SE:V Changelog v1.43

I like #18, I played a game where the AI built drones with just engines. Up to that point I had been lazy and didn't really have a counter for a lot of drones so they would have wasted my fleet. To top things off I couldn't catch the buggers to destroy them so they just stayed there floating around the system.

I like several of these, including the continuing speed increases.

#8 makes me wonder exactly how this is being handled, but I doubt it will be anything but good.

#14 concerns me, however. Is it that both planet and system facilities of this type stack, or were multiple system or multiple planet facilities stacking with themselves?

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Great, some more bugs squished! (Wait... why do you look at me that way Xi'Chung? ... Help!)

7. Such as cloaking?
9,10,11. Great! Don't have to regroup them in fleets anymore!
12. Does that solve the false 1 movement point spent shown for orders like load cargo?
13. "the report": do you mean the order lines? (Using backspace clears them now and is faster than going into the orders screen btw)
16. For DirectPlay only or also PBEM? That would really help to prevent some turn rollovers!

For 7, yes, the cloaking. MM had left in the different types of sensors that were in SE:IV, although there is only the one generic sensor type in SE:V.

And I bet 16 applies to any game running in simultaneous mode.

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2,000,000 isn't hard to reach. Even the stock AI can get there in a few years.

Although I suppose it's better than the current 30,000, which is about 1/15th of the score you start with in a Quick Start game.

All good things.
But 1.43 is still not out (for us, not for beta).
Some more time, or is not the official patch yet ?

14. Hmm... I would expect them to stack, otherwise the system facility is not really useful compared to the planet facility when you think about the huge research cost for practically no benefit except for the rare case of a system with lots of Small and Tiny planets that have some of those facilities on each one.

And even then I doubt it's worth the tech points needed: in BM you need 300k research points to get the maximum efficiency computer complexes. Then if you want to replace them with max System computer complexes, you need another 800k research points!
For ressources: 1650k to get the maximum planet facility, the basic facilities and the robo miners and 1950k to get the max system facility and only one more level of basic facilities and robo-miners.

I assume the system is similar for stock, maybe even worse since levels tend to be practically unlimited, and so system facilities would not catch up with planet facilities.

System and planet facilities stack with each other. The problem was that all of these facilities were stacking, so 5 planet facilities had been stacking with each other.

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Where do you get Beta patches, or get to test them?

beta patches are available now only for selected beta testers

Oh, then I misunderstood Kwok...

I was wondering when the new patch and Balance Mod, I just started a new game, has 7 players, and a med. sized map, already I am waiting 15 minutes between turns...making the game still unplayable. i am hoping that this new patch, and Balance Mod help. Thanks for working so hard MM and Kwok for working to get the game to what it cam be!!

...strange I have an old AMD Athlon 2600+ and it doesn't take more than 5-8 minutes per turn (after turn 50+), maybe we need a benchmark to calculate approximate turn duration according to proccesing power.

Due to the glacial pace of games I will not start a new game before the patch, especially with all the fixes and additions like the color-coding of the map, and of course the "final" version of Balance mod which is equally anticipated. I would venture an uninformed guess for this weekend.

I have a Sempron 2800+ 2.0ghz, 2 gigs of ddr ram, 512mb 3D Radeon graphics card, 150 gig hard drive. It is not the system. I am not sure which turn I am on, but I have been playing the game since this past Friday night. Still it is a medium sized map with 7 players, 15 minute wait time between turns is along time. I tried playing a game with a medium map and 20 players and as soon as I was waiting 20+ min... I started a new game. Any idea when the new Balance Mod and Patch may be out.

With regard to processing performance, I have some results which are interesting. I have two systems at home:

1) AMD 64 3400+ with 2GB Corsair RAM, 2xGF7600 SLI and RAID-0 disk SATA2 disk array.
2) VAIO Laptop with 1800 GHz CPU (IIRC), 1GB RAM, 256 ATI CPU, regular HDD.

System 1 is the gaming system and plays a good game of Oblivion, FPS, RTS etc. System 2 is primarily a work machine but has graphics light games such as SE5 installed! Both run Windows XP SP2.

I can say without doubt that SE5 runs better on system 2. The interface is less flickery when moving between screens and turns take less time to process!

I conclude that there is more contributing to SE5 performance than CPU/RAM/Disk speed alone. I have to use year old nVidia GPU drivers on the desktop (the final release before they introduced the advanced SLI modes like AFR2 etc) to avoid instability (long story) but apart from the age of the drivers all games on both D3D and OGL APIs run flawlessly. Both systems are quite lean and have minimal background processes running etc, the usual stuff. Yet the laptop appears to be more efficient!

I've wondered if the old drivers, the slight flickering when drawing the interface and the less efficient turn processing are connected. It's not conclusive (and I certainly don't have benches) but the results are interesting to me and I suspect SE5 is quite sensitive to the different PC configurations out there. I'd certainly advise people to make sure system drivers, CPU drivers etc are up to date as much as possible to see if an improvement can be achieved.

I'm running an Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4GHz, 2GB of DDR2 800 RAM, processing time is pretty constant after about 20 turns, and slowly increases. Processing time tends to be between 3 and 5 minutes, and this is on large galaxies with 16 players, using FQM and Unnamed's AI.

I turned Multi-threading on in Settings.txt, but it doesn't seem to actually do anything.

Processing time seems very random across systems, and I do not yet see any reliable pattern of system specs.

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When will we see the new and last BM and the new patch?

Maybe MM could add an option to make the AI omniscient. It would practically delete the "green bar" turn processing time, wouldn't it?

Can you already guess if the 1.43 with balance 1.09 is savegame compatible with PBW games with 1.35 with balance 1.05 ?

~Myrath

afair 1.10 will break savegames ...

Great to see #14 fixed finally, and improved turn processing is always welcome. Looks like it's gonna be a nice patch.

nice patch im sure but as far as im aware the overwhelming issues with the Alliance system havent been given so much as a second glance.

When are we finally going to get to use Alliances properly without having to worry about them destroying our games?

I cant understand why priority is being given to ridiculously meagre errors such as '7. Fixed - Mines had an incorrect description for their abilities' when such a blatant handicap as the Alliance system is staring us in the face.

The time to fix those minor errors is on the order of seconds. The time to fix alliance problems is probably much greater, on the order of days, or even more than a week. Do you claim that minor errors should only ever get fixed once every other problem has been corrected?

I don't disagree that alliances should get fixed, indeed I would like to see them fixed very much, but there's no reason not to correct minor errors.

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