Report - Current Bugs and Issues

[sven]

The technology "Hyperspace Metrics", increases my traveling speed on the galaxy map.
The tech fluff says a speed of 1.1 parsec/turn. My advisor says it is now 50% faster than before.
How fast am I actually going ? =)

Right now, your base drive speed is 0.75 parsec/turn, and your speed after discovering hyperspace metrics is 1.125 parsecs/turn. So, both pieces of fluff are correct (though the 1.1 includes some rounding error).

Originally, your base speed was 1 parsec/turn, increasing to 1.5 with the first tech bump. But, after a few months of playtesting, I decide that was a bit fast, and so applied a global 75% nerf to ship speeds. I should probably adjust all the various in-game docs so the unit we're calling a "parsec" is 75% smaller than it was originally -- that would make the tech-info around the speed increase effects less confusing.

[sven]

In this case, that your human colonists are showing up as a transparent "in Orbit" population is probably a design mistake. To be consistent with the rest of our UIs, the humans should not appear in this case.

Aww, and I just got the idea how I could exploit ahem "boost" my pop growth by mass producing colony ships

Well, actually, the settler-bomb strategy (versions of which some of you may remember fondly from Alpha Cent) should more or less work. You just need to go to the colony ship info panes, and hit the "disembark" button by hand (after which you'll probably want to scrap your empty colony ship).

But, in almost all cases, I think the game is balanced such that just switching to "city planning" is both easier and also more effective. If you discover a situation where building colony ships as a means of replicating your population does appear to be an attractive strategy -- please let me know about it. It's a sign the balance is off

[sven]

This is an old awkwardness in the core mechanics. Technically, colony ships are just population transports with the ability to found new colonies. In some ways, that makes a lot of sense (there are in fact colonists on your colony ships, and if you really want to, you can disembark them to an inhabited world).

Ah, that explains why I also could invade an undefended colony with civilians
(or at least try, I doubt my settlers are much help against tanks and militia )

Yes. This is one of those cases where I think making the colony-ship inhabitants auto-join the fight does make sense -- in the extreme case where you have a small fleet + a colony ship, you should have the option of making a desperate bid to conquer a lightly held planet by sending out your would-be colonists as infantry. However, this does mean that if your colony ship is just tagging along behind a heavy invasion fleet, it's possible to accidentally lose your colonists in a tightly contested ground battle. (The details of the "deck combat rules" make this unlikely, but, not impossible.)

And if this happens, it will probably be confusing -- maybe I should insert a special rule to the effect that colony ships are implicitly destroyed if the population they commit to a ground battle is destroyed? That's not totally unreasonable -- I mean, if used as "landing craft" Colony ships don't really seem that likely to survive, particularly if all their colonists have been killed during an assault on a defended planet

[bjg]

This time it wasn't just an error after "Continue", but an error in green squares instead of letters. It's good I remember where "upload" and "ignore" are.

[sven]

This time it wasn't just an error after "Continue", but an error in green squares instead of letters. It's good I remember where "upload" and "ignore" are.

Can you tell me a bit more about this bug? Does it go away when you use "Load" instead of "Continue". Does it occur consistently in the current build, on both 32 and 64 bit?

[bjg]

It's not persistent. I just did "continue", and error didn't appear. Used "load" before with no error.
I did manage to upload that error though, just can't tell the number (because of the funny font).

[SirDamnALot]

But, in almost all cases, I think the game is balanced such that just switching to "city planning" is both easier and also more effective. If you discover a situation where building colony ships as a means of replicating your population does appear to be an attractive strategy -- please let me know about it. It's a sign the balance is off

I tried the "colony bomb", a whole pop for taking a few turns to produce a colony ship seems worthwile,
if you don't have anything better to produce.
But: you always have something better to produce: trade ships or war ships.
The AI has the tendency to build large fleets, even if it is just two dozens of scrappy destroyers.
If you don't have a fleet to match, they will alpha strike your planetarey defenses with tons of missiles.
The Gremak marauders seem to have different rules, they only have one or two systems, but plonk out high tech battlecruisers like there is no tomorrow

To get back from the tangent: disembarking the colonists worked fine, embarking them from a multispecies planet, takes the first pop that is shown in the colony screen. In my case the scanvengers that lived there first. But I couldn't start a new colony with rat people

All in all, if the colony bomb is a dubious feature anyway, I would disable the function for manual (dis)embarking.

