What I Hate Most About SEIV
 

Oh this is going to be an ongoing list.

1. The AI, going from being a great ally to declaring war in one turn without cause. (NO, I am not a mega evil empire, in fact, I am in 9th place)

2. Lack of wheel mouse support.

3. SLOW --- SUPER SLOW turn times.

(1 down, 3 to go.)



[This message has been edited by Atrocities (edited 08 November 2001).]

Re: What I Hate Most About SEIV
 

1. Inability to save mid-turn in simultaneous games, you have to do your turn all at once.

2. When retrofitting, the screen that has the potential retrofit types includes those that cost more than 50% of the original design so you have to calculate manually to see if a design is valid for retrofit.

Re: What I Hate Most About SEIV
 

Well, if you dont want your planet list to show systems that you have marked as "avoid", then you must make sure there is a little green dot by the option, "no sys to avoid" in the planet list. Then you won't see any planets from avoided systems. But you've been here a while, so shouldn't you know that already?

[This message has been edited by apache (edited 07 November 2001).]

Re: What I Hate Most About SEIV
 

- When I sometimes assign a ship to a path for the upcoming movement (simultaneous movement) you don't always see the ship path/blue lines showing it's proposed route.

A pain when you come back to it and can't tell where you have sent it when you select it.

Re: What I Hate Most About SEIV
 

I still detest the cruddy attempt to make a "cool" looking interface. The SE III interface was light-years better. If the game play weren't so addicting I'd have gotten too annoyed to play for long. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif

Re: What I Hate Most About SEIV
 

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Baron Munchausen:
I still detest the cruddy attempt to make a "cool" looking interface. The SE III interface was light-years better. If the game play weren't so addicting I'd have gotten too annoyed to play for long. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif I know that most the people that knew SE3 before SE4, consider much better the SE3 interface.
We have complained many times about the features that had SE3 and we lost with SE4... and sadly I'm pretty sure that we'll have not luck.

Re: What I Hate Most About SEIV
 

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Well, if you dont want your planet list to show systems that you have marked as "avoid", then you must make sure there is a little green dot by the option, "no sys to avoid" in the planet list. Then you won't see any planets from avoided systems. But you've been here a while, so shouldn't you know that already?<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Good GOD! Um, so I missed that one.

Thanks for the tip, I appreciate you making a fool of me in public. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif Or was it I who made me a fool in public?

Re: What I Hate Most About SEIV
 

Okay, here's one, and I did write to Malfador long BEFORE 1.49 came out with this suggestion.

One example of losing all the population is a plague. If all the population dies off and you re-colonize, all the buildings seem to have been killed off by the plague too. WTF???

Buildings should remain once they are built!

Re: What I Hate Most About SEIV
 

Next/previous ship buttons cannot be changed to skip fighters. If you have loose Groups of fighters in every system for defense, you get nuts with hitting space.

Re: What I Hate Most About SEIV
 

Mark your fighter group with a sentry order and everything is fine. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif

Re: What I Hate Most About SEIV
 

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by [K126]Mephisto:
Mark your fighter group with a sentry order and everything is fine. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif

<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Thank you very, this brings the "F" button in Civilization back to my mind http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif

Re: What I Hate Most About SEIV
 

I don't mind the slow turns so much because it gives me a chance to get a new beer or see a man about a horse.

But...

The AI is probably the biggest annoyance. I completely understand that no AI is actually better than humans, but come on...a little consistency (as Atrocities pointed out). I like to role play, as do many here, but it is hard, unless you really use your imagination, to explain away some of their actions.

Seems like the best ones are either ultra friendly or ultra mean. Ones in the middle, flip back and forth so fast they never get ahead.

The worst of all are the neutral empires. I have time and time again tried to help the little guys. Once I even built a sphereworld for one neutral, just for fun. I gifted it to them and they declared war on me several turns later. I've also tried to gift neutrals ships. I once gifted one neutral empire 20 dreadnoughts, so as to be a heavily militarized buffer zone, but the next turn all the ships were gone. It was a full tech game, so they had nothing to gain other than resources by scrapping them. Stupid.

Re: What I Hate Most About SEIV
 

Sort Sort Sort.

Why can't we sort. Scrolling sucks.

How about a history file for intel.

Where was that supply base in system x 8 turns ago????

How about a retro fit all ships of this class button. ( If ships are not at bases they head home to be retro fitted )

And show all system wide abilities on the map.

