Using the newest patch, some bugs and suggestions. The game plays much better than my last play-through, so great work there!


Bugs:

"DGBHELP.DLL too old" - dialog pops up at startup of sis64. But game loads anyway if you ignore it. Press "ok" though and the game crashes.

* I have a ship that's moving between star systems. The ETA is 1 turn. I redirect the ship to somewhere close-by and the ETA goes up to 2 turns (even though it should be 1 turn). So I redirect the ship back to its original target and... the ETA remains 2 turns! Have to use UNDO to fix it.
* Further to the above, when you've redirected the ship the second time, the icon isn't in the same place as it was before the initial redirection (it's a fair bit closer to the target).

* The AI invaded one of my planets. Two turns later I took it back. but when I did I discovered that my population had a -25 "Conquered Population" - "You invaded our planet" modifier. Shouldn't that be "+10 Liberation"? If they change loyalties over two turns, they're really quite fickle.

* There was a battle in a system with two AI plus me. One AI (my friend (not ally, but had all the other diplomacy things including open borders) - who had a single ship. Our mutual enemy had only their planet. I "Intervened" and then pressed the "autocombat" button - the result - I captured my friend's ship?! And now it's asking what I want to do with it (integrate, science, etc). But they were my friends!

* If you move colonists within the system, the ETA says 1, but it should be 0. You also get rather pointless immediate messages about their arrival.

* I was defending my planet and my ally was there too. My ally lost two ships, and we destroyed the enemy ship. But in the summary afterwards, the enemy ship is listed under "lost" and the ally ships are under "destroyed".

* The interface gets a little laggy late game (turn 340 on a default-settings map). Saving, quitting and re-loading the game improves the issue (but doesn't entirely resolve it), at least temporarily. (RAM use before quitting: 1GB. RAM use on re-loading: 500MB. So it looks like there is some leaking going on.

* The race mouse-over for spice mongers is "Spice_mongers".

* There was a planet where when I scraped an item, it didn't free up the slot. Instead it just disappeared. After I got the (arcologies?) tech that increases size, scraping an item did work and free the slot, but maybe not enough? Didn't check in hindsight.

Suggestions:
* AI turns seem very slow. I'm seeing 10+ seconds for quite a few of them even fairly early on. I'm playing on a Ryzen 1700 16 core CPU and the game is only using 1 core really (occasionally two; about 5% of the time). And this is still mid-game.

* If there's a npc ship near/over one of your stars (it's simply passing over it), it becomes very hard to target ships to move to that star. In some cases, it's impossible!

* Playing with a GeForce1050 and the scrolling in/out of the map isn't very smooth. It feels CPU bound rather than GPU bound.

* I took over an AI planet that had artifacts. Of the 7 slots on the planet, only one was a lab! This seemed to be a recurring thing.

* Automated production doesn't seem to terraform.

* If I've terraformed a planet, can I not see the "terraform planet" options that remain unless I enable them explicitly?

* It seems odd that "dreadnaught" is only an optional requirement for super-dreadnaught

* It would be nice if there was an automated way to get transports built late-game. I've got 100 of them but by the looks of it I need another 50 or so... Even queuing and building 5 per turn on a single planet.... (with the interface lag it's even worse).

But yes, great improvements.

Oh, and this post - http://stars-in-shadow.com/forum/viewto ... read#p9018 - you say the patch release year is 2018, not 2019.

To produce large numbers of transports, add the infinity symbol queue item. It will produce multiple of whatever ship you queue before it.

Moriarty wrote: * There was a planet where when I scraped an item, it didn't free up the slot. Instead it just disappeared. After I got the (arcologies?) tech that increases size, scraping an item did work and free the slot, but maybe not enough? Didn't check in hindsight.

There is more than one tech to increase building slots: the AI might had more

Another option might be due to population capacity: this affects planet building slots as well: if oyu have eliminated an entire population type on the planet during invasion/bombing, then the net capacity of the planet might have degraded and you need to settle futher compatible races on the planet to get it back

The "DGBHELP.DLL too old" bug seems to be sis64.exe only. It does not happen with sis.exe.
(Windows 7 64 bit)
Also, uninstalling and re-installing doesn't fix it.

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When starting sis64.exe it's no-longer possible for me to interact with the main menu - I suspect this is related to the above bug. I'm sure I could previously. Reinstall didn't fix it. Works fine in sis.exe. Mousing over items on the main menu works, but clicking doesn't work.

Moriarty wrote:The "DGBHELP.DLL too old" bug seems to be sis64.exe only. It does not happen with sis.exe.
(Windows 7 64 bit)

My first guess would be that your computer is running out of memory when trying to startup the game. sis.exe has a lower memory footprint than sis64.exe, which could explain why it's not crashing. What kind of machine are you running on? How much memory does it have? Is there a dedicated video card?

