Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Felius]

As it is right now you can just churn out massive quantities of ships unless you put a hard cap on game settings.

You really can't, unless your economy can support it or the ships are fairly small. Your proposed solution, as pointed out, would just favor building larger ships.

Or it is so in the end game, that a mighty fleet of a few dozen 3000 scale monstrosities is used as an escort, and its cost only pocket change.

[KaguroDraven]

Yes, but that's End Game, it's supposed to have that kind of awesomeness.

[Orb]

So, I just finished playing a 4 player game, with three normal AIs, and thought I post some of the bugs I remember.


1) When you pick the Eusocial Society race trait, AIs still send you diplomacy requests asking for luxury/goods, which you can't produce.

2) When you are at war, AIs sometimes send diplomacy requests that, if refused, they will declare war on you, even though you are already at war.

3) When you have ships in a system of an exploding star jump gate out before the shock wave reaches them, they blow up in the other system, as if randomly. Also, star explosions don't explode other stars. Finely, if some wayward planets survive the blast, it orbits something that doesn't exist.

4)Every once in a while, only in early game, my game will become unresponsive and I'll have to use control panel to end it. Its rare, but frequent enough to happen about once or twice each game. If there's a way to trace the error, I'll look into it next time I play.

Of course, these are just nitpicks. The only one that bothers me is the ships exploding, because keeping a roving band of star exploders is fun.

A few features, or questions if I just haven't figured it out yet, I might request:

1) A manual launching option. Something to launch craft manually from another craft. Also, there doesn't seem to be an automation for unloading ore onto ships. These two things come from my attempts to design a harvesting vessel for asteroid systems, so that I can produce metal on site and export it to the galactic bank.

2) Sort of a big request, but some sort of pirate base the pirates operate from? They take a random system, which is then heavily defended by stations. Attacks fly out from there, and the force behind these attacks is reflected by how much "loot" they steal in attacks. If a lot of attacks fail, they start to dwindle. Also, of course, if you destroy the pirate base, there are no more pirates. The idea comes from Sins of a Solar Empire.

Finely, a question or two:

1) How exactly do "boarding" numbers compare? Is it a % chance, or do repeated boardings slowly wear down a "boarding" HP? If it is a percent, what is the rate of troops per ship scale, to get a 100% chance? Can boardings go through shields? Do boarding actions take time? There wasn't anything in the tutorial, and through experience I haven't learned much.

2) How do the numbers of shield hardening compare? If I make it 2, instead of 1, what does that mean, shield holds until 33% instead of 50%?

"Edit" Figured out how to do automated remote mining. Just required a few tweaks in the AI settings.

[LoSboccacc]

aha! I just managed to fend off the first AI attack on a standard start with 4 of the easiest AI available.

I was killed on the next wave, but was still fun to watch.


Those 30 size colonist where not such a good idea 

[forsaken1111]

"Edit" Figured out how to do automated remote mining. Just required a few tweaks in the AI settings.

Could you share your method? I am interested.

[Orb]

"Edit" Figured out how to do automated remote mining. Just required a few tweaks in the AI settings.

Could you share your method? I am interested.

Sure. This game is almost like Aurora in a way that you can design some pretty neat ways of doing things. Especially with carriers. I've just started messing around with them. Construct strike craft on the go? Build a fleet while battling, using scavengers built into it to build more ships? All very possible.

Anyway, here are the two designs I used. Note most of the scales are dependent on your current tech level. However, there are a few essential things you'll want to keep in mind. I'll elaborate on those in the spoiler.

Spoiler: Designs (click to show/hide)

This is the carrier ship, IE the ore processing and shipping vessel. It takes the ore in, converts it into metal, and ships it out to the galactic bank. The other thing that looks like the the export dock is the metal refinery. Note the capacitor. Metal refining takes a lot of bursts of energy, and if you have a fusion/anti-matter plant, chances are your ship may explode randomly, as I found out several times before it hit me. The bussard ramp scoop is also important, so that you may provide fuel to your harvesters.



This is my strike harvester. It could still use some tweaks, but I was sick of them blowing up for random reasons.

Note the large shield and capacitor. These are vital if you want your collector to live more than a few minutes. Mining lasers take HUGE bursts of energy to operate, and its guaranteed your anti-matter ships will blow up unless you have a huge surplus, which is inefficient, and even then it might blow up for whatever reason. Next is the shield. I am quite certain that when an asteroid is finished getting mined, it blows up, and like all explosions, they damage your ships. After a few asteroids are harvested all your strike harvesters will be gone, and you'll be fuming for a while. This is of course late game. You'll want somewhere around 3m shield, that's when my harvesters stopped dieing(but once again, I haven't really tweaked it). So depending on your tech level, you may have to double the scale, or sacrifice some other modules for more shield.

Now the next tricky part, the AI. Its actually quite simple once you understand what everything means.

