SilasOfBorg

Join Date 05/2009

+10

Synthetics sullied by bugs, immersion breaks

Since I have yet to be able to play MP and my latest support post has gone a week unanswered (which to be fair is not a huge amount of time -- though it grates, MP is a "rarely used" play mode and GOG is a "rarely used" platform compared to single player Steam. Anyway, I digress), I decided to give single player a good test drive when the GOG folks finally released the 3.03 patch.

So I rolled up a synthetic race. That was fun. The civ creator is in a good place and I love being able to tweak just about everything.

Then I played the synthetic race. I ran into a few things that really screamed "we still haven't really thought this through or playtested it thoroughly yet":

1. A bunch of synthetic tech descriptions have reference to "humanity" or are clearly written from the perspective of a meatbag race.

2. Conquering a meatbag planet somehow instantly converts all that meat into useful synthetic population. Considering it takes most of my planets several turns to make ONE new pop, this is rediculous, and also game breaking given how hard it is *supposed to* be for synthetics to make new pop.

3. After conquering a meatbag planet, I tried to scrap a couple cities (Synthetics have no use for them) but I couldn't. What the hell? Are they made of Unobtanium, these meatbag cities? This is patently stupid.

4. I conquered a class 20 planet with a Durantium Cloud. The description of the cloud was "-50% Synthetic pop cap" but the pop cap was still listed as X / 20. Is this just a display bug or could I have built out the planet to 20 pop?

I'll check back a few patches from now -- I can't be the only person who has reported these and I feel like I only scratched the surface (this was from a single 100 turn session).

Lest I seem like a hater, I loved GC2 to death; enough to spend a lot of time working on the Community Mod with Mabus et al -- I guess I'm just impatient for GC3 to get to the same place.

/rant off

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Publius of NV

Join Date 08/2002

+187

I recently finished a 3.03 game as synthetic, getting the highest metaverse score I've ever gotten (I never understand those scores).

Anyway, I noticed your #1 as well, but it didn't bother me much. I guess seeing "Krynn Consulate" (and others) for a devout but non-Krynn race has desensitized me. #2 I was sort of surprised by also, not sure what they could do to fix it. #4, yes, you could build it to the population cap. I think when the hard planet cap on population was implemented the precusor worlds were overlooked, as they often have been when updates are done.

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I find improvements being indestructible is one of the stupidest things ever. Fortunately, if you are so inclined, you can easily fix this yourself with an XML editor. Just open ImprovementDefs.xml, find and replace <IsIndestructible>true</IsIndestructible> with <IsIndestructible>false</IsIndestructible> on the improvements that you want to be destructible, and problem solved.

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Quoting Nilfiry,

reply 2

Interesting. I'm a little leery of modding this in; destroying an improvement the engine isn't expecting to be destroyed sounds like a good way to cause things to get out of whack.

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Horemvore

Join Date 08/2009

+123

Quoting SilasOfBorg,

reply 3

Interesting. I'm a little leery of modding this in; destroying an improvement the engine isn't expecting to be destroyed sounds like a good way to cause things to get out of whack.

Most of them are set this way due to possible exploits. The engine wont care either way tbh. (pre crusade they were destructable)

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admiralWillyWilber

Join Date 05/2009

+99

I agree cities should be destructible along with idealogy buildings to.

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Quoting SilasOfBorg,

reply 3

Interesting. I'm a little leery of modding this in; destroying an improvement the engine isn't expecting to be destroyed sounds like a good way to cause things to get out of whack.

Yeah, as mentioned, the engine has no expectations for the actual value in this attribute. It merely checks this attribute to determine whether it will let you destroy an improvement or not. This is actually true for most attributes that can be found in the various XMLs that this game relies on. The game engine expects certain attributes to exist (and will even default if certain values are missing), such as internal name and what not, but it does not expect a specific value to be assigned to that attribute other than data type/length.

It is actually pretty hard to break the game if all you are doing is making minor tweaks to pre-existing attributes. The only times that I have managed to crash the game on load are when I mod new content.

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