1134 Just too broken to play

[mordachai]

And the main build isn't far off...

Yeah, for my time, the game engine is currently too broken to play.
Minimum fixes before I'll pick it up again, include:

1. Pathing.
Ships must be able to go from point A to B relatively directly. No backtracking to a world in the wrong direction. None of the shenanigan's like flying in a triangle in the opposite direction in order to go a short distance (often when nebulas are involved, but sometimes just any random point A -> B becomes A -> C -> D -> B. None of the flying around the universe for reasons...

2. Random Orders.
As in - STOP IT! Fleets are currently randomly deciding to fly to places 10x further than their fuel capacity, for reasons that are totally inscrutable. Why are they going to this star 1/2 a galaxy away? There's voidakar there, okay, but WHY?! There are threats within my borders, within their 33% fuel range standing orders, WTAF are they doing?

3. Random Dead Economy.
Many have reported that their freighters just stop carrying certain materials and the game is unplayable at that point. Pretty sure I am seeing that in my latest game (casalon this time - had 450K and it's burned down to 30K and there's been no wars, no uptick in use, just... I don't think freighters bother to haul it anymore).

[Jorgen_CAB]

And the main build isn't far off...

Yeah, for my time, the game engine is currently too broken to play.
Minimum fixes before I'll pick it up again, include:

1. Pathing.
Ships must be able to go from point A to B relatively directly. No backtracking to a world in the wrong direction. None of the shenanigan's like flying in a triangle in the opposite direction in order to go a short distance (often when nebulas are involved, but sometimes just any random point A -> B becomes A -> C -> D -> B. None of the flying around the universe for reasons...

2. Random Orders.
As in - STOP IT! Fleets are currently randomly deciding to fly to places 10x further than their fuel capacity, for reasons that are totally inscrutable. Why are they going to this star 1/2 a galaxy away? There's voidakar there, okay, but WHY?! There are threats within my borders, within their 33% fuel range standing orders, WTAF are they doing?

3. Random Dead Economy.
Many have reported that their freighters just stop carrying certain materials and the game is unplayable at that point. Pretty sure I am seeing that in my latest game (casalon this time - had 450K and it's burned down to 30K and there's been no wars, no uptick in use, just... I don't think freighters bother to haul it anymore).

There are some issues with pathing at times I do hope they will fix.

Random orders I have seen very little of though, but I take it you have seen that but it can't be that common to happen. I also would like to investigate if there is something else involved in why this is happening.

On the third point you easily can sort your freighters on caslon and see how much they carry and to where. In most cases that I have seen is players who built too many ships and stationed them in bad places which provided really bad situatio with fuel... unless you stations the fleets at your capital you need to be very careful how many ships you station at what place in order for them to get enough fule. You need to inderstand that your empire have more needs than fuel and planets will also consume allot of luxuries and construction material for the civiloan part of your empire. This will limit the number of freighters that can carry fuel at any one time.
I would not consider point three to be a valid complaint before first seeing any such empire in trouble and see if I could spot the error the player might have made, which i have seena few of from a few complaints.

This is a very complex game and there are ways to completely break the game as a player that has nothing to do with the game being broken.

[AKicebear]

On the third point you easily can sort your freighters on caslon and see how much they carry and to where. In most cases that I have seen is players who built too many ships and stationed them in bad places which provided really bad situatio with fuel... unless you stations the fleets at your capital you need to be very careful how many ships you station at what place in order for them to get enough fule. You need to inderstand that your empire have more needs than fuel and planets will also consume allot of luxuries and construction material for the civiloan part of your empire. This will limit the number of freighters that can carry fuel at any one time.
I would not consider point three to be a valid complaint before first seeing any such empire in trouble and see if I could spot the error the player might have made, which i have seena few of from a few complaints.

This is a very complex game and there are ways to completely break the game as a player that has nothing to do with the game being broken.

I think this is a fair response - but, the game could certainly provide a better UI to indicate the fault is with supply and demand, in particular too much new demand, rather than a logistics AI breakdown. This could be achieved with a few (empire/local) stockpile, supply and demand timeline charts, highlighting that the player decisions suddenly spiked fuel demand.

[Jorgen_CAB]

I think this is a fair response - but, the game could certainly provide a better UI to indicate the fault is with supply and demand, in particular too much new demand, rather than a logistics AI breakdown. This could be achieved with a few (empire/local) stockpile, supply and demand timeline charts, highlighting that the player decisions suddenly spiked fuel demand.

There might be more information readily available but I do think all the information you need already exist in the game. So to some degree it is not just a problem with the UI and infomration presentation but what the player decide to focus on that is the problam in many respect.

