Beta 1D - crashes & suggestions

from Stardock Forums
I started a new game after upgrading to Beta 1D - still the largest galaxy, all AI's set to average.

Need some sort of help for the various screen options.

Need some way to look at what the various things you can build are before you commit to building them. However, it seems like you can switch production back & forth without losing any accumulated progress on the item so maybe this does not matter. Not very realistic that way, though - 2 months from finishing a you decide to switch it to a Defender and lose nothing, next month switch it back and still have only 1 month to go.

Need something to tell you what the choices of planetary governor do for you (or are supposed to do for you if they are not yet implimented).

Crashed to desktop when I clicked on my survey ship from the ships screen - not repeatable

Need a report showing all the known empty planets, for purposes of choosing the destination of a new colony ship.

Should be able to launch a colony ship empty from the planet where it was built and load it with colonists at a different planet.

Crashed to desktop when I clicked on "speak to" in the diplomacy screen, first turn after I discovered the Universal Translator. This set me back a pretty large number of turns when I restored from the autosave. Is there any way to set how often autosave happens? In SEIV, you can set it to autosave every turn - it has 10 autosave slots among which it will rotate.
201 views 3 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top
I'll help where I can. :)

"Need some sort of help for the various screen options.
"- Eventually, the advisor will give you a bit more information besides "This is the planet screen." ect. However, we don't want him to give away too many answers, otherwise players will always follow what the advisor says...What kind of information were you looking for on the various screens?

"something to tell you what the choices of planetary governor do for you"- Currently, the Governors have no default builing order. It's up to the player to go, set the build order, and remember who does what. One quick way to see what order things get done...after selecting a Gov, return to the planet screen and the improvements should be numbered in order of the governors' build list. We will, eventually, have a better planet details screen where the build is accessable right from the governor's list. That's down the road, however.

"Need a report showing all the known empty planets"-I don't know how useful that will be, since, most of the time, a useful planet gets colonized immediatly, though I always play with "occational" habital planets. I can see how that would be nice when eveny star system has 2-3 habitable planets. That's one for Brad (frogboy) to answer... he's the yes/no man around here.

"Should be able to launch a colony ship empty from the planet" - Make's sense, and shouldn't be too hard to implement.

"Crashed to desktop when I clicked on "speak to" in the diplomacy screen" - Hmmm...if it thought you had a alien selected, but you didn't, I can see a crash problem there. I'll look into it.

"you can set it to autosave every turn" - Funny, we were ust talking about this at the office yesterday. I guess in the OS2 version, the game DID autosave every turn. THe way this galciv is set up though (2 meg save files), saving takes a good 6-10 seconds. It should be instantanious for autosave every turn to work smoothly (people wailing on the old turn button could run into some problems).

Thanks again for the list...we'll be checking out the above bugs shortly. And does anyone else have need for the "habital planet list"? I'm interested to hear opinions either way for the feature. I'm sure it woudln't be hard to add...as long as it's not viewed as superfluous down the road.
Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top
I don't think it should be a 'habital planet list', but an 'Known Planet List', A list of all the planets I know about. You could, on planets that the player owned, show what items are curently being produced at the moment, kind of a 'Everything I Know About The Planets, But Didn't Know Who To Ask' kinda screen. :)
Star Control: Origins
Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top
Look at how they did it in SEIV...

There, it is a "known planets" list but has filters like:

Enemy planets
Colonizable
Colonizable-breathable (in SEIV, you can colonize
places you can't breath via domes, but it greatly
reduces the max population & facilities you can
have there)
Colony ship on the way (useful when it takes several
turns in route, to keep from forgetting that last
game session three days ago you already dispatched
one to a given planet).

It is a separate report from the one that lists all of your colonies (which also has multiple filters for the info displayed).

In SEIV, you can select a colony ship, click the command to colonize, then open the report and click the planet you want it to go colonize. An enhancement which SEIV does not have, but would be nice, would be if before commiting it told you how many turns the trip would take.