FreeOrion

Okay, first off, the boring stuff:
v.0.3.13
OS: Kubuntu 9.10 AMD64
packaged obtained at playdeb.net

after going through some of the stuff, I really enjoyed the game, had a few crashes (sorry, no I don't know what turn, just reloaded the turn before and went again) but all in all great! So I had some thoughts while playing though:

REPORTS!!! This would have been VERY handy, I noticed that I had negative population, and even negative food at one time, but could not find it in the 100+ systems I controlled. A report that shows the growth/shrinkage of the meters would have helped out TREMENDOUSLY! As it turned out, the system with the neg pop was that way because of a neighbor that was providing food.

Production: Liked this aspect except for two things: first, you cannot remove an item from the production list, when I deleted one it removed it from the list, but once I added something else, it appeared again (really annoying for those items that have "Never" as finish time. Which brings me to the second point, how about some indicator that tells you what the projected completion time would be before you move it into the queue? For example: I had a system that I had tried to build a shipyard on, and then I tried adding the Lighthouse. For whatever reason the shipyard won't build, and the lighthouse will never finish until the shipyard does (at least from my perspective).

Research: I LOVED the tree view, I wish most 4X's had this in it so you can see what you need next and queue them up!

Buildings: I guess the term: population center could be defined a little, as when reading the buildings description, I'm not sure which of my planets are considered a pop center. Also I have been having a heck of a time trying to figure out how to make ships on other planets other than my home, and how to refuel them. Any ideas? (I've built shipyard and drydocks, but it still will not let me build a ship).

Thanks folks, and keep up the good work! Can't wait to see what this is like at the 1.0 release!

Welcome.



I don't believe it's supposed to work that way.

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I'm not able to reproduce this in v0.3.13. Could you give a specific set of actions or steps in the UI to produce this after starting a new game?


An estimated turns to build if given full funding column could be added to the production items list. The list needs some significant reworking other than this, though.


That's probably not an accurate interpretation. If something can't be built, then the production system will apply any available PP to the next item on the production queue. If your shipyard wouldn't build, it's probably because there wasn't any minerals or wasn't any industry output available at the system. This is also likely the same reason the lighthouse wouldn't build.


I'm guessing you're referring to the autogenerated effects description text. This is known to be very poorly worded and hard to understand, primarily because it is autogenerated. It's not meant to be final polished text and it's not suprising that it uses confusing terms such as "Population Centre" without defining them. This will be fixed eventually, although it's not a priority for most contributors at the moment. That said, if someone wants to provide better descriptions for existing buildings (or other content) we'd consider using them.


To refuel ships in v0.3.13, they need to be within fleet supply range of one of your planets. There's no other way to refuel them besides extending those fleet supply ranges. I think there are a few buildings and possibly a tech that can do this, but it's been a while since I've looked at the v0.3.13 content. In more recent versions, ships regenerate 0.1 fuel / turn when not moving, so you can limp them home slowly if they stray too far from supplies.

For building ships, having a shipyard and drydock should be sufficient to build ships that you have sufficient tech to build. Were you trying to add a ship you could build on your homewold to this other system, or some other ship? Were you able to enqueue buildings on that turn? Does this always happen on any planet besides your homeworld, or just in one particular game? I think there were some bugs in v0.3.13 about not being able to enqueue things when you should have been able to in certain situations, although these issues have been resolved in the SVN version.

I'm not sure of specific steps, but basically I added an Orbital Garden instead of an Observatory, when I removed the garden and added observ, the garden showed back up.



Agreed, but overall it's still a great start!



I see, I will have to look at this a little more, still trying to understand the dynamics



No problem, also, are some of the buildings supposed to be "rare/unique" similar to Wonders on the Civs? I noticed I was able to build multiple palaces and Monolith of Exodus (I think that's the right item), and didn't know if eventually these would be unique (1 in the game at a time).

As far as the ships, I believe I figured it out, just took some looking around and poking...

For reports, I think the following would be useful (from what I've experienced in a 200 planet setup):
For each planet, what are the meter losses/gains (pop 0.0, health 0.0, food +1, mining -5, etc)
What/where are available ships? Also are the moving or stationary? For Moving, where are they heading?
Maybe a game report, comparison charts with enemy stats, or something (i.e. systems owned, resources, etc)

I do understand that it's in Alpha state, which means bugs, mostly functional, etc; but it's looking VERY good!

If you have time, try to isolate the exact steps to reproduce... It's working fine for me on v0.3.13, and we might have already fixed it in the SVN version, but I can test that once I can replicate in in v0.3.13.


All buildings are supposed to be more like Wonders in Civ than buildings in Civ, with each being a rather significant features in the game, although not all will necessarily be unique in an empire or the universe. However, there aren't any mechanims implemented yet for restrictions on making more than one copy of anything. Actually doing this is a bit complicated in practice, and it's not really a priority at the moment.