You have to add the word "cheat" to the command line. The Wiki describes it.

I guess I could put some editorializing into these numbers. First, a Medium/Abundant galaxy now appears to have about half the number of habitable planets it used to have. This isn't a minor tweak. it will have severe affects on game strategy. As such, it should have been run through the beta instead of just introduced with the production version. Second, since the 79 habitable planets isn't near the number bandied about as a maximum (300? 400?), I assume there will be more available planets in the bigger galaxies. That gives me an option of going with a Large galaxy (though I don't much like the added distances). But, assuming the cut back in size is the same on all the galaxies (which is probably a bad assumption, it could be logarithmic (they like logs here)), the people who play the whopping great galaxies are going to be a tad irritated: they'll have no option. Since the upcoming Twilight of the Arnor will (I believe) have a bigger map, maybe that's an option.

I can't tell you how many stars, but the habitable planet count usually came in at 910 to 920 planets.

I wonder if you started a game in 1.61 and then loaded it into 1.80a that
you would have high inhabitable planet count and aggressive AI.

I don't know whether the AI gets saved in a saved game.

Tacky, isn't it?

I took a look at a Large/Abundant map. It seems the percentages are pretty close. Out of 10 CTRL+Ns, I came up with the following number of systems:

94, 99, 88, 101, 113, 110, 103, 91, 94, 92

That gives:
- an average of about 98 systems,
- a maximum of 113,
- a minimum of 88,
- a standard deviation of about 8.

Dividing that by the 8x8 grid and you come up with the same ratio as with the Medium/Abundant map: about 1.5 systems/square.

In a Large/Abundant galaxy with 92 systems, I had 169 Habitable planets. Of those, 81 were Extreme (48% -- close to my Medium's 43%) and 284 were uninhabitable (63% vs the Medium's 58%). The Medium galaxy ran at 2.1 Habitables/sytem, whereas the Large ran at only 1.8 Habitables/system. But, like the Medium, the Planet Class of the Habitable planets middles out at about Class 7 (half above, half below).

It looks like I'll be moving up from Medium/Abundant to Large/Abundant. The Medium now has too few planets. The Large has about 30% more planets than I'm comfortable with, but I can probably move down from Abundant with some experimentation (again, I'm not happy with the additional distances in a Large galaxy, but c'est la vie).

I tried 1.8a and there's no significant change from 1.8. I know you guys are working on this issue, but I can't enjoy the game like this. I play gigantic maps, everything set on abundant, with loose clusters. I play this way because I enjoy the time it takes to discover everything a map like this offers. I don't want the # of stars limited to 300. I don't use the Metaverse. I haven't had a memory leak problem for quite awhile. Everything was working great before the cap. This is a great game & I love it. I just want the game back the way it was before the cap. Thanks.
Here are my computer specs;
Windows XP Home Edition
Lenovo AMD 64x2 Dual Core 3800+ 2.01GHz
1Gb of Ram
250 GB Hard Drive
NVIDIA Geforce 8600GT 512mb

Sorry about all of this. I've been on Twilight, but watching the forums I can understand everyone's frustration     With the month of beta testing 1.7 we assumed 1.8 would be smooth sailing....guess we learned our lesson

Concerning the larger Maps in the expansion, we have been talking about different ways to handle the memory issues, and have a several ideas to cut down the per-planet memory footprint. The most promising idea requires some heafty asset creation that will probaby be Twilight specific, but I'm sure we'll be backporting other possible fixes to the 2.0 DA build.

Sorry again....I wish I knew more about the code so I could be of better assistance to Cari, Brad and Jesse (instead I'll jsut cheer them on - "Go team!!!!")

  I don't think that helps.

I love this game and I love the support that Stardock gives us, but I agree with scifi1950. I have never had any problems with gigantic maps with abundant planets and I don't play the metaverse. If you need to perform memory optimization, then great! I support that... but optimizations should be transparent to the user. If you need to remove existing functionality to achieve those goals, then it is not an optimization, your removing something that we enjoyed in the past.

The simple solution is to put a slider in a performance section that allows the user to customize it, or at least a property in a file some where that you can adjust the max back to normal.

But other then that, thanks for all the hard work on the game and listening to all your demanding fickle fans!

No way. 1.8A definitely provides more habitable planets.

I believe it does, though the definition of "habitable" is in question. The *overall* map quality is fine, though point farmers on the metaverse may see a small decline in overall scores.


I'm still encountering frequent problematic starting positions relative to the AIs. With the thalans, abundant settings, I just made 6 maps. 3 of which I was the only planet in the starting sector, 2 of which there was another planet, but it required colony tech, and on one map I hit the jackpot. The AIs all had 3 -5 planets in their starting sector alone, and were adjacent to plentiful sectors with which to expand without much effot. Maybe it is really totally random, but perhaps it needs to be less so. Maybe in the past the planets count was so prolific, on those settings, you couldnt help but get at least a few nearby worlds with which to make an effective starting "footprint".

