Re: SE5 Demo Bug Reports
 

Yeah. Which is why I still use the example flags I made instead of the internal sizing option. Smaller than the small option, and still legible.

Re: SE5 Demo Bug Reports
 

More importantly it resizes the flag without resizing the status bar for number of ships etc.

Re: SE5 Demo Bug Reports
 

This has already been mentioned, but I think it is very important to fix therefore I report it again:
The point defense efficiency depends on the selected combat speed.
I had two identical ships firing with only seekers and point defense (blasters). At combat speed 1x all incoming seekers were destoyed by the point defense and no damage occured. By incresing the combat speed at 2x (without changing anything else, ships not moving at all) the point defense got leaky and the ships were damaged.

Re: SE5 Demo Bug Reports
 

I added some emphasis on that problem in my latest bug report... so we'll see what happens.

Re: SE5 Demo Bug Reports
 

Aside from re-echoing some the "Access violation" bugs that have been previously mentions, I have a few more "bugs" to add:

1. No ship strategies.
Choose quick start. Able to choose strategies for newly created ships (good). Start new game, create new empire. Unable to choose ship strategies and all ship appear to have "don't get hurt" as default, colonizers or attack ships with DUC's (didn't try missile ships).

2. Error during setup.
Choose quick start. No errors. Again, start new game, create new empire. During Galaxy creation receive a Data File error "Unable to load data file C:\Program Files\Strategy First\Malfador Machinations\Space Empires V Demo\Empires\"" (Yes, there was a " symbol after the Empire subfolder).

3. Unable to access ship mounts.
After discovering Ship Mounts, either from start (Create new empire) or by research in mid-game, I receive an "Access Violation at 006F0F1E" when clicking on the "None" in the Component Mounts menu of the Create Ship menu.

4. Odd blue box graphics.
In “Create Empire” menus, the area for choosing atmosphere and Planet type is a streaky blue box. In the “Design Ship” menu, the view of the hull is a number of similar streaky blue boxes. Neither of these are fatal, since the streaky boxes in the Design Ship are slightly different for Armor slots, Inner and Outer hull. In the Research menu, the bar that should be filling up with accumulated research is a blue streak with a off-set purple overlay.

System
Windows XP
AMD Duron
952 MHz
256 RAM
Direct X 9.0
Rage Pro Turbo AGP 2X video card
28 Gb free Hard drive

File
Downloaded se5_demo_v100_091106.exe from Filefront

Re: SE5 Demo Bug Reports
 

Hi all,

Well I'm excited about SEV. So there. As far as the ship, planet and fleet tags being too big, I just jig left or right with the arrow keys to see behind. Doesn't seem that big a deal to me.

I immediately tried to create a ship capture race, as that was a little buggy in SEIV. In space simulation the capturing ships would close, launch some little grey/white packets (presumably space marines) and run. The little packets swarmed around the ships, but did not ever succeed in taking any. Little exclamation points would pop up every once in a while, but I dont'know what they're supposed to indicate. The crew quarters of the swarmed ships did not sustain ANY damage, even when outnumbered 10 to 1.

Hope this can be fixed. Could it just be an error in the data files (ie. crew quarters too strong/space marines too weak)?

Re: SE5 Demo Bug Reports
 

I've found an interesting bug involving a colinize ship.
If you issue a colonize command on a planet with a colonizer after it has no movement left, and only after you cancel it's current orders, it wil move an extra space.
So by cancel order, colonize, cancel order, colonize, etc. You can colonize as far as you can see in one turn.

Also I'm running Vista and encountered a bug involving the mouse cursor being very unresponsive. By changing the resolution from being 32 bit to 16 bit seemed to fix it for me.

I've also found at empire creation, using the Naturally Depressed option for -500 and the Emotionless for 1000 to be interesting.

And the only minor annoyance is the whole having no intelligence output at the end of a turn, and it stating that 100% of your intelligence hasn't been allocated.

Re: SE5 Demo Bug Reports
 

Oh, another thing on UI:

There is no slider for intelligence/spying. As a result I had to click the mouse 99 times to allocate all my resources to "internal security". It didn't even have the "hold it down and it will count up automatically" feature.

Re: SE5 Demo Bug Reports
 

jimbob: click directly on the slider and it'll set at that level. Alternately, shift-click will add 10 points at a time.

Re: SE5 Demo Bug Reports
 

For research, I'd like a "<something>-click" to increment the research time (.1, .2, .3, .4, etc) instead of the %s.

