First Impressions

Describe your experience with the latest version of FreeOrion to help us improve it.

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maackey
Space Krill
Posts: 2
Joined: Sun Nov 25, 2012 11:28 pm

First Impressions

#1 Post by maackey »

First off some context: I haven't ever played MoO 1 or 2. I really like strategy games and open source games. Some of my favorites: Zero-K, Total War series, UFO:AI, Master of Magic and many more. I tried to avoid any wiki's to see if I could learn how to play by trial and error, which worked well for the most part.

Sorry for the length, there is a tl;dr at the bottom

Starting off I played around with the controls, and they seemed pretty reasonable; I could move ships easily enough and sort them into fleets etc. one problem though was I couldn't find any shortcut for common operations like end turn. Are there no shortcuts? having to click "end turn" manually every time is really frustrating especially on my laptop with a touchpad. Switching between Production/Research/Map is also a tedious chore with the mouse.

Production is handled fantastically. I happened to guess how the x1, x1, columns worked, some tooltips might help other newbies though*

Research is quite nice as well. Shortcuts to filter out different categories would again be nice. My laptop is pretty crappy and the game got quite slow on the research page with everything active.

The galaxy map looks excellent. Planet models/images for each system is really helpful for distinguishing important characteristics for visual people like myself. The fleet icons were a bit confusing though. Individual ships or groups of the same type were distinguishable enough, but combined fleets had a completely separate icon which I wasn't immediately aware what it meant (still don't, although I'm hopeful there is some underlying schema that I'm not currently aware of) Also, if there is only one ship in the fleet, that ship should be selected when I click on the fleet. When colonizing/invading it is frustrating how many clicks I have to go through to perform an action without shortcut keys.

It took a while before I figured out how to actually invade a planet. I had sent my troop ships to invade (after sending a colony ship to no effect) while my main battle fleet kept the planet secured. But because the option to invade doesn't show unless the troop ships are specifically selected, I spent dozens of turns trying to figure out how to destroy/invade the planet. I had 10 dropships (50 troops) ready to invade a planet with 40 troops, but still couldn't capture the planet. Eventually I figured it out, but hiding functionality like that is very annoying. It was actually only after I successfully colonized a planet (after going through much trouble and testing) that I figured out how to "invade". If I had the opportunity to change something, I'd probably change this first. Perhaps the option to colonize/invade would show up if the ships were present in the system, as opposed to selected. Then when you colonized/invaded the ships would automatically be used up without having to select the individual ships manually.

Invading was somewhat boring as you only needed +5 more troops than what was currently on the ground and you succeeded every time. Perhaps instead of raw comparison, troop count could be a random roll of pass/fail so each troop would give a 50% chance to increase your strength by one and then you could compare the resulting randomized strength to determine if a planet is successfully invaded or not. It still maintains the strength of higher number of forces, as the distribution is normal, but adds excitement and suspense because they could *possibly* fail. There could even be upgrades to your troops to give them eg. 60% chance to add to strength, or planetary penalties that make invaders only provide 40% chance etc. But yeah, I guess I can write another post in Brainstorming for this.

I was very disappointed when I researched laser weapons. I had gotten all the way to the best mass drivers (4?) and then it turns out that all that research was completely useless as lasers are better in *every* *single* *way* than my best cannons. I also disliked that each iteration of cannon research completely made previous designs obsolete, and they would clutter up my ship design list. Why would I want to keep my Mark I ship when Mark IV is just as cheap, builds as fast, and does craptons more damage? Why do I still have the option to use v1 Mass Drivers when I have upgraded to v4? The fact that lasers go well beyond the mass drivers is not only frustrating because my previous designs and equipment are useless, but the fact that ALL THAT RESEARCH WAS WASTED because I could go for laser 1 right after cannon 1. Frak. Frak Friggety Frak that is retarded. I know that the game is still in early development (wasn't until I finished my first game that I realized how early it was -- it looks really well polished for an OSS game) so this will probably be worked on with different effects for weapons or whatnot but heh it was quite a surprise.

I built some guys on a hostile planet. Everyone died. But I still got infrastructure/production/research/troops/defense etc. from the planet even though noone was there. Probably a known bug, but it also reminds me that I have no idea what infrastructure does. I know that production lets me build stuff, research lets me research technologies, troops keep guys from invading my planets, defense shoots down ships, but I have no idea what infrastructure does, it is not explained anywhere.

Similarly with stealth. I have no idea what effect stealth has on the game. I researched some stealth/detection stuff just for the heck of it but the cloak ship modules I got said "Strength: 0" ... so I didn't even know if it was implemented at all (like planet happiness) but if it wasn't then that brings me to the fact that I never got a victory screen or any indication that I won (at least I think I won -- I had conquered all planets connected to the grid) and I wasn't sure if that was because someone was hidden, if there was another section of the galaxy inaccessible to the starlanes or if the game just doesn't have an ending??? I gave up that game and started a second, but how do you tell if there is something hidden? I had researched active radar etc. but couldn't see anything.

Oh, almost forgot: wtf is the Ion Storm? It looks like some alien barfed on my screen and it doesn't actually do anything to my knowledge. You can't even select it to tell what it is (I had to go to the object list to see what objects I could see and rule out ships/planets etc.) It blocks selection of anything under it, and it seriously detracted from the otherwise nice look of the galaxy map (its really ugly). At one point I had 3 (count em three) concurrently splattered over my screen.

