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Few questions

Posted: Mon Oct 17, 2016 10:44 am
by codekiddy
0.4.6 2016-10-3.63f4283
hi, this is game version I'm playing right now..

Few things in the game are not clear to me, need answers to them, hopefully you can answer them :)

1. building stealth
- most of planetary buildings get stealth applied after researching tech. except basic shipyard, orbital drydock and few others which have their stealth lower than the rest of buildings, what is the reason behind this?

2. building stealth and planet invasion
- lets say one or more buildings have stealth higher than the planet it self... then, if some empire have detection strength higher than planet stealth but lower than stealth of one or more buildings, is this empire able to invade such planet?
I mean, can just high stealth of a building (higher than enemy detection strength) prevent an invasion..

3. scrying sphere
- what is the purpose of this building? in 99% of the games planets/systems already have visibility to other systems, especially in late stage of the game when this building becomes available..

4. abandoned colony special
-it reads that some of the planet infrastructure is still usable, however after colonizing a planet with abandoned colony special, the special it self doesn't add nor reduce planet infrastructure.. it looks it's presence doesn't give any bonus/malus to planet infrastructure.

5. ramscoop
- how much (in numbers) does a ramscoop benefit a ship refueling? and if a ship has 2 ramscoops, do their bonus stack?

6. bio weapon usage (bombarding)
- how do I use them?
I built a ship having a weapon that gradually, (and later) significantly reduces organic population. however after moving a ship to target planet, it didn't reduce population...
I thought planets shield are preventing attack since the ship didn't have any fire weapons, so I build another ship having both fire weapons and bio weapons, but it still haven't reduce population even after reducing planetary shields to zero..

7. bombarding weapons stacking
do bombarding parts stack their bonuses?
Say if one ship has 2 bombarding parts of same type.

if not, do multiple ships with same bombarding part at the same target system reduce population quicker?

Thank you a lot for answering :)

Re: Few questions

Posted: Mon Oct 17, 2016 10:55 am
by Sloth
codekiddy wrote: 1. building stealth
- most of planetary buildings get stealth applied after researching tech. except basic shipyard, orbital drydock and few others which have their stealth lower than the rest of buildings, what is the reason behind this?
Orbital buildings are not affected by most techs.
codekiddy wrote: 2. building stealth and planet invasion
- lets say one or more buildings have stealth higher than the planet it self... then, if some empire have detection strength higher than planet stealth but lower than stealth of one or more buildings, is this empire able to invade such planet?
I mean, can just high stealth of a building (higher than enemy detection strength) prevent an invasion..
No.
codekiddy wrote: 3. scrying sphere
- what is the purpose of this building? in 99% of the games planets/systems already have visibility to other systems, especially in late stage of the game when this building becomes available..
You are correct. It's not a very useful building.
codekiddy wrote: 4. abandoned colony special
-it reads that some of the planet infrastructure is still usable, however after colonizing a planet with abandoned colony special, the special it self doesn't add nor reduce planet infrastructure.. it looks it's presence doesn't give any bonus/malus to planet infrastructure.
Infrastructure doesn't do much anyway at the moment. Infrastructure and the abandoned colony special can be considered work in progress.
codekiddy wrote: 6. bio weapon usage (bombarding)
- how do I use them?
I built a ship having a weapon that gradually, (and later) significantly reduces organic population. however after moving a ship to target planet, it didn't reduce population...
I thought planets shield are preventing attack since the ship didn't have any fire weapons, so I build another ship having both fire weapons and bio weapons, but it still haven't reduce population even after reducing planetary shields to zero..
It uses the bombarding button next to the planet.
codekiddy wrote: 7. bombarding weapons stacking
do bombarding parts stack their bonuses?
Say if one ship has 2 bombarding parts of same type.

if not, do multiple ships with same bombarding part at the same target system reduce population quicker?
That should be the case (but i'm not 100% sure).

Re: Few questions

Posted: Mon Oct 17, 2016 11:22 am
by MatGB
Scrying sphere is most useful in a large map with lots of specials as it appears as a special around the galaxy as well, Geoff mostly introduced it as a proof-of-concept for some new code effects and we haven't really done much more with it (yet).

It is kinda cool though.

Bombardment is occasionally buggy and more work needs to be done on the UI (see: https://github.com/freeorion/freeorion/issues/672) but the effects can be fairly powerful, I haven't done a proper balance pass on the costings yet, I suspect that most of the parts & tech are overpriced compared to the advantages of invasion, but we hope to do more in future for different ways to win instead of pure conquest.

Abandoned Colony does grant the bonus, as far as I've seen, but on the turn after conquest, that probably needs to be documented better and/or it could be rebalanced to grant a faster growth rate for a given period of time, etc. Doing more with infrastructure is one of those projects that always gets put back compared to other more urgent stuff.