Bug: adding cargo in simulator is broken
 

BUG: In combat simulator, if you click on a ship that has been added to combat (before starting combat!) you can add cargo to it. (Use the Add Cargo button.) So I made a drone-launching cruiser and went to add drones to it. I had encountered another race and one of their sat designs was in the list of possible things to add, just below my drone design. But every time I clicked on the drone to add it, the program also added an alien sat. Then I had to click on the alien sat in my cargo bay to get rid of it. In addition, raising the amount of cargo to add had NO effect. So adding 8 drones to cargo took 16 clicks instead of only 2 or 3 clicks if things had worked. Now imagine if this had been a real game, and it was turn 150! Instant carpal tunnel.

Question: How to make drones work?
 

In the combat simulator, I can't figure out how to get drones to attack the enemy. They just sit there.

Re: Question: How to make drones work?
 

Dmm:

It's *technically* not a bug, but the the add cargo function needs to be improved in the simulator certainly. It should be on the to-do list.

Drones with warheads are not working properly in the demo. If they have regular weapons they should work ok.

Re: Question: How to make drones work?
 

They don't. They'll shoot, but they won't move.

Design Flaw: Sucker missile ships
 

Missiles can't target drones, and drones can outrun ships. Therefore, ships with only missiles are easy prey to drones. The obvious solution is to put a few PDC or direct-fire weapons on the missile ship. Here is the design flaw: A crucial advantage of missile ships is that they can stay out of range of direct-fire ships. But if you have such weapons on your mainly-missile ship, it will use them to attack any drones EVEN IF THAT BRINGS THE SHIP WITHIN RANGE OF ENEMY MAIN GUNS (thus violating the "Maximum Range" orders). It's like bees to honey; they can't help themselves. And, to make matters worse, the drones can have few engines and lots of armor. So they quickly fall behind the main enemy fleet, causing the mainly-missile ships to run RIGHT THROUGH the line of enemy capital ships, subjecting themselves to devastating point-blank main-gun salvos in their mindless hatred of drones.

Note that you only need one drone, and that it has no purpose other than being bait, so it only needs one engine.

This exploit probably works with fighters and sats too. Sats would be particularly cost-effective.

Note that I am also assuming that the drone-launching fleet has sufficient PDC (or sufficient ships) to withstand the initial missile onslaught.

Re: Design Flaw: Sucker missile ships
 

That can be remedied by adjusting the strategy for missile ships to target only other ships.

Re: Design Flaw: Sucker missile ships
 

Wouldn't that prevent the point defense from working?

Re: Design Flaw: Sucker missile ships
 

Good question. If so, how about this instead: remove the point defence entirely, create a ship with only point defence, set it to defend (picket?) the missle ships. Would that work?

Re: Design Flaw: Sucker missile ships
 

A ship will NOT fire at anything its told not to engage, even in self-defense. So your missile ship PDCs would hold fire except at incoming missiles.

EDIT: if you stick seekers, drones, and such at the bottom of the priority list and make sure Type is one of the targeting priorities, the ship should stay away, though..

Re: Design Flaw: Sucker missile ships
 

sounds like the targeting priorities need to be split into "targets of opportunity/in range targets" and "primary/actively pursued targets"... (not to mention different targeting priorities for different weapon types). Of course, I could be very wrong.

Re: Design Flaw: Sucker missile ships
 

Aren't PDCs auto-fire for any valid targets - that's why I suggested removing drones from the target list. But if you're going to use direct fire weapons, then like Phoenix-D said, make sure ships are first priority.

Re: Design Flaw: Sucker missile ships
 

No, PDCs will not fire (on fighters, at least) if the unit is set to Not Engage.

Re: Design Flaw: Sucker missile ships
 

I'm not seeing the "Drone bait" problem with the default strategies. Are you using custom ones?

Re:
 

I've been thinking about the Reserved for Intel Defense clicker... and I know about the shift-click that increases it by 10% and the complaints about warnings when there is zero Intel point production.
Anyway, I think it should be made a slider... a two color Slider... One color is the "Reserved For Defense" that the player can set, and the other color would be for unspent Intel points that would automatically get added to Defense.

RE: Enhancement requests
 

UI Interface Enhancement requests

- Add an additional display of news that has each item taking up even less space than they do without the images.

- Add a display of the Supply and Ordanance for planets when viewing them from the default screen. Feel free to decrease the amount of space the Resource fields take up.

- Add small icons so that when you click on a sector and it lists the fleets, planets, ships, satellite groups.... etc... you can see their status..... (Just like SE IV did)

- When transfering population to a ship, include the Millions of people as well as the amount of space they take. (Just like SEIV)

- Supplies and Ordance should be treated exactly like Cargo. Why can't I fill a cargo hold full of supplies and ordance to be delivered around the galaxy? Supplies and Ordance stored in this way, can't be used to resupply ships in fleets. Perhaps add a component that can transfer supplies from cargo to usable.

