3.7 Bug List

Thanks for reporting these. I'll take a look and see if we have them already in the log.

Add another one:

   6)  When the "lots of Precursor Anomalies have appeared in the galaxy" event occurs, NO additional Precursor Anomalies appear.  

There may be a general problem with events that don't correspond to game happenings, and this was a long-time bug, but it's hard to tell with most of them.  The "lots of new Artifacts have appeared in the galaxy" event is accompanied by hordes of Artifacts, which yields the next bug:

   7)  Artifacts yield way too much money.  (Yield seems to be progressive with the number explored.)

After the event, there were so many Artifacts in a Medium universe that I had 5 surveyors running full-time to sweep them up, and couldn't before turn 200.  In one turn I explored four (4) artifacts each worth over 97,000 Credits.  Busted that 1,000,000 Cr cap many times.  The (Normal) AIs were too stupid to generate more surveyors (I think) so never had the Credit resources I did.  I could have bought the win.  (To be fair, I have seen the AIs generate additional surveyors.  But it wasn't in response to the abundance of Anomalies.)

   8)  Relics can be stolen.  The relic will benefit the closest lab to it.  Place one closer and suddenly you "own" it.

This may not be a bug.  If it's as designed, it should be mentioned in the manual.

Again, these are for 3.7 without Crusade or Intrigue.

Campaign - Return

   9)  The High Output Mines tech does nothing.

I can understand de-emphasizing it in the scenario, but when I spend 10 critical early turns rush-researching and get nothing, it's more infuriating than entertaining.  Have it yield *something*.

BTW, what blinking tech tree is the campaign using?

..\Steam\steamapps\common\Galactic Civilizations III\Campaigns\Campaign\Game\ Campaign_Return_TerranTechDefs.xml and Campaign_TechDefs.xml don't seem to be used. 

    <InternalName>Return_TerranLogisticalOptimization2</InternalName>  ...
    <Stats> ...   <Value>1</Value>    </Stats>

is as expected.  So what tech tree is in use?  Is it recorded in a log?

   10)  The various Artifact and Ship Graveyard events yield awards that never happen.  E.g. +2 Movement or + Range to all ships.

The additions to the Treasury may not happen, either.  I wasn't paying attention.

   11)  The Pragmatic "No War" unlock does not work as expected.   It appears to suppress the wars, but doesn't.

"No one will declare war on you for 50 turns."  So I took a chance and tried it, even though it doesn't say that existing wars will end.  In fact, on the Diplomacy screen, the war connections *disappear*!  So it appears that you have 50 turns of breathing space.  But 10 or so turns later the Drenghi attack.  This is a trap that you would do well to address.

   12)  When the Drenghin race is destroyed, the victory conditions (upper left and in the Victory Status screen) do not reflect the fact. 

   13)  The way to take down the Precursor Shield is opaque, to put it mildly.  Mystery Rally Points.

A Rally Points appears on the map near Earth.  I probed it but got no information, not even the name.  I stumbled into it when trying to take down the Shield, and found out what it is for.  [The other RP near Gateway appeared after I destroyed the planet rather then let is be re-taken.  The RP was on the dead planet that resulted.  Why!?]

   14)  Capitals on bonused tiles, and unusable tiles with bonuses. 

I don't recall seeing either of these elsewhere.  The presence of a capital makes the bonus irrelevant.  And the unusable tile I was able to terraform and make it usable. 

There is a bug that let's you build the same starbase upgrade over and over again while the computer is processing the ai turns. You can access your starbase and if you upgrade just before your own turn begins you can get 20 or so modules from the same upgrade.

OK, just trying it out again after about a year away. I've got the full Founder's edition, so all packs, DLC, etc.  I'm playing on the default resource/event/whatever settings for galaxy creation.

I'm finding one thing that's a bug, and another that's more of a tunable that needs to be fixed:

BUG:  Events aren't generating Ideology or having any effects for at least 20 or so turns. I haven't found exactly what triggers them to start working, but the first couple of events don't actually work. I select any of the options, and it happily totally ignores my choice. No ideology are accumulated (the ideology menu remains greyed out), and no actual consequences happen.

