Matrix Games Forums

I just got done playing 1.0.4.4 a dozen game years and had some issues:

1) At one system (and only at one system) independent merchant ships kept attacking my military ships. I'm assuming this is a bug as I have never encountered it before.

2) Newly recruited agents are assigned to counter intelligence missions, but only for one month. I had to cancel those assignments and reassign them to have the mission last until cancelled.

3) The game froze on my first planetary invasion. I had to cntl-alt-del out of the game. A reload fixed it and I successfully completed four planetary invasions, but then the game froze when I destroyed an enemy gas mining station.

I played as Ikkuro with Republic in a 700 star galaxy and 17 AI empires. Research speed was set to normal and starting tech level was set to basic. Expansion and size were both set to starting.

The economy seems OK - I never went into the red, and had a huge surplus (100,000+) by 12 years in. The AI empires were colonizing very well. I think they all had at least 5 colonies by year 12, plus there were at least a half a dozen AI empires that were nearly as big as mine. There were very few mixed empire systems. I think I noticed more continental and marshy planets and fewer desert, ice, volcanic and ocean planets; which should balance the size of the various empires better.

The early tech seemed too slow, it looked like it was going to take forever to get SY-200. I ended up trading for it. The pace of the tech has never been an issue with me, maybe it's the just the higher tech levels that need to be slowed down?

I also encountered two other long standing issues unrelated to 1.0.4.4: When two diplomacy messages from different empires come in rapidly, the second one automatically causes the first one to be declined. And pausing the game doesn't seems to be instantaneous, as popup messages occasionally come up while paused.

What is the big deal about corruption? Does it hit a nerve? Perhaps someone wronged you somehow and the local police just shrugged it off? lol

I don't see a problem with corruption myself. And it IS a part of every civilization/country now and in the past.

you can't expect a planet on the other side of the galaxy, on the outer fringes of your empire, to be crime free. If I was ruling that colony, I sure as hell would think I could get away with almost anything.. and probably could.
I would sure be a rich Governor.
Especially if the colony grew extremely big and the transactions get lost in the shuffle.

Corruption is a necessary evil. Live with it or find a simpler game to occupy your spare time.

If there was no such thing as corruption, then we would now all be from Italian decent from the Roman conquest of the world. Or Greek.

I identified the problem with fleet patrolling and zoom (to selected) functionality. Easy to reproduce to see what I was dealing with.


1. Start a game, fly your first few military ships to a single point for easy drag selecting. Create a fleet.

2. Drag select the new fleet and try to patrol. Doesn't work. Drag select the fleet and scroll your screen away, now try zooming to the fleet. Doesn't work. If you noticed the lower left selection panel isn't displaying complete fleet information when you select the fleet in this way. If you set your hot key for a fleet via the drag select method you will experience these problems.

3. Going into the fleet screen (F8), selecting the fleet, clicking the "select fleets" button, close the fleets window, then resetting the hot key fixes it.

4. Summary: The UI doesn't function correctly when you select multiple ships. Same if you drag select hot key multiple ships.

EDIT for clarification: Drag selecting isn't the issue. By shift selecting multiple ships the same loss of UI functionality occurs.

My experience about 7 hours in:

1) Ship control is not working as desired whatsoever.  I brought in a fleet of three ships to destroy a pirate base.  One ship jumped in close and was brought down to 20% shields...my other ships were coming in and the ship was going to win the fight...but the AI kept taking over and ordering the ship to 'Escape the station' by jumping away.  I lost that fight because I couldn't get my ship to stay at the planet to destroy the base before the other pirate ships came in.  Manual player commands need to override the AI automation.  Another example of this was an out of fuel repair ship in a far away debris field.  It ran out of fuel and kept jumping back to refuel, even while I was repeatedly clicking on the damn thing to stay in place.  Other examples include attack runs: I order my fleet to attack a fleeing ship, instead the ships attack an incoming space creature.  Repeated clicks overrides the AI's decision to attack the space creature for about 2 seconds.  Very frustrating, this really needs to be fixed.  Fix this generally but also please include a toggle so that I can completely shut down the AI for a fleet or ship.  When you are sending in your best fleet for a big battle, you don't want the AI interfering and retreating/refueling ships that are needed for that fight.  It is very frustrating to lose because the AI retreated half your ships that had 20% shields.  I know that you can change that setting in the ship design fields, but I want to keep that setting for 90% of the time...but be able sacrifice the ship if needed to win the larger battle.