So yeah, tl;dr:
Game looks quite nice & polished overall
Lack of shortcuts sucks hard
Invasion/Colonizing interface needs re-design
Weapon Balance also needs serious work
Descriptions (eg. infrastructure, stealth) and tooltips need to be added/improved

I look forward to conquering some more galaxies soon! :)

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Dilvish
AI Lead and Programmer Emeritus
Posts: 4768
Joined: Sat Sep 22, 2012 6:25 pm

Re: First Impressions

#2 Post by Dilvish »

Hi, thanks for the feedback. Perhaps you could also clarify which version you were playing, gotten from where? It sounds like it's probably the latest stable release, a month or two ago. There are more current test builds available also, with a lot of improvements, including a much tougher computer opponent and covering at least one of your cited issues, simplifying colonization.

As for hotkeys, I can't remember where it was I had seen something written up on them, but here's something condensed from some of the code:


ESCAPE -- ReturnToMap
RETURN -- OpenChatWindow
CTRL RETURN -- EndTurn
F2 - ToggleSitRep
F3 -- ToggleResearch
F4 -- ToggleProduction
F5 -- ToggleDesign
F10 -- ShowMenu
s -- CloseSystemView
e -- ZoomIn
KP_PLUS -- ZoomIn
r -- ZoomOut
KP_MINUS -- ZoomOut
d -- ZoomToHomeSystem
x -- ZoomToPrevOwnedSystem
c -- ZoomToNextOwnedSystem

// Keys for showing fleets
f -- ZoomToPrevIdleFleet
g -- ZoomToNextIdleFleet
v - ZoomToPrevFleet
b -- ZoomToNextFleet
If I provided any code, scripts or other content here, it's released under GPL 2.0 and CC-BY-SA 3.0

maackey
Space Krill
Posts: 2
Joined: Sun Nov 25, 2012 11:28 pm

Re: First Impressions

#3 Post by maackey »

Thanks a million Dilvish!

I'm using v0.4.1 (Rev 5379) from the archlinux repo.

davidescott
Space Floater
Posts: 36
Joined: Sun Dec 23, 2012 10:37 pm

Re: First Impressions

#4 Post by davidescott »

I'm also new to MoO having played mostly Civ type games in the past. I would like to +1 many of the comments as well as make a few of my own and make a few suggestions.
  • I hate consumable units. Its pointless to build a bunch of units, send them somewhere and then lose them. I would rather have a permanent unit that gives me a capability (but needs protection), but which costs me time/production to use the ability. So rather than building a colonization ship for each colony, let me reuse the colonization ship but make it take 5 turns and 10 production each turn to build the new colony.
  • Invasions are doubly annoying because of the need to build lots of consumables and then individually select a sufficient number to complete the invasion. I would rather use a single troop ship and have it reduce the number of enemy troops by 2 every turn I control the system.
  • The use of fractions is annoying. I can understand fractions coming from powerups (125%) but a lot of base values seem to be fractions (7.9) which is really odd and confusing especially when 8*1.9 = 16 < 2*7.9=15.9
  • There is still lots of micromanagement in the way that ships are managed. Especially when it seems to require a minimum of 10 ships to do anything useful. Most invasions require at least 5-9 troop ships, attacking monsters seems to require 10-20 laser ships. If the way to build a fleet is in groups of 5-10 ships then its really annoying and pointless to have individual ships to begin with.
    I would love to see a target fleet management level for each solar system. You say I want 10 of this hull class in the system, and as ships are produced they automatically move to the system that is furthest from the desired number of ships of that class.
  • Upgrading ships. It would be nice to dedicate a percentage of production to automatically upgrading ship weapons and equipment. It could also alleviate the Laser I is better than Mass Driver 4 if upgrading Mass Drivers was essentially free but Lasers had a production cost.
  • Occasionally I would lose my supply lines, and had no idea why. There should be some way that is represented graphically. Perhaps by hovering over an interrupted supply line the offending enemy ship could be highlighted.
  • Ships passing in the night. This happened multiple times. I would send a powerful attack fleet from X->Y and leave a small reserve fleet behind. It takes 2 turns to travel along the line from X->Y and after one turn the enemy abandons Y and attacks X. As a result my overwhelming attack force sits around doing nothing and my reserve fleet is destroyed. This means I have to double my attack fleets and have powerful attack fleets spread multiple layers back into my territory. If this passing behavior is desirable then a completely different way of managing defense for different systems needs to be arranged. Either fleets need to be much much larger (so that every system can have 100 ships) and those are managed by setting target levels for the number of ships in each system, or you go with a Civ style solar system auto-attack incoming ships, and the units become purely focused on taking out other ships or attacking systems.
Otherwise a good game with a lot of potential. I'm looking forward to trying it out again in the future.

davidescott
Space Floater
Posts: 36
Joined: Sun Dec 23, 2012 10:37 pm

Re: First Impressions

#5 Post by davidescott »

I thought I would flush out some of my thoughts on how fleet management might be done.

For a system you control the following options would be presented to you:
  • A minimum number of ships of the hull/weapon class
  • A desired number of ships of the hull/weapon class
  • A maximum number of ships of the hull/weapon class
The program would produce and move ships around to first ensure that each system has the minimum, then the desired, then the maximum.

If there were ever not enough ships to meet the minimum across the empire the production of ships would automatically become the #1 priority with some heirarchy of the hull classes (the user could click and drag to prioritize cheaper vs more expensive hull classes).

If you set the min/target/max for a system that was not under your control, then ships above the desired amount from across the
empire would be removed from defense of that system and moved to the system closest to the system to invade, and then would move in to attack in mass.

A few other things that would be nice to have would be shortcut buttons to the "boundaries" with various enemys. So you click the "Blue 1" boundary button and it selects all solar systems that are within your supply lines that are only 1 arc from an arc supplied by "Blue" so you could adjust the number of ships on that front in mass to reflect changing relations with that opponent, and then fine-tune from that point on. Or select interior planets which are >3 systems towards the interior of your system and set as a policy a lower number of defensive ships in those systems.

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