[1.0.4.9+1.0.5.0] Ackdarian game feedback, issues, weirdnesses i noticed

[Lunalis]

now that 1.0.5.0 is out i think i better write this from the game i had yesterday.
seems 1.0.5.0 is mostly an engine patch so all this stuff is probably unchanged. (i guess i have to restart my 1049 game now and see if this all still happens in 1050.)

no idea what is a bug and what is intented to work like this... but i thought i mention things that look weird incase its not working as intended.
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akdarian mining station:
-ships fly through it when trying to dock.
-ships docking dont stop at the hangar area but keep flying though.
-i guess this is trying to get the whole ship into the hangar so the end bit doesnt stick out, but it makes it fly through the walls on the other side.



very early in game i apparently know of "recource locations" that i have not found? (i think someone once mentioned in a thread that the game knows what recources are in your system even if you havent explored the stuff yet?)
not 100% sure on this one... i probably have to check this again when i start a new 1050 game and look if they know of locations when there barely any explored yet.



research and mining stations dont get fuel delivered anymore? (i think i saw something about it in some patch)
i guess fuel tankers deliver fuel to these stations now too?
maybe when building stations the construction ship could load up caslon too to fill them up when building is finished?



missile gfx is transparent


i set a fleet of ships to guard a mining station and once they arrived they spread out around it, but a few ships sometimes dont "stop" correctly and are at speed 1/2 and just slightly rotate-wiggling while stationary. after a while the ships who sit at 0 speed still have fuel where the ships at 1 or 2 speed and stationary ran out of fuel.



fighter stuff:
-why do fighters/bombers have the deficit message in the ship designer of "considder adding energy collectors", when there arent even fighter sized collectors.


-basic fighter engines slots are "wrong" for ackdarians... top than middle+bottom, instead of middle than top and bottom.


-basic fighter has a weird geometry shadow over it on some camera angles.


-do fighters/bombers actually use resources to be build? if yes how do carriers build their fighters then? where do they take minerals from as carriers dont have to go back to a colony to rebuild fighters?


-Particle Beam and thuon beam on fighters dont have a beam projectile gfx going from fighter to enemy, but a very small weird tiny one in the middle between fighter and target.


-fighters docking at a spaceport create a shuttle from hangar going to the middle of the spaceport model.
-i think the basic command module for fighters isnt even needed atall. as to actually design a fighter you need to unlock the star fighter tech and that tech comes with a better fighter command module. so you never actually use the basic one that comes with the space command tech.

-independent colonies dont have a race person when you talk to them.


-one thing i noticed is that if i manually tell a fleet to guard a station and they fly off to engage a pirate that is nearby. that after fighting they dont go back to guarding and are set to "no mission"... might be nice if they would go back to the guard command and return to the guard target.

-the spaceport humming audio direction changes with the rotation of the camera and not the position of the spaceport to the center of the screen.
i.e. i had the hum in my left speaker for a while and wondered what causes that and i had no station to my left... untill i found out it was the spaceport on the top right of the screen that had the audio. when i moved the view around the hum always was on my left speaker untill i rotated the camera, than it changed to the right.
(actually not sure if it was a spaceport as in the new game my spaceport doesnt hum... maybe it did hum because i repaired the broken ackdarian one in the game yesterday hmm)

-if you design two frigates (i.e. a combat one and a carrier one) clicking the "auto design" button in the design list does swap it for both designs. the auto refit option does individually turn that on/off.


-i am not sure if the "medium particle beam" actually fires 2 vollys... like with the rail gun you can see them shoot two projectiles, but with the particle beam it seems like they just shoot once similar to the small particle beam and not twice in a row. maybe it should be made more visible that they shoot twice?
i noticed that as i had a ackdarian escort with small+medium particle beam and both beams always fired at the same time... even though the medium one has two vollys in its description.
the later medium thuon beam switches back to have 1 volly and doing doubble damage instead.

-maybe pirates should be able to build independent freighters and mining ships... so they have a way to get resources to their pirate bases to build pirate ships.
(but i guess that is for later once the DWU pirate mechanics are added)
-maybe independent colonies could also build a few freighters and mining ships, so that there is more "neutral traffic" and trade going on?

i.e. in the picture the pirate base is basically out of materials and ships. and maybe independent colony freighters could trade minerals to the pirate port so the pirates can build freighters/miningships to get minerals again themself to build combatships again.


