Galactic Civilizations III v4.1

Sounds good to me so far

Before anyone asks, it's not yet available as an opt-in at the time of this comment.  I just checked.  We'll have to wait until Derek adds informaiton about how to get the opt-in.  Hopefully, we can wait patiently.

There are good changes there.  Will there be more?  There are some important bugs that have existed for too long that really need to be fixed.  I regularly compile and report a list of problems that concern me.  Here is my latest list.

Even if few or none of them get fixed, I'll keep playing.  It's too hard to break the habit.

Have one problem with 4.01 just found ....

Play as the measured race - and my Citizen have all pictures from other Races (except the first Leader) ...

How open are you guys to UI improvements?

Its a lot of work to upgrade ships in a fleet, especially a fleet composed of smaller hulls. You have to select them one at a time, give them the order to upgrade, find the ship in a list you want them to upgrade to, repeat until all units are upgrading, then wait until all the upgrading is complete, then select them all again so you can order them to join a fleet. Its quite chore if you have 40 or more tiny hulls in a fleet that need upgrading.

Ctrl + a: Select all. It would make it much easier to select upgraded ships so you can make them join a fleet.

Hold Shift: Currently, this works like hold Ctrl (will allow to select multiple ships one at a time). Instead, it should allow you select 2 ships, and then the program will add all ships in between the 2 ships you selected to your selection.

Upgrade all ships in a fleet: Some times you only want to upgrade a fleet or two. Or maybe you can only afford to upgrade one or two fleets. There should be a way to focus the upgrade so it only applies to a fleet, and then maybe only to the point where you can afford it.

Keep ships in a fleet when upgrading: In GalCiv 2, ships that were upgrading were still kept in a fleet. They had only 1 hp and couldn't move until they were finished upgrading. Duplicating this would remove the need to select all upgraded ships so you could put them back into their fleet.

Boy! You guys are such teases!! I keep starting up the game, thinking I'll have to start a new game (no complaints as I'm currently getting my butt kicked) because the update is available... but nooooo. No worries, take your time and get it right but I AM looking forward to it.

We are planning to Optin later today.

I love your bug lists, thank you for putting it together.

I would love that! I try to go through the issues on the forums but honestly lists like Old Spiders are super helpful for being able to go through on a fix pass.

That was a bug??? I thought it's designed to attract attention to important planets ;)\

BTW, Good timing, I am almost done putting together my new PC. I got 32GB of ram, guess what was excuse why I need so much...

Lol. You have no idea how hard that issue was to fix, you are going to make our developers cry. The issue was a deep math problem where the worldspace coordinates would be slightly different and cause the screenspace coordinates to be placed slightly off frame to frame. Its sounds so minor, but it took a really big hammer to fix.

I was looking for something to do this afternoon, and I found this.  Good timing.

I try to do as much as possible to get information about a problem before reporting it.  This includes getting saves just before the problem occurs or that show the problem so whoever is working on fixing bugs doesn't have to try to find them.  It isn't always possible, so I try to provide as much information as possible to make it easier to find the bug.  I don't believe it helps to make posts like this:  "Hey Stardock!  [name of feature] is broken!!  FIX IT!!!"  I've seen a few posts like that.

I then try to keep a list of bugs that I find most annoying and post it occasionally.  This consolidates all the information in posts I have made into one document.

I left these two out of my latest list.

1.  AI ships are obsessed with attacking the drones/fighters/whatever they are that are automatically generated at planets when the right conditions are reached.  The ieasiest way to see this is to play as the Iconians and start wars with the other races.

2.  AI ships end their turn after combat, even if they have moves left.  This is best seen when an AI ship attacks any object protected by ships or when an AI ship attacks asteroid mines.  This means an AI ship will make one attack, then quit.

The report on the vibrating icons is interesting.  It shows there can be a big difference between finding a bug, finding out what is causing the bug and fixing the bug.

