I think the rationale behind this is that they are receiving fire support from the planet's surface. Easier to shoot at the invading ships from the ground than to boost the shields or whatever of your defenders I suppose.

Heheh. You see the ship moving? How is the interface fine if the ship (which could be attacked on its way to the planet and back) stands still? And who said it was an interface issue?



I'd say that anything that doesn't do what it says it does hurts gameplay experience. Since most of these things are easily fixed...



Heheh. I'm sorry. An "algorithm", eh?
You do know the techtree is pretty straightforward - that's how the AI can be relatively smart. There's also been a lot of fedback on these forums about trade and the exploits that it allows. And then there's the non-equivalent costs for different "comodities", which *Brad* chose to let be tradable across the board. He keeps trying to be different, and it just doesn't go well. Also,



You're not thinking *you* can do his job better than him, are you?   



Define "lasers cancelling out", please. I'll try using my imagination as soon as I stop ROTFLMAO.



Just for the sake of argument, which ones exactly? And I mean *every* 1.5 months. Not seasonally.



There's actually a lot of tuning to be done. Maybe there's nothing else to be said, but you replied to some weird stuff being pointed out, dismissing some of it. Just telling you where *your* replies are not valid.



It's not that it doesn't work, it obviously works. But it doesn't make sense - the employment explanation? Ugh! Notice that the focus is part of all the global spending system (vs localized), and that focus does what it should - focus. It's not focus in itself that doesn't work. It's the premise of the whole system.



Doubt that.



Don't go holding your breath now   

You're tough Tos... I was merely stating what I've seen seems to be the main focus in Brad's eyes, the AI. He speaks of it like it was one of his kids so this was where I was coming from. Do I 'know' what the AI is? Hell no, never claimed to. I've had my fair share of bitching over this game, more for reasons of crashes and system freeze and whatever else rears it's ugly head over the course of a game. Bitching over the 'stupid' stuff, not so much. To me it has been about just actually being able to play the game, not what the gameplay is like once I am playing, if this makes sense. So easy there big fella, I was merely sharing what I thought was the case for the lack of 'realism' or lack of 'things making sense'.

All BHE, was that to raise your military score? Does high defense raise your military score? The 5 HyperWarpIII drives on my dreadnoughts made the few ones used for war much more useful but once I was building them only to boost my score I probably should have switched to all weapons as well.


I've been playing GalCiv II since Dec. 2005 and I remember it being in the pre-release betas.


I total agree. I don't like things that force me to due strange things if I want to be optimal (such as the 1 HP attacker rule making it better to attack a planetary defender with a single ship rather than a fleet).
Attacker Advantages are Exploitable!

I think the off-type defense bug is the reason people are not saying the super warrior ability is one of the most powerful abilities. I used it to avoid any loses of combat ships (just constructors and starbases) during the entire Dread Lords campaign and my first Metaverse game (before it was removed in DL 1.2). In fact I was one of the few asking for it to be removed because the AI could not exploit it nearly as well.

Actually, that was a legitimate question. What's an awesome idea for an AI? I'm curious, that's all.
Granted, the AI in this game is better than the AI for most comparable games. But it has a lot in its favor, like the simplified techtree. It doesn't need "tactical squad" coordination. It was considered excellent in DL, yet it managed to get a huge boost in DA with lots of player input. Its flaws are labeled as not really AI related. It doesn't have any kind of situational awareness, especially in trades and defense. I'm not saying it's easy to do, it's not, and yes, it's a WiP. It's the heart of a SP game, and I'm a SP man. Improving is paramount, I agree, but the game cannot be just AI IMO. There are other coders in the team too.

It's an interface issue because if you had to manually move the ship back to a planet, upgrade there, then move it back, that would take more player time. The current setup is very convenient.

Whether the savings in player time is worth the distortion in game mechanics is a judgment call. Whereas there are plenty of other issues with the game that aren't judgment calls...



Okay, I may have been a bit loose with the language there. The question is, how much does it hurt, vs. how easy is it to fix?



I didn't say that you couldn't do his job better than him. I just asked you to prove it in a way that he could use. I think that is doable.



There are much bigger problems with the game's realism than that, heh.

