Beta 4B available

from Stardock Forums
Beta 4B is now available for download via the Drengin Network Component Manager.

4B focuses on these things:

1) Stability.
2) Performance
3) Polish.

In stability, we have, we think, fixed most of the reported crash and hang problems that were reported. The details screen crash though is still there.

In terms of performance, it's even more threaded now. Late in the game where there would be 9 second waits between turns, that time has been dropped to less than 1 second by making the parts that were taking several seconds calculate during the player turn (you'll still wait 9 seconds if you wail on the turn button of course but late in the game we assume you're moving ships and such).

As a result, galaxy sizes have been increased again to now have NEARLY 600 sectors in the gigantic sized galaxy (nearly twice as big as the already substantially increased gigantic size in 4A).

In terms of polish, we have begun translating the game from illiterate engineer to English. Thanks for all the reports. Hopefully you'll find fewer typos.

We have also continued to work on the diplomacy screen. We hope to have "Make Peace With..." in beta 4C.

There are several new United Planets issues and the AI is significantly more intelligent.

A lot of work has gone into tweaking game play to make the game more fun. In fact, there were TWO updates tonight (a final tweak to gameplay was done).

There will be ONE more public beta (4C) which we expect out one week from today. Then it's gamma and at that point the beta will be closed to the general public.

What we want to know:
1) Is it crashing on you at all? I.e. is it stable? If not, please report the crash to us by providing your OS, your hardware info (CPU/mem), the debug.err file and the SmartException log (SE can be found at www.stardock.com/temp/smartexception_galciv.exe).

2) Is it performing well for you? Does the game seem responsive. Obviously if you're playing on a gigantic galaxy on a p3-600mhz system with 128MB it's not going to be very fast. But we do want to make sure that the game is responsive.

3) How about polish? Are there any items in the game that you find particularly glaring? We're not talking features that you would like but rather game play flaws or buglets that really detract from the overall fun of the game?

Let us know. Thanks! Have fun!
1,478 views 55 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top
So far looks pretty good. Love the gigantic galaxy! :CONGRAT:

I do notice that the autosave (Dec turn) takes a lot longer than it used to. I was wondering if it is supposed to be like this or if anyone else noticed this change.

Scott
Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top
Update to last post-

The December Auto-save turn takes about 8 seconds for me.

Scott
Start11 - Customize the Start Menu and Taskbar in Windows 10/11.
Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top
"SE can be found at ..."

Brad,

Is this a new improved version?
Reply #4 from Stardock Forums Top
Had half a game, seems good. One thing you may want to look at is that with the minor races. When trading with them if you ask for one of their planets they won't give it to you for anything. Ask for 2 or more planets and they will give you all there tech the planets for one piece of your tech. They will even trade themselves out of existence.

I have seen this in previos builds and it is still there in 4b. The caracnoids seem to be immune, but the offshhot civs like the dregen peace group and the fundimentalists ( I was evil and they split from me) just gave me the lot.
Reply #5 from Stardock Forums Top
decisions, decisions, shall i play 4b today or play with my window blinds (ok i'm totally hooked on all the stardock goodies) I'll put window blinds away for now, and play the game LOL LOL LOL

By the way i had the game on my laptop and the guys at work were climbing all over me trying to play it!
Reply #6 from Stardock Forums Top
Bigger the galaxy, longer to save.
Reply #7 from Stardock Forums Top
On the huge system it seems to be working smoothly..........

I absolutely love the layout of the stars on the new galaxy.....will make for frenzied games........

I noticed far less anomalies.......but not too few.......It should vary from game to game.

I noticed that both the minor races and major races are a somewhat more stingy in their dealing.......

But most importantly, I tried the culture rush, but to no avail. I have a clear advantage, but I'm going to have to build starbases to get the wins.........Good work!

It has far better balance and polish, the performance is great, and it is a much harder game than the previous build.
Reply #8 from Stardock Forums Top
I'll start a gigantic galaxy tomorrow. I played a large one tonight and not done yet. I thought I was ruined but the Drengin Empire had a civil war and broke up into mini civs.
Reply #9 from Stardock Forums Top
Wow! On my relatively slow machine (P3-550) I'm sailing along on gigantic and I didn't even notice that Norton started a disk scan in the background, which previously has brought the game to a halt.

Two playability issues: maybe post 1.0, but the biggest annoyance for me is being shown something happening and then being whipped on to the next thing without being able to respond. Some of these are bugs, like defecting planets popping up when you are about to choose the next technology (still in this latest build), some are just annoying, such as seeing a ship move, new planets or resources revealed and getting yanked away, wondering if you are going to forget to deal with whatever you saw happening in the crush of ongoing events.