2)Ship entry into a system when exiting from hyperspace is somewhat wacky.  The ships can be clustered together but then end up entering the system on the opposite side of a planet.  This lets them get taken out piecemeal.  I'm okay with this generally but I think a tech that improves fleet jump cohesion would be a good feature.

3)Players need to be able to easily queue actions for ships.  If I have a debris field of 20 ships, I should be able to ask my constructor to repair 5 ships in a set of 5 clicks at once.  Right now I have to sit there and babysit the constructor for 20 minutes.

4)The tech gained by scrapping advanced ships from debris fields etc doesn't have a check to see if the player has already completed a tech line.  Three times last night I was given a tech boost in a field that was already fully researched...this means I just wasted that ship.  A check to ensure that the boosted field isn't already completely researched is needed here.

5)There isn't any way to tell how much armor is left on a ship.  The red bar should go down like the shield bar to let the player know how much is left on a ship...right now it is just guess work.

6)I like the economic changes.  I found I was quite close to breakeven point most of the game, I wasn't 100k in the red early on, but I wasn't 100k bloated either.  It felt about right.  Can't say about late game yet.  I like the idea of corruption/inefficiency being modeled...as it most likely leads to the end of most empires.  Probably need a way for the player to change corruption levels somehow...perhaps increased troop presence?

7) Spies need a 'repeat mission continuously' button.  Right now it is too much work for a player running the rest of the game to have to click 10 spies into sabotage missions every month for training.  Really tedious, not fun.

I think this is a great step Erik.  I have played games that were completely broken before (HOI3, MOO3) this game isn't even close.  You've really put together a gem here and I really enjoy playing it...the graphics seem timeless.  Every aspect works, it just needs some optimization and fine tuning.  As someone who makes engineers things for a living, I can tell you that once you've made something, there will be a lot of people who produce nothing that will complain...They're often times the nosiest ones.  Try to focus on the people who appreciate your work and are trying to help you make it even better.

ORIGINAL: vengen

I just got done playing 1.0.4.4 a dozen game years and had some issues:


3) The game froze on my first planetary invasion. I had to cntl-alt-del out of the game. A reload fixed it and I successfully completed four planetary invasions, but then the game froze when I destroyed an enemy gas mining station.

So I am not the only one with this problem then. Every time I destroy an enemy mine, or do an invasion, my game freezes. This never happened to me before in any other patch.

ORIGINAL: Davor

ORIGINAL: vengen

I just got done playing 1.0.4.4 a dozen game years and had some issues:


3) The game froze on my first planetary invasion. I had to cntl-alt-del out of the game. A reload fixed it and I successfully completed four planetary invasions, but then the game froze when I destroyed an enemy gas mining station.

So I am not the only one with this problem then. Every time I destroy an enemy mine, or do an invasion, my game freezes. This never happened to me before in any other patch.

Interesting... doesn't happen to me. But I do get a "freeze" whenever I open the construction menu or ships menu in a late game stage (aka, 300 planet empire).
However, this isn't really a freeze as the game just taking 30 seconds to compile the full humongous list. Letting the computer think while I go for a snack resolves those.

I guess my luck ran out. I had no freezes or crashes while others had. I have uploaded my saves, so I hope they can take a look and see if anything is wrong. It's very hard to continue the game because it seems like every time I attack sometning and I am successfull it freezes.

Another night of playing. I still think the early game economy was made to be too easy. It probably shouldn't be as difficult as Beta 2 was, but maybe somewhere between now and then. But I can't argue with a slider to control this. If you guys do decide to implement that, could I ask that there be two sliders instead of one? One for the AI empires, and a separate one for the player's empire.

