Auto-design and other autos: awful and buggy

[Rainbowsand]

All games i played were in 1400 galaxy.

As a little introduction: for experimental purposes i had turned on full automation for my Haakonish Empire stretching about a 1/6 of outer rim with positive economy about +100k income and neutral reputation. In about 15 minutes when i did only clicked ok at a constant diplo window pop-ups about declaration of trade sanctions and wars (which btw interrupted autogameplay as response was not auto-prompted) because it had become absolute evil with -300k income and few scores of flying junkers, lost about third of its colonies to rebellions (while capturing 2 planets), all the time trying to propose peace to little 8-col "empire" from which these planets were taken - i had declared war on it manually before full auto.

So these autofeatures are leading to immediate collapse: - agent recruitment: by spamming to full limit these largely useless (ai sells tech and trades maps freely, sabotage is a joke) entities with exorbitant prices and maint costs equal to an average space station; - agent missions: by methodically angering everyone undiscriminatedly to the point of war; - autodesign: by making hilarious junk out of good components (my starting custom ships usually able to scare away 2-3 enemies alone) - autobuild: by spamming that junk in an enormous quantities swiftly bringing income into the far red even without help of agents; - war and ts: by provoking close stronger rivals to start a war which may otherwise have been avoided for much longer and utterly failing to conquer much weaker neighbours (i assume that devs logic on that was "they aint a threat"; that they are "empires" even if they but a little more than indeps seemingly obscured their status of a snack)

These next features are not so gravely suicidal but still quite detrimental: - sending gifts: gifts entirely wrong empires by giving money critical for expansion; - treaties: proposing trade treaties MUCH less than it is possible and sometimes to the wrong empires - colonisation: by queyeing colships on nearest planets which usually have negligible production speed while leaving overpopulated capital with max prodspeed untasked - fleet formation: works randomly without any consideration for ship roles and proportions

These features are absent which is quite annoying: -auto-retrofit, which must be done as sole option; - even manual retrofit for civilian ships/stats should be better than is total absence.

These features work sufficiently well with some manual optimisation so i leave them on: - recruit soldiers; - autoattack enemies: with good designs capable to defend against anything but fails in carrying out assaults on strongholds;

An outright bugs caused by insane ship autodesigns: - when i built res/rec stat on top of neutron star it had become a deathtrap for foreign freighters and liners: they came, they docked and they died, with only few of them crawling away severely crippled.\; - AI evaluates my heavily armed scouts and freighters in their system equally to large fleets in terms of diplo, although the scout is but a smallish single ship and i cannot order freighters to attack; a few hilarious accidents included whole system defence being scared away by my freighters after attacking first. - pirate attacks simply do not work on any of my custom ships, even a scouts, even a starting leftslidertech ones: cases that pirates manage to scare away my ships are extremely rare and quite often they get killed by a single mining station.

Oh, yes, when pirates are being purposedly fed by ill-designed stations, their escalation often surpasses military build-up of a moderate-sized empire.

A possibly offensive comment: game structure leads me to suspect that no dev had played MoO3 on so-called "impossible" level in largest spiral galaxy, max n of civs and senate with Xes disabled. And this game does not pretends to qualify as economic/logistics/politics/space wars simulator but rather as a shiny dupe (a.k.a "dude") distraction and source of income, "matrix" in company name, jests in descriptions and overly simplistic parts such as prices fluctuation being most suggesting.

A small unasked-for advice for devs as to handle publishers: they only respect those who can defy their will. Blizzards take their time to work on single game for a few years, then to delay release date for some six months, then do the same again, and no finance manager dares to cross them.

Some few other small annoyances: - same type components such as armour often result in really humongous length lists where single icon with a number shall suffice; - illogical sorting on all lists, pick-up components in particular results in lenghty poking for evrey new part until you memorise their relative position, explorer-like expandable tree should be much better; - no orders such as retrofit, disband, move to can be given through spreadsheets and main mapscrolling "next something" is quite poor a substitute; - no orders such as obsolete or scrap can be given with multiple list items selected.