- Add Mood and Reproduction to the planet default display. Keep it simple. Go off of the lowest mood of the planet, either color code the population figure or add an icon next to it... smilie face, frowns... etc... For reproduction, an up arrow, down arrow or dash next to the population. This is determined by the overall change that would occur given the values of each race..... I'm assuming you can have negative migration? If not, perhaps an overall average of the percentages.

- When in the Fleet Transfer screen, the first ship and first fleet listed should automatically be selected.

- Condense the lists of troops, satellites, etc... just like SEIV did.

- Do not itemize the construction of each Unit that is built. Just like SEIV did

- When turning on Repeat Build, have a multiplication appear next to items in the list that will be built multiple times within a single turn.

- I'm unable to find it, but there is an icon that appears over ships that appear heavily damaged. The icon is a red barrel with a deep red or yellow (can't remember) X in the lower left corner. Anyway, when I place my cursor over it, the tooltip of what it is doesn't display.

- Overall, descrease the width of fields displayed in the various screens. Descreasing them will allow players to display more of them on the screen at once.

- Add a horizontal scroll bar for the various screens, since you are able to list more columsn of data than can fit on the screen.

Re: RE: Enhancement requests
 

Your suggestions are funny. I think I've made screenshots for almost every item you list that I've sent to MM.

Migration only goes from high to low - it's like osmosis. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif

Re: RE: Enhancement requests
 

I've noticed that Ordnance is not used during the combat screen, but shows up depleted after a battle.

Re: RE: Enhancement requests
 

Ok, girly whining here, but since this the minor annoyances thread...

In the demo, if you are going thru the tutorial, the "T" key toggles the tutorial window on/off. Unfortunately, it's always working so if you want to name a ship something that has a "T" in the name, you get no T, but you do toggle the tutorial window.

This would be a total zero for me and I wouldn't have even mentioned it save for one thing: It appears that SE:V allows user-created scenarios, based on my looking at the tutorial data files. If the "T" key will be used for user-created scenarios, this should be fixed. I see great potential for user-created scenarios. More research needed on how easy they are to create and how many things could be controlled in-game.

Re: SE5 Demo Bug Reports & Annoyances/Requests
 

I'll just echo the access violations, seemingly random, but most likely to occur in the ship design screen, and most likely to occur there when holding the shift key and adding multiple components. I have turned off one of the CPU's, doesn't seem to matter. Getting them waaaaay to frequently.

WIN XP SP2
Pentium D CPU 2.8 GHZ
1 G RAM
Radeon X300 128 Meg
Over 200 giggles of HD space free!

Re: RE: Enhancement requests
 

I haven't looked at the scenario creating for SE5 yet, but in SE4 also had the T button to toggle the tutorial, and it also had user-creatable scenarios, but the T button was hard coded to only work for the tutorial. It did not function in the user-created scenarios.

Re: RE: Enhancement requests
 

When you try to conquer a enemy colony frequently the population is killed and a colony with 0 population is left. This can happen (but it is too often IMO) and not itself a bug. However this ghost colony cannot be destroyed even if you give the specific attack order. That IMO is a bug. I read that you can occupy this empty colony by dropping population on it. However you still should have the option to just nuke it.

Re: RE: Enhancement requests
 

If you colonize a planet with foreign population that breathe a different atmosphere, which matches this planet, you should of course get an undomed colony. However always 1M of your original population is added (migration I suppose) which gives then a domed colony!
You as a human player can commit mass murder by jettison your original population into space to get back the undomed colony. But I am pretty sure the AI will never do that.

Re: RE: Enhancement requests
 

It's actually not from migration. Migration only moves from high to low and only to breathable planets.

It's from the auto colonization amount in settings.txt ...

Re: RE: Enhancement requests
 

So you can turn that off. That is good news. I would then suggest that the standard value is 0.

Re: RE: Enhancement requests
 

I will give migration props though. It makes population management so easy. Population increases really quickly on breathable planets without having to micromanage population transports and you don't lose any population from your homeworld being at the maximum population amount as many will migrate elsewhere.

When you capture races of different atmospheres - they'll start migrating to planets of their type, which you can then remove your own population and then make them undomed - reducing 50% of the work required to do this in SE:IV or if you prefer to just jettison your own people into space it's 100% reduction. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif

Re: RE: Enhancement requests
 

I agree completely that migration is a good feature of SE V.
I was talking about the auto colonization amount that I would set to zero as standard.
What just gets very important IMO is that the population minister/AI can handle the migration benefits from foreign population and removes unwanted races from a colony to undome it.