Pretty sure this is a bug, when I hit "copy as new" the maintenance fee on the new ship is actually increased over the old design and stays that way once saved. As best as I could check the component list has stayed exactly the same.

ORIGINAL: taltamir

Interesting... doesn't happen to me. But I do get a "freeze" whenever I open the construction menu or ships menu in a late game stage (aka, 300 planet empire).

I think that particular funness happens because the game always opens the ship tab in SHOW ALL SHIPS, even though by late game, this tab display is absolutely useless because of the sheer profusion of ships in the list, instead of remembering the last filter you were looking at, which, by that point, will sure as hell NOT be "all".

ORIGINAL: Fishman

ORIGINAL: taltamir

Interesting... doesn't happen to me. But I do get a "freeze" whenever I open the construction menu or ships menu in a late game stage (aka, 300 planet empire).

I think that particular funness happens because the game always opens the ship tab in SHOW ALL SHIPS, even though by late game, this tab display is absolutely useless because of the sheer profusion of ships in the list, instead of remembering the last filter you were looking at, which, by that point, will sure as hell NOT be "all".

I agree, as I said its not a REAL freeze because it eventually resolves it if I just leave it to work for a little while
I don't honestly see the POINT of an all ships filter personally. If I open the ship list, it was for a reason.

I'm really enjoying this version.

Found a bug though (not sure if it has been listed previously).

Select a military ship. Mid view of galaxy. Right click on system. Select 'Patrol XXX system'. And an exception is thrown. Telling it to patrol a particular base or planet in the system isn't a problem.

************** Exception Text **************
System.ApplicationException: Invalid mission target type
   at DistantWorlds.Types.BuiltObjectMission.ResolveCommandsForMission(BuiltObjectMission mission, Boolean allowReprocessing, Boolean& couldResolveCommands)
   at DistantWorlds.Types.BuiltObjectMission..ctor(Galaxy galaxy, BuiltObject builtObject, BuiltObjectMissionType missionType, Object target, Object target2, CargoList cargo, TroopList troops, PopulationList population, Design design, Double x, Double y, Int64 starDate, BuiltObjectMissionPriority priority, Boolean allowReprocessing)
   at DistantWorlds.Types.BuiltObject.AssignMission(BuiltObjectMissionType missionType, Object target, Object target2, CargoList cargo, TroopList troops, PopulationList population, Design design, Double x, Double y, Int64 starDate, BuiltObjectMissionPriority priority, Boolean allowReprocessing, Boolean manuallyAssigned)
   at DistantWorlds.Types.BuiltObject.AssignMission(BuiltObjectMissionType missionType, Object target, Object target2, BuiltObjectMissionPriority priority, Boolean manuallyAssigned)
   at DistantWorlds.Main.2wtdNFqM7Zw0TFIbsvUT6uEiXAi8Uhygvqq67KTrk75SnDBG(Object , ToolStripItemClickedEventArgs )
   at System.Windows.Forms.ToolStripDropDownItem.OnDropDownItemClicked(ToolStripItemClickedEventArgs e)
   at System.Windows.Forms.ToolStripDropDownItem.DropDown_ItemClicked(Object sender, ToolStripItemClickedEventArgs e)
   at System.Windows.Forms.ToolStrip.OnItemClicked(ToolStripItemClickedEventArgs e)
   at System.Windows.Forms.ToolStripDropDown.OnItemClicked(ToolStripItemClickedEventArgs e)
   at System.Windows.Forms.ToolStrip.HandleItemClick(ToolStripItem dismissingItem)
   at System.Windows.Forms.ToolStripItem.HandleClick(EventArgs e)
   at System.Windows.Forms.ToolStripItem.HandleMouseUp(MouseEventArgs e)
   at System.Windows.Forms.ToolStripItem.FireEventInteractive(EventArgs e, ToolStripItemEventType met)
   at System.Windows.Forms.ToolStripItem.FireEvent(EventArgs e, ToolStripItemEventType met)
   at System.Windows.Forms.ToolStrip.OnMouseUp(MouseEventArgs mea)
   at System.Windows.Forms.ToolStripDropDown.OnMouseUp(MouseEventArgs mea)
   at System.Windows.Forms.Control.WmMouseUp(Message& m, MouseButtons button, Int32 clicks)
   at System.Windows.Forms.Control.WndProc(Message& m)
   at System.Windows.Forms.ScrollableControl.WndProc(Message& m)
   at System.Windows.Forms.ToolStrip.WndProc(Message& m)
   at System.Windows.Forms.ToolStripDropDown.WndProc(Message& m)
   at System.Windows.Forms.Control.ControlNativeWindow.OnMessage(Message& m)
   at System.Windows.Forms.Control.ControlNativeWindow.WndProc(Message& m)
   at System.Windows.Forms.NativeWindow.Callback(IntPtr hWnd, Int32 msg, IntPtr wparam, IntPtr lparam)