I won't mention the combat OPPPPPPPPS just did

------------------
Utinam logica falsa tuam philosophiam totam suffodiant!

Re: What I Hate Most About SEIV
 

How hard it is to get a fleet to capture a defended planet in a PBW game without glassing it first... Arrgh!

Re: What I Hate Most About SEIV
 

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by taterbill:
How hard it is to get a fleet to capture a defended planet in a PBW game without glassing it first... Arrgh!<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Not very hard... at least to me! http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/ima...ons/icon12.gif I have conquered a lot of small colonies.

Re: What I Hate Most About SEIV
 

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Master Belisarius:
Not very hard... at least to me! http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/ima...ons/icon12.gif I have conquered a lot of small colonies.

<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Can you post a recipe, please? I've made it work, but neither reliably nor gracefully. Suppose I'm moving in with a fleet containing both attack ships and loaded troopships -- what orders do I give? What settings? Do I break up the fleet, or keep it together? Any pointers would be appreciated.


------------------
Not *that* button!

Re: What I Hate Most About SEIV
 

Tesco.... When you say sort.

On the planets screen, clicking the name of each column will sort the planets, change the filter to get access to the different things.

This works on ships, colonies, queues and probably some other windows.
It would be nice to be able to specify how everything is sorted but numerical stuff is sorted either from most to least or visa versa.

Re: What I Hate Most About SEIV
 

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by vreln:
Can you post a recipe, please? I've made it work, but neither reliably nor gracefully. Suppose I'm moving in with a fleet containing both attack ships and loaded troopships -- what orders do I give? What settings? Do I break up the fleet, or keep it together? Any pointers would be appreciated.
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

If you change the fleet strategy to Capture Planet, and keep your ships withouth break the formation, usually you will take over the planets (first the attack ships try to kill the weapon platforms if exist, and then, the Troop trasnport drop the Troops.
Remember that the ship with the troops must be designed with the type "Troop Transport".

Re: What I Hate Most About SEIV
 

I can't think of anything I hate about SE IV, just a few annoyances. Most of them have already been mentioned in this thread.

The one that most immediately comes to mind (since I just saw it happen again today):

When ships are abandoned for lack of maintenance, sometimes a satellite group is abandoned, even though sats don't have any maintenance cost.

------------------
Cap'n Q
My first SE IV mod! Hypermaze quadrant
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the
human mind to correlate all of its contents. We live on a placid
island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was
not meant that we should go far. -- HP Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

Re: What I Hate Most About SEIV
 

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Master Belisarius:
If you change the fleet strategy to Capture Planet, and keep your ships withouth break the formation, usually you will take over the planets (first the attack ships try to kill the weapon platforms if exist, and then, the Troop trasnport drop the Troops.
Remember that the ship with the troops must be designed with the type "Troop Transport".

<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

If your fleet consists entirely of ships all of which have both troops and weapons, should you designate all of your ships as troop transports? Will their weapons be used against the planet's defenses?

Re: What I Hate Most About SEIV
 

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Slaughtermeyer:
If your fleet consists entirely of ships all of which have both troops and weapons, should you designate all of your ships as troop transports? Will their weapons be used against the planet's defenses?<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Yes, I think that you should designate all of them as troop transport.
About the weapons, I don't know... probably they would use the weapons if fail to take over the planet.
Anyway, IMHO, you should have different ships designs for your attack ships and troop transports.

Re: What I Hate Most About SEIV
 

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Master Belisarius:
Yes, I think that you should designate all of them as troop transport.
About the weapons, I don't know... probably they would use the weapons if fail to take over the planet.
Anyway, IMHO, you should have different ships designs for your attack ships and troop transports.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

That's another thing I hate about SEIV, too much "I think that you should..." "I don't know...probably" and "IMHO you should have" when trying to figure out basic game functions that should have been explained in the manual. I did a test and found out that ships designated as attack ships will indeed drop troops.



[This message has been edited by Slaughtermeyer (edited 12 November 2001).]

Re: What I Hate Most About SEIV
 

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Master Belisarius:
Not very hard... at least to me! http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/ima...ons/icon12.gif I have conquered a lot of small colonies.

<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Yes, I've managed to take a couple lightly defended small colonies also.

But taking a homeworld is pretty much impossible. Any fleet strong enough to get past the weapons platforms, defending ships, satellites, etc. will invariably glass the planet before the troops land.