As others have said, the real question is what game mechanics are fun. And square-rooted off-type defense is arguably more fun than zero off-type defense, so I don't see any reason to eliminate it, realism be damned.



Bacteria can reproduce every ~20 minutes, independent of season.



I am not saying that, given infinite time and resources, the weird stuff isn't worth fixing. What I am trying to do is perform triage, since Stardock doesn't have infinite time and resources. They have to make money selling games, after all, and some of these bugfixes cannot be expected to improve sales directly or indirectly to justify the programmer time required. Sad but true.

As is, Stardock already spends more effort on updating the game for free than practically any other company.



I'm not sure you fully understand what focus is doing, then.

As Purge pointed out, in earlier versions of DL, focus was just like changing the sliders on a planet-for-planet basis. If you had an all-factories planet, and focused research, you would get essentially zero research -- no difference from global 25% research spending.

But in some DL patch, focus was changed to act completely differently from changing the sliders, and as a result there is now no good reason to ever set the research slider to something other than 0% or 100% after the first few turns.



I have seen his posts in defense of the spending sliders, and they are not consistent with being aware of how this loophole works.

Remember, it took a while for the community to realize what was going on, so there is every reason to believe Stardock didn't understand this when they released the patch, and that in focusing on implementing new features in DA they never seriously looked at the problem.

I am very thankful for the feature of being able to upgrade ships in space. Can you imagine upgrading a large number of ships by bringing them back to planets. Putting 10 of them at a time into port. Upgrade them, then re-launch. Move the next 10 in. So on and so forth. Nothing fun about that. The current time delay system seems like a darn reasonable compromise to me. I'll take smooth game flow over to realistic any day.

That would be fine IF this wasn't supposed to be a *strategy* game. Granted, it's a very loose definition of strategy here. But part of the *real* strategy of a game is knowing what you have and planning the future *also* in terms of available facilities to upgrade ships. This simplification, besides allowing some cheese, removes most strategic thinking in tech upgrades for ships. Notice that this could be done with an auto-repair function, which would automate the whole process, therefore being transparent to the player. Smooth and realistic - I just can't figure why this is even a discussion, being so simple a solution. Requires resources, yeah, but again, there's more than one coder.



I could repeat myself to death, I won't. How many coders do they have?



Again, look for the threads about trade, plenty of that there. If he doesn't read those, he sure as hell won't read mine   



I thought we were discussing intelligent beings... but I can do that too. You do know that reproduction rate for bacteria depends on the medium, and that the growth is exponential *for a few hours*, and then they die, don't you?



I'm sure they can do that by themselves. Now, if you're just replying to keep a healthy discussion, which is always a good thing, that's fine.



Wow, take a break there. Let's not get started on that.



Not sure if it's really me you're talking about:



What Purge said was:



Mascrinthus replied:



Which is different from what you just said.
Would you care to explain the rest with more detail? Because you lost me.



Maybe because he doesn't look at it as a loophole? It's happened before. It works, it's good, don't touch it.

The upgrade system was discussed to death during the DL beta, and the current system is what was eventually settled on as a balance between cheese and gameplay convenience. Realism is always secondary to gameplay; just consider the extended upgrade time when away from a planet as transit time for unseen supply shuttles.



Right now, working on DA patches, two (Cari and CodeCritter), plus Brad doing AI/balance tweaks while he plays.

I was pointing out that flooding a starport with ships for upgrading should actually be a *strategic* consideration. Which should be upgraded first, etc. This system removes that.



Out of curiosity, how is this calculated? Does it take into consideration the existence of a starport on the closest planet? Starbase? Shouldn't those shuttles have to be built and payed for?    Trade shuttles are visible, and can be attacked...



So are the other coders working on something else? The new game?
Just a thought, could the time spent on writing dev journals be put to better use on fixing stuff? As much as a few people like reading them, I don't think they're so much insightful as to be worth passing up on more important things. Since time is money, that is.
Also, is there anyone else playing/testing the game?

The all BHE was for scoring. High defense does raise your score, but you can't completely fill a ship with them with any of the stock hulls. There aren't enough places to mount them all...Plus they don't benefit from a free +25% boost when in orbit.

I didn't realize the focus was in the game before that time. Ah well, memory is the first to go! Hopefully one of the old GC Iers is around and remembers. I suppose I could grab my old disk and install it...

Some of the new super abilities are at least as powerful as first strike. Both the Torian and Thalan abilities tend to let you get off the mark much faster than you would be able to do otherwise. But yeah, the defense stuff is definitely a factor.

I preemptively replied to this ("judgment call", etc.). For some reason you deliberately refused to include that part when you quoted me.



Kryo answered this. No, you can't fix everything with 3 coders. If you think otherwise, you're welcome to try to write and maintain a better game yourself, just find two competent friends.



Star Trek notwithstanding, intelligent beings don't necessarily have to be human-scale. Also, if we ever develop machine artificial intelligence, we will probably be able to embed it in something that can reproduce at Torian-like rates or better. The similarity of every other species' population growth rates in the game is more "unrealistic".

What really matters is gameplay here.



The devs read the forums, but they only have a limited time to do so. When you are cluttering up a discussion of a few bugs that really are high priority with a bunch of low priority bugs and claiming they must ALL be fixed, that is likely a disservice.



Hmm, I briefly installed and played an early version of DL before getting Dark Avatar, and I noticed that focus was not broken in that early version of DL. I can try to reinstall and double-check.

As for the rest: suppose, instead of using focus, you just set your spending rate to 75% production/25% research. You'd get practically no research on an all-factories planet.

That is how Purge and I remember focus working in the past (though Mascrinthus' statement implies our memory may be wrong), and it's how I think focus should work in the future. You'll then actually have to THINK about the division of factories and labs in your empire.



If Brad ever explicitly says something like that, then the issue is settled.

But as far as I can tell, he's never said a word about it. And his defense of the spending sliders implies that he really wouldn't like this loophole if he understood it.

Hi!

I remember reading his post about sliders: he didn't want to change the way they work because of the AI's sake. Probably he'd need to change too much of the code from the GC-1 to make them "think" properly.

However we're slowly getting some progress with the way sliders work:
- In GC-1 ALL production from ANY empty queue was lost. So in the mid-game it was a mayor PITA to get an undeveloped planet, since social slider was set very low to avoid waste, ant there was no focus.
- Similar situation was in first version of GC-2, but now much bigger comunity became very vocal about that waste. So they introduced first the transfer of unused social spending in military queue (IIRC with 1.0x), and very soon after that also posibility to produce nothing in military queue, so the waste was practically eliminated. The focus was introduced as the last, but before version 1.2.

After writing all this down I realized that regarding sliders there was no progress done in last year or so. Maybe we shoud be more vocal about demands for separating production and reseach financing. Brad did not say the development of the game is over. Maybe in another expansion pack we coud finaly get it? Or at least in GC-3.

BR, Iztok

I was referring to focus with my remark. I wonder, to what extent does the AI use focus?

That it was a judgement call, there's no doubt. That doesn't mean I can't elaborate on my point of view, right? For that I don't need your judgement call sentence. I wasn't refuting it. So I don't see why I should mention it.



I think you should say "No, *I* don't know any 3 coders that could do that", which is completely different from what you actually said. You know, other people have different experiences than yours. There's a certain tendency to generalize here.
I can't really recall right now, but the DA credits seemed to me that had more than 3 coders listed.



Bacteria are hardly intelligent beings.



Machines don't reproduce. They may replicate at best. That would depend on manufacturing capacity basically. That's not an example. Going this way we could argue why the Yor have the same repro rate as humans, and even why they pay taxes.   



Maybe, maybe not. Intelligent life as we know it, it can only come to be on a very specific set of conditions. Repro rate depends on a lot of factors, not all of them biological.



I assume you're only guessing. Have they *asked* *you* to help them with the triage?



When you are cluttering a discussion of weird things with half-thought replies, that's a disservice too. Who told you that the list of weird stuff is not something they'll look into later? And who's claiming that they *must* be fixed? If I find something that I consider wrong, I'll point it out. I'll do it with the hopes that'll be fixed, of course. That's the whole point of posting bugs, whatever their priority. I guess you can understand that. That we have different priorities, that's another issue. But that's the way it works. And it's not you who defines priorities, last time I checked.



You do know that this discussion started at least more than one year ago, don't you?
The focus thing. What was changed in v1.2 was that the focus button was introduced in the Civ Management screen.



The way I recall it, focus has always diverted 25%(/50%) of the other production type to the focused type. Your example doesn't say much.



Have you ever considered that if he said *nothing*, that's because there's *nothing* to say?



I'm not going to waste my time looking for such a statement, though I would believe it exists.



Again, these are your words. It's not really a loophole, according to the game. Focus allows you to redirect production. You don't like it, I don't like it, a lot of people might not like it; some like it because it adds another way to play the game, some like it because they simply like exploits. If he ever intended it to work any other way, it'd have been changed long ago. You see, that's the problem with criticizing those who criticize things that don't make sense - eventually you'll get caught by it.
It's "fun", it's not game breaking, adds diversity, it's a game, who cares?

Ok, here is where I have to chime in, because your problems with the game have now transformed into whining about the amount of community involvement that the developers have and how it affects the quality of their games.



No, the rest of the 30+ coders are just sitting around playing Oblivion and drinking coffee...    OF COURSE THEY ARE WORKING ON SOMETHING ELSE!! Stardock has multiple games in the works, plus their non-game software, such as the whole suite of Object Desktop software and Thinkdesk software like Multiplicity.

So yes, the other coders have a lot of projects going all at the same time. This leaves limited resources and money to update a game FOR FREE for which you have already paid. How many game developers provide the level of free content that Stardock has once they have started making another game? I don't know of any.

I understand that you want the game to be better, but your idea of "better" is not going to be everyone else's idea of "better." I, for one, could care less about sending hundreds of ships to a planet or space station to upgrade when it can be done in place with minimal effort on my part. I could care less about most of the points you made from a gameplay standpoint. They aren't problems in my eyes, barring a few small things here and there.



This is where my big problem lies with you, though. I really appreciate and admire the workers of Stardock for their involvement in the gaming community. I would not have it any other way. I feel like a person and not just another $50 when I buy from Stardock. So it irks me when people like you come in and suggest that they would make better games if they didn't spend so much time interacting with the community. No one is forcing you to buy from Stardock. They could treat you like every other gaming company and forget about you once they have your money, but they don't. We get constant, free, majorly game-enhancing updates and I, for one, feel like I didn't pay them enough for the level of support I have gotten compared the standard for gaming companies today.

As an aside, the two coders mentioned, CariElf and CodeCritter, don't even write that many dev journals. Brad writes the majority of the journals, and they are very interesting to me. I appreciate all of the journals and the time it takes to write them.

For what it's worth, I suspect that ArenaNet, which provides an online role-playing game with no subscription fee (Guild Wars), is one example that outdoes Stardock. But I don't like that game genre as much.

For that matter, MUD's were completely free. It was free public domain software that let you host your own MMORPG, and volunteers became wizards who developed/supported the game on their own free time. The whole idea of MMORPG's came from MUD.

Sorry I had to force you into it   



You should start by reading things a little better. First, There are 40+ people in the office, not necessarily all coders. Kryo isn't for starters. Second, I mentioned the list of coders *in DA*. Third, when DA was being developed, those things weren't fixed, and supposedly all the DA coders were working *then*, don't you think? DUH!!



That's part of the "deal", isn't it?



Those that provide patches for their games.



Just like yours isn't, just like everybody else's isn't. Doesn't stop me from laying down my idea of better, right? Just like other players.



Then don't read *this* thread. Why are you reading it? Your eyes aren't everyone's eyes too BTW.
Go read the threads about *all* the game imbalances, and *those* do affect gameplay in a significant way. Have they been addressed? Most are in the simple to fix category too. But this thread went on a tangent about silly things, and that's what I posted *here*. So easy on your replies, and read things in context. You wouldn't want to look silly.



Is this the part where I say I couldn't care less what you think?



What I'm saying is that since there's *so much* that needs to be fixed (and only if you're blind don't you see that), and people will always turn to time constraints to explain the lack of fixes, wouldn't it be better *for the game* to capitalize on that time? It's *my* opinion. It's not yours, but should I care about that when I'm posting?



Yep, real champions. Unique, no doubt.



Good for you. But let others do what they think is appropriate. For them.