-there might be a typo in the ackdarian event: not sure if its supposed to be TO there... there are alot of TO words in that sentence and a "...bring knowledge AND art to..." might work better? (but i am not a native english speaker so not sure)


-are medium thuon beams supposed to be red? and not a similar white-ish color of the small ones?
well it makes them look different so that is good... it was just weird to suddenly see two different colors of beams with the same type of weapon... but yea... if the "larger types" of weapons have different colors to make them more visible its good to keep it, but i thought to mention it incase its intended to be the same colors.


-somehow the "refuel and repair" fleet order doesnt send ships for repairs?
atleast the damaged fleet that fought a pirate base just went to a starport and refueled... the damaged ships didnt get repaired there untill i manually ordered the individual ships to repair at the spaceport.
(it seems in 1.0.5.0 so far they do refuel and go for repairs... no idea why the fleet didnt also do repairs in the 1.0.4.9 game, maybe there was something going on with the spaceport that prevented them from docking... i dunno... seems to work in 1050 atleast.)

-and as a random suggestion regarding repairs... maybe adding a automatic order option for construction ships to just "autorepair ships/stations" in that list of options could be usefull?
also what even is "auto-salvage" supposed to do? not like construction ships can dismantle ships.. ships to dismantle do that at spaceports.
maybe auto salvage is just for picking up ship debris? i guess that might be it, to have a ship dedicated to grab such stuff. (than again any ship can pickup stuff... *shrugs*)

[Lunalis]

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with 1.0.5.0 i started a new ackdarian game (i guess i could have continured the one from the first post afterall... but i had it back in 1040 or so wher loading different games made ship designs bug out (human troop transport)... so i just started a new game just incase.)

so new game... new stuff and weirdnesses i found and i just add them to this topic and not open a new one:

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-the fighter reactors have alot more fuel storage than the actual dedicated fighter fuel cells. so it doesnt make any sense to add fuel cells to fighters if you can just add a 2nd reactor, get more fuel and extra energy.


-if you have more than one new design for a ship avaiable to retrofit to, the retrofit button when you have the ship selected shows "multiple NONE designs avaiable" that NONE shouldnt be there or?


-empire automation policy setting "characters at conquered colonies or bases" has a doubble entry in the dropdown.


-you can move multiple scientists on the same research station and they all give their bonuses. (not like just one scientist per research lab). so if you have 1 research station and two scientists you can put them both on the one station and they both give their full boni to the empire.


-also the galactopedia entry for scientists still shows that you can move them to spaceports, but you cant move them to spaceports.


-in the ship designer the speed info gfx stuff (on the right side) doesnt factor in the bonuses of the hull.
i.e. an escort has a speed of 68 in the designer, but once build it has a speed of 93 because of the +25% escort hull speed bonus.

-jump accuracy when compareing two hyperdrives should list the difference in red as negative when larger.


-i had it where if a mining station gets attacked by a pirate ship and you send a fleet over to "guard the mining station" and one ship arrives early and engages the pirate, than i think the whole fleet stops in hyperspace to switch to an attack pirate ship order and then starts a new jump to get to the pirate to attack it. i guess the fleet order swapped from guard to attack and it counts it as a new order?
instead of continueing the jump to the guard target and then seeing a enemy nearby/a ship in the fleet getting attacked and doing the attack order.
i guess its similar to the guard order getting removed after engageing an enemy that i wrote about in the first post in the 1.0.4.9 game.

-i keep noticing single automated escorts trying to fight strength 400+ gravilex and vordikars for some reason.
not exactly sure why that happens... either maybe a "patrol system" order they get from automaton or the "engage system wide enemies" tactic they have might be it... still it seems they ignore the "attack power overmatch" of the empire and somehow attack by themself.
in the save i have it might been that the escort was either guarding the mining station in that system or escorting the construction ship... and then maybe because of the system wide engage setting decided it is a good idea to solo fight the gravilexes at the sun.
i dunno, maybe they somehow ignore the empire strength overmatch setting or something when escorting/guarding with systemwide engagement range.
(a bit later i had a case where a escort was attacking vordicars in an asteroid belt)
((up in the 1.0.4.9 game i had a case where this all worked really well with two fleets. i had the homesystem pirate base in my system and i was adding all my ships to a fleet... than i build more escorts in a second fleet and at some poin t both fleets decided to attack the pirate base together as combined they had 3:1 more strength than the pirate base had.))

