Auto-design and other autos: awful and buggy
Posted: Mon Apr 19, 2010 8:12 pm
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.
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.