FreeOrion

You're right - thanks. Fixed.

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Active Radar is usually the first detection improving tech i come across.
It produces IMHO an excessively huge boost in radar coverage. Is this what you intended?

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This seems excessively huge when playing in a relatively small galaxy, but I figured that such a game is probably going to be a lot shorter, so fewer techs will be researched, so each tech should have a comparatively greater effect.

Playing in a 500-star galaxy makes the Active Radar bonus look like peanuts, and Sensors are required to get a good view of a fairly large portion of the galaxy. I thought the progression was pretty good for a 500-star galaxy, though to be fair, I didn't really test their balance at all on a fairly small galaxy.

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I also found the progression in detection rather steep. Another detection tech (or an existing tech giving a detection bonus) and a building or two would allow the current detection boni to be lower without players having to get lost in huge galaxies.

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I find myself completely failing to understand stealth, at least with regards to building stealth into one's ships.

I have a bio-adaptive hull here which is listed as having a stealth of 30. I want to use it to build a super stealthy scout ship. I have both the electromagnetic damper and phasing cloak available to me. However both of those two technologies list as having a strength of zero. If I put either of them or both, the listed stealth of my scout does not change, it stays at 30.

What am I missing here? Do these technologies actually make one's ship more stealthy, or are they just non-functional place holders right now? Would the effect of the two be cumulative of one installed both electromagnetic dampers and phasing cloaks, or does the higher tech of one over ride the other? Can one stack multiple copies of the same highest level tech in order to boost the effectiveness? (Of course scanner tech should be similarly boostable if so.)

Yeah, it is a bit of a pain... Actually, those two questions are very much related. The default for ship parts is that the effect stacks, so if you add the bonus by entering it in the "capacity" field of the part description, then you would be able to put on 5 phasing cloaks and get 5 times the phasing cloak bonus. To avoid that, I put the bonuses for those in an effectsgroup with an appropriate stackinggroup associated with the ship part, which doesn't show up in the design screen, but will show up on your ship after the fact. Only one bonus is used, and I'm not sure I took any measures to ensure it's the best bonus, so mixing EM Damper with Phasing Cloak is not a good idea.

If you're ever in doubt about whether something actually does anything, go to the options menu under UI and turn on Auto-Generated Effects Descriptions. Then some auto-generated text appended to the end of its description will tell you, albiet in a verbose and occasionally abstruse way, what the thing actually does, if anything.

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Thank you. Now that I have built a couple (with one phasing cloak) the result is indeed readable when looking at the built ship. I was surprised to see the size of the stealth bonus of multi-spectral shields, but then when I happened to look at the scout outside of a star, I was again surprised to see just how non-stealthy the ship was with regard to it's own detection capacity. The bioadaptive hull gives a 30 stealth and the phasing cloak adds but 15 to that (I was somehow under the impression that it would add more like 65). Meanwhile the ship's native detection capacity is 150 and the sensors tech adds a whopping 350 to that. That seems to be quite a bit out of skew with regard to balancing stealth and detection. (When in a star, the ship has a stealth of 95 due to the plus 50 of multi-spectral shields.)

I should note what I see as a bug to report. Researching 'Dimensional Cloak' appears to unlock 'Phasing Cloak'. Then later in the research tree, there is the researchable field of 'Phasing Cloak', which again unlocks 'Phasing Cloak'. Now these two may in fact be two different versions of the phasing cloak with different numbers associated, but it would be a lot easier to grasp if the first was was instead called 'Dimensional Cloak'.

You seem to be using a pretty old version. As of a while ago (see this thread), stealth was redone to make sure there were consistent bonuses being applied everywhere, and a rough correspondence between stealth and detection bonuses. The issue with the tech unlocking the wrong item has also been fixed.

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I'm using FreeOrion Version 0.4 which is the latest one listed through the download link. I suppose I should go searching for the latest test build and figure out how to get that working. It does make sense that if I am going to post about bugs and playtest, I really should be using the latest build.

Alternatively, you could get Visual Studio 2010 and Compile directly from the source code. There have been significant changes even since the last test build. Both food and minerals are now gone.

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Ah, I was wondering about that, having downloaded the latest and tried it. I noticed that while industry was showing up, it didn't seem to do anything. Meanwhile, my mineral mining was what was determining my build capacity. (Which would make sense if I had a zero mineral stockpile and my industry was otherwise greater than my mineral production.) It was all more than a little off kilt.

I don't suppose there is a freeware (or otherwise very cheap) version of Visual Studio? I can see a "VISUAL C++ 2010 EXPRESS" that is apparently free, but I don't know if that would do the trick. I am not prepared to drop hundreds of dollars for some software package I will likely never use for more than a few minutes. Nor am I temperamentally prepared to pirate it.

As far as I know, FO only uses Visual C++, so it may very well be adequate.

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Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

Visual Studio 2010 Express can be used free of charge (although, IIRC you'll have to register after a 30 day trial period) and is sufficient to build FO. FO doesn't require commercial compilers on any platform.

If you want to compile FO on your system, go here: http://freeorion.org/index.php/Compile

Here are the windows specific instructions: http://freeorion.org/index.php/Compile_In_Windows

HTH

Alternatively perhaps, there appears to be full builds of the very latest here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/freeori ... rion/Test/

Am I wrong?

Full builds yes, very latest - that depends. These builds are far more up-to-date than the official releases of course, but even they are sometimes a bit behind. It depends on how frequently those who make these builds have the time to provide a new one.

Currently, Geoff is the one providing the test builds for Windows, and I'm the one providing test builds for OSX (AFAIK there has also been someone providing statically linked builds for Linux, but this guy seems to be gone for quite some time). As Geoff is also the main developer and (as far as I can tell) the de facto project lead, he simply doesn't have the time (and nerves, I guess) to constantly provide an up-to-date binary. My contributions are limited to providing the OSX builds and fixing some bugs now and then (which happens mostly when said bugs are OSX specific) at the moment, so in theory I've a bit more time to provide current test builds. However, as I'm not "part of the team" but something like an "occasional external contributor", I don't have the access rights to upload my builds directly to the test build folder myself, so I post them on the forums in this thread. Whenever Geoff has the time he uploads my builds to the test build folder, but that doesn't happen for all my builds, so if you want to be sure to get the most recent OSX builds, go to this thread. If you're not on OSX, never mind