The number of worlds requiring tech to colonize is pretty obnoxious though. I'd really like to see this reduced 20% or so. Something to bear in mind... I'm sure most internal testing gets done on mid range difficulties for speed sake, and to relate to the game the way the broadest audience will. But on the highest difficulty settings that most veterans have graduated to, a speciality planet is essentially a planet that's going to the AI. Players cannot compete with the tech rate of the AIs in the early game (or ever on the top two difficulties) on these settings( at least not without racking up prohibitive infrastructure defecit), and that's when the AI techs these up and colonizes these worlds. The AIs generally dont trade these techs ( to the player). The players recourse on these levels has always been to steal these worlds (and the colony tech)later in the game.

The argument that these levels are supposed to be "hard" is not lost on me. But this is a significant jump, and not really a fun one. No one was really "in love" with the colony tech aspects of the game, but accepted that you had balanced some races against it, and we could avoid them if we wished. This no longer seems to be the case. I would really rather see the Extreme environment worlds as "bonus" worlds, and not as "required".

I suppose the point is moot though. Next week will mark the end of the game as we know it anyway, and we'll have to relearn everything, regardless, for better or worse. I think I'll just hold off til then, and put to rest "classic" gal civ 2.

I just started a 1.8a All abundant/Gigantic, ctrl+u'd it and got a total habital planet count(inclucing special envir.) of about 483 with what seemed like an overwhelming amount of class 7 and below. I used the planet list sorted by class to count. I'm afraid I wasn't up to trying to count all the special enviro. seperately, but it did seem to be a higher ratio of them than in the past. DAs All abundants have had up to and beyond 900 planets in the past, so this is more like DLs level of planets.

So Stardock.... Most gamer machines have more than 2 Gigs of RAM. The ones that don't have XP operating system anyway. I know that XP wouldn't use any more than 2 Gigs no matter what; but I have Vista and I don't have that problem. Do you guys want to update yourselves to the technology that has updated? Also... how in the heck does your programming kill memory when there are a lot more graphic intensive and very buggy, memory leaking, pathetic games out there that do not have this problem? That's meant to be a compliment on the game by the way. I love this game but I really don't understand how you can destroy it a tiny bit each time with updates claiming to optimize memory. Are you guys sure you got rid of all the memory "problems" and not just leaving one really big one or a bunch of less critical ones in just because it would require a major overhaul of the code to fix it? It seems the more you add the more you have to take away in other areas. I am very excited about TOTA and about the moving a size up in playable galaxies. However, I don't see any benefit if the status quo doesn't change on how you guys "optimize" memory. Frankly I'm skeptical at this point. Right now I am not even crossing my fingers that TOTA isn't going to be a crash fest for a long time, or have some form of major memory problems, (during the beta of course). I can just see with the trends lately that the final release of TOTA will cut something that users, especially beta testers, will come to appreciate and want.

You guys are really the best programmers I've seen so I don't understand what is going on with all the need to optimize memory; aka: remove clutter that the user can't see anyway, and more importantly take stuff away from the game that used to work just fine. I can only assume that the corporation side is taking over and there is a greater push to get the product out without being cleaner in development. Please don't turn into EA.

And I agree with a statement made earlier that this is the best strategy game ever. I believe someone else used the words "...to date." However, if you guys keep up with your "optimizations" you might as well go back to the original Galactic Civilizations.

Again Great game!

Knock off what ever you did to 1.8 and 1.8a that has me thinking I'm using a 10 Mhz 720K RAM computer again.

I just thought of something that will probably show how much I don't know. Graphic cards are much better than when Gal Civ 2 first came out. Are you guys using graphic cards power and potential or just shoving stuff they could handle and do handle in every other game to the system RAM so less powerful machines can play and the rest of us who actually have hardware that can kick ace have to suffer. I can appreciate the game working on my very non-gamming notebook when I'm away but if that is the case then sell two different versions. One for intel graphic chipsets and another for systems that actually have a modern graphics card. Personally I would rather have it work on the desktop and forget the notebook rather than continually have the game watered down so it will always run on my notebook.

Stardock - I love you guys, but you're setting a bad precendent with this, just like you did with the change to ship thumbnails.

Just like you wouldn't want to make the game into an uber system hog with the TBS variant of Crysis graphics require Vista and Directx10 and alienate half your userbase, please stop alienating your userbase with good, solid machines that can run this game just fine.

I have NEVER had a problem with galciv crashing due to a memory problem, and I play gigantic abundants. And I have 2gb of ram...