I have planets in a line:
A - B - C

* If I move ships A-C, I see an ETA of 4. But moving ships A-B has an ETA of 1, and ships (same design) from C-B has an ETA of 2, for a total ETA between them of 3. What's going on?

* I autocombated a combat in a system where I have two planets. I lost the combat and I guess my fleet retreated. Except they retreated to the same system they're already in (and have an ETA: 1 to boot).

* As above, the next turn I "auto-retreated" and my ships "retreated" to the same system they're already in! It is therefore impossible for me to actually retreat my ships

* Diplomacy. Race A decided they really wanted to be at war with me because they really wanted a planet, so they declared it. A couple of turns later their allies Race B join them to "come to their aid".
Race A then asks for peace after getting the colony. Now I have a -75 reputation hit "you're at war with our allies" (Race B) - but /they/ declared it and I've done nothing! Surely I shouldn't take the rep hit in that case?
For bonus points, a few turns later Race A re-declares war to "come to the aid of their allies" - Race B. A perpertual circle of war with me as the victim. *sigh*

sven wrote:

Moriarty wrote:The "DGBHELP.DLL too old" bug seems to be sis64.exe only. It does not happen with sis.exe.
(Windows 7 64 bit)

My first guess would be that your computer is running out of memory when trying to startup the game. sis.exe has a lower memory footprint than sis64.exe, which could explain why it's not crashing. What kind of machine are you running on? How much memory does it have? Is there a dedicated video card?

Machine has 16GB RAM, right now only about half of it is in use. Graphics card is a GeForce 1050 with 2GB RAM.

Edit: Curious. If I start the game using the GOG "Launch Stars in Shadow" shortcut which points at sis64.exe, it works fine. They have an extra flag: "-noupdate". I guess that's the problem (I've blocked sis from accessing the internet).

* The "trade ship" seems to default to having "armor brigade" in its cargo slot, rather than "cargo pods". That's not a trade ship, that's a troop transport.

* I ended the turn and get a red error box up: I'm guessing it was an AI action that triggered it as I wasn't doing population transport and hadn't for quite a few turns.

* I "Ignored" the above. Next turn I get: Unfortunately, loading the 10-turn autosave, it keeps happening. So that game is a bust.

Some more suggestions/bugs:


* population in transit don't consume any food. This allows you to "cheat" your way around starvation to some degree.

* I worked around the lua error by changing the "else" on line 451 of pop_transports.lua to " elseif(planet.pop)"

* I'm at turn 259. Looking at the "Intelligence Briefing" for the first time. One of the AI's (Ashdar Colonials) has two HUGE vertical cliffs for Scientific Progress. Between the two of them they account for over half of the entire Y axis, and they put the AI on par with me (Orthin - easily first for scientific progress, so there's no-one the tech could have been stolen from, and certainly not those huge leaps). There's no correlation with Science production which has remained fairly constant and low. The AI is generally in third place overall. No idea what's going on and I don't have contact with this AI.

* "Compatible Components" for space stations includes warp lane amplifier. "Deep Space Scanner" also seems superfluous.

* I auto-designed a military transport but it had no transport capabilities. It used Interceptors rather than assault shuttles. I only noticed it after building some.

* Starships don't auto-route via stargates. I have fleet at a planet with a stargate and I target somewhere that's near another stargate. But the fleet insists on trying to go the slow way rather than use stargates.

* The orthin super-dreadnaught doesn't have a busbar. Intentional?

* THe "ETA" displayed for an enemy fleet that's coming to attack a location with a Warp Inhibitor doesn't factor in the warp inhibitor. Well, sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't. Not sure what the trigger is.

* The AI that started with the ancient startgate annexed themselves to me. I got the startgate but... it didn't work. I was moving a fleet from it to a regular stargate system that was far far away. The ships took the 5-turns regular transit option (maximum speed tech). I can't build a new stargate because I have one "already built". Same for going "to" it - I can't go to it via the ancient stargate. I had to scrap it and build a regular one.

Moriarty wrote: * I worked around the lua error by changing the "else" on line 451 of pop_transports.lua to " elseif(planet.pop)"

So, in theory, I think the only way you should be able to get into this case is if
1) A player or AI sends transports to a planet
2) The pop of that planet is wiped out by planetary bombardment
3) Before the transports arrive, the player/AI creates an outpost at the site of the one-time colony.

A sequence like this isn't impossible -- but, I can see why there haven't been many bug reports about it. The right fix, I think, is probably to put a planet.pop check in line 478 of pop_transports.lua. Because the right behavior in this edge case is probably just for the transports to do nothing, and revert to direct player control.

