Prioritizing for Beta 2! PLEASE READ!

Priority 1) - Get SmartException working.

Priority 2) - Fixes!!!!!

Priority 3) - better rounding on calculations - 11 * 1.08 = 12, not 11.

Priority 4) - Put more into accelerator keys.

Priority 5) - all of the rest.

Maybe I am more practical minded than most, but having debuging tools work so problems can be diagnosed easily and quickly is always very high on my list. The current state of affairs with SE has to be costing a lot in the time and effort of trying to guess what is causing the crashes many of us have reported.

Cheers,
Jack

Bug Fixes: Mostly the auto-pilot bug makes playing the game un-fun.

Better Info: Need good info about ships and planets. When you spend money on espionage -- you should get good info about the other guys too.

Ranges: Make it user selectable.

Fleets: Set up a system where I can send a transport with an Avatar to a system and nobody can kill the transport without killing the Avatar first.

Defaults: Why do I have to start up every colony with Mr. Ford as the govenor. I should be able to have a default govenor who will govern new planets unless I override her. Also, I should be able to have a default military build for new colonies.

Bug/Playability issues resolved.

Decimal instead of Integer math, and apropriate display changes as well.

Patrols: Being able to set ships on paths to guard large areas. Alternately, when in guard mode and someone comes within range, seek & destroy.

I also agree with Jack that whatever the problem with SmartExecption is be resolved, so we as beta testers can give better information about problems.

Good stuff, keep it coming. One question, which auto pilot bug to you mean? (I spent the last week in Califonrnia visiting the game mags so I'm a bit out of touch).

i voted for the minor races. Here what i would like:

1. Diplomacy: with minor and major races can always be enhanced. This is what i am looking for in a strategy game. Alliances must also mean something: especially if one of the allies is attacked... It would also be cool if you could help a race or a planet with medical or food supply. This would help the relations. More than the usual: " give me money and i'll like you".
2. Balance: i want it to be very difficult to elimate a race. In MOO2, when i was ready to conquer the universe, most of the races had already disappeared. If the balance is good, then the diplomacy will be more important.
3. United Planets should also be enhanced...seems very cool. Would be nice if minor races could vote without being able to make proposals.
4. I still have some problems with the main screen. I would change the graphics of some ships (main screen). All the other graphics are cool.
5. Of course the bugs.
That's all now

PS: i'm impressed that you work on sundays...well done.

Ship ranges-just to give me a little brething space.

counter offers from opposing civs.

more options and depth on the game creation screen. like variants on how to generate the galaxy, trade and up variants etc....

anomalies and floating junk should have two or three more options for each, perhaps even negative ones.

perhaps having stack wide bonuses like warlords II might add to the mix. like dreadnoughts bringing +10% on defense to everybody in the fleet.

thats all I can come up with right now.....

Ship Ranges are a must. How about stackable Warships which can be sent to a location with only one click on the top
ship of the stack. Worked will in GC OS/2.

Fox the Auto-Pilot feature, especially bad at the Gigantic Level Galaxy. Too many double cliking on a ship to get it to move, some times 2 turns will pass before the ships can move.

Id like to be able to enter the @-char at the metaverse submit screen. As well as the swedish/danish/norweigan chars.

Other things Id like to see (apart of the ones suggested in above postings)is the barter at the trade route establishment, as well as beeing able to see some sort of autopilot destination lines or other markers. So one know which ship has the destination marker you are looking at.

I hope you have all the suggestions users have made in this forum written down somewhere as I have a hard time trying to remember all

Fix the known bugs, implement all of the ships and add graphics for those improvements that don't have any.

A look at making some of the colours either configurable or more contrasting to background might be helpful. Faint blue overlaid on dark backgrounds is just about invisible to these old eyes.

The auto-pilot bug is where your ships on auto-pilot don't move. If you have auto-turn on, then they just sit there. If you have auto-turn off, then you get to go through the ship list (which will not display the correct information for the ship until you click on the listing) one ship at a time to make sure that all ships have used their movement points. Calling it the auto-pilot bug isn't really fair -- ships that *aren't* on auto-pilot get missed too.

I'm sure this happens in Gigantic galaxies -- apparently it isn't such a big deal in smaller ones.

Frank Fujita

Bought the game yesterday played alomost 12 hrs now and found a coulpe of bugs. I've looked but haven't seen them listed.

Here is the first.
When you go to the icon that list your ships if I click on the defender I crash to my desktop but not always this has been hard for me to reproduce as it catches me off guard when it happens.

Next in a battle for the planet if im attacked and my planet has around 9000+ and the attacker has about 2000 I defeat them but it says my losses are -4.XXXXXXXXXX

Third is when a unit is finished moving it moves to the next unit if your not careful u might move the unit in the wrong direction or cancel its autopilot.

Forth is when i research I believe is the nano-frequency it says that the new buildings i can build after this research is completed i get a whole slue of omega stuff thats not listed.

Fifth is when you are at war with a race you should not be able to trade technology. I was at war with everyone which seems to happen all the time and was able to buy their tech from them.

Six This has happened to me only once an ally. When your relation becomes good enough you become an ally I gave them a gift and it said our relation was no string and the line that said we were ally disapeared one would think you remain allies if your relation gets better.

I have another but forgot to write it down when i remmeber it i will post it back up.

Fifth

It happens in smaller ones too, it's just uncommon to have enough ships for it to happen regularly and/or noticibly.

Two other things that just came to mind, one a bug and one a interface issue.

First the interface. If your plan to keep the current 'press spacebar' invasion system, the invasion window needs to be forced to the top when the computer invades one of your systems. In my current game I've lost several systems without being able to attempt to defend them because the GNN window and the research complete window both popped up on top of the invasion window and before I was able to dismiss both of them the battle was already over.