When you cut something back, you need to not tear it out but give us OPTIONS.
Options are good, forced removals are bad.

Something we can check in the options menu like "Allow higher star/planet counts" and "use high-resolution ship thumbnails" and when we check it and hit apply it pops up with a window "Warning, the options you have selected may have an adverse effect on preformance" would be GREAT.

Also, for the love of god, can we get a "Extreme Planets" option like we get for stars and habitable planets? A lot of us really don't like them, and at the same time I think a slow tech game with Common Planets (overall) and Abundant Extremes would be fun.

Okay, maybe I'm beating a dead horse here, but I really don't want this issue to carry over into the new game, which I have pre-ordered because I really like what you guys do.

Here is the breakdown of the stars systems within 3 sectors of my homeworld on 1.8a (gigantic map, all settings abundant, loose clusters):
13 stars, 8 habitable planets (11,10,8,8,7,6,5,2), 8 habitable with tech (10,9,8,8,8,5,1,1), 27 uninhabitable (63%)

Here is the breakdown of a pre-cap game, same settings, stars within 3 sectors:
14 stars, 14 habitable planets (22,18,17,16,15,15,12,11,11,10,9,5,2,1)
12 habitable planets with tech (23,20,14,14,14,12,12,11,11,11,9,7)
13 uninhabitable planets (33%)
Now maybe this game was a lucky draw, but it certainly meets my definition of "abundant". This was obviously a very busy game, but that's what I expect the setting of gigantic/abundant to deliver!

to cari - I have a 2gb system and I never had an out of memory issue. I know what my computer can handle which is why I run these larger maps with a lot of planets. If my computer couldn't handle this like my previous laptop which had 512mb I played a smaller map usually no larger than a large map with abundant planets. I know my restrictions and other players should also understand this. Just like everything else in life there are restrictions. Please let us enjoy this game.

However, dispite of this displeasure with this game I do love this game and great work for getting out update 1.8a. Thanks for all your hard work keep it up.

The memory wall has nothing to with windows Vista vs XP. As I understand it it's a problem with 32bit processing. So you could have 8GB of shiny ram in your PC and each process will still only use up to 2GB. WWW Link



They're trying to make the game playable to all their customers. People with top end machines are still getting out of memory problems.



Status quo? They did one questionable thing, (star cap). If people want it gone Stardock WILL change it. (actually the best solution that other people have also mentioned is make the star cap a slider in the options.)



Frogboy aka Brad Wardell (stardock ceo) IS the cooporate side



Again they did ONE questionable thing... Hardly reverting the game to galciv1



Pretty much.

Maybe we can save some damn memory by getting rid of the smaller habitable and non-habitable planets. I never use them anyway. Rarely do I planets smaller than 10 unless I need to extend my range.

The AI uses a lot of them--to its disadvantage. It needs to be looking for better planets. If you are doing a military victory, it is production (with an economy to support it) that wins games. I see the AIs taking over puny planets that can little production or economic value.

I never play gigantic maps except with very low planet settings (I like games that take 4-8 hours start to finish), but I am also against this change. Make the default be a max of 500 planets if you want (or whatever it is now), but an option with a fat warning seems like it would be insanely better.

As for low-quality planets, I hate 'em if they're too common, sure, but keep in mind that low quality planets tend to have more terraforming available. The AI almost always ignores classes 1-3, but I grab those babies up every time. They start out as little more than an extra expense, but (a) the AI tends not to invade, and (b) when I go Neutral and get a terraforming tech, a class 1 can jump sometimes up to a class 6 or 7. I remember one game having both of my class 1 planets having 6 terraform tiles per tech, ending up at class 19 each. It was very sexy.

You do understand that Vista comes with a 64 bit version, don't you? Machines today also support it. I thought I was stating the obvious since this topic concerning 2 gigs and 32-bit operating systems has already been covered in these forums somewhere.



If all these memory "optimizations" and cutting the game out of the game keep happening it will be Gal Civ 1 in the end. I bet it would save a lot of memory to get rid of designing your own ships and watching battles. Just have little fleet icons moving around a 2d map.



Really? I believe that was the entire point of my post. The end statement basically being that they should make it work with good machines and screw the rest.

I just played a gig/abun 1.8a game for several hours. It looked good to me. Since the number of habitables was greatly increased from DL to DA, I wouldn't be particularly upset if the number was reduced somewhat, but in that regard, 1.8a doesn't seem to be much different from the previous non-beta release.

Stardock needs to be more careful about making drastic changes like they did in the 1.8 release. It can really alienate the users. I've voiced my opinion plenty about this kind of thing in the past so I'm not going to say any more. Fortunately, I saw the 1.8a update on SDC by the time I finally got around to trying the latest release. I imagine I would have been fairly dismayed if that hadn't been the case.