************** Loaded Assemblies **************
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ORIGINAL: jam3

Pretty sure this is a bug, when I hit "copy as new" the maintenance fee on the new ship is actually increased over the old design and stays that way once saved. As best as I could check the component list has stayed exactly the same.

This is not a bug. Maintenance fees are created by current day prices. What ever components you have on the ship and the prices for that ship can be higher to buy, so therefore your maintenance fees will be more. Maintenance fees are created at time of creation of the ship, other wise maintenance fees would fluctuate as the prices of resources fluctuate.

ORIGINAL: Davor

ORIGINAL: jam3

Pretty sure this is a bug, when I hit "copy as new" the maintenance fee on the new ship is actually increased over the old design and stays that way once saved. As best as I could check the component list has stayed exactly the same.

This is not a bug. Maintenance fees are created by current day prices. What ever components you have on the ship and the prices for that ship can be higher to buy, so therefore your maintenance fees will be more. Maintenance fees are created at time of creation of the ship, other wise maintenance fees would fluctuate as the prices of resources fluctuate.

No this is me going through and redesigning the original ships with pause on. Like designing a mining base one with the luxury extractor and one without for the maintenance savings. Once I hit copy as new the new base with the exact same components costs more and not a day has passed in the game. I can also redesign the exact same base using "add new" and the maintenace cost will be identical to the original.

This is a bug.

There is absolutly no reason why duplicates with the exact same component list would have different maintenance costs; the fluctuations would effect each ship the same. Likewise a ship with an identical component list minus a few components should always cost less, i.e. hitting "copy as new" and doing nothing but removing components should always cost less than the original because the fluctuations would make the original go up in cost as well.

What Jam3 is describing certainly sounds like a bug.

Is this with the newest beta release or 1.03?

Latest 1.0.4 I was redesigning all my ships after installing at the start of a game when I noticed this.

I have a constructor ship stuck in retrofit. 1.0.4.4 Client. I read that this was thought to be fixed with a previous version. My Capital planet ES128. Retrofitting to a Zeus MK4 constructor ship. All resources available.

If you want the savegame let me know. I tried to upload it but it said the file type wasn't supported. Do I just rename it to .txt? Anyway, let me know.

Another bug. Game froze after blowing up a star base. It was straight after the explosion animation where the whole screen rocks. Couldn't reproduce it through so perhaps it is some sort of memory leak that was re-set when I restarted the game???

Suggestion: When the various 'Do you want to...' screens pop up it would be good to have an icon on them so we can see what it is referring to. For example, the spy suggestions I usually say yes, but the attack suggestions I usually ignore. Would be nice to be able to recognise the context before reading it.

I started a new game as humans and the default destroyer was unbuildable because it was size 201 and the maximum ship size was 200. I think this was because I started with the torpedo tech and the AI really wanted to include one. I let it sit for a few minutes to see if it would redesign a buildable destroyer, but it didn't so I had to do it myself.