-cant set fleet retreat strategy tactic to "when enemy greater" in the fleet template screen (raid templates start with it by default at game start and its selectable when selecting a fleet and changeing their tactic with the bottom left button)


-the tactics of a fleet dont change when you change the template of a fleet. i.e. an existing defence fleet swapped to an attack template doesnt update the tactics to what the attack fleet template has set.

-pirates equipped with "atomic devestator" bombardment weapons fire it at ships/stations... even when it does no damage. (pirates often have it as one of their 3-4 weapons on ships) i guess in theory it should just fire when shooting a planet. (i guess they would make point defence shoot at them still)

-it you open the galactopedia in a game and then go back to main menu than the galactopedia is still open.


-the ackdarian medium freighter uses the blinking lights of the large freighter model.


-the mortalen small troop transport uses the haarkonish blinking lights pattern... also is missing lights on one side of the ship.
-and the medium mortalen troop transport uses the normal mortaleen blinking lights (good), but is also missing lights on one side of the ship.
-the mortalen light freighter also uses haarkonen blinking pattern and not the mortalen lights.


--zenox battleships:
the battlecruiser and battleship designs have one right back weapon mount (weapon slot 4) and just on the heavy battleship they get another one on the left side.

maybe switch around the weapon slots a bit to make it more symetrical:
-on the battlecruiser: remove weapon 15, make weapon 7 a large mount, make weapon 4 a small mount, add small mount 5 from the heavy battleship.
-on the battleship: make weapon 4 a small mount, make weapon 6 a large mount, remove small weapon mount 15 and add small weapon mount 5 from the heavy battleship.
-heavy battleship stays as it is

--zenox troop transports:
-small troop transport: has 2 weapons... but just one is visible on one side of the ship. also has 4 defence module slots , 3 marked as visible but just one is visible on the ship. and weapon slot 1 is 360° where it should be 180° same as the right side of the medium troop transport.



-medium troop transport: has 3 weapons... but weapon slot 1 is 360° where it should be 180° like the other side of the ship. also has 3 defence modules marked as visible but just one is on the model.
large troop transport: weapon slot 1 is still 360° here. same with the 3 marked visible defence modules but just one visible on the model.


-ackdarian battleships (all 3):
the hangar slot 0 "visible node" is inside the lowerback structure of the ship and not at the top where it shows the hangar added on the model.


-ackdarian medium troop transport: weapon slots 1 and 2 are 180° where they should be 360 like on all other transports... and weapon slot 0 is 360° where it should fire 180°, same as the large slot 0 on the bigger transports.

[mordachai]

FANTASTIC POST!

I really want to underscore this:

i had it where if a mining station gets attacked by a pirate ship and you send a fleet over to "guard the mining station" and one ship arrives early and engages the pirate, than i think the whole fleet stops & drops out of hyperspace...

I really, really hope that this get's addressed!

I've seen this SOOOOoooo many times - a whole fleet drops out of hyperspace because the lead ship "saw a squirrel, and then SQUIRREL!!!"

Other ships should not give a flap -- and absolutely should NOT drop out of hyperspace because one ship in the whole blasted fleet arrived, but they have not yet!

In my head I have a list as long again as this one of issues like weapon mounts that point into the ship, or randomly backwards, or where a 360 weapon is clearly in a 180 mount, or vice versa, etc. Nice that you accumulated so many with clear pics!

[Lunalis]

just adding a few little things here:

-if you have all automations set to manual and colonize a planet, than all the planet automation is by default set to automatic, not to what you have set in the policy settings = manual.

-if you make contact to a new faction, the relation strategy setting is set to "auto" by default. even if you have everything set to manual automation. (i dont even think there is a policy setting that controls this?)

-building a resort base with the location list menu (top left menu) lists resort bases as a "private economy expense" the same as how mining stations are listed that way.
but resort bases are "other state maintenance" and require you to have money to build them, where for mining stations you can build them even if you lack enough cash as the private sector pays for it.

resort bases are not private economy but all state economy, so the tool tip shouldnt show the "private economy expense" when building resort bases.

[Thineboot]

[1.0.4.9]-[1.1.3.6] Jump Accuracy : compare shows wrong color