The game is still runs 32 bit with a 64 bit OP. Still from my understanding you could increase to uses the whole 4gb for the game instead of the 2gb user/2gb windows split while running a 64bit OP.
This same problem show up in many of Civ4 mods. The more stuff you add to the game the more virtual memory it uses and faster it hit this 2gb limit.
Here is a post dealing with increasing the 2gb boundary:
WWW Link

I'd like to add a comment here about the number of Extreme worlds. Personally, I don't much care for them and, initially, was a bit upset about having 43% of all Habitables being Extreme. But, after thinking about it for a while, I can see a reason for having so many. There are 5 Extreme planetary technologies in beginning and advanced flavors. To make it worthwhile to research these things, there's got to be a good number of Extreme planets. On my Medium/Abundant map, there are 34 Extreme planets. That's about (on average) 7 planets per Extreme type. Really, any fewer than that and those techs wouldn't be worth researching. If we're going to have Extreme environments, then I guess this is a decent percentage to work with.

Note: I just saw that I didn't specify the version I was using on all my earlier posts. Except for my very first one, all the others with planetary/stellar numbers are from 1.8a. I don't have any statistics to back it up, but the number of Habitables under 1.8a seems to be about half what they were under Beta 4.

And yet the vast majority of copies sold are still 32 bit. Blame Microsoft on that one (why do they continue to keep 32 bit alive? I'd have though Vista's release would be as good a time as any to force the switch, since all the hardware on the market is already 64 bit).

So, I decided I'd had enough fun counting suns and planets and actually decided to play a game. I brought up a 1.8a Large/Abundant map and blew my averages. From my earlier tests, most Large/Abundant galaxies should fall in the range of 90 to 106 systems with an average around 98. This map came up with 65 systems. I decided to play it anyway. After a few turns of exploring, I was finding very few Habitable planets. So, I pulled it up in a cheat setup and did a CTRL-U to see the whole map. This is what I found in my nine immediate sectors (starting with "1" as the sector just above and to the left of mine (mine being "5")):

1. Empty
2. Vesta: 3 Habitables (Class 9, Class 9), 1 Extreme (Class 11)
3. Empty
4. Empty
5. Sol (Mine): 2H (10, 4)
6. Poseidon: 3H (9, 8), 1E (7)
... Scottling (Minor Race): 1H (15 - taken by minor)
7. Empty
8. Dester: 1H, 1E (6)
... Weber: 1H, 1E (11)
9. Wardell: 3H (10, 8), 1E (8)
... Haber: 3H, 3E (9, 3, 1)
... Titus: 0H

So, immediately accessible to me were 1 Class 4 (my token scrap planet), 2 Class 8s, 3 Class 9s, and 1 Class 10 for a total of 7 additional planets. Obviously, with the small number of systems, this is an outlying galaxy. But, there's no excuse for these kinds of numbers in a Large/***ABUNDANT*** galaxy. If the dice roll brings up so few systems, then the game should stock those few systems with an appropriate number of Habitable planets to make it Abundant.

I will do more analysis next week on the algorithm and if it is indeed less than 1.6 I will make tweaks and we will release as 1.8B.

However, I want to point out that some of you really need to get a grip.  It is exactly the crappy attitude shown by some people here that results in updates being non-free.

Look at the FEATURE list of 1.8 over 1.6.  There are a lot of new features in 1.8 and instead of people recognizing the massive improvements to game play that some of those new features result (such as being able to much more easily manage constructors) we get whining about a tweak to the habitable planet algorithm that we've already demonstrated a willingness to work on (1.8A released less than 24 hours later).

If you guys don't want any more free updates, you're doing a good job in making that case.  Let me be clear: We don't have to do these updates.  We don't need to even do the expansion packs. We do them for you because we care about the game and the community and we like doing them.

So let's cut with the whining okay? Constructive criticism is fine. But a lot of the talk in this thread is whining and misinformed whining at that (the thumbnails in 1.8 are better than they were in 1.6 -- go ahead and compare -- we listend to beta 4 feedback and worked hard to find a better solution).

And yes, the 2 gigabyte limit is a big deal. Nearly everyone is running 32-bit XP or Vista and that 2 gig limit matters.  You get thousands of ships running around and you will hit it.  It doesn't happen to most people but it does happen and hopefully 1.8 will alleviate it.

And some people you'd think we didn't do the obvious thing to prevent the memory issue - we don't limit the # of ships you can build. That's what most other games do. 

So to summarize: We will evaluate the updated algorithms and release a 1.8B if there's a noticeable different in # of habitable planets.  But the flaming of 1.8 over this tweak while ignoring the immensity of the updates is a good way to ensure an end of free updates.

 

So, um , anyways...did you guys see that Dumbledore was gay? How about that? Crazy stuff, huh...?