Bit confused about 1.11 AI using CPU more thingy. I noticed that there is actually new line in prefs.ini called "AllowCPUIntensiveAlgorithms=0". But as you see its default on zero as in 0 which in my logic means disabled

I hunted for this in options section but as we all know it does not appear there. Frogboy should we enable this feature on our own or whats the catch?

Iam really excited about 1.2 too, there are some great UI changes coming that will make the game much fluent to play. My main source of happines is the colony management screen and the enchantment that allows you to set rallypoints in that screen.

I hope SD can make constructor zones bit more easy to spot, really hard at the moment. Also zoomable tech tree would be a god send. Why did I not cry about the zoomable tech tree earlier, guess its too late now

Has the upgrade bug been fixed where it costs way more to upgrade all your ships at once than to do them individually?

Yeah, I like the simultaneous combat. It was pretty absurd that you could fire a slow-ass missile and the badguys wouldn't react until it plodded it's way over the screen and hit - this is much better.

I wouldn't mind a conditional first strike, though - but really, incorporating mainmap modifiers to the battles is a great idea all round. Some kind of 'readiness' thing, where fleets lose reaction as ships become damaged or they are attacked many times in one turn, would be interesting. A fleet of busted-ass ships fighting off constant attacks should be a different tactical situation to a pair of brand-new fleets fighting in open space.

I'm a sucker for anything that removes the 'works fine till the hp are gone then it blows up straight away' nature of most hp-based combat systems. It'd even give all those space-marine fans a way to use them!

Has the upgrade bug been fixed where it costs way more to upgrade all your ships at once than to do them individually?

I never realised that there was a bug that was causing the problem that you described. I was always amazed at the total cost of upgrading my fleet and so rarely bothered.

Great upgrades so far. Best value for money in years. Good stuff, at a rather sad time for PC games. It's almost anachronistic, when looking at other companies. Thanks for the Herculean effort.

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RE: First Strike

The way I would like to see a "combat sequence" performed in a space battle is not one side and then the other (the current system). Even 'simultaneous' application of combat results across the board, while an improvement, could be a missed design opportunity.

To simulate 'maneuver' in a space battle situation, I would let the ships with the fastest speed and smallest hull sizes fire first. Add the ship's speed to its hull size value, and the highest-numbered ships fire first (or simultaneously, if their values are tied).

-1 Cargo Hull
0 Huge
+1 Large
+2 Medium
+4 Small
+6 Tiny

This will help give smaller ships more 'play' later in the game as well.

Just a thought...

Alan Emrich

I like removing the first strike "benefit" to the player, but I see some problems.

Right now (I think) human players rely on a fast moving, hard hitting force. With this change, more ships will be lost by the attacking force leading to a few forced strategy changes:

You will need to have more ships on hand as you will lose more ship and producing/moving ships is time consuming. Also, I usually trail the AI in military strength. The AI won't easily sign for peace when it has a higher military rating than you. So in order to "win" a war, you either need to wipe him out completely or destroy enough of his military force so that he will sue for peace. Either of these will mean a large military build-up.

What I fear is longer wars of attrition. This means more planets with production and starports for human players, more emphasis on production, more peace time military production. In other words, we will need to adopt the current AI behavior.

Looks to me as though there will be no advantage to attacking first... Not sure how I feel about that. I guess I will have to play it a few times to determine how much it changes the game. My first thought is that I want my surprise attack back! Yet, upon further consideration, these ships dont exist in the abstract. They are in the real world (game world actually, but you know what I am trying to say) and thus able to react and respond to ship threats and attack percentages. I mean in the real world if a fighter craft from another race was heading in your direction your alertness to their location and possible hostile actions would be acute. Thus, the probability that all of the attack crafts would be able to fire a volley at you without you returning fire at the same time is sorta unrealistic. I see their point for the change, yet I am not sure if I want the change... Guess I am spoiled.
In either case, it should make the game interesting with this new twist.

I hunted for this in options section but as we all know it does not appear there. Frogboy should we enable this feature on our own or whats the catch?

It's on one of the first start up screens each game..

Is the bug where there is no research during the first turn after loading a saved game fixed in 1.2?

it might be a little early to ask since 1.2 isn't quite out yet, but what is planned for 1.3 Frogboy? I'd imagine some finetuning stuff and probably fixes to all the small bugs such as the hardpoints not bieng symmetrical.

Is the bug where there is no research during the first turn after loading a saved game fixed in 1.2?

I don't think that Stardock considers this behavior as a bug ...

Personally I always made two forces. My defense fleet with high sheilds, armor or ECM (dependingon need) and my attacking force with more firepower but still with proper defense just not as high. However I may try out simply ignoring defense now if I know my defense ships will get to fire no matter what. I should be able to build 2x as many cargo hull defenders with lots of weapons as my defenders.
Sure a lot will get killed but I know the attacker will be wiped out too durring the attack. Basically I place a lot of one shot canons in orbit. As long as I out number them each attack wave the defenses will hold till the main fleet arives.

Hey Frogboy, btw.. I know this has been said before but I'll say it anyways... You guys are doing a great job. I really appriciate the effort and creativity you and your team put into this game. You guys are a throw back to the days of Sierra when they were still growing and producing great games. I mean that as a compliment. You prove that great games doesn't come with big name licenses or the more $$$ the better the game. I know it's may not mean much, but thank you for what you guys are doing.

Anyways, back to my post. I was wondering, I'm pretty new to the modding thing. I know how to change the aliens and add a backstory to them. That's pretty much the limit of my modding. But is it possible to mod the UI where I can add starship captain's names into each individual ship in addition to the Ship names? Say another input area under the name of the ship for the Captain's name. If it's not possible, can you put that in?