Or, you try some different strategy and then the ships don't do enough damage to the homeworld, and your 100 troops get annihilated trying to take on all 4 billion of the population.

In tactical combat, I could bombard the planet until, say, 500M population was left, then send in the starship troopers. Simple. If you know a strategy to reliably accomplish that in strategic combat, then please share.

The strategy dialogs allow you to say "bombard planets until 70%" or whatever - the problem is, it doesn't work. Your ships bombard the planet until it is 70%, then they look around for more targets, and finding none, return to the planet to continue scouring it of all traces of civilization.

To me, this is the one glaring gameplay problem that desperately demands attention. All my other complaints are merely cosmetic or easily worked around.

Well, at least I feel better getting it off my chest...

Bill

Re: What I Hate Most About SEIV
 

Will the ships blow away the planet if the troop landing is a stalemate?

If not, use 2-3 Large Transports full of heavily shielded troops.

I was a race with 50% ground combat, and I took an 8Billion pop planet that way. First load had 375 troopers, second boat was a smaller transport, with only 125 or so. My troops got whittled down over 5 turns, and at the end, my troops lost by the slimmest margin (&lt;10% of the militia survived)

The key is that militia don't regenerate unless there are no foreign troops waging war on the surface.

So, if one boatload of troopers can survive 10 rounds of ground combat, dump 1000 of 'em on the planet and wait.

If you break up your fleet into squads, with each troop transport as leader, you can probably get all the transports to drop and run, while under cover of the warships (use a formation with the leader in the middle)

Re: What I Hate Most About SEIV
 

S_J,

Your post brings to mind a off-topic question I've had in my mind for a while. What is the formula for calculating how many militia will be on a planet? And what are the statistics of a militia?

It would be nice to be able to know what I'm about to go up against.

Thanks,

Bill

Re: What I Hate Most About SEIV
 

See settings.txt for the exact numbers, but IIRC, there is:
1 militia for every 10 to 100 million.
Militia have 1:4 firepower:hitpoint ratio.
Probably 10 damage, 40 hitpoints.

I'll look it up when I get home, and edit this post in about 3 hours.

Re: What I Hate Most About SEIV
 

Research. I much prefer the way research was handled in SE3. That was one of the best features in the game. I don't like this "all or nothing" method in SE4. Although, it does work nicely for Intel.

------------------
"You don't know the Power of the Dark Side. I must obey my Master"

Re: What I Hate Most About SEIV
 

What the heck are militia?

You mean the population of a planet actually defend it like troops would? And how formidable are they? How many troops are sufficient to take over a medium-population planet. (Medium troops, filled with Ground Cannon III)

I thought I'd be able to simply pop my troops down there and take over the planet.

Glad I found out about these now, I'm about to launch my planet-conquering fleet.

Re: What I Hate Most About SEIV
 

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Slaughtermeyer:
That's another thing I hate about SEIV, too much "I think that you should..." "I don't know...probably" and "IMHO you should have" when trying to figure out basic game functions that should have been explained in the manual....<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Sorry, but that is one of the things I like MOST about this game - figuring it all out. The game has so much depth (in game and in modding) that it takes a long time (and a lot of questions) to get stuff figured out. If it was easy to figure out and get the pattern that won all the time, it would quickly bore me and I'd find something else to play...

Just my (humble) $.02....

Re: What I Hate Most About SEIV
 

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>What the heck are militia?
You mean the population of a planet actually defend it like troops would? And how formidable are they? How many troops are sufficient to take over a medium-population planet. (Medium troops, filled with Ground Cannon III)
I thought I'd be able to simply pop my troops down there and take over the planet.
Glad I found out about these now, I'm about to launch my planet-conquering fleet.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>You may want to add some defense to those troops, otherwise they'll be cut down faster than you can say "oops" http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/ima...ons/icon12.gif One tiny shield generator III provides 60 hitpoints!

But aside from that, militia are insignificant for planets of less than 500Mil or so. They will prevent a half-baked capture attempt, so you'll need a dedicated transport design, even if its only a destroyer hull.

Be sure to bring at least 50 troops to any planet capture, large planets will require hundreds of troopers, or planetary bombardment.

Planetary militias will be fully restored to their original size whenever your landing forces are completely defeated.
If your troops hold out for 10 rounds, you can drop additional reinforcements from a second (or third or fourth) ship.

If your first transport's troopers are wiped out, don't bother sending the second one in, since it will suffer the same fate against the same conditions.
If the first troopers are still there, the second wave faces fewer militia and enjoys a larger attack force. Keep dropping reinforcements until you win.