Re: Few questions

Posted: Tue Oct 18, 2016 2:06 am
by EricF
I don't see the point of any of the bombardment techs at this point and never research them. Why would I want to kill a species off? I mean if they are xenophobic and just annoy me you can always just build a Concentration Camp. :)

And could you also explain to me the point of planetary stealth techs? What advantage do they give me? Another whole tech line I never research.

Re: Few questions

Posted: Tue Oct 18, 2016 4:16 am
by defaultuser
With planetary stealth, the attackers can't invade or attack the planet until their intelligence level is higher. You see that often with Laefa, which have natural stealth. I don't research it either, as I figure the best defense is a good offense.

Re: Few questions

Posted: Tue Oct 18, 2016 1:32 pm
by MatGB
Agreed, in single player stealth is fairly pointless for planets currently, but only in the "it's boring" way. If you keep your planetary stealth above AI detection they can never invade you, so you can save RP for planetary defences &c and not need to worry as much about defending systems (although you still want to stop them getting too far).

One of the problems with it is the UI can't give you any indication of what other players can see, you can know your planets are invisible but it doesn't feel that way.

NB: the Empires window shows their detection strength currently, I have that at just bigger than the fleet window so I can see just that column just to be sure I know what of my stuff can/can't be seen.

Re: Few questions

Posted: Tue Oct 18, 2016 3:18 pm
by user0169
Question 5 / Ramscoop; the bonus does not stack. Even in the current maps full of planets i will not be needed.

Generally there are some useless feratures in my opinion in a great game idea and v0.4.6 adds some more (different bombardement f.e.). Most of the changes i dont like or even see them as not necessary as the new design of a ship/monster and map graphics (what for the work on it). Monsters mostly got weaker and play therefore lesser role; its a pity, should be the other way round. Whats new and useful is the possibility of update old ship design. Lesser changes with a look at cp-prepositions should bring a project forward.

The weak AI is a main problem in the game!

The added screenshot shows a game situation where a Gysache AI (swamp=good) (yellow party) put an Abbadony colony on a swamp planet. This cant really work, even their whole colonization is slow. The pic shows the player (green party) who colonized about as much as all the maniacal-AI together without conquering only one of their planets.

Instead of the seen changes all work should be invested in stronger AI.

Re: Few questions

Posted: Wed Oct 19, 2016 6:21 pm
by xlightwavex
Ya the ramscoop is garbage as it is, i changed it in my scripts to be .4 fuel when stationary so that every couple of turns stationary you get a move

Re: Few questions

Posted: Fri Nov 04, 2016 6:29 pm
by chaz572
MatGB wrote: Bombardment is occasionally buggy and more work needs to be done on the UI (see: https://github.com/freeorion/freeorion/issues/672) but the effects can be fairly powerful, I haven't done a proper balance pass on the costings yet, I suspect that most of the parts & tech are overpriced compared to the advantages of invasion, but we hope to do more in future for different ways to win instead of pure conquest.
Thanks for the link, Mat. I never would have figured out how to use the bombardment weapons without reading that issue thread. It is seriously non-obvious. I was all but convinced they were unimplemented and worthless.

Suggestion for a possible solution...
If there are any ships owned by you with bombardment weapons in a system with planets not owned by you, then all planets not owned by you get a bombardment drop-down (same place as the invade button), allowing you to select how mercilessly you want to bombard them, zero up to the maximum extent allowed by what ships you have in place. Much like invasion, selecting a non-zero bombardment level on one planet reduces that available for other planets of the system proportionately, as each individual ship can only bombard one planet.

Basically, I think the principles involved should be:
*) Something should appear in an obvious place, just by having the proper ships in the system and looking at the system.
*) It should operate purely at the planet level; i.e. not require fleet panel clicks.
*) It should look and feel as similar to invasion as the game mechanics allow.

My apologies, as I see an awful pot of spaghetti code quickly piling up here in figuring out which bombardment options are still available given other bombardment choices already made on other planets of the system. Five different types of weapon (four metabolism specific plus chaos wave), times two different efficacy levels, and each ship could have any different combination of said weapons, and each ship must only operate on one planet in a given turn, but there could be any number of instances of any number of different ship designs in the system, each with a different mix of bombardment weapons, making automatic ship-to-planet assignment given user bombardment requests an exponentially expanding problem equals about half a bottle of Advil for the programmer and a few thousand lines of code that nobody but the original programmer will ever comprehend, if indeed he still does a year after writing it. And when a user uncovers an obscure bug in that code... Been there; done that; feel your pain; sorry for my suggestion. :wink: