[1.29][bug]AI is building cities on top of outposts.

Sometimes I think Stardock have finally managed to get FE to a stable state with no more bugs in core functionality, and then along comes a bug like this

I can't understand how such a thing can be possible - it shows that the game is totally wrong somewhere in its core design and that it will thus never get to a sensible state.

I think that's a tiny tad negative. 

I am using a beta version (1.29) after all.  If I choose to use it then I know there are probably undetected bugs.

AI can build cities on all sorts of places human players can't - rivers, shards, outposts, you name it.  Stardock needs to block all human non-allowed locations from ever being decided for the AI to use.

Doesn't the AI need all the help it can get ?

How come you think so positively? Have the movement point issues been fixed? Does saving a game work? I have not seen any reports about that, and those are absolute basics.

I think this conclusion suggests itself, even if we are talking about a beta version of the upcoming patch. After all, we are looking at version 1.29, not 0.79.

The game does feel somewhat unfinished, but weren't the Galciv games the same at release ? Hopefully Stardock will iron out the issues over time just the same...

Note the version before the dot.

And you've been around long enough to have seen earlier reports of this (kind of) bug - as StevenAus enumerates ...

IMHO this fix goes in the wrong direction. Instead, anything happening in the world must be under control of some kind of world manager, and that world manager decides whether settling (or building an outpost) is possible independent of which player tries to do it (human or AI).

It's the same for movement - if two stacks try to enter the same tile, the world manager decides whether to start combat or to stack them (or put them into one stack, if they are small enough and from the same player).

And - since the game is multi-threaded - movement must be serialized (easier) or at least coordinated to happen in the same thread (a bit harder) so that two stacks in the same tile can't happen by "lucky" timing.

Do you mean the fact that all members of a stack have the movement points of the stack, and the stack only has as many movement points as the member with the fewest points remaining?

This is a common design. While individual points would be useful, it's not a bug.

For me saving always works.

Loading a game also works if there is enough free memory.

I'll admit I haven't tried saving with a dialog open.

The bug is that destroying the "old" world when loading does not free the memory used by the old world - a classic leak. And no, despite being known since early WoM days (I think it was already there when I got WoM shortly after release), there is no trace of a fix. Any improvements here seem to come from the efforts to use less memory in general.

Exactly. But Frogboy explained in a different thread that it doesn't work that way and never will. Instead, human players are prevented from doing certain things by the UI, and the AI has to duplicate this behavior somehow.

I mean the fact that all members of a stack pay for the movement of a subgroup leaving the stack. Assume, for example, a stack where one unit has two movement points and another unit has four movement points. If the "slow" unit (with two movement points) spends one movement point to leave the stack (it does not matter how far it moves; only the first tile counts in this case), the other "fast" unit will pay for it with half of its own movement points. That is, it loses two movement points without moving.

I also mean the fact that all members of a stack lose movement points if another group joins them. If, in the example above, the "slow" unit moves back to join the "fast" unit, the fast unit will again lose movement points without moving. If the "slow" unit has one or zero movement points left, the movement points of the "fast" unit will be set to two or zero movement points accordingly.

Movement points are individual, they just don't work.

That depends on what you mean by "always works". Yes, it does save something but not necessarily the current state of the "world". For example, planned moves are executed and may even trigger the bug that hostile factions can end up on the same tile or that an unguarded lair is not looted. The improper cleaning you mention is a second bug.

All of this has been around since the public beta (as I was told) and has been reported several times. No acknowledgement from Stardock so far.

Yes, these sorts of bugs show things are poorly coded. Just like the ability for the AI to instantly raze captured settlements while the player has to wait 5 turns. All these checks should be going through common code. Mmilleder called it a world manager, I think it would probably be multiple different managers and rules engines but the concept is bang on, the logic should be centralised in some fashion and called by both the AI and player UI. Instead it appears the logic is coded separately for both which is why months after release we still have so much inconsistency.

Note that having the logic centralised wouldn't meant that the AI would necessarily play by the same rules as the player. Not at all, coders could easily code different behaviour into the centralised functions but they would have to do it deliberately instead of what we have now where most of the many differences in behaviour appear to be oversights due to the duplication of logic.

I should also say that this sort of code duplication isn't at all unusual in software development, you need a very good well disciplined team to do it properly. But it is still a bit disappointing.

Oh quit being a drama baby emo it's not that bad of a deal. It's not like it happens all the time in every game. Cry when YOU have something to cry about not when somebody else does.

*laughs* Oh, doesn't fanboism feel all warm n cozy?! This game ist fucked up in many ways (though not as many as WoM) and still people try to tell people who state things the way they are, they are just all negative n stuff... *rollseyes*

Yes, and that was bad enough. Shame on them that they're still releasing games with not fully thought through design (don't consider it unfinished).

That is why SD came up with the so called stand alone expansion Legendary Heroes. They're desperately trying to make the original game work the way it should have from scratch but realised that it is fucked up too bad. So they release it with an all new core design and sell it for half the original game's price again...

All this might sound "a tiny tad negative" now. But let me asure you that I like the game for what it is, enjoy playing it to a certain degree and I really do like a lot of aspects of it. Still, major flaws like AI heroes standing around doing nothing for ages, AI building on top of ressources outposts and other locations it should not be allowed to and the AI having no common sense at all let alone a consistent strategy are not only spoiling the fun but makes on ask oneself how much time SD spent actually testing the original game - especially the AI part.

Although I agree the game and especially the AI need more work, it's become standard industry practice to release games a bit early because games cost so much to develop. That's especially true for TBS games (remember the sorry state of Civ V when it came out ?), because let's face it - TBS players are a fringe group, dinosaurs from the long forgotten Microprose era... Nowdays the money's on FPS and to a lesser extent RTS (on PC that is, because the rage is now mobile devices). So let's not hit too hard on the few remaining TBS developers who allow our endangered specie to get its TBS fix

~ K