Hi

I just bought Dark Avatar and played my firdst game. I actually intended to wait a little until it gets cheaper, as I have little time to play at the moment, but then I thought what the heck. I've had such good experiences with Stardock and Stardock support in the past (like having them update Stardock Central specifically after I reported a downloading problem), they deserve that their products are being bought at full price.

... and in the same vein, here are my bug reports for Dark Avatar.

I played Dark Avatar 1.50X on an Athlon64 3500+, nVidida 7600 GT, Windows 2000 SP 4.

I played as the humans, on "tough" difficulty, in a huge galaxy, with 10 players, common stars and planets. I checked the option "force AI to use max CPU". The game was fun, although a bit eventless, but that was probably due to my playstyle as mega-diplomat/influencer (I had no battles in the whole game except three fights against pirates)), and also due to sheer luck on my part: *every* major random event played into my strategy.

Here are the bugs / annoyances / questions I ran into, numbered for better reference. While reading, please keep in mind that I *do* enjoy the game. It's just that when I get started on bug reporting, I use to do it thoroughly, and so it might seem as if I see only bugs and don't like the game - but this impression is wrong.


Showstoppers:

1. One nasty showstopper which let the game crash to desktop: When the Torians surrendered to me, two of their ships joined my fleet. One of those ships was stationed *outside* of the map grid. I could not see it on the map, but when the game activated it (because it had moves left), the screen centered on a position outside of the map grid. I could see the ship's details in the HUD, but I couldn't move it. When I finished my turn, and the game moved my ships, it always crashed to desktop when it tried to access this ship. After some attempts to localize the error, I finally destroyed the ship (the "Find" button activated it, although I still couldn't see and couldn't move it, and I could destroy it with the respective button from the HUD). This cured the crash.

This bug has the potential of being a nasty showstopper. The game just CTDs and gives no hint what's the problem, and although the cure is quite easy once found, it takes some serious amount of detective work to find it.

The bug *may* have been caused because one of the Torian planets was only two parsecs away from the map border, i.e. there was only one empty square between the planet and the map border. And this one empty square was south-west of the planet, i.e. it was the planet's ship launching square. When the problem occurred, this square was occupied by another Torian vessel. So the bug *may* have been caused by the game trying to place formerly orbiting Torian vessels on the map after the planet changed ownership. (There were several Torian ships distributed to several other civilizations, but I don't know where they all were stationed.)

I have a savegame of the turn after this bug occurred, which will CTD if you press the turn button. Just tell me if you want it to be mailed to you. Unfortunately I don't have a savegame of the turn before, which would be better for the analysis of what went wrong.


Bugs:

2. The pie chart that shows the distribution of votes in the United Planets still doesn't work correctly. That's a rather old bug. One of the sectors was significantly smaller than it should have been. It's as if the game calculates the votes total to be smaller than it really is, or draws the sectors a bit too large, so that the last sector will be partly hidden behind the first one (or vice versea, depending on how the code works).

3. I had two "Vegan" civilization joining the game. Having two different civilizations with the same name can be a bit confusing.

4. "Ghosting" graphics: I had a Lantzlandian damaged space station showing up on a square where it apparently didn't exist any more, clicking on it had no effect. At another time, I had a damage animation displaying on a square that showed nothing else.

5. In the weekly report that is displayed when my turn starts, I can select a planet and click on "Goto". This usually works. However, when a planet changes ownership during that same turn, the game becomes confused. What happens is this: First the turn report is displayed. Then I click on a line reading "Planet X built improvement A", and click on the "Goto" button. Next, the game shows me a popup informing me that planet Y revolted and joined my civilization. Then, the game gets confused and shows me the surface of planet Y with the name of planet X.


Annoyances:

6. The camera doesn't really follow moving ships (although the option says so). What it does is positioning the camera at the starting point of the ship's move, and then standing still while the ship quickly moves off-screen. This makes that oprion hardly useful. The camera should follow the moving ship.

7. The turn report doesn't have focus for mouse wheel scrolling. Scrolling it would be more convenient if I could use the mouse wheel. Nothing big, but it *is* a bit annoying when you move your mousewheel for the umpteenth time and are reminded that in this specific dialogue you can't use it.

8. The turn report doesn't respond to double clicks. Double clicks could be a fast alternative to the "Goto" button.

9. Introducing new civ one step away from tech victory. A couple of turns after I researched "Beyond Mortality", I got a message that another civilization is nearing a tech victory. *Then* the civilization mentioned actually joined the game. While I do like the random element of new civs joining mid-game, introducing a civ that is just one step away from winning the game is a bit hefty.

10. The exploit "park constructor near foreign mining space station, wait until it gets shot down by someone else, then quickly take the resource" still works. Wouldn't it be better if the AI took a constructor along when attacking a starbase? Also, when attacking a starbase, does the AI evaluate whether there are constructors in the vicinity? If AI-1 is in a war with AI-2, but is also concerned about my resource-grabbing, then a smart AI-1 should probably not destroy AI-2's space station when it sees my parked (and possibly well-protected) constructor beneath it.


Questions:

11. No one ever attacked me - is this intended? It made the game very easy. I *did* play the humans (with their super ability), chose additional diplomacy bonuses, and made diplomacy research a top priority. So that may explain why everybody liked me so much that they didn't bother to attack even though I had a military rating as low as 20 points at times. I actually *do* like to have the possibility to play that way instead of being forced into a military playstyle. But it was a bit too easy this time. The other civs battled each other across the galaxy, wasting their resources, while at the same time they seemed totally oblivious to me building influencers right in the heart of their empires.

12. Is it correct that only the new Altarian leader is animated, and all other leaders are just pictures? Nothing that actually disturbs me (animations are fluff I can do without), it just seems odd that one leader is animated while all others aren't.

13. Discovery Sphere was sometimes very cheap to buy. Sometimes buying a DS cost me less than 100 credits, although building it would still have taken a dozen of turns or more. Why that? I didn't investigate further, so I may have missed an obvious explanation.

14. After researching the tech victory, I had to finish my turn and then finish *another* turn before the game realized that I had won, and displayed the victory movie. Is this intended?


Edit:
15. Another small bug: Several times other civs warned me about the Thalans. When this happens, the lower text box shows a potential reply from me. This reply read something like "Sorry, Alan Bradley, I trust the Thalans." The "Alan Bradley" should have been the name of the leader who contacted me, not the name of *my* leader.