Best bet here is that it suddenly starts working after I settle my 2nd world, where I get a "settlement choice".  But that's not 100% verified. All I know for sure is that they're broken for the initial part of the game.

TUNABLE CHANGE NEEDED:  the number of "special" things per planet is way too high. That is, a combination of the Arable Land special tiles and the various artifacts/resources, etc. often occupy a substantial portion of the planet.  For instance, I've played multiple games where my home planet has 50% of the tiles (6 out of 12) occupied by Arable Land, the Colony Capital, or Special Artifacts.  That's far too many, and makes building out the planet impossible in any meaningful way - that is, you basically just have to ignore adjacencies, which is one of the biggest fun things of the game.

There really needs to be two limits here: 

1. For Planets of initial quality 8 or less, no more than 2 tiles should be of any reserved type (excluding the Colony Capital). For 9-13, no more than 3, and for 14+, no more than 4.

2. For 12 or less quality planet, only a single Artifact/Special Resource should be located there. On 13+, a max of 2.

[Edit:]

After further testing, the bug is nondeterministic. It regularly (bordering on always) crops up, and I can't tell what causes it to go away and allow Ideology to start accumulating. I'm even getting Events that do things like Grant A Ship, which gives me the ship, but not the Ideology. So, in short, for times before the 20th turn, I regularly get Events that don't work properly. They don't ever grant the Ideology, and sometimes give the other action, but not always. I don't have a good feel for what causes the Events to start working properly - I can't tell if it's time played, planets colonized, anomalies surveyed, or anything else I might do.

Regarding reserved tiles:

1. IMHO the concept of arable land was overused. It should take less of these, or maybe none at all - make farms planet-unique and be done with it! Or create a planet-type-dependent resource that limits the number of farms: desert planets shouldn't allow multiple farms, but bread-basket types may allow half a dozen.

2. Also I see no point of planetary resources for Prometium, Elerium, and the like, which can be mined in space, much more efficiently. I typically destroy these planetary resource tiles to make room for more sensible stuff.

3. The total number of planetary resources is too high. As a result the chance of not having any available is too high, and that often means you can't build certain things! Reduce this number to at most 3 or 4, and create projects (social) or missions (military) to allow trading one of these few resources for other kinds.

If these approaches were used, it should reduce the number of special tiles suffciently.

I'm gonna agree with Franton here on #1 as suggestion:  desert and low-quality (4 or less) planets simply should NEVER have arable land on them.  And high-quality planets with the bread-basket quantifier should have at least 4 arable land tiles.

I also think #2 is a valid point, given that tiles are at a premium, and you can get resources a lot of ways besides having them on-planet.

For #3, there already are a bunch of missions that allow you to effectively change resources/special resources for others. Plus, there's the marketplace. 

Still, I really think that no planet should have more than 1 of the special things on them (e.g. artifacts, et al.)

Also, two more things I've run into.

BUG: 

Why do the ordinary (i.e. non-unique) economic buildings have adjacency bonuses for Approval and Influence, but NOT wealth?  The other kinds of basic buildings (production, morale, research, etc) all benefit from adjacency to each other. But not the wealth ones?  That seems.... wrong.   I'm OK with the economic buildings having Influence bonuses for the base building, but the adjacency bonuses and leveling bonuses absolutely should both be for wealth and nothing else. Special wealth buildings should provide for something else, but to keep the wealth buildings in line with other types, just wealth for leveling/adjacency.

BALANCE:

On a similar subject, there seem to be very few tile bonuses for research. Certainly, FAR fewer than for any other type.  Maybe bring up the occurrence of these a bit more.

More importantly, the adjacency bonuses given for various special tile types really needs to be looked at again, and some better rationality applied to them. They seem to be assigned almost haphazardly, and many make little sense to what the flavor text describes.