Take your own conclusions then. I assume Brad can edit xml files, any 9 year old can.



Good for you again. I'm sure you learned a lot from them. But can you accept that some people *might* think that the time could be better spent on balancing the game?

Despite the surface appearance of disagreement, there isn't much more for me to say about most of ToS_Iceman's last (oops, actually second-to-last, I replied too slowly) post. The upgrade game mechanic is a judgment call currently decided in favor of player convenience at minor expense to game strategic integrity. If Torian reproduction is unrealistic, Yor reproduction is as least as much so, so who cares about realism there, just focus on game balance. No, I don't have the authority to decide what bugs Stardock will try to fix, but I can at least try to filter information a bit and hope Kryo has some use for that.



I didn't start this thread. (And remember that the original topic of this thread IS the all-factories/focus exploit, not all the other stuff you added.) Others think all-factories is broken too. So, I have considered the possibility that there is nothing to say, and rejected it.



Well, what else is there to discuss then? I made a falsifiable statement, you're too lazy to try to prove me wrong (no problem with that, there are higher priorities in life). We can leave it at that.

Purge brought that one up, and it is indeed strange if you analyse the numbers alone. Of course it's a game balance issue. But look at the flagship issue for example. That's not a balance issue. It *directly contradicts* the game rules. You don't have the techs, you can't build it. Period. And there are more in that category. Tell me you don't find that stupid (besides illegal).



Do you really think you'll save him any time whatsoever? In order for him to read your posts, he'll have to read the previous ones. Does he have you flagged as the triage man? Do you understand how silly what you're saying is? Kryo or anyone else in SD can think for themselves I'd say.



Neither did I. Purge went on a tangent (not pointing the finger at him, good thing he did) and I followed up on it. As for the OT, if it is in fact intentional, then it falls pretty much on the same category.



I've seen good players say it's fine in terms of gameplay, even if it is not intuitive. Like many other things about the game.

The point you don't seem to get, ToS, and that myself and others are trying to drive home is that from any other game developer, especially the major ones with tons of resources, you hardly ever get the devotion and support to the community that Stardock gives. In my opinion, people like you are the reason for that. When you provide too much community involvement, people seem to think that they can tell you what to do and demand things from you, and even attack your work ethic and time management, because they know you are listening. I am just overly tired of hearing that on these forums. So stop picking apart each post someone writes with statements like "That's part of the "deal", isn't it?" (by the way, it isn't the "deal" when you buy from major developers most of the time) and criticising the good portions of Stardock's business model. You are entitled to your opinion, but draw the line at attacking Stardock and its workers, especially for things that are good for the Galciv 2 community.

The point *you* don't seem to get is that different people have different experiences and interpretations. You talk about major developers, but you can't really compare. Else I'll point you to *freeware* sites, where developers work for *free*, on *free* games, with constant updates, and we're talking people that have *jobs* and code on their spare time - they're usually *very* small teams too. Their devotion is unprecedented, and I could even throw in my own experience with a small dev company, but I won't. So when I hear all this crap from people like you that don't seem to have a clue, I can only laugh. It's pathetic. Yes, there's a reason big developers don't interact with the community so much, and I'm sure that's not lost on SD. They're going that way, by their choice, and I'm sure they knew what they were getting into - they can't be too naive, contrary to players. Am I attacking their work ethic? When you sell a *space* *strategy* game, it's supposed to be about space, not civilization in disguise, and about strategy, not dumbed down choice. It's fine that they have their own views on sci-fi, but when they break their own rules in the game, that's not very ethical, is it? Their time management, I'm just counter-argumenting what *players* say about their time - did you read something else into it? I'll pick apart each and every post that uses stupid arguments to refute my opinions because the posters doesn't think before opening their mouths - err, attacking their keyboards. Take Dog of Justice for example, he's "triaging" posts here, but writing the *exact* same kind of posts in other threads - he needs a reality check, he just doesn't know it yet, he's too fired up to realise it. As for the "deal", major companies don't make such "deals", because they're smart. SD made that "deal", for business reasons clearly, so once they commit to it, they better uphold it or their credibility goes. That *you* think they should be given some slack, it's your opinion. It'd be mine too, if it worked even partially. It doesn't seem to, just like many other options, be them "business model" ones or not. These are matters of opinion, and individual confort. You can't please everyone, so you can't generalize either. What is awesome for one person (gfx, memory, non-drm) might be totally disastrous to another. There is no such thing as *one* galciv community. There are different people with different goals. None of this precludes having some real work done on basic issues with the game.