The second playability issue unfortunately involves a new feature, though it has been asked for quite a bit, the optional always visible minimap. In anything from a large to gigantic galaxy, it is impossible to remember what planet is where and making decisions about what to build (or not build) next on a particular planet becomes nearly impossible. In the ship and planet lists, being able to highlight an item and see its position in the galaxy would insanely helpful. Anyway, if this is only going to happen post 1.0, please let us know.

A similar but more minor issue involves being asked to make decisions about money (usually events) and not being able to see where your treasury stands. Sometimes if it is climbing, you're not sure if the penalty you might want to pay in bc is going to put you below the negative 500 mark, for instance.

One little bug I noticed--mining modules on starbases still do not report correctly when you double-click the starbase. With "mining barracks", "mining headquarters" and "resource refinery", double-clicking showed "ultra-mining" instead of refinery.

This goes a few builds back, but I also really enjoy the range of incidents that can occur, and especially their rareness. It is neat to know that there a bunch of events that I haven't even experienced and very neat to come across a new one, even if they occasionally make a bad situation much worse--that's the way it goes. Anyway, I've had events pull my ass out of the fire too--as long at it goes both ways I'm happy.

You guys are kicking ass so far. Keep it up!

-Robert
Reply #10 from Stardock Forums Top
Performance on my P3-650 was drastically improved! Bravo!
The only bug I ran across is in the notification window the military production doesn't show up immediately, only when you click an item in it, or it will show up the next turn. Otherwise, I'm having a blast! :)
Reply #12 from Stardock Forums Top
Comments regarding Beta 4b

A. General comments-

Superb! magnificent! bravo! And a significant improvement on Beta4a.

I LOVE the imaginative and dramatic scripted random ‘events’. These in many ways are a key feature. I particularly enjoyed encountering the Galactic Assembly vole on War Tax – superb touch! Can I be greedy? – more of the same of this class of creativity please!

B. Performance-

Excellent. I commend all you guy’s and Gall's on their technical skills in largely pioneering multithreading in video games.
Stability – never really been a problem to me. (XP, Athlon 900, Via Chipset Mobo).

December turn and save-game time on new ‘mega’ galaxy size – more than acceptable.

Fun factor – increased and in the right direction. Reduced anomalies – very happy with this. Planet seeding, fine, but would really like draatic aesthetic swirls, but accept you are opting for strategic placing which is more important.

C. Game play comments –

When the ‘ethical challenges' come up which cost cash, population, resource, good-evil etc, there is no info info-box on screen reminding you of your current levels of these resources – that’s a bit of a pain.

On the stats screen it would be useful and interesting to see the income/research/resource broken down between planets and space stations rather than a general total.

I would like to see a total income value on the trade screen at the bottom of the list of individual trade route incomes. Minor point, but nice.

Voting – I hope there is more to come on this as it is a very intruiging aspect. As you watch the opposition parties gaining strength, you feel a bit helpless.
What would be fantastic for me would be an ability to counteract the growth of opposing parties. Perhaps you can? for example, if I am a Technologist opposed by the major opposition of Federalists is there anything I can do (except generally keep people happy) to specifically target the growth in support for the major opposition?

What would be fantastic (for me) would be the ability to ally with one or more of the ‘minor’ opposition parties (typical 20th century continental European politics) in order to out-vote a major opponent? with penalties and benefits as appropriate.

Are election frequencies increased? If so see above point as if more part of the game now we need more ‘responses and interaction’.

I would love to see a simple representation (number or symbol) indicating that there are ships off-planet when reviewing planets and production from the planet list. An indication of the type and number of ships would be even better.

Freighters now don’t get a shield icon off-planet which doesn’t help in locating them. When browsing via the Galactic screen (which I often do).

Now that saves are (understandably) lengthy, a ‘save in progress’ message would help as I really did think it had hung first time I saved in beta4b.

Please apply a positional cursor in the saved game naming routine. At present it is impossible to amend a name, only to create another. I assume there will be an ability to delete saved games other than via 'Windose' directory housekeeping?

I still think love mushrooms are far too valuable as a trading commodity. In my view they disrupt income build-up and can be abused to trade for incredible amounts of Influence.

On the foreign policy screen, when discussing trade terms with a Race, it would be nice to click ‘next’ to go to the next one rather than ‘cancel’ (strange message?) to exit then re-select and go back in.