Enough commenting.  The opt-in has been downloaded for a while.  Time to test it.

I'm not using mods while testing this opt-in, but I have one that makes changes to some of the improvements, and this opt-in also makes changes to some of the improvements.

I decided to make sure my mod had all the changes in this version and found 23 improvements in this version that had the <IsIndestructible>true</IsIndestructible> tag in the ImprovementDefs file but did not have the Can not be destroyed text in the ImprovementText file.  The information for these improvements contradict each other.  I was only checking the ones for Retribution.  I have no idea what the Crusade and base versions have.

Here are the names of the improvements in the order in which they appear in the files.  The names shown are names that are the same in both files to make searching for them easier.  I have broken the list into groups of 5.

Brindlesobservatory
DimensionalObservatory
KimbreysRefuge
Bank_Name
BankingSector

MegaResort
KrynniacSanctuary
HyperionMatrix
NavigationCenter
GalacticNavigationNetwork

GalacticNavigatorsGuild
WeatherControlCenter
WeatherControlZenith
TempleofValor
AntimatterPowerPlant

AquaticBiospheres1
AquaticBiospheres2
AquaticBiospheres3
MonumentResistance
MonumentApproval

MonumentSoldiering
MonumentProduction
MonumentGlobal

An extra possible problem I found is that a City has both pieces of information indicating it is not destructible, but a Silicon City has none, which indicates it can be destroyed.  Is there a reason why one cannot be destroyed and the other can?

Yes. In Crusade, normal cities can't be destroyed while silicon cities can be. I don't know why that is the case.

I would like to be able to destroy normal cities because the AI sometimes picks some of the worst spots to place them in. Most other planet improvements can be destroyed.

At minimum the Yor should be given the ability to destroy cities. I agree that everyone should be able to do so, though.

Destroy cities? If the population of the planet is at max limit, what happens to the population the city enables? They'd have to vanish with the destroyed city, right? Otherwise it's another massively cheesy exploit.

Overloading a planet past its maximum population is already possible by shuttling people with colony ships. Any time a planet is over population cap, people start leaving/dying and the population goes down. I don't see the possibility of destroying cities as a serious way to exploit this versus shuttling people with colony ships.

It's a game with too much cheese as it is, why enable more? ALL Cities should be indestructible (didn't know about the silicon), and having the AI stick them in less than optimal places is a small price to pay for less cheese IMHO. 

It gets even worse when you invade planets belonging to synthetic civs such as the Yor. The Yor may increase their population all the to way to the max allowed by the planet quality without needing to use cities. This means that any planets taken from the Yor might see their populations decrease over time unless you quickly build cities to support the population.

My document is more or less done. I could add more to it, but then I might not get it out this month.

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/yg5gazcm7l04ch9fzhb0a/GalCiv-3-bugs-and-wanted-features-v4.01.1.odt?dl=0&rlkey=tymezbingulmhhj7gzsrun9za

If I had to pick 2, I would like for upgrading ships in a fleet to be improved and have the ability to import ship designs into existing games. If I got a third pick I would like for carriers to be improved as well.

I don't know if it's my imagination but turns seem to be going by much faster than in the past. That's a good thing. 

Is the AI more aggressive in this version? It seems that way.

On the downside, the turn information on the left is still disappearing.

Thanks, SD, for all your work,

Richard

Thank you! I'm going through all of it.

Is this thread a better place to report issues? I have made 3 different threads in the support section, and I have no idea if those issues have been acknowledged.

Please stick to the support section when reporting issues.

The game is very bad, the text boxes appear black, with nothing to read, dialog boxes 
appear where you must choose an option but because of the problem that the text 
is not visible you cannot choose anything, also from time to time it appears on 
the screen image processing texts and game processes which should not appear 
when playing because they block the view of the game itself

The missing text is because of certain folders not having been made during first time boot. You can fix it by running the game under admin once.

We are updating the FAQ for these common issues here.