It is like complaining that a certain fleet just loose every fight it gets into even though you have better fleet power but you completely disregard that the enemy uses components that completely counter yours. You need to pay more attention to the detail which is part of the skill of the game.

But I don't say that we don't need more information in regard to the health of an empire, but there is only so much that can be done in regard to this or the player gets overwhelmed by information they don't know how to sort or interpret it properly anyway.

If I can look at someone elses saved game and identify a particular issue and problem they player put themselves in, and do so in a few minutes... why could they not have done that in hours of gameplay themself?!?

[AKicebear]

I think you're assuming a level of attention to detail that the devs cannot assume of the average player, even of 4x games. If the devs are fine with negative reactions and reviews, sure. Otherwise, I suggest better tutorials, notifications, or other UI elements to navigate this type of situation.

The same of your hypothetical regarding fleet strength vs actual outcome of an engagement. I take it your solution is for the player to manually check the designs of the opponent, notice the damage type, consider their own designs, and in their head reach a conclusion that despite the strength summary value, there is a weakness being exploited against their fleet.

But that assumes a very specific and attentive approach that I think most players lack. And will simply react by thinking the game is broken. The solution, which doesn't change the mechanics but does change the communication, is to have a summary after an engagement concludes of the types of damage dealt by both sides (simple summary stats), and perhaps a suggestion that there is a weakness in defense being exploited. Of course that is hard to get perfect, but not so hard to get better than what is currently offered - zero. This type of information could also possibly be used by the AI in weighting it's decisions on future design upgrades.

[Jorgen_CAB]

As I said... there might be some things they can do better... but at some point it does not matter becasue the information you give can't really inform people to the degree that they want anyway. There is a limitation on how much information the average player are willing to consume anyway.

How can we be assured that whatever new info is shown will help or be analysed in the correct way, most of it is already there. Although I do have some ideas for improvements to some important types of information that would be helpful.

Let's take the above problem with fuel for eaxmple... how will you explain to the player that they have too many ships based in the wrong place. Perhaps it is that they just are not waitong enough for fuel to adjust to the new fleets being assembled in one place. The fuel exists, just is in transit... then the player change location once again... making matters worse.
Perhaps they also are just producing fuel enough so the empire have enough fuel, but can't match when many ships are located in a single place in a short timeframe, especially if they switch places frequently.
How should we present this issue casued by the player in a clear and prominent way?!?

I think that these are not easy things to show with just numbers... this is the product of having a simulation of resources not being in a magic bin available to everyone no matter where they are, this is the sort of problem militaries loose wars over in the real world too.

In this instance there is enough fuel, not just in the right place. The player also already have all the tools they need to see this in the game as is today. They can see all the locations and how much fuel they have, they can also see where all their freighters are hauling fuel and how much. You also can manually set fuel reserves and might need to do so in preparation for stationing large fleets in a particular location. It probably would be helpful if each fleet showed the total fuel needed to refuel it. Would be good to make some decisions and know what to look for when stationing a fleet someplace.

In my opinion it will be really difficult to "fix" certain player related deficiencies with justadding some UI changes, some of it is just a lack of understanding on how the simulation of the game take time to react to changes and how you sometimes need to prepare things in advance and pay attention to things like fuel levels or even contruction materials for producing new ships due to losses in a war.

Again... I'm not saying things can't be improved... I just say that the complexity of the simulation is something allot of people must learn and understand and can't be easily transfered in numbers in a simple page.

From my real work I am so sick and tired of people complaining there is no documentation of a certain feature or part and then when you point them to the fact there is documentation they just have not read it makes you just cringe. People often just want to pointto it so they can blame their fault on someone else... sometimes people just complain on stuff they should be able to figure out by just paying attention to the details and mechanics of the game a bit more instead of blaming it on the game not holding theeir hands.

[mordachai]

I appreciate that you're trying to help. But... your assumption is that I don't know how to play this game, and that I haven't already given it copious volumes of forbearance and tolerance and benefits of the doubt.

The casalon isn't draining because I don't know how this game works, or that I've somehow stationed massive fleets all in one place and over-burdened my economy to keep that area in a surplus.

This is - like so many I've reported - just a random thing that started happening out of an otherwise stable situation. I noted that in the OP. So that you'd know. And not think it was for other reasons.

but if you doubted me, you could have loaded the save game. I posted all of this on the tech support forums, with images, and save.

I'm not bothered by the lack of feedback in-game - I can and do regularly use the in-game tools to figure out what's going on - or why things are wrong. But this is a "yet another occurrence of a situation that shouldn't exist in a live game" IMO. Economies suddenly taking out of the blue? Not a thing a playable game does regularly. How do I know it isn't just a weird edge-case? Because many others have reported having to abandon games in 1132 or 1134 for precisely this reason (albeit the resource in question has often been polycarbon rather than casalon - same diff).

