Newbie Questions

2) You don't. All they give you is extra cargo space. You may want to try out the balance mod (Que Kwok!) which goes through and clears out most of the stupid stuff like that.
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There are 10 types of people in the world:

Those that understand binary, and those that don't.

Or you could play with full tech.then you can spend your resources on intel and colonies
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Every great fall begins with a single mistake, YOU just made your's........

Culture Accumulation was never implemented (although a few pieces are still lingering around) and was replaced by Cultural Achievements.

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Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

Is this a good spot to post a newbie question?

My question isn't really about game play. I downloaded the demo and am messing around with it, but the game screen keeps flashing white intermittently. What causes that, and does the full version of the game do the same thing. It's going to drive me nuts if it keeps doing that. Also, what is a good target FPS rate?

The flashing is a "known" issue that a lot of people have had. No one is sure what caused it, though there is evidence suggesting popups in the background can cause it (though other thigns can cause it too). In my experiance, running in a windowed mode removed them entirely, as well as allowing the game to run in the background.

And, FYI, FPS isn't really an issue for this type of game. So long as your UI is working, you should be fine. Its about thinking, not reactions.
_______________________
There are 10 types of people in the world:

Those that understand binary, and those that don't.

The game is a lot better than the Demo as almost all of the bugs in the Demo (v1.08) are fixed by this point in the main game (v 1.20) though the occasional flashing thing is common to both and Starfury so it might be something to do with the common 3d engine that they have and some display drivers/hardware. Lots of popups and background processes also may cause it and don’t help generally.

Higher TL's of colonization are a bit pointless as if you want more people on your initial colony its more cost effective to add a couple of cargo bays to the coloniser and research cargo to up the capacity of that and small ships to increase the capacity of the ship, so as to add more cargo capacity.

I believe that the flasing screen is a problem to do with whether the game or your control pannel controls the settings for AA and AF. Set it so the game controls each of these and things should be better.

Is there a way to select ALL of your production queues for a ADD TO ALL order without having to individually click on each line?

Anyone? Hasn't anyone that's played wondered about this? If I own 100 colonies I don't want to have to freakin' select 100 colonies one at a time to so that I can add the same item to each production queue.

Anyone? Bueller?

What about seeing distances between hexes? In SE IV you could see how far it was from a selected unit to another square. Can you do this in SE V?

Neither of these are in. I've requested the Select All button before, but I hadn't thought of distance between sectors. That would be a good addition too.

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Watch for my mod - codename: Dimensions - coming by Summer, 2007!

I'm sure that common sense will rule the day, and that eventually we will be able to click on the column heading in the Queues report and have it select ALL colonies.

As for the distance between sectors, in SE IV I use that function every turn when deciding whether to issue move orders or not. I don't like to leave my ships sitting out in the middle of space just waiting to be attacked. It's much better to be able to slide from planet to planet if you can't get to your foe in one turn.

If my mouse is a little sluggish in the game, what would be the best way to speed it up? Should I lower the game resolution, change the hardware settings, graphic detail, or what? This game can't really be that graphic intense that it should cause my mouse to lag behind my movements.

That also depends on your background programs and the memory you have in your system

It seems that lowering the game's resolution helps the mouse issue a bit. It doesn't seem as choppy, and makes the game a bit more playable, though not necessarily more fun.

..that'd be bad. It'd make much more sense to use that for sorting, as you can with the Construction list.

Do you have an ATI card? I have the same problem. I found out that disabling anisotropic speeds up the game immensely, but causes strange little artifacts. Under many 2D graphics pixels will constantly switch position with each other. It's very odd, but makes the game much more playable.

However, if you haven't recently purchased the computer, you might consider upgrading to a new card. I bought a 7600GS that should be here by Tuesday, and I have high hopes that this mouse lag will not be an issue on the new card.

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Watch for my mod - codename: Dimensions - coming by Summer, 2007!

I'm using an NVidia card. I'm thinking that it was just my imagination that lowering the resolution helped. It seemed to at first, the mouse was very fast and responsive, but as I continued playing it became more sluggish. I can't imagine that this game can be overly resource intensive.

Thy Reaper posted a fix? for mouse lag:

Submitted by Thy Reaper on Mon, 2007-02-05 11:24. Space Empires V General
If you have severe mouse lag, much greater than you should have, I've found the solution. The problem was being caused by the amount of text being displayed using default windows methods through DirectX. It is using Clear Type even when it really doesn't need to. ClearType is a relatively slow method.

