FreeOrion

I just loaded FreeOrion 04.1 RC2 and find a couple of items that puzzle me. I notice that you can't remote terraform (even if you have the tech) plants that should be able to be terraformed, but only have an outpost on them. You have to send a colony base/ship there first. The second item is I can't send a colony ship/base to a gas giant or asteroid belt even if I have learned Orbital Habitation. Are these expected behaviors? If so the descriptions on these techs should be changed.

I guess that's another thing the new outpost feature broke. Now that zero-population colonies don't have population, the effect to set next best planet environment is meaningless.

I'm starting to think more and more that outposts should have species associated with them, as there's a lot of content that seems to rely on them, and it will require quite a bit of effort to make sure stuff doesn't seem broken.

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I guess I didn’t follow the reasoning to drop outposts to 0 population. I believe I saw somewhere that the argument was you shouldn’t be able to grow a whole colony from just an outpost. I would have set them more at a much lower number for population such as .01 or something smaller, so that any growth would be rounded down to no growth each turn. (I am assuming that the populations is rounded in that statement. ) That would have had the same effect and not broken so much else. (I think)

The existence of "Orbital Habitation" probably wasn't considered, but asteroids and gas giants are supposed to be uninhabitable now for humans (and likely various other species).
Old content is going to have to be rewritten... It's unavoidable when adding and reworking game mechanics. There are properties of planets, ClockwiseNextPlanetType and CounterClockwiseNextPlanetType, which don't presently have parsing, but will soon, which could be useful for less automatic terraforming implementation, and which don't depend on a particular species.

Regardless, I'm inclined to leave these issues in v0.4.1 unless there are major objections.

Not bugs, but wishes:
I'd like for aggressiveness settings to actually relate to something. And for neutral (not-at-war) empires to be unable to park fleets/go through systems you own.

I'm not sure if I understand what you mean by that. Because they definitely acutally do something...
Well, ATM there are only two diplomatic relationship "states", "peace" and "war", so we don't have something like "neutral" now. There are more planned of course (you've seen that in the ongoing discussion on fleet aggressiveness).

I see these errors message in RC 2, revision 5079



I'm not sure if it means things are working as intended or not, but messages like: "increases target industry ... by the greater of .2 per 5 units of population, or .4 per 8 units of infrastructure" -- is surely not the clearest way to communicate what's happening.

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Another thread (linked to below) suggests that they are misleading, so I don't know...




Should "peaceful" fleets be able to go through my systems, then?

Or, remote terraform could use the species of the originating planet if destination planet has none.

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As far as I've seen from my playtesting 0.4.1 so far, things work this way ATM:

If you're not at war (=at peace) with an empire, your fleets don't engage in combat at all, regardless of aggressivness setting. If you're at war with an empire, your fleets are engaging in combat if at least one fleet in a given system is set to "aggressive". If all fleets in a system are set to "passive", no combat is triggered, even if the empires involved are at war.

Did another round of playtesting, found two issues in RC2:

• Apparently the size of the thumbnail images in the finished designs list is not the same for predefined and player defined designs for the basic small hull type. I didn't check this for other hull types, maybe this applies to them as well.
• We have several techs in the tech tree that enhance detection range, however, I didn't see any that increase detection strength. Apparently there haven't been added respective techs after the detection mechanics had been changed. This is a problem, as there is currently no way to ever detect universe objects who's stealth is greater than your default detection strength.

No, but it's a heck of a lot easier to maintain while still conveying what's actually happening. As you've pointed out, I like changing effects more than I like updating stringtable entries. This way, if we decide that we want to scale population or infrastructure resource bonuses by a certain amount, we don't need to redo all the stringtable entries, but can just modify a macro instead. I definitely wouldn't want to see descriptions like that in the finished game, though...

As for the Cyclic Key Expansion, I think that's a bug in the parser. There is no such cyclical reference. However, I've noticed that when I use the same macro key twice in the same entry, the second one doesn't get parsed, and remains as [[WHATEVER]].

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

There is a bug of that nature with stringtable entries. I had to rewrite some code for content file macro substitution to avoid it, but didn't bother at the time for the stringtable substitution.

I was unable to enter any text in my game (for instance for renaming or designing ships). Restarting the client fixed this. I presume it might be because I tried to alt-tab, behaviour which seems to not be supported in the client (as it simply does not work, I see my menu bar, but FreeOrion stays on top otherwise).

Beyond this, whenever I hover over items in the production list, there are lots of green (PASSED).

Finally I found it very confusing that things like The Imperial Palace were available for building on my home world, later on I found out they had already been built there!

Oh, and maybe a way to change the seed of the game, because all games I so far created seem exactly identical thus far.

If you want to see other windows while running FreeOrion, run in Windowed mode.
And? Why is this a problem?
Add or remove a star. Reproducible galaxy generation is intentional, mainly for making reproducible testing possible.