D. Possible Bugs-

My sound still pops and gives of horrible grinding noises particularly on the start-up screen but corruption 'popping' occurs randomly throughout the game. I have the latest Creative drivers for my Audigy, run DX9 (since this beta ) and run XP.

Sound coruption is not a common fault with my machine but I can’t say I have not had problems with sounds in other games from time to time as sound generally is a nightmare isn't it?
In my case it may have something to do with my hardware interacting as I have a Via Mobo and I have read in hardware forums that Via chipsets and Creative cards don’t get on.

The ‘spontaneous’ minor race ‘The Jakians’ in my game has no image file and a year or so after they arrived I tried diplomacy with them and they had (minus) –787879925 bc in their treasury.

After a turn, the selected ship isn’t often highlighted and/or located on the mini map. But if you ‘waggle’ the mouse – without clicking - over the mini map area it jumps to and highlights the selected ship.

More comments as I find them, but I had to post early, as I love what’s happened in Beta4b.
LOL
Reply #13 from Stardock Forums Top
This games performance is fantasic, I appreciate the obvious improvements you guys get in with each new build.

Initiating trade and diplomacy are two things that are not as intuitive as they should be.

The game has not crashed in about 12 total hours of play, large galaxy, and turns fly by, even late in the game. Athlon 1700+, 512 ddr ram, 80 gb hd. radeon 85000 128mb.

Keep up the great work.
:D
Reply #14 from Stardock Forums Top
Jack: No work has been done on SE.
Reply #15 from Stardock Forums Top
A & B) Things look substantially faster. The only crash I had was my fault (details view).

C) The undersea dome event still has "interfear", which I don't think is a word.
Reply #16 from Stardock Forums Top
Hi Folks,

So far, 4B is running very smoothly on my 1.7 MHz, 512MB RAM, Win XP Dell laptop. I love the new, larger map size. It always bothers me when games like this cover too small an area--interstellar space is AWFULLY big!

A few problems, some of which are still present from older builds:

1. The announcement for United Planets meetings still comes late--either the turn of the meeting, or the one following.

2. A new problem similar to #1--announcements of new social projects or ships completed now often come late, something I don't recall seeing before. In addition, previously, once you closed the build screen, the main map would be centered on the planet you had just dealt with. Now, you often see some random section of space.

3. Someone brought this up before: once the UP passes the law restricting harvesting of anomalies to your own, or unclaimed, space, the auto-survey function becomes useless. It's a real pain to have to direct each survey ship individually. If the program can't be modified to recognize legitimate anomalies to harvest [and it must be able to do it for AI civilizations, right?], then I'd rather see this issue eliminated from the UP repertoire than have to micromanage each survey ship/starhawk.

4. If you complete more than one ship on a given turn, issuing orders to one of them causes the program to move on to moving those ships which already possess orders and finishing the turn, so that you lose the chance to move the second new ship until the following turn. This is annoying.

5. I want to second Jotun's point about the constantly visible mini-map. This would greatly improve playability. In addition, I'd still love to be able, on the mini-map, to toggle a highlighting of a) resources, and b) stars with colonizable [15 and above] planets which I have discovered and which have not yet been grabbed by someone. I play almost exclusively on the gigantic map, and it can be a problem keeping track of this stuff.

Enough complaints for now. I'm sure you're working on absurdities in diplomacy, trading bugs, and other AI difficulties. As it stands, the game is really coming together. Research is particularly fascinating. I'm enjoying it much, much more than I did with earlier builds. I'm looking forward to seeing where you go from here.
Reply #17 from Stardock Forums Top
Tweaks and observations..

First some kudos. This is very playable and a lot of bugs are squashed.

Need to tweak/disable the sentry and guard "mouse over popups". The timing of the popup can sometimes interfere and you end up with the help screen rather than setting a ship to sentry (irritating).

Not sure what is happening, but when I save a game and later resume it, the population graph shows a temporary drop in all civs populations. It also seems to affect the income (less taxpayers?)..

In the later stages of the game, the background threading is making current ship movements very jerky. Drop the priority of the background threads?

I have a saved game where it seems to "hang" on the turn. Perhaps it is taking a LONG time to take this turn, but I waited 10 minutes and it still wasn't finished. I was surprised that could still "save" the game while it was in the middle of "processing the turn" and have verified that it does the same when I reload that game.

Reply #18 from Stardock Forums Top
"In addition, I'd still love to be able, on the mini-map, to toggle a highlighting of a) resources, and b) stars with colonizable [15 and above] planets which I have discovered and which have not yet been grabbed by someone. I play almost exclusively on the gigantic map, and it can be a problem keeping track of this stuff."