If the marketplace were available for the base game, I would agree, But it isn't. I only have Crusade, and constantly run into the issue of one or several types of resources being in short supply or simply non-existent.In my most recent game, I chose th e Vigilant racial ability, and couldn't build the special navigation buildings because the required resource wasn't available anywhere before turn 100. At the time I finally found a planet that had it, my ships were already moving at 25+ tiles per turn, and had little need of another +1 bonus.

Also there are too few missions in existance to obtain such resources, and only a fraction of the resource types is even covered.

Yup, that's a rather common problem: quite a few buildings do not grant adjacency bonuses of the type they are themselves. That doesn't make any sense. Moreover, the level bonus from adjacency is sometimes of an entirely different type: e. g. ship building improvements (the few that there are) typically grant bonuses to resistance instead of military production as you would expect. That doesn't make any sense either: even though ship building is mostly militaristic in nature, it has nothing at all to do with planetary resistance!

I may have found two bugs here. One is very annoying and the other one is small and doesn't affect me.
On this image I can't choose Go to for fleets, that happens when i choose next turn and it will be like that until I restart the game. 
https://imgur.com/DNYdGTy

If I move one ship from the fleet and choose that ship, then I can click on the Go to buttom, but as long as it is in a fleet, I can't choose it until I restart the game. I have to close the game, just going to the main menu and load the game again doesn't work. 
https://imgur.com/EiEDwh3

The other bug I found which is not a big deal, but sometimes gets me confused, is that icon in the top right corner that shows the approval of your citizens. Is says 0% there for me, but when I check the civilization tab and go to colonies, is says 100% on every one of them. I have even checked the approval when I go to the colonies, and they all say 100%. 
https://imgur.com/6yRyzNY

I agree with the second point one. It happens in.several places, if I have the game quit trying to sell me that.

" 7)  Artifacts yield way too much money.  (Yield seems to be progressive with the number explored.)"

I assume you meant anomalies,  because artifacts are something else.

Actually one of the anomaly types gives you 10% of your current treasury.  As you can imagine that can snowball.  There should be a cap of some kind.

OK, this is in 3.8 now.

BUG: 

 For the Subspace Resonator-B improvement (special reward from colonizing a Precursor planet), the "level" bonus it receives is set to the wrong type. It's an absolute number, not a percentage.  As such, it get 0.5 Sensor power per level, which is so tiny as to be ludicrous.

The proper thing should be +5%/level to GLOBAL sensor power. 

UNKNOWN:

Farms don't receive any level bonus for being adjacent to population improvements. I don't know if this intentional or not.

Logged for fixing.

I swear farms in the past have flat food bonus from adjacency. It was +0.5 per level.

Bad Balance:

For ship modules, the Stellar Support module compared to the Environmental Support module: 20% increase in range, 20% increase in size, 2x in cost.  That seems really dumb - same mass/range ratio as the older tech, at a cost of having to research a new tech AND pay 60% more in cost/range.  That's seriously out-of-line.

The more advanced Deep Space Support module and Stasis Field Generator modules are much, much worse; they require very advanced techs, are extremely expensive, take up massive space, cost a large amount (even to the tune of requiring Promethium in the latter case) all while providing no tangible benefit over earlier modules.

The balance is so bad that there's absolutely no reason to mount any Life Support module other than the Environmental Support module, in all but extreme edge cases.

All three of these life support modules need serious rebalancing.

Guys, I know this isn't the first time it's been brought up (since I've been around since beta, I personally have asked this several times, and I know others have too), but why isn't the bug database & reporting system PUBLIC?  Why on earth don't you make it so?  We can report these things far easier that way, make sure we're not reporting duplicates, and even attach fixes (since a lot of these are merely XML changes to the existing user-visible files, and not code changes). 

We can do your work for you, you just have to enable us to do it. Come on people.  It's a little effort on your part that pays a lot of dividends, especially now that GC3 is moving to "bugfix only" part of the lifecycle.