[sven]

It's not persistent. I just did "continue", and error didn't appear. Used "load" before with no error.
I did manage to upload that error though, just can't tell the number (because of the funny font).

Ok, found the game upload. Looks like it was game 990. And I think I know, more or less, what went wrong here. It should be fixed in the hotfix I pushed to 'stable', r15185.

[bjg]

The error itself didn't bother me much, rather the fact that it was unreadable (as well as the related interface).

[SirDamnALot]

Right now, your base drive speed is 0.75 parsec/turn, and your speed after discovering hyperspace metrics is 1.125 parsecs/turn. So, both pieces of fluff are correct (though the 1.1 includes some rounding error).

Originally, your base speed was 1 parsec/turn, increasing to 1.5 with the first tech bump. But, after a few months of playtesting, I decide that was a bit fast, and so applied a global 75% nerf to ship speeds. I should probably adjust all the various in-game docs so the unit we're calling a "parsec" is 75% smaller than it was originally -- that would make the tech-info around the speed increase effects less confusing.

Ah yes, I saw your "Kludge" variable in the techtree lua file
(I had a look at the file because I was playing with the thought of writing a tool that parses the techtree and makes an actual tree out of it)

R15185 Dev
In tactical combat, moving and firing happens on right-click. Rotating a ship with the rotate command happens on left or right click.
A cruiser ate a volley of missiles because the "let's-not-do-that-left-click" still performed the manouver. Shields be praised, she survived

Edit: Is it meant that orbital installations can be boarded without the docking collar? I had a Phidi destroyer infestation again and they were quite eager to board my space station.

[bjg]

Is it meant that orbital installations can be boarded without the docking collar?

You can board anything that does not move (damaged ship, star base or station). Space stations have a lot of crew though, not easy to capture.

[SirDamnALot]

Is it meant that orbital installations can be boarded without the docking collar?

You can board anything that does not move (damaged ship, star base or station). Space stations have a lot of crew though, not easy to capture.

Aha, so I could board a ship without docking collar if I immobilized it with limpet/emp missiles? Now I could see a use for it
And yes, even the puny space station had plenty of people to spare after nearly a dozen destroyers tried their luck

[bjg]

SiS_embark_number.PNG (22.13 KiB) Viewed 15906 times

game_991 - there are 2 empty slots, but it shows 6 available, which is the total number of cargo slots on a DS. Same thing happens with Phidi's Trader - showing 2 instead of 1.

[sven]

game_991 - there are 2 empty slots, but it shows 6 available, which is the total number of cargo slots on a DS. Same thing happens with Phidi's Trader - showing 2 instead of 1.

This is more a questionable design choice than a bug, per say. Right now, we're connecting the colored spaceship glyph to several somewhat different semantics. It appears as an on-hover overlay when you have the option of moving ships to the trade pool, and when you have the option of transporting colonists via the trade pool. It also appears as an indication of your transport capacity, which, depending on context, may indicate a number of ships, or a number of usable population transport slots.

Arguably, we should be using a somewhat different glyph when we're talking about "available population transport capacity" rather than "available population transport ships", as in the late game, those can be rather different numbers. However, there's also something to be said for the iconography as it is, as it does a pretty good job of advertising the connection between transports, the trade pool, and the population transport mechanics.

Maybe in contexts where we really are talking about population transport capacity, rather than population transport ships, we should change the icon slightly -- say, a little colored spaceship with a small up arrow next to it?

[bjg]

In this case it's neither of what you've said. There is one available ship with two available cargo slots, but the game says 6, which is the total number of cargo slots on the available ship. Seems like a (minor) algorithm error, affecting only multiple cargo ships.
Not a very big deal, but I relay on that number to see how many more brigades do I need to build.