I agree that this would be big, and think that most would agree.
Reply #19 from Stardock Forums Top
Just found a new bug.
Fresh turn, I get the selection about dangerous mining and which choice to I want (no mining, mining with drones, etc). Immediately after that I get a election screen which I respond to. Then the normal series of screens for the planets which have finished a project. After that I get a wierd mixture of the normal galaxy screen without the graphs. I can see part of the mining choice screen in the background. I can't select it, nor can I select anything on the normal galaxy screen. I can cause the galxaxy screen to move around by moving to the edges of the screen, but I can't select anything, even the menu.
Keyboard/mouse focus problem? Foreground/background problem?
Reply #20 from Stardock Forums Top
'Freighters now don’t get a shield icon off-planet which doesn’t help in locating them. When browsing via the Galactic screen (which I often do).'

The shield is for defended planets. Freighters have no defense, and as such do not register for that shield icon.

'I can see part of the mining choice screen in the background.' 'Keyboard/mouse focus problem?'

According to what Cari said in another thread, this seems to be caused by another window that has the focus being hidded when it shouldn't be. If you can find where the window with focus would have it's DONE button, it should be clickable.
Reply #21 from Stardock Forums Top
Crashing bug: :sniff!:

I invaded a minor race's homeworld (Dmer) and took it over. I continued to receive notices the Dmer were doing bad things and should be put down.
When I try to view the Minor Races and scroll to the Dmer, the game quits to the Windows desktop. Is there some logs or files I can send in?
I read about some crash util tool in another post a while ago, but the file had been removed by the time I tried it. Hey, what about included that utility in the 4c beta?
Reply #22 from Stardock Forums Top
It is much better thanprevious builds in preformance. I use a P4 1.8 Mghz, 256 ram, windows XP. Longest delay was about 7 seconds on gigantic for autosave and a similer one during one turn of a huge war late game. Rest of the time it moved along fine and so far no Crashes. Only tryed two partial games so far though.
Reply #23 from Stardock Forums Top
Further contribution to discussions on Beta4b

Bugs-

#When I switched production from a warship to a colony ship the cost was displayed (for the various lease options) as follows-

-447244042 bc for 0 mo...cut off
-2075782152 bc + 162853813 bc f..cut off
(+)1628538210 bc + 28537 bc for 2....cut off
(+)814269155 bc + 14268 bc for 261...cut off

#Scotlings - when trading with them they had (minus) -171729322bc

#Other in-game created minor races have huge minus numbers as credits in their banks.

#Often auto-survey ships end with one move left being displayed.

# The Guard and Sentry buttons still call up ship rename in 1024x768 unless you hit the sweetspot which is right on the left border of both buttons. This has gone on for months PLEASE help!

Gameplay and interface comments-

the 'Good' interface seems very white, bright and 'bleached' (1024x762 32bit)

I placed a starship 'guarding' a space station which was attacked and the station destroyed and the ship was not attacked. I assume this is a bug and that ships should be destroyed if sitting on starbases before the starbase is destroyed?

A gameplay suggestion - I suggest starbase modules are more expensive and preferably upgrades more beneficial. Starbases are great things and look cool ajd do a lot that impacts on the game.

Therefore I don't think they are as resource intensive and dramatic enough as they should be as I seem I have dozens of modules and dozens of stations in existence mid game - I always hoped that starbases would be few, very strategic and very poweful.

I agree with other testers that the impact of losing elections isn't 'severe' enough - but players must be aware in detail of the remedies and consequences if this is to be 'beefed up'

There MUST PLEASE be a planet in galaxy positional locator thatyou can see when choosing construction options on a planet

It wold be nice but not major to switch of exploration info pop-ups when junk and anomolies are explored.

s


Reply #24 from Stardock Forums Top
Smiling Death,

The "crash utililty tool" is SmartException and Brad put a pointer to it in the original post of this thread.
Reply #25 from Stardock Forums Top
Polish Related:
1) How can I tell what special wonders have been built and which race built them?

2) The Space Sharks detailed description is screwed up. Clicking information on a Space Shark brings up the usual info screen, but the information presented looks like it was mis-formatted for the screen.

3) Where can I see all my trade routes, who they're with, and how much each one makes?

4) How do I find a minor race's home planet without manually searching the map?

Sorry if any of these have "obvious" answers. I feel like everyone else here has been playing the game for some time, and has lost touch with how much the lack of documentation cripples a new player.

Thanks.