It would be nice to have better in-game tooling to delve into what's happening - but that's an icing on the working-cake feature. I just want a working cake; we can leave icing for a future thing.

[Jorgen_CAB]

I would like to try your save and see for myself, that would be interesting. As this is in the tech support forum and I don't see a link in the OP could you provide a new link?

[Jorgen_CAB]

Never mind... I found your save in another thread.

I can with confidence say that all fuel issues was player created and I managed to fix and stabilize the fuel situation after about 30min of playing at speed 4x.

You had WAY too many civilian ships and they had way to bad fuel efficiency and you had too many worthless mining stations.

I went on a crusade of scuttling all worthless mining station and scuttled around 100 freighters and then started to add allot of fuel mining stations instead. After a while the game had built new freighters (as I built new mining stations) and I also updated them with fusion reactors.

After this all ports started to stock up on caslon and the whole civilian fleet just came alive again and started operating very efficiently. Now I could see almost 100 freighters moving fuel and in the range of 1500-3000 per trip and even as high as around 5000 sometimes per trip from the mines.

Caslon in particular you can't have too little mining stations of, at least as long as they are close to your colonies. Be careful building them far away unless you do so for strategic reasons to increase the range of explorers or you want to station defensive fleets there.

Around 2845 your capital had 150k caslon stored and empire wide about 500k and most if not all colonies had surplus caslon except for a few outlying colonies, but no colony was at zero caslon. I had a total of 32 Caslon Mines... I think you had around ten or something. So... it took me around a decade to "fix" the problem.

This is the point of this game... as resources only exist where they are you can get very screwed for a long time if you don't pay attention, especially to things like fuel. But other resources can be similar. I practically deleted almost all steel mines and a few other construction resource mines that you had.

[mordachai]

I'm impressed that you took the time to do this.

That's cool that a dedicated Human player can optimize the situation over time, and counter balance the automation's appalling failures.

My beef remains that this is not a playable game where allowing the automation to choose what mines to build - and what freighters - and when - and so on - should lead - in an otherwise normal situation - to ruin.

And this doesn't happen most games - I had assumed that this was an issue with 113x in particular, since there have been many reports of similar issues. If anything - automation shouldn't be suggesting building 10x the steel mines needed, nor building 10x the freighters needed. By definition, that's a poorly engineered game.

I can see needing to step in and hand-hold the economy if I set things up with scarce resources. Or if I chose quantum (antimatter) reactors that are horribly wasteful. Or built out a massive military suddenly that stressed things beyond the automation's generally functional but imperfect level.

This wasn't any of those things.

What you're suggesting is that every AI is unable themselves to function - because the automation routines are fundamentally incompetent - and require a Human to custom tweak them to bring them to success under |normal| conditions.

Hence, for me, that is simply too broken to play - especially when combined with fleets randomly being assigned missions 2x to 8x their fuel range randomly. Or pathing causing a fleet to literally try to circumnavigate the galaxy in order to fly 5lys.

Still... I guess it says something that fundamentally the issue here was civilian economy overbuilding the wrong things and tanking itself.

[Jorgen_CAB]

AI should in my opinion not have problem of building mining stations in a tempo that fit with the overall need of a factions needs. The AI should know very well when building another steel and mebnar mine is not needed. It should be quite easy for the developers to teach the AI to be allot more conservative with construction resource mines and only build them to make sure there is a small surplus production. The AI should then concentrate to focus on luxury reources. Fuel stations also need to be considered based on the size of the empires military and civilian fleet. Even this should not be too hard for the AI to figue out a relatively good amount of fuel sources to exploit.

All of these decisions should be relatively simple to come up with some algorithm so the AI focus on the correct type of mining stations, or even stop building mining stations if you start to run out of things like fuel or other construction resources.

The AI seem to focus way too much on current needs which is a very dangerous thing to concentrate on... although... the AI usually do quite well in the games I have observed and I believe there are a few reasons for that. I also don't understand why the AI built so many steel mines in your empire, it must have run out of things to build. Can't remember seeing the AI go bananas on steel mines like this, but I might need to study that further.

The problem that I see with the algorithm that calculate when a resource is in need is relatively flawed. It must also take into account the stored resources and look at a longer perspective. The problem is that the AI can go crazy trying to satisfy a need that is not really there becasue many players aften upgrade in waves and that is when resources are quickly used up and will produce a need for those resources that probably is not there. This can lead ot he AI trying to compensate when it should not do that. This is why need also need to look at the storage as well as current consumption and do this better.

The AI also need to stop building mines if there are no actual needs and not just continue building any place that is available at that time. I'm not entirely sure how the AI act in that situation but right now I assume the AI will continue to build if it can.