Spoiler: AI (click to show/hide)

Since I am lazy and try to refrain from making larger walls of text than I already am, I'll be throwing in a few more pictures.

The Harvester

This is actually the less complicated of the two. Mining vessels usually automatically due their stuff, but to planets, not ships.



This is the huge part both for refueling and gathering resources. "Allow other ships to fetch resources" allows strike harvesters to get fuel from the refinery, which will prevent your ships from exploding due to running out of fuel. "Allow other ships to deposit resources" will allow the strike harvesters to deposit their ore, if they so wish to. The "Allow other ships to supply resources" may or may not be important. I'm inclined to believe that if a tanker wants to supply fuel or ammo, this options lets it, or not.

Next part is carrier settings, but I'm pretty sure that's obvious.



This is the automation. I'm pretty sure when you make the design, this will all be done for you. You can take off the fetch fuel/ammo automation orders if you want. I don't believe they will mess with anything.

Strike Asteroid Harvester

Now this was the more difficult of the two.



The first two parts are to prevent other ships from stealing your harvesters fuel and to prevent your harvesters from dumping ore on each other. Though I'm not sure if this will actually happen, but it doesn't hurt to be safe.

The important part here is to "Deposit resources on ships" and allow other ships to supply resources. Otherwise, your refinery won't give your strike craft fuel while their operating. You can uncheck deposit resources on planets if you feel so inclined, it won't matter unless you have a planet in the asteroid system(which isn't that bad of an alternative either, I tried it once, though I started getting pirate raids.)

You can mess around with docking. It doesn't matter much. Though if you want to eliminate a few potential headaches, have them dock only in ships, or don't let them auto dock. You can have them auto dock when the system is under attack, though you will be forced to manually launch them every time a scout flies by.



Last part. Only thing of note is to deposit ore when over 99%, instead of the usual 25%. Not sure if it actually did anything, but it doesn't hurt to change it.

...and that's it. I wanted to make sure I covered everything. If you somewhat follow these guidelines, and pay close attention to the "notes"(which if ignored will probably cause your ship to explode), then you will be having surplus metal late game when everyone else is feeling the ore crunch. 

[cerapa]

I havent played all that much. I knew that ships can run out of juice without big enough capacitors, but I didnt know they would explode.

[Felius]

I havent played all that much. I knew that ships can run out of juice without big enough capacitors, but I didnt know they would explode.

If you are running Antimatter and Fusion, they lose containment, and explosions follow.

[cerapa]

Losing containment on antimatter would be real bad, if these ships were real, I would like to punch the person who decided they dont need failsafes to keep power on themselves.

Who the hell designs these shi.....oh.

[Orb]

Welp, I've been throwing around the idea of trying multiplayer.

If anybody wants to do some sort of "test" game, I'll be hanging around the DFC chat.

[LoSboccacc]

wow, I managed to survive enough to kill one (easiest) AI, and then messed up sending my best ship to scrap instead of refueling.

I had quite some success with a battlecruiser having one very big railgun with rack and one small and fast firing railgun racked as well, and just varying the size of the whole ship until the big gun did enough damage to strip off the shields from AI ships in one shot (so the faster gun could tear apart their internals); a @12 scale fleet of those was enough to fend off two larger and costlier enemy ship each, while the @120 scale monster was enable of cleaning whole systems alone, as long as it was moving toward the enemy full speed so that he could have a break from engagement and repair itself thanks to the game physics.
 

this is an awesome game, has full indie glory with a manageable interface.


random noob notice: if you use +/- on components they double/halve in size, if you use the mouse wheel they grow/shrink in .25 increments.

[Felius]

LoSboccacc you can also use ctrl+click (or it was shift+click. One of two), to do the .25 increments.

A few of us played a little multiplayer (I had to leave before the game ending though, had family visiting, had to entertain the guests) a little earlier. Should try again sometime, specially now that we know better HOW to do so. =p

But anyway, have reached the conclusion that one of the issues of the game is that it's pretty attention intensive and speed dependent. You need to always keep track of everything that's happening, and keep doing stuff everywhere. To play against the insane level AI a professional Korean player level might be the appropriate one. 

[LoSboccacc]

true, I'm used to play strategy game in general while doing something else (like watching tv or reading a book) but this is plenty of stuff happening at any time and you can't let attention down a second.

[cerapa]

In single player I play it like DF. Set up some stuff and then let it run until I want to do something again and pause.

[de5me7]

But anyway, have reached the conclusion that one of the issues of the game is that it's pretty attention intensive and speed dependent. You need to always keep track of everything that's happening, and keep doing stuff everywhere. To play against the insane level AI a professional Korean player level might be the appropriate one. 

I get round this issue by playing small galaxies, sort of 20-80 stars rather than 200-800 stars. I also limit the number of ships to about 200 per player. This is partly to compensate for having only a core2 duo, but even if i had a faster processor i dont think id expand up the game that much for managability reasons.