Any old text editor should work, I think. But a relatively light programming editor like visual studio code will probably be more comfortable, because it will recognize the file as a a Lua dialect, and color code stuff like comments for you.

The difference in the 2 code blocks is subtle if you're ...

I find tuning difficulties one of the hardest things to do as a dev -- after a given patch/rebalance pass, I know what feels "relaxed", "challenging", and "nearly impossible" for *me*, but everyone coming into the game has their own perspective.

A lot of modern games have started sortof "passing ...

It's expected. Tinkers empires became an official part of the main game when the DLC launched. Buying the DLC gets you the ability to play as this new faction, but they're meant to be a part of the game regardless.

Glad forum is back.

I'm honestly not 100% sure I've fixed the forum. I've been messing around with some updates for our servers, which when it's done will hopefully stop stuff from crashing again for the foreseeable future, but the forum and website will likely flicker on and off a few more times ...

But if I try to use rpairs instead, it complains about an "attempt to compare two nil values".

I don't actually have the code up, but, if I recall correctly, my rpairs is similar to the 'spairs' code you linked, but the sorting function works differently. In the code you linked, the sorting ...

How would I go about adding Opil crystals to all island worlds?

I don't have the code in front of me right now, but, off the top of my head...

The easiest option is probably to just write a for loop over the all_planets list that adds the opil special to any planet with the 'Island' type. There ...

The AI's short sighted use of bombs is really bad when two AI go to war though, as it basically ensures that the AI never benefits much from fighting another AI in the long term, since both sides will likely lose a lot of population, which in the long term greatly weakens the AI's late-game power ...

That feels inconsistent with disconnected harmonized aliens colonizing planets, then. Why does colonization result in immediate response that same turn while transporting them from planet to planet gives you a one-turn grace period? Either both should have an immediate response or both should have ...

Once again something along the lines of MoO 2, where moving ships can't be boarded without shuttles or transporters, seems more balanced.

If the game were still in beta, I'd probably change "boarding pods" to "boarding shuttles", and make them easily intercepted by PD, like assault shuttles are ...

Moving Harmonized Lummox units to the new colony (with no Machine Altar yet) also resulted in not seeing the new disconnected artwork:

I've tried multiple ways now to make the disconnected population units show up and am just not seeing them, I'm afraid.

The problem here is that you're playing ...

I'm on the In_Development branch, so I expected to see the new disconnected Teros but instead saw this:

Ok, figured it out. I made a mistake when importing Arioch's art for the unhappy disconnected Teros, so the game couldn't find the correct art asset, and ended up falling back on the generic ...

The planet is still under my control and will never reach the point of rebellion. So it does not appear that the disconnected update is currently working as intended on the In_Development branch.

Ok, I thought I knew where the bug was here, but it looks like I was wrong. Could you upload this ...

No, I'm going to stick with "unintended" or at the very least "contrary to reasonable player expectations given the patch notes."

Yeah, this is almost certainly a bug in the colony base code. Thanks for the report. (You can upload games for reference by going to Options, and selecting "upload ...

I guess it's mostly the "wait, wtf" experiences that stick in my head.

"wait, wtf" moments often make good bug reports, if you can remember to upload a game and write a post about how things went sideways when it happened ;)

It would be nice if ships in Refit weren't ignored entirely for that ...

Its my opinion that there's something about using full destroyer-only fleets that just makes the AI dismiss your fleet strength completely. To them, no large ships equal helpless.

The problem, at a low level, is probably this formula (paraphrased from line 88 of design_evaluation.lua):

design ...