Re: RE: Enhancement requests
 

Well, the auto-colonization could be left alone- just make it so when you colonize with people already in the hold, it doesn't add that amount.

Re: Design Flaw: Sucker missile ships
 

I did change the default strategy for "max range," because the default strategy was faulty. Instead of staying at max range for every enemy ship (if they could), missile ships were only staying at max range for the ship they were currently attacking. So, of course, once that ship's engines got damaged and it fell behind the rest of its fleet, the missile ships would allow themselves to come within range of the (undamaged) untargetted enemy ships. And they would quickly get destroyed. (The problem is quite similar to the "drone bait" problem.)

But, if I remember correctly, all I did was switch the order of preferred targets to put "nearest enemy" at the top of the list, and had them "break formation immediately." This causes ships with long-range weapons to stay out of range of everyone else (assuming equal engine technology). It doesn't work perfectly for larger vessels because (like all SEV ships on autopilot) they fail to account for the time it will take them to turn tail and run after coming within range. Therefore they start their turn too late and this allows the enemy to get off a shot or two at extreme range. But it works much better than the disastrous default "max range" setting. In practice, it makes ships with longer-range weapons almost invincible to other ships with the same engine tech.

Re: Design Flaw: Sucker missile ships
 

That's why, then. Move Target Type near the top of the list and put drones down near the bottom of the Target Type list, and it should solve that issue.

As far as I can tell what the ship is doing is looking at its PDCs and saying "Hmm, what's the nearest target these can shoot at?" There's only the one drone and thus..off it goes!

Re: Design Flaw: Sucker missile ships
 

I agree with your second paragraph, but your solution in the first paragraph won't help. It MIGHT help for drones but leaves the underlying problem uncorrected, which is that there is a bug in the way targets are selected. When you pick "max range from nearest target," the computer SHOULD use the max range of the longest-range weapon that can target any enemy. But it doesn't. (Certainly not with PDCs, and my guess is not with other weapons.) My missile ships dutifully stay at max PDC range from the enemy drones as they attempt to pick them off with PDC. Meanwhile, they fire their missiles at the nearest enemy ship, so they clearly know about the enemy ships and their distances. But the max PDC range is over-riding the max missile range, even though it is smaller. That's a bug. I don't think it is solvable by tweaking strategies. (If it is, then the default settings for the max range strategy are wrong, which is still a bug, although a more-easily fixed one.)

Re: Design Flaw: Sucker missile ships
 

Well, it doesn't happen with the standard max range strategy, so it CAN be fixed.

EDIT: and yeah, that's a problem with any tactical AI. If you set it up like you said, you'd get the opposite problem- a ship armed with, say, Ripper Beams would stay at PDC range. Blag.

At least they don't friendly fire each other. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif

Max Range
 

Whatever software algorithm is used for "Max Range," it should work out to "as much as possible, stay as far away from danger as you can while still being able to attack the enemy." As a human being, it is not too hard to figure out what to do in every situation as it comes up. But it is hard to think of an algorithm that covers all reasonable cases. If you can figure out the algorithm used, you can usually find a horrible weakness. However, the current algorithm seems particularly bad and should be improved. It is too easily exploited.

Re: Design Flaw: Sucker missile ships
 

See my earlier post explaining why I changed the standard max range strategy. In brief, it is monumentally stupid, making long-range weapons worthless for anything but 1-on-1 fights.

Re: Design Flaw: Sucker missile ships
 

But that's apples and oranges -- RBs are not a long-range weapon, so if your ship mainly had RBs you wouldn't set the strategy to MaxRange. However, if the ship was mainly intended to be a PDC ship and the RB was just to provide some last-ditch defense against close-in enemies, then you might choose MaxRange strategy, and then the behavior you describe would be exactly what you want.

Bugging out
 

Sorry to cut off the discussion, but I gotta go. No more responses until at least Monday.

Did I mention that SEV is very fun and addictive?

Re: Access Violations
 

I had been setting system affinity to 1 CPU only and having frequent access violations. I stopped doing that and have played about 25 turns without an access violation now. So try everything I guess is my point. I don't have any suggestions or other reports that haven't already been made. I'm sure things will be improved, but I'm liking SEV overall and looking forward to the journey!

Re: Access Violations
 

This might seem a small annoyance,but I can't put capital letters when naming ships,etc.

Re: Access Violations
 

When you want to rename a ship design, it should give you the existing name to edit.

Re: Access Violations
 

I am able to use capital letters all the time AAshbery. Sounds like a system issue you're having.

Re: Access Violations
 

I too have no problem with using capitals naming either ships or units.