0.4.5 stable review

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

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Pumukel
Space Krill
Posts: 5
Joined: Wed Sep 16, 2015 7:06 pm

0.4.5 stable review

#1 Post by Pumukel »

Hey there!
I've been watching this game for several years now, and it's starting to get to a really playable and fun state. Good work so far :D . What I like most about the 4.5 release is the change in the combat system, so spamming of cheap weak ships is no longer promoted. And the hull rebalance is not bad either. Unfortunatley the game crashes regularly on my laptop, so I didn't get to some lategame matches. There will be an extra thread dedicated to this crash and I would like to share my thoughts on the game here. Well it's more of my thoughts on the interface anyway.

Glitches first:

In some games there were planets with stealth 65536. What is it? No research gives you that much detection. Once the planet became visible after
researching the active radar technology?

If you have an item at the bottom of the production queue window, the drop down menu to select the quantity ...well drops down and off screen.

You can select multiple ships with one click while holding the shift button, but you can't unselect them the same way.

You cannot scrap multiple selected ships with one click.

You can select ships by clicking anywhere on that ships button, but to unselect a ship you need to click on the line with the ships name. The bar with firepower, fuel etc. will not work for unselecting. But for selection it works.

Mouse flickers when moving the mouse. To me it looks like a low refresh rate of the position of the mouse pointer picture.

Multiplayer does not allow player names with a " " space character. The ok button is greyed out if you use one. There is no reason to not allow this, as it works fine in single player. Someone was very sad, that he had to play as "I_eat_you" instead of "I eat you" :wink: . Oh and there are many more charcters disallowed it seems. Any non english and special characters in fact. How are we supposed to play as "El imperio aliño", "Câpre éternelle" or "Großer Bösewicht"? ... wait, this would mean the space is not a valid character for the english language :shock:

In the multiplayer lobby, if one player makes a selection in any drop down menu, or finishes typing his empire name by pressing enter, this will close all drop down menus of other players and reset whatever they have written in their empire name text field to the start name. This is annoying, as it keeps you from making your setting simultaneously. Or it is a feature that allows players to play tricks on each other :wink: . (This one is present since 4.3 or earlier)

Nice gesture of the AI to acknowledge their coming defeat at the start of the game :wink: . But putting a english word in a latin sentence feels somewhat wrong. Human should be translated as homo (imho), or whatever the correct form of this word in this position in a latin sentence is. Or you could use the player's name instead in single player.

Then we have a long list of wanted features, which are mostly polish, but but would be very appreciated and improve comfort:

If one player quits/looses connection in multiplayer, you should be able to save the game instead of being kicked to the main menu. Pretty annoying if you are playing over an unstable internet connection. I would recommend a sort of wait for/try reconnect and save window.

Notification if you are the last player that hasn't finished his turn. (Red end turn button with slowly pulsating evil glow?)
And a notification when the next turn starts (sound, some color change, a flash of lightning etc.).
We had the issue, that if one player had finished his move, and had to wait a long time for the other player, he would not notice the start of the next turn (as the game advances sneaky). And thus keep the other players waiting and simultaneously thinking he is still waiting for the end of the last turn.

A quit to desktop button in the in game menu.

An option to save your in game window layout.

Have an option to save custom ship designs for your next games

Popup for weapons in fleet window should show the strongest weapon in the fleet. So you can easily see whether your shields are good enough without having to sort through dozens of ships.

Hotseat mode. I know about the trick to start two instances of the game and join at localhost, but it is somewhat cumbersome.

A automatic queue outpost base and outpost and built gas generator option. (It's tedious to do this over and over again for 20 or more systems)

Option to set the start distance of empires. ( have been starting a 2 player game with 150 planets, just to start trapped in a corner 10 jumps away from my buddy.)



Apart from the cosmetic stuff, the game already feels like a finished game :). By the way, is there a established AI interface with complete documentation, so I could give it a try to script my own AI? This game seems perfect for some fancy graph optimization stuff.

Keep up the good work!

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