Is the bug where there is no research during the first turn after loading a saved game fixed in 1.2? I don't think that Stardock considers this behavior as a bug ...

I would consider it a bug. You could conceivabley chart the entire map, get the best planet(s) at the begining, and generally cheese the whole game in turn 1.

It would work better if you bought 3 colony ships in 3 sucessive turns and then used this nice cheese tactic.

All you need to do is move all your ships, turn, save, load, move, turn, save, load, move, turn, save, and on and on. You can explore the entire map, get all the anomolies, get the 3 (or more if you buy a colony ship every time you collect enough $$ from anomolies) best planets on the map/within range of your ships movement.

If you combine this with +luck attributes and universalists, you might start out with $50000 or a huge fleet of colony ships.

re: first strike

don't get your knickers in a bunch. the tricky thing about adding something new to this game is making AI that can use it as well.

don't get me wrong, i really want an expanded list of components, and i've all ready thought of half a dozen possibilites. but i think it's only fair to realize they're outside the immediate scope of GC2. my thinking on this issue is, they're game developers. if i've thought of it, they probably have too. if i want it, they probably do too.

i'm more stoked on the UI fixes. and honestly surprised. i hadn't heard anything about that being a part of 1.2, but that was probably just me. but 'numerous fixes' all at once makes sense. it doesn't make sense to bait too people too much until you're actually almost done, i think. then you just get a bunch of impatient people hounding you.

also, this evolved into a pretty massive debatae when the changes to combat were first announced (they dabbled in the idea first while developing 1.11). the participants in that discussion talked about other ways to structure combat that might be interesting, like turn-based attacks with initiative, a-la D&D. if i remmeber correctly, the game was never meant to be about war exlusively. still, i think they are definately working on lots of ways to make combat more interesting. but you also have to maintain a sense of priority. without AI to use the things, there's no sense in adding all sorts of cool features yet.

so to extend that point, if more components are going to be a part of GC2, i think you an expenct a whole bunch of them to come out at once. possibly in an expansion.

It's on one of the first start up screens each game..

I feel like a bit of an idiot asking this, but I've gone looking for it at start up a couple of times and I can't see it ... I'm using the latest version.

What I fear is longer wars of attrition. This means more planets with production and starports for human players, more emphasis on production, more peace time military production. r.

Acutally all this is good..... if it happens.

I havn't been able to find the Ai intensive option either when I looked for it Makris. Can anyone say exactly where it is?

Also Frogboy, any comment on how it is way more expensive to upgrade all ships at once than do it individually?

I think the best compromise would have been, the attacker gets automatic full strength attack rolls with a first strike and normal random rolls in every other round of the fight. So, if your attacking ships have attack strength of 10, they automatically attack with that strength on the first firing round.

Still not the overwhelming advantage it is now, but it doesn't make it unrealistic. He who shoots first generally wins in the real world. This change strikes me as being nothing more than a way to cover an inherent weakness in the AI - that they don't have sense enough to attack first when possible.

Although, it will be nice to be able to build planet defender cruisers (medium hull) that might actually defend the planet. Currently I build them only to keep my military rating up, since they usually die before firing back, no matter how much defense they have.

It's on one of the first start up screens each game..

Ummm make that three of us as i cant see the option either??

Yay.

More incrimental "refinements" to the interface. Evidently this game wasnt ready to release when it was. By all means, continue developing the godamn interface...people are much more interested in that then say...new playable content.


Or god forbid you come out of your little realm of denial concerning real Multiplayer.


Stardock has managed to squander any goodwill it had from the release of this game, by being totally and consistently out of touch with what people really want to see expanded. Remeber, word of mouth can work both ways, and the word has started to turn decidely against SD for failing to expand or develop anything of significance to the game post-release. Nothing to make anyone who had enjoyed the game for a reasonable amount of time after release pick it up again.



And by all means, spend development time and charge people for a ship part expansion when the community will produce all manner of content along those lines for free.



No, I wont pay you for a token ship part pack. Im also not interested in playing the newest moderately revised version of your damn interface or the biggest waste of bandwidth next to these wretched message boards...the "metaverse". I will however, donate a few bucks for SD to buy themselves a clue.


In case youre wondering, this is the reaction you get when you let people believe you make development decisions based on meaningless web polls, when really, you just dont want to do something and because youre not capable.

Or god forbid you come out of your little realm of denial concerning real Multiplayer.

I'm guessing somebody REALLY wants multiplayer. Since the game was released without and they have stated several times it's far off if it all, why are you sticking around?

3. # New battle system. Ships fire at the same time in battle. 4. # AI Improvements. Lots of tweaks that we think will make the game more fun, especially for veteran players.

This will help the AI since when playing against experienced human players the AI never gets in the first strike! However, battle will likely remain one sided even if inaddition the AI redesigns ships more often, because it often designs poor ships. In v1.11 on level Painfull, going from 2nd-gen to 3rd-gen the AI went from a heavy fighter (small) with missile attack 12 to a cruiser (large) with missile attack 4 and missile defense 4; 3 missiles where replaced with 1 missile and 4 chaff modules! Why waste space with poor/low tech defenses that would be better used by mid/high tech weapons! Also why did the AI not research better defenses if it was planning to use them!

In v1.11, the AI is still building too many embassies and morale centers. I understand you have addressed this for v1.2 and want to avoid scripting the AI but I still think adding the following rules would improve the planet build up:
(1) first two structures built on a planet should always be factories
(2) only factories may be built on manufacturing bonus titles
(3) only labs may be built on research bonus titles

Memory usage/performance improvements. Lots of DirectX-techno stuff that as a non-DirectX guy I can't explain but memory use is noticeably less and performance on lower end systems should be significantly even better thanks to new techniques.

HALLELUJAH! No more 5 minute loading and saving times on a small map! As they say, "w00t!"