Great posts, shame the only thing that devs seem to take from this disscussion is to fix one broken Lost Treasures improvement (That has been reported along with alot of others with similar issues many many times before) 

Quoting Horemvore, reply 18

Great posts, shame the only thing that devs seem to take from this disscussion is to fix one broken Lost Treasures improvement (That has been reported along with alot of others with similar issues many many times before) 

End of Horemvore's quote

Which is exactly why I want the bug database public, so I'm not duplicating old reports (which I don't have the means to troll through old forum posts for).  I've been away from GC3 for over a year now, and I'd like to start playing again.  But there's lots of low-hanging bugs and balance issues that are seriously impacting my enjoyment.

Heck, I'd love it if there was some sort of "Community Contributor" system where we could pay a nominal fee (say $10 or so) and get plugged into the bugfix system directly, allowing the community to push fixes into the system. Have a CC review requirement, but otherwise, a lot of this is just XML that needs a consensus as to what the proper change should be, and really doesn't require an expensive SWDev for time.

I'm a professional Systems Architect and Release Architect, so I'm intimately familiar with how SDLC works, and what systems are involved. This particular issue is an easy-to-solve one. Heck, I've done it for a project 1000x the size and complexity of GC3:  the Sun JDK. 

Stardock folks:  this is one area you're SERIOUSLY lacking in, and it's costing you money. A lot of money. There's no reason to not do it.  We can even help you set it up. But the ball is in your court. Don't muff it.

trims2u: The core reason why we don't maintain a public bug database is because it would only be additional work for everyone in maintaining it. There was some momentum for fans maintaining an XML fixlist. But sadly that never got anywhere. If you want to take the initiative on creating something like that though I can present it to the team once you have something and maybe even help get other players using it.

Thanks to the great Steam sale I finally have Crusade, so now I can see such features as Citizens.  I think it looks good, and the Tutorial is a solid step up from your previous.  Well done!  However, there are bugs in everything.  These are from the Tutorial at Normal difficulty:

1)  The Xeno Agriculture branch of the tree is just missing.  It's lack disables Cities, which may be intentional, but Fat-Butt Bot makes a point in one sequence of telling you that you should research it to increase Food supply.  And the home planet has Food tile.  Be consistent!  So there are two potential bugs here: gimped tech tree, or erroneous tutorial.

2)  Adm. Casey says that she is transmitting the tech to build Transports (presumably Planetary Invasion).  She never does.  The bad planet has no Legions, so maybe this is a change after the fact.  Fine, but once again, a narrative is out of synch with reality.   It's only text, guys.  Surely you could get it right.

3)  Not really a bug, but the notice of a distress call places it (rally point) right on top of a starship graveyard.  A defended starship graveyard. A newbie would blunder in and die, thinking that he was told to. 

Thanks!  I look forward to playing Crusade.

I heartily agree with trims2u on a public bug database.  Heck, isn't there one built in to Sourceforge? or have I been away too long?

It's simple enough.  Someone files a bug report.  The report progresses through statuses of Raw, Evaluated/Accepted or Rejected (or Duplicate).  Fixed - Please Verify.  Closed.

If SD really does accept user-filed bugs, this seems to be the most efficient way to do it.  I mean, you already have someone evaluating reports, right?  Right?

JDK!  Dude!!

No surprise.  Do you know a public person fluent (or even stuttering) in XML?  The mere suggestion must have been a joke.  Such a beast *must* be forms-based.

The point isn't a seperate database. It's to run your actual Stardock issue tracking system with a public face.  That requires virtually no extra effort on anyone's standpoint in terms of setup, and VERY little effort on Stardock's.  All modern issue trackers (JIRA, Bugzilla, Redmine, Trac, Helix/Perforce, etc.) have this capability built-in. You have to spend a day configuring the system and security, but that's about it.  They all have the capability to make certain projects private, other public, and even hide or show specific issues to various groups. Licensing is also generally not an issue, as pretty much all that I'm aware of license external users (who are restricted in what they can do) either free or at extremely low cost. 