Good empire sim must be fully controllable thru only spreadsheets, and main map serves only as a sight to behold and rejoice when all orders are given, and to micromanage assaults.

[Rainbowsand]

- automated constructors: with auto-design off they still devise some hilarious research junk and spam it in dire places (when it often gets demolished either by beasts and pirates or neutron pulses, sometimes even during construction) in stead of building only much needed mining bases on top-list resources.

It would be logical to arrange component build order so after building armour online shall come shields - all of them - then weapons then assemblers then all other stuff for stations, armor->engines=>shields->weapons+>other for ships sand it would be possible to move unfinished ship with working engines out of shipyard then to repair it later to escape demolition by raiders and/or pulses.

There also should be special ship class to move the statons around because there is hilarious rare bug when station slips off the orbit and stays motionless in space (btw, all existing space stations have maneuver thrusters) and it is quite insane to demolish huge station with no salvage whatsoever when it becomes unneeded, not that it matters with huge gaping inconsistencies within financial system though. Another little btw: i see but one way to "scrap base/ship immediately" and it is the reactor overload; when done in orbit of a planet it should cause reduction in planetary development and approval based on the station size due to the downfall of huge radioactive shards and charred bones, as in some cases i presume these wont burn out completely in atmosphere.

[Erik Rutins]

Which game version is your report based on, Rainbowsand?

[Rainbowsand]

1.03

And i have found this amusing to remark that this is not report as i do not perceive myself as your subordinate but rather an attempt to improve my toy according to my wishes, and also brought this picture of Neutron Last Resort - as you can see, my freighter (brown) is unharmed.

[RViener]

Erik, I find Rainbowsand's remarks,

in his post to be unnacceptble and highly offensive.

Bob Viener

[Rainbowsand]

A simple idea had occured to me as how to unmake auto features from instagamekillers without actually improving them, as temporary measure i hope: remove internal "credits" thing entirely. (After all, i can hardly imagine spiritual utopia compatible with omnibuck, and soviet ruble was resigned failure to build a working tyranny as in Egypt) Instead, research rates on stations should drop along with sys approval, and protesters can shutdown stats and hijack ships and construstats as to become pirates. The "credit" should become a real intergalactic credit: to count the resources you had taken from other emps/indeps and given. The size of this credit should be varied upon the attitude/might/prosperity and resources should be really used up at factories and consumed thru maintenance as it is quite foolish to build this marvellous net of stats and freighters to use it only for correcting resource "price" from 100 to instaperma1.5 .

[Erik Rutins]

Bob,

ORIGINAL: RViener Erik, I find Rainbowsand's remarks,

in his post to be unnacceptble and highly offensive.

You're right, I skimmed it and did not see that.

[RViener]

Erik, I think removal of the offensive post is in order. Bob Viener

[Erik Rutins]

Rainbowsand,

I skimmed your post at first because I wanted to verify the game version before getting into the details. I'm extremely disappointed to see this kind of commentary. If you want to stay a member here, you would be wise to stick to the facts in the future. This is a family forum - no personal attacks or prejudice, no swearing, etc. You can consider this an official warning. We don't ban on first offense, but if I see anything like this from you again you will be taking an enforced vacation from this forum.

Regards,

- Erik

[Erik Rutins]

Bob,

I edited it out - I'm keeping the rest of the post for reference and he's on official warning.

Regards,

- Erik

[RViener]

Erik, I'm sorry but you should remove the offensive statement and not let is stand in the forum regardless whether you give him or her a warning. Bob Viener

[RViener]

[left]Erik, Thanks.[/left][left]Bob Viener[/left]

[Erik Rutins]

In an e-mail to me, he just removed all doubt that he was deliberately trolling. Thread locked and Rainbowsand has been given a vacation from the forum.