I'd like to be able to test the patch though -- do you still have a save where the bug was manifesting? If so, could you upload it (or email it to me at ashdar.games@gmail.com.?)

sven wrote: I'd like to be able to test the patch though -- do you still have a save where the bug was manifesting? If so, could you upload it (or email it to me at ashdar.games@gmail.com..?)

Apologies, but I didn't keep the save.

* I autocombatted a combat where one of my ships was in refit. I got this error after the autocombat (the ship was destroyed in the combat):
I get the same thing if I manually do the combat and the ship gets destroyed.

This then stops turns from ending as it pops up during end-turn process too (same error and lines).
Even if I manually scrap the ship being refitted before combat, it STILL produces that error!
Unfortunately my LUA isn't good enough to fix this one so I've had to load a game 6 turns old.
I do have a save for this one - will email as too large to attach.

* I have two planets in a system. One is refitting a ship (the above bug). However, during combat, the enemy attacks the other planet (the one that isn't refitting). Surely the being-refitted ship shouldn't be able to attend this other combat as it's in orbit around the first planet being refitted (and it's flagged as "inactive")?

* Why do my population growth rate boosting techs (longevity, cloning) also boost the growth rate of viscids?

* After one of my auto-combats, I got this: There didn't seem to be anything particular special about that combat. I could ignore the error just fine.

* The file: "LATEST_PATCH_NOTES" - only has a line for a single patch item in it.

* "Scientific progress" on the bar keeps going up even after you've researched everything. Shouldn't it plateau? That would give a good indication as to when others have reached the final tech level along with you. Possible algorithm: Number of points expended on completed research projects.

* Balance. I'm playing brutal and it's now endgame 1v1. The intelligence page says that my metal production is about 50% higher than the enemy. I'm pumping 100% of it into ships and have no metal surplus, yet somehow the AI's "military strength" is increasing about 3 times faster than mine does. For instance, the AI has pumped out at least 10 mobile planetoids - I've done 4 over a much longer period.

* Balance - Fleet bases seem very expensive. They're the same price as a superdreadnaught but have less weapons, armour. More shielding and crew but the later is meaningless.

* During very large ship battles auto-combatting, the entire game locks up during the processing. It would be nice if there was a "combat in progress" type thing and the interface didn't lock up.

* Balance - autorepair item doesn't seem very pointful. Because shields are so strong and armour/hull so weak, especially in regards to weapons, ships die before it can be used. Despite having it deployed on most of my fleet, it was never used at all as far as I could tell.


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But yes, nice game and great job.

Moriarty wrote: Unfortunately my LUA isn't good enough to fix this one so I've had to load a game 6 turns old.
I do have a save for this one - will email as too large to attach.

Thanks for emailing the save. A reasonable fix, I think, is to change line 20 of ship_repair.lua to read:
rather than: I'll push a patch with this diff soon to the various 'in_development' branches, but, it sounds like you use GoG Galaxy only reluctantly, so you may prefer to just patch your lua files by hand.

Moriarty wrote: * Balance. I'm playing brutal and it's now endgame 1v1. The intelligence page says that my metal production is about 50% higher than the enemy. I'm pumping 100% of it into ships and have no metal surplus, yet somehow the AI's "military strength" is increasing about 3 times faster than mine does. For instance, the AI has pumped out at least 10 mobile planetoids - I've done 4 over a much longer period.

This is the main problem with giving the AI goodies on higher difficulty: all games do this (strategic or other) and it breaks the games mechanics that rely on the player using its very mechanics (see agent mechanic in TW series on higher difficulty=utterly pointless). My suggestion as always: play on normal and chose the einvironmental variables in a way that it is challenging instead of racking up hte difficulty level.

Moriarty wrote: * Balance - Fleet bases seem very expensive. They're the same price as a superdreadnaught but have less weapons, armour. More shielding and crew but the later is meaningless.

The issue here I think is range: all base and defenses can be sniped, but since the AI is not using this tactic, this is not that clear when the playr is using bases instead: I sometime add shuttles to the base which is a great way of taking the attacker vessels away as starbases naturally have much higher crew.

Otherwise, ranking up range of planetary defenses would make both types of starbases much more effective (even witohuth furhter adjustments) as they not only need to hold the line long enough for the bug guns to do their job: the longer they keep standing the more attacking vessels need to retreat or are destroyed/captured

Moriarty wrote: * Balance - autorepair item doesn't seem very pointful. Because shields are so strong and armour/hull so weak, especially in regards to weapons, ships die before it can be used. Despite having it deployed on most of my fleet, it was never used at all as far as I could tell.

Fully agree: shields need nerf (or at least rechanrge rate of larger ships does) and armor needs buff: especially sicne it can be negated via AP mod