Disable it by going to Properties on the desktop, then Appearance->Effects. Disable any of the ClearType options that are enabled, and have fun with a much smoother gaming experience. I know I will

The only time the screen flashes for me is when I Akt-Tab into windows.... Or when playing in window mode.

What if you don't have any ClearType options checked? Is there another way to decrease the mouse lag?

The "mouse lag" is probably caused by low FPS of the game itself. (Hit Ctrl+F to display FPS and again to disable).
If you have not tried yet, you could change your color depth - try 16bit or 32bit. Maybe this will help.

I'm currently averaging ~10 FPS with the game set to 1280x960x32. Should I change that setting?

Good Lord. i read this thread and noticed the mouse lag bit and the fix for it. now let me say that i dont have any mouse lag at all. but just for giggles i did the fix and checked my FPS in the game, it stayed at a rock stead 100 FPS (IS it caped at that or something, because it never moved from 100, up or down) anyhow that was with the ClearType options turned off. anyhow since i didnt have any lag before, and the type looked a bit odd with it off i turned it back on again. then rechecked my FPS in game with it on, it droped to about 45 FPS pretty steady.

now it seems to me that a 55 FPS drop is a bit much for something as simple as that fix was, is this common with all games? or just a problem with this one?

im not complaining mind you, 45 FPS is fine by me, but ive never actualy seen a radical change like that before.

if anyone cares, my rig is

intell 3.2GHz dual core
2 gigs ram
7800 Nvidia GTX X2

its an Alienware rig (pre dell buyout)

ohh and im runing on what ever the shiped resoultion is. i havent changed that since small type is hard on my old eyes

What is the default resolution for the game? I immediately changed it to match my desktop resolution because I hate apps that switch the resolution. Maybe if I tried it on the default I could get more than 10 FPS. It goes up to about 30 FPS in small combats but that's about as good as it gets.

the default is 1024 X 768. its funny that you get a FPS increase on screens with alot of movment like combat views and take a hit on what are basicaly static screens like the regular system views. it should be just the other way around.

anyhow as i said i took a 55 FPS hit by changing that type setting. thats pretty extream imo and should be looked into. i tryed several different games last night with the font setting turned off and on ( Never winter nights 2 , Fabled , Knights of the Old republic 2 , Galactic Civ II, and Warhammer 40K,) and it didnt make any difference in FPS for any of those games. seems each game made has their little flaws in one way or another, turning off shadows for NWN 2 increases FPS by 30+ easy for me, while runing full shadows for fabled, arguably a deeper game for eye candy gos makes only a 2 or 3 FPS difference.

now that ive actualy been looking for the mouse lag i did notice a tiny bit after id ran the game for say 200 turns or so without saving and reloading. i doubt id have even noticed it if i wasnt looking for it. but its there so somethings going on. and a lesser system i immagin that it would be annoying and noticable as all hell.

Try pressing Ctrl+S to switch of some background effect on main screen (btw. i keep pressing it when i want to save game)

Changing to this resolution gave me no improvement, nor did using Ctrl-S to switch off the backgrounds. I only come back to this game once a week now because it's so annoying to play.

You could play in windowed mode instead.

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Sotho Tal Ker wrote:

You could play in windowed mode instead.

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I imagine that I could give that a try. What do I have to do to get it into windowed mode?

On the startup screen click on setup and set Video Mode to windowed. This will make the game have a window size of 1024x768 though. If you have a resolution greater than 1280x1024 I do not recommend it.

Also you could fiddle with the other options there. Maybe you need to change your desktop resolution to either 16 or 32bit aswell to get a speed improvement.

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Sotho Tal Ker wrote:

On the startup screen click on setup and set Video Mode to windowed. This will make the game have a window size of 1024x768 though. If you have a resolution greater than 1280x1024 I do not recommend it.

Also you could fiddle with the other options there. Maybe you need to change your desktop resolution to either 16 or 32bit aswell to get a speed improvement.

All of these things I might have to do seem so...distasteful. I will try windowed mode to see what I think, though if I see a single scroll bar it's all over! And I definitely don't want to have to change my standard desktop resolution for this one app. If it was something I really liked I'd do it but so far I'm not completely sold on SEV.

well with the better colony modules you get more "bang for your buck" in terms of cargo space per kiloton but if you feel absoultly no need for such investments then don't research it.

Oh gosh, I have been looking for a select all button for a while and was hoping that I just missed it or something.