start positions. There are a couple options to think about there.
First off, maybe you want to establish political regions on the map, with the objective of expansion over a period of time. Any gains or losses can be made individually, or as a team effort.
Secondly, it may be a good move to implement in-built protection for beginning players, say up to completed research level 4, for example. I can see that may be exploited though, so it also me be a good idea to program research so you can't get more than 2 levels ahead in a particular field (for example), unless the whole level is complete.

Yes, slow turns are a pain when you're playing, but they're a life saver when you're not (night time mostly).
When the server started, I think I was the only one playing for quite some time. I grabbed some 15 systems in the 1st 100~150 turns. If turns would have been faster, I guess I could have gained quite an advantage.

Systems seem much better now, being smaller.
I'd propose a few changes to the stats of planet types, because they don't seem to make much sense (Barren has higher GR than Desert? etc). Attached a pic with a suggestion.
BTW, Arctics having max pop 450, it's easy to see if there's an odd number of them in an unexplored system

Regarding the minimum growth of 5 pop per planet, in Volcanic and Arctic planets it seems they always grow at 5/turn, thereby negating their GRs (Volcanic 900*0.4%=3.6mill < 5mill ; Arctic 450*0.2%=0.9mill < 5mill). Some of the others grow at 5/turn for a large part of their development.

About research, being too fast means there's actually some ship components you never get to use.
BTW, in the shipdesign window would it be possible to move the Save button up, to where the other buttons are? Or have some key bindings. Using Tab doesn't seem to work for the lower buttons, only for the upper right ones. So that I can actually design (and build) some ships in the netbook

Damn if I did it again. Server down. I've wiped out all of Iceman's forces and shipyards and was mopping up the last several star systems (all under bombardment followed by a quick invasion). Have around 50 systems to Iceman's 7 or 8 (I was invading when the server crashed). I would call it unless everyone is a glutton for punishment.

I noticed that in both sr71's and Ice's systems they had boku factories to crank out numbers of ships. Meanwhile the planetary display addresses this as a surplus. There should probably be some sort of repercussions for starving your population in favor of constructing factories or labs.

Kind of ironic that the section of the galaxy I started in was as fertile as the Asian steppes. Forced me to behave much like another Khan from history.

You broke the server again?? :o This is why you guys can never have anything nice! :p
What was the last thing you remember doing before it froze up?

I am planning to have "Political regions" on the map, so when you create a server/game you choose if the placement is random or you set up zones where each faction will spawn randomly, or specifically place down spawn locations.

Yeah, I'll definitely change that minimum growth rate, it's left over from a time where the populations were calculated differently. And I'll tune the maxpop/gr of the planets as well. And make sure population actually does something useful.

I was bombarding 7 of Iceman's systems, one I had just started bombing that turn. The eighth system I stopped bombarding and was invading the turn of the crash.

I wasn't really playing anymore, I thought it was just the 2 of us playing, and got really busy this weekend. Last night I saw you were attacking me, but sonce I couldn't design ships... everytime I tried connecting to the server at work I got an error, so I just kind of gave up.



The surplus is what is actually available for building stuff, after all the industry upkeeps are deducted. It's not a very friendly term though.
The food upkeep for factories was removed for this latest build; I have mixed feelings about these upkeeps.
I wasn't starving my pop, you just don't need that many farms - unless you build Outposts and Bunkers. I was building farms as I needed them. I didn't login for some time, not sure if there was starvation because of that. It's not easy calculating required food, because there's no info on how much food pop requires. Even the rest of the upkeeps, it's kind of a pain having to do all the calcs. With fast turns, this gets worse. You can, of course, play more or less loosely, using the production bars as reference.

I think it happened with shipbuilding too, one other time. I think research too, not sure if it was related to the fact that research seems to take one more turn sometimes.




Elaborating a bit more.

Generally it'll only take 1 more turn or so to build a 2 colMod ship instead of a 1 colMod one, for 20 more pop, 1 structure and troops. It's almost a no-brainer (to the point that the default colony ship should do this).

The colony module should cost at least twice what it costs now, so that there's actually a trade-off. And the ship's speed should be more affected by additional colMods, IIRC a 1 colMod ship moves at 0.5 and a 2 colMod ship at 0.4; should probably be something like 0.6 (increased - not sure if scouts should also be slightly increased to compensate) vs 0.4, or if you could go with decimals 0.50 (no change) vs 0.35 [0.3 seems way too low, 0.35 moves 1 sector in 3 turns].

From a realism perspective (which even though not being fulcral to a game it's still something one should strive for), nothing really makes sense in 1 colMod vs 2, except for pop (which is effectively double). Only 1 more structure? 1 module takes 7 and 2 take only 8?! And only 1 more troops? Both modules cost the same... and it's not explained anywhere (stats are not displayed).
Also, 1 colMod costs 350 production and a single Farm costs 650?! And a Factory 1450. The module carries 7 of these structures... plus troops. One Factory takes something like 23 turns to build another Factory, but one of these modules is built in something like a turn or two! Notice that both the ship and the structures are built by the same Factories, so the scale is totally off. Comparing its cost to other ship components is no better too; like the Warp Core, considering it contains a Power Plant or two.

On a more gameplay oriented note, related to the realism observations, why not make the colMod more expensive, and carry only basic structures (in number and type), like 1 (or 2) Factory, 1 Farm and 1 Power. Everything else should be built in situ.
Also, the population it carries should be a fixed number (not 20 per planet) and should be discounted from the shipyard system when the ship is built. That would have an impact on the system, especially when it has been colonized recently. As it is, you can just crank out colony ships like there's no tomorrow, with little impact on your economy; colony ships being cheap (cost and pop) also has the effect that you can just colonize everything in sight, instead of choosing which system to colonize. This reduces the strategic game.
Slower colonization means slower research too, and that would help with using more stuff in the techtree.

Colonization speed could be slightly adjusted. For level 1 colMods:
1 colMod = 17%/turn , 6 turns
2 colMod = 24%/turn , 5 turns
The difference could be higher, so that with a higher cost comes much better efficiency.
1 colMod = 15%/turn , 7 turns
2 colMod = 20%/turn , 5 turns
3 colMod = 25%/turn , 4 turns

A few questions:

Would it be possible to show the shipyard icon somewhere in the system box too?

Would it be possible to, instead of having the Deuterium Plant as an initial structure in new colonies, having a default "silo" with 100 capacity (from the colony ship's fuel tanks)? Some systems do not have GGs, and frankly it's not a basic structure. This default silo would be enough to store the colony ship's remaining fuel, which might be handy, and it would make sense and it would be one way to distinguish some systems in regards to system development - in some you need to build this structure (instead of something else), in others you don't.

When the remaining races are implemented, how will you handle homeworld type for each of the races? Will they all prefer terran? Given how planet types are set up, having different preferences doesn't seem viable (growth rate, max pop, slots).

WOW! You must have had a LOT of ships queued up. Took me forever to keep gathering forces to whack-a-stack while protecting the systems close by from counter-attack. Some of those systems were cranking out a ship every 4 turns!