Second the bug. If you somehow manage to get one of your racial stats above +999%, as I have with soldering (+1260-something according to the invasion window... I can't see the last digit anymore), it dissapears entirely from the Domestic Polocy -> Stats dialog.

It doesn't make any sense to add new features before correcting existing bugs.

After the existing bugs are fixed, the feature priority is:

1) Improve the AI, which includes diplomacy
2) Improve and increase the variety of player decisions regarding good and evil. Does making the good choice make any difference now? And could the good/neutral/evil planet colonizations choices be more random, so sometimes it makes no sense not to do the good thing, and other times it makes no sense not to do the evil thing. Also, good powers should not go to war with other good powers, no matter how lop sided their respective power may be. However, good powers should jump at the chance to attack bad powers.
3) Improve the graphics on the mini-map, including an indication of where discovered worm-holes go to. Other graphic improvements need to be done, but not before the palyability issues are addressed.
4) Make the bonuses more random (maybe the purple gas cloud shouldn't always give you the tech you're working on).
5) Keep your chins up and your eyes on the prize!

Are there plans to provide a change all function for the ship building assignment? That is one of the features from the OS2 version I missed. It is a real pain to have to go trough all of the planets to change the ship build asignment when better ships become available.

I found my notes from earlier:

Survey Ships should be 1/3 less expensive to build.

A Zoom in and out for the main space map with some sort of adjuster.

Make defender, battle cruiser, etc. more valuable in actual combat. Used to be a battle cruiser did fairly well against the enemy. Now its practically useless and you have to head straight for battleship and dreadnought. It would be nice if a stack of 4 or 5 battlecruisers could withstand and defeat at least 1 battleship.

Once in a while have third column entities offer deals such as free ships, trades with minor races for free tech advances, offers from third column groups to harass your enemies-plant viruses in their computers-start rebellions, etc.

Fix current bugs - autopilot, event screen

Ranges

Colonization and transport balancing - 40-60 billion troops on one transport is just too ridiculous and too easy to abuse. See seperate message.

Minor rances

United Planets

Senate

paul.

ranges (big loss from GC OS/2)
UP (big difference from GC OS/2)
minimum amount of population to start a colony
ship stacking

most previous appends are reasonable to me also.

1. bugs - obviously.
2. info screens - a must. These add a lot of replay interest value and satisfaction to any game. Specifically info on planets and very much so on ships -where are all the lovely enhancements up from base models I have slogged to research and pay for?
3 Combat - I know you fellow Beta's voted 2:1 for diplomacy but combat is very insatisfying - just a pop up telling you the details or a touch of multi-ship advantages to combat - such as stacking combo's; outflanking etc. What about taking some simple tank combat aspects and have armour facing effects for multi ship conflict? this would be fun.
4. Scroll bar arrows bigger or introduce middle mouse wheel.
5. Survey ships- strange things these! I have one running around the universe now having picked up all this space debris enhancement stuff which is nearly indestructible!

6. Don't like this 'bits and pieces bonuses in space' business -I would MUCH prefer to earn or research my advantages over my opponents in the lab or in trade/production. I don't think this is up with quality of the rest of the game -but it is addictive hunting them down I admit.
7. Not at all keen on the spacebar combat - mind you it's as good a method as rolling dice as any, but in risk 2, it seems more exciting somehow? Perhaps the bigger numbers and lack of feel for the calculations in GC (millions rolling agains millions) make it more obscure than rolling a 6 v 4 dice in Risk2 - perhaps a more graphical rep of the force ratios would help??

In terms of new features I would be excited to see-

a. More interaction with the planets, such as more abilities to improve them and more 'suprise' aspects such as prospecting for minerals, political aspects, cultural and natural incidents (positive and negative)

b. I know this wont go well but I am not at all turned on my the graphical look of the universe/play area and ships/counters. I am not talking 3-D fps lightshows here! (mind you some light sourcing on nebula etc would be pretty), but perhaps a pseudo isometric viewpoint (bear with me!) which would allow a little more freedom with the ship graphics which are very flat and uninteresting at the moment.

To me the game is shaping up well, but the AI, Diplomacy, trade and economics coding needs to be beefed up a lot. I am mid-game (mind you on quit easy level and have run out of things to do - victory is just a question of grinding the bad guys down - not sure I will finish this game, prob start again.

More random aspects

1. Installer fixes - this has been exteremely frustrating

2. Top bug fixes - mostly covered above but go for the high impact ones.

3. Graphics improvements to get Galciv closer to the "Final look and Feel"

4. Really focus on the diplomacy, as I feel this can be one of the best differientators for Galciv from the competition

Finally I really applaud everyone for the efforts so far, its great to be playing Galciv again...

Chuck.

A timeline that is accessible during and throughout the game, with statistics on various wars, (units lost/destroyed, systems captured/taken) would add a lot I feel.

1. Confirmation messagebox before you attack a ship. I've accidentally started wars because of a slip with my mouse.

2. Enable the use of the mouse wheel on scrollable lists.

3. Add links to descriptions of projects from the technology screen. When deciding which technology to research, I'd really like to know what the stuff I'll be able to build does after researching the tech.

4. Improved sliders when loading a colony ship. Once a planet has a large population, I can't seem to get the sliders to produce anything in the neighborhood of the value I want.

5. Improved game balance with regards to production. No matter what I do, all the other races always seem to leave me in the dust on production. The only affordable social project I can build on my planets to boost production is the fusion generator, and that still doesn't seem to close the gap much. Perhaps I'm missing something here, but I feel like I don't have enough social projects to boost production early in the game.

One word: Shipyards

Frank

Another thing that could be used from the OS/2 version is when in Combat and you take a advesaries planet you can get a Technology, that you don't have, if the Advesary has that Tech built. The Advesary can do the same.