This thread is about *crazy* things in the game. I went with the spirit of it. Somewhere along the line (and not by *my* choice) it derailed. Champions of justice tend to have this effect. I'm not even sure why this discussion was distorted into looking like it was all about the upgrade thing, since it was just one item in two long lists. Sigh. Oh well. It's sad when a well spirited discussion ends up in a disputed debate.

The differences are,

(i) if you said that my other posts referred to low priority bugs, I would have agreed with you.

(i) I don't criticize the developers. If I was part of writing a game like this, would there be fewer bugs of this sort? Probably. There, I said it. But also, new features would be implemented more slowly, and I strongly suspect the overall effect on sales would be negative. Again, if you think that means Stardock has crappy programmers, and I'm an even crappier one, you're welcome to work on your own game.



It has worked for me in the past, with multiple developers. (The Master Gremlin rush in Heroes of Might and Magic III, and the research overflow bug in some patches of Civilization IV, are the two examples that spring to mind right now.) An adversarial approach is fine, but in my experience it's best combined with civility and respect.



Here's my perspective of the history of this thread:

(i) Mascrinthus makes the first post of the thread, remarking about all-factories and all-labs strategies being crazy.

(ii) Purge remarks that many other things are crazy. The implication is that the all-factories quirk is really not a big deal, in perspective.

(iii) I break down Purge's list, and assert that most (though not all) items are not of comparable importance to the effect of all-factories on the game. I also state my intuition that this strategy may not merely be a benign unintended consequence of focus, as far as I can tell it actually runs completely counter to something Brad wanted the production system to do. Thus there is a possibility that as soon as Brad understands precisely why all-factories and all-labs completely dominate any intermediate strategy, he'll want to change the situation.

All of this seems rational enough. Then things somehow degenerated.

I will readily concede that my hope may be naive. As I said earlier, if Brad ever specifically defends the focus status quo, then I'm obviously wrong. But it looks like he hasn't done it so far, at least, so there is some possibility that I'm right.

Some one posted an interesting treatise on all labs being superior to all factories. I have discovered that all basic factories with starbases is superior to all labs because of additional undocumented bonus production which is free - resulting in a measured bonus of .8 free to .2 at cost. This results in significantly cheaper research (not greater) which can (in special circustances) be entirely funded by trade revenue if your using the Korx with special abilities. (In summary) Leaving players with having to spend like a devil to get rid of all that extra money before your penalized - ergo building lots of fleet to protect those extremely VALUABLE starbases. If that isn't a crazy exploit then neither is anything else discussed so far!!! What does this mean??? How about a PQ15 moon world with +384% starbase bonuses, a CEC, a starport, a SE, a FDC, a QPS and the rest basic factories. Think 7B pop, 119bc income, 19bc maintenance, 61bc spending with 299mp, 13iu, 11 tp at 60/20/20 with 100% industry, 100% approval, and 69% tax rate ... now think 9x9 sector galaxy with 22 worlds in Korx control with a minor civ in the cluster contributing 2k per turn in trade with 2 other worlds one a 384% starbase bonus world with no planetary poduction bonuses, and the other a 288% starbase bonus world and of course the minor civ. Understand that the Korx have a 170% trade bonus and you'll realize how 1 minor civ can support an entire empire. The bonuses aren't great - you wont see a 17K research planet, but you will see a 17K+ income from trade with 1 minor civ (as you add more worlds on larger maps) and if you have the Galatic Privateer acheivement no ones going to disrupt your trade unless you are militarily outgunned and they walk all over your empire. All it takes is 1 minor civ in a sector where it is possible to build 20 starbases - 4 inside and 16 around it - which becomes YOUR TRADE NEXUS. Tell me that isn't outrageous. Just don't forget to build your manufacturing capital and economic capitals on one of the high bonus worlds and give the same techs to your pet minor civ so your starbases can compound the interest daily ... in this senario the economic "focus" far overshadows all the rest