I'm presuming your system isn't either a completely custom one, in which case this is a problem. Or if you use Visual SourceSafe, we're screwed.

Ideally, this would map directly to an XML code repository, where proposed fixes could be submitted, and reviewed by the community, before designated individuals (likely Stardock employees, but not necessarily so) would promote them into the mainline release stream. 

This is exactly how we did it with the JDK. And how many other public/private projects work. 

It seriously cuts down on Stardock's workload going forward, as the community is doing the large lion's share of bug finding, analysis, balance discussion, and even probably the proposed fix, and all Stardock has to do is a short QA run for sanity before putting the fix into the release. That easily cuts the engineer/hours in half, if not radically more.  That leaves Stardock engineers time to focus on actual engine/source code fixes, which, I'm assuming, is probably not only more productive, but more interesting than just managing weird XML errors.

I completely get the impetus to defend and protect the GC3 source code from the outside. That's proprietary knowledge and trade secrets. I'm not suggesting you put that portion in the open.

But neither the issue tracker nor the XML codebase fits that description, and keeping them closely held means you do a lot more work than necessary. 

Playing Milky Way (yes, again) with 3.8.  Using the console to watch opponent development (meaning I'm in contact with everyone).  First non-tutorial game with Crusade and the Mega Events DLC installed.

4)  Anomalies are incredibly rare.  I think I've seen six total.

5) The Pirates just sit there and do nothing.  If this wasn't intentional, it's a very long-time bug.  Of course, just after I type this, on Turn 75 they all came out of hiding.  First time in two (three?) reps that I've seen one.  Might it have something to do with the Difficulty level?  I turned both up to Gifted a couple turns before they appeared.

6)  The BIG one:  The events are fubar. 

1. 30+ planets colonized:  NO Ideology event.  I have no Ideology so no benefits and every hates me.  This can't be intentional.
2. I keep getting warnings from other civilizations that I'm using Precursor relics, even when I'm not.  [Cute reply about the pamphlet.]  I don't recall ever seeing this event before this game.
3. A couple times I've gotten, "Don't trade with infidels."
4. Other than these, no events have occurred by turn 76.  Not even, "Our mutual trade makes us closer."
5. [I do get Trade Offers, but those aren't events, are they?]

7)  I like the new font, but on the UP Council screen the resolution description box obscures the lower level votes.  Minor races have been banished from the Council and the Diplomacy display?  Update:  I've discovered the vote bar flyover for results and the delegate flyover for attitude.  Nice!

8) I was threatened to remove a starbase by a race on the other side of the galaxy.  I didn't see *any* SB in Thalan territory, much less mine.

9) Pirates are highly annoying, not least because you kill one of their shipyards and another(?) immediately takes its place.  Are Pirate shipyards intended to be doubled??  If not you got a BUG.

10)  Oh woe is me.  Now 10+ turns in, I'm getting BSODs after playing for 1+ hours.  The last one the game disappeared and a "Galciv crashed" dialog appeared on screen before BSOD.  Can't tell the cause; I haven't read a PC dump in decades, and Win7 x64 tells you next to nothing intelligible anyway.

The game gets a little sluggish, possibly a warning - like precursor symptoms of grand mal seizures - so I've been saving and restarting.  But not often enough.  It *feels* like a memory or heap leak.  8GB RAM with nothing else running.  You wanna see a trace or dump file?

11)  The minor races have shipyards yet never build ships.  Not one.  Huh?

12)  In the Tourism Income popup, a Scenic planet (+25) shows +1 (standard) and +25%, as expected.  However, the sum of the two (on the line above the list and on the top line) is 1.20.  I don't understand how you get 1.20 out of 1 + 25%.  [Got a screen snapshot, but how do I upload it?  Homey don't play the hosting thing. ]

13)  I noted "relic stealing" in an earlier game (3.7?).  When you set up a SB (with appropriate modules) closer to the relic than the existing foreign owner, the relic switches output to the closest SB.  Anyway, in 3.8 it no longer does this.  Is it supposed to?