Issues in MP games

[Lakotavar]

Well, certainly the AI should be able to do use the same dirty tricks But yes for Hard and Impossible mode sounds fair to me..

Anyways that is why I have usually two obvious tactics depending on the situation.
1) In my backyard, far away from other civs I terraform all plaets and then colonize.
2) Closer to the border I would terraform the best planet of a system and conolinze immediately.

In fact I thought the AI can already "steal" systems so I played safe.

[Lakotavar]

We finally finished the medium map MP game.. unbelievable

Unfortunately it was hard to keep track of the moral. But for example I ignored a diplomatic offer from my friend and I did not see any effect on trust or regard. But in this older version of the game I would not be surprised really.
Also it was a bit strange later on when the Roms (friend) were able to get a cease-pact with the Cardassians even though he conquered some of their systems. I destroyed their main fleet but even combined with gifts they did not accept a cease-pact. I would have thought that killing civilians is worse but not for the Cardassians it seems In fact the war was declared by the Roms in the first place but in the end the Fed couldn't get out.. Sounds like an inverted DS9 episode..

For the final step I declared war against the Roms and since I lost some ships to the Dominion earlier it was actually pretty close. However we decided to not rebuild fleets and the Roms would not conquer every single system..
The combat worked as expected, we did not see any issues here. Of course we did not calculate everything in parallel on paper and compared

In case you want to look though the chaotic end scenario:

SP Federation Medium Irregular 469.sav

(1.19 MiB) Downloaded 30 times

Would it be eventually possible to have the newest version of the game for the next MP game in a huge map combined with the CE? I know Misfire is still working on it but there is one combined (test-) version on the server so I thought maybe..

[Lakotavar]

Actually one thing that reduced the overall experience was the interface delay. When I reported this last time (and I know others have before) it was still OK. But now during our last 100 rounds it kind of reached the maximum (no further in-game developments that took up performance I guess) and it was.. 50-100ms...? Felt like it
I'm curious how the performance will in a huge map and I'm almost sure that less didicated players could be scared away by this Is there actually an easy to understand reason behind it? It is still almost static screens and interestingly even moving the map was no performance issue even though this has more visual impact.
Also are there any settings in Windows or for the graphics card that would help?

[Misfire]

Re: Multi-player in combat engine, not yet. Still have some work to do on base mechanics first. It will be coming though.

Re: Lag, there might be something being done on the UI thread somewhere that shouldn't be. May not be avoidable to some degree on very large maps though.

[Lakotavar]

Re: Multi-player in combat engine, not yet. Still have some work to do on base mechanics first. It will be coming though.

Re: Lag, there might be something being done on the UI thread somewhere that shouldn't be. May not be avoidable to some degree on very large maps though.

Alright, that's absolutely fine. These two items would have been great for the next round but we will definitely come back to the game at some later point and I am curious about the progress if you guys keep up the good work like this

[Lakotavar]

I was about to edit my check list but no one would find a small edit I guess..

Situation in our medium map MP: I had an Alliance with my friend and another computer empire while the friend also had an Alliance with the same empire.
I declared war against this computer empire and my friend had to declare war too due to our Alliance, despite his own Alliance with the other empire. Should there be a chance to decide which Alliance is more important and thus would be honored more? I would say yes.

[Iceman]

Ok, for now I only made your friend not declare war, as deciding which alliance is more important is non-trivial.
I just got back to work today after my sick leave and I have tons of work to catch up.

I fixed the autobuild not deactivating idle shipyard slots when the shipyard option is enabled (for the human player); found the issue while mapping where AIMode is used in the game, this is one such situation (for the AI). Unfortunately the fixing sucked up all the time I had to devote to said mapping. During the weekend, maybe.

I might not have time for more fixes before you start your game.

[Iceman]

Well, certainly the AI should be able to do use the same dirty tricks But yes for Hard and Impossible mode sounds fair to me..

Needs to be tested, but the (Hard and Impossible) AI might now be able to use those dirty tricks
It will also colonize a system that they're terraforming, immediately, if another colony ship arrives - Normal AI will still hope not to be tricked...

[Lakotavar]

OK, no worries, this is still very nice progress all together

The huge map would be anyways played in parallel to other games since we won't really play botf non stop for half a year We have our eyes on some 3D stuff and can easily start the new botf game a bit later if you feel like another week could make some noticeable changes

[Iceman]

No need, the patches can be applied at any time, they don't break savegames.
The sooner you start the better, it should take a while for contact to happen in a larger map.

[Lakotavar]

Alright, Admiral we will start today or tomorrow but I would agree is night tage very long until we meet. So the next reports on this could take a while.

BTW, why is there no Lieutenant rank on the forums? Or does just randomly nobody have it? This is probably the most important question ever..

[Lakotavar]

We started the new MP game (huge map) tonight and here is the current savegame:

MP Federation Huge Irregular 131.sav

(1.29 MiB) Downloaded 23 times

We noticed a few things..

1) My friend still has issues with the resolution

resolution.jpg (719.75 KiB) Viewed 453 times

2) When I don't select a ship I get the "no model" placeholder. This window could just be empty I guess.

no_model_initially.jpg (97.99 KiB) Viewed 453 times

[Lakotavar]

3) The AI wanted to build the council in 61 turns instead of upgrading the replication plant first which seems inefficient to me.

council_before_upgrade.jpg (592.79 KiB) Viewed 453 times

4) When one of my ships was destroyed I got a corresponding sitrep but another one says it arrived somewhere which was maybe formally correct but it's unnecessary information by that time.

ship_destroyed_arrived.jpg (815.04 KiB) Viewed 453 times

5)a) On this screenshot you can see that I have shipyards on some colonies but the adjacent sectors are not contested but Card sectors. This was the case for a few round before they finally got contested.
5)b) I think a related observation is that some of the new colonies with a shipyard did not claim the sectors around them even without another civ in range.
What would be the trigger in both cases for the game to claim the surrounding sectors?

not_contested.jpg (767.57 KiB) Viewed 453 times

[Lakotavar]

6) When I assigned a diplomat to a civ I noticed I accidentally picked the wrong civ but was not able to cancel the assignment even during the same turn. Maybe there could be a button to undo the assignment.

[Iceman]

1) This has not been addressed yet, no. From your previous report, there's only issues with this screen and the envoy assignment (IIRC) window, correct? If you run into the envoy issue again, please post a pic.

2) Will look into it. What resolution are you playing at? That text should be centered on the viewport.

3) If the number of turns you shave off those 61 by upgrading first is less than 11 (the time to build the upgrade), I'm not so sure.

4) Yes, but those 2 SitReps are triggered at different phases of the turn, so I can't really suppress the arrival sitrep.

5) The radius of claims depends on the population of the colony. As the population grows beyond certain thresholds, adjacent sectors will be claimed. Those threshold values depend on the type of civ (empire, expanding minor, etc). It's always limited to 3 IIRC. For empires it's every 100 pop.

6) That is a known bug, yes, but IIRC it requires some non-trivial refactoring. IIRC even when you cannot recall from the diplo screen, you can from the Assets screen Personnel tab.