With a decent ground combat racial characteristic, a single Large Transport, filled with 375 Troops should be more than sufficient for most worlds, and a second transport can be used for homeworld assault.

Re: What I Hate Most About SEIV
 

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by MegaTrain:
You mean the population of a planet actually defend it like troops would? And how formidable are they? How many troops are sufficient to take over a medium-population planet. (Medium troops, filled with Ground Cannon III)<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

If you're playing against a human, make sure to check your opponent's ground combat racial characteristic. A lot of players drop it to 50% in order to get extra racial points to spend on other things, but this makes them extremely vulnerable to invasion; the 50% reduction applies to militia number as well as militia combat ability.

From what I've seen, when a player drops his ground combat ability to 50% you only need _one quarter_ as many troops to take his planets as you would if he was at 100%, and conversely he'd need _four times_ as many troops to take over one of your own planets. Such players make excellent sources of slave labour. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif

Re: What I Hate Most About SEIV
 

4. How this game sucks up my free time like a 4 year old taking on a milk shake.
5. How this game never lets me sleep for I am always stuck at "just one more turn."
6. I hate the fact that no matter how hard I try to get people to buy this game, some people are just to lame to get it. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon9.gif

Re: What I Hate Most About SEIV
 

My pet peeve, shared by my play by email friends, is that once you finish your turn, the game exits to Windows. If you are the host and have just gotten a few turns sent in, you have to start all over again and run the next game. Then it shuts down and you have to restart before you play your turn. And so on. Not a big deal, but annoying. And no, PBW does not suit our arrangement, we like PBEM better.

Re: What I Hate Most About SEIV
 

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>My pet peeve, shared by my play by email friends, is that once you finish your turn, the game exits to Windows. If you are the host and have just gotten a few turns sent in, you have to start all over again and run the next game. Then it shuts down and you have to restart before you play your turn. And so on. Not a big deal, but annoying. And no, PBW does not suit our arrangement, we like PBEM better.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>PBW doesn't change this. You still exit to desktop after your turn is saved.

------------------
Cap'n Q
My first SE IV mod! Hypermaze quadrant
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the
human mind to correlate all of its contents. We live on a placid
island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was
not meant that we should go far. -- HP Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

Re: What I Hate Most About SEIV
 

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by capnq:
My pet peeve, shared by my play by email friends, is that once you finish your turn, the game exits to Windows. If you are the host and have just gotten a few turns sent in, you have to start all over again and run the next game. Then it shuts down and you have to restart before you play your turn. And so on. Not a big deal, but annoying. And no, PBW does not suit our arrangement, we like PBEM better.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>


You can use the LAN helper to host your PBEM games.

You point it to a folder and a game in it and it monitors the .plr files submitted there. Once you have all it needs to generate the next turn, it starts SE4 form command line and puff - the new turn is generated.

And yes, you can run several of them on one machine if you host several games.


[This message has been edited by Aub (edited 13 November 2001).]

Re: What I Hate Most About SEIV
 

What I hate the most about SEIV is not the combat, lack of tcpip play, nor the intel.

I hate the fact that the game is so addictive. Thanks for getting me in trouble only a couple of times with my wife. I think she cringes every time she hears 'the mail the mail is here'. Then within 5 minutes I am in doing a turn. Yep can't stand that part. Saying 'Sphere world by March 2002' and knowing that a couple hundred pbemers are thinking that is 80 turns away so he must have.............

------------------
Utinam logica falsa tuam philosophiam totam suffodiant!

Re: What I Hate Most About SEIV
 

What I hate the most is everytime I play the game, I find some new and stupid trick or feature I missed the previous 4 and a half billion times I played the game before that makes me slap myself.

------------------
HADRIAN T. AVENTINE
admin@spaceempires.org
Administrator | SpaceEmpires.org

Re: What I Hate Most About SEIV
 

Woah; Hadrian is back.

Re: What I Hate Most About SEIV
 

My major complaint about SE IV is the tactical AI. It tends to charge in and forget the self preservation thing. But I suppose that if everyone is using the same tactical AI it's not that big of a problem.

Re: What I Hate Most About SEIV
 

I'm only back at limited capacity for just now. I hope to be at full capacity soon.



------------------
HADRIAN T. AVENTINE
admin@spaceempires.org
Administrator | SpaceEmpires.org