SEV Annoyances and comments |
Having had SEV for a couple weeks now, played 3 and early 4 extensively, I have noticed a few things.
1. NPC Diplo AI, The npc will make a demand, I can then send back a blank 'Accept Proprosal' message and they are happy. No need to actually comply with the demand. So they demand aid, I say sure I will send aid, never send the aid, and they send back, Wee! We are happy again.
2. Survey System AI, OMG! I cannot imagine a more inefficient and braindead routine. It apparently pays little attention to sensor range and tends to leave 1 hex wide bands unexplored until it goes back and forth across the system a few times. And really annoying, the scouting ship moves up to a star, moves right, turns around and moves left, turns around and moves back right, ooops, out of movement now... Only defense is such a wide sensor range the system is explord in a turn or two. As well, an automatted ship will sometimes go all the way to the edge of a system, seeing no new spaces, before turning to a new vector.
3. With all the unique system affecting facilities, it should be easier to find if or not a system already has one of them in place or in queue.
4. If I upgrade a ship design, cannot there be an easier way to find every queue that is still listing the obsolete design, or could the upgrade facilities button also update ships designs in the queue that are from an upgrade path.
5. When I contact another empire, would it be so hard to have the message in the News take you to the location they were spotted at?
6. When a facility or component is developed, choosing 'goto' on the News should take you to the item, instead of needing to open a planets build queue, or the ship design to find out what the new items function is.
7. Could there be a warning or function added to automatted ships to return for resupply instead of running dry unannounced on the far frontier?
8. Blackholes, they state they draw ships in 2 spaces each turn, but instead seem to draw them in by 4 spaces.
9. I need to try and test this again, but have noticed that if you place point defense and main guns on the same vessel, it will fire one or the other each turn, not both.
10. Endturn speed and game stability seems to become very painful post about turn 50. I will often save the game, quit and restart to improve performance.
That should do for now. Overall I am happy, most of the problems are annoying and not lethal.
Re: SEV Annoyances and comments
#7: In Empire Options->Minister Settings, there is an option called "Ships - (All) Resupply"
With this selected, all automated ships are supposed to start heading to the nearest resupply depot once they get low
#10: This will be improved in the new patch
Re: SEV Annoyances and comments
Hmm.
Do you have the latest patch? It's the only thing I can think of to explain the difference. There were a lot of UI changes in the patches since the original release.
Re: SEV Annoyances and comments
In my most recent game, I discovered that one-way warp points aren't traversable via pathfinding.
Also pathfinding often displays one route while the ship chooses another.
Re: SEV Annoyances and comments
It appears that pathfinding will display the shortest route, but if you can see there's something blocking it along the way, the ship will take a different route.
Or, in my latest game, I hadn't actually scouted a particular warp point's hex but had scouted some hexes in the systems it linked. Pathfinding showed the turn-off for that shorter string of warp points but the ship took the long (fully explored) way. I didn't look in every system along pathfinding's display to be sure, but I believe it was showing the best case *if* I would finish my lousy scouting job.
At least, it seems to me that that's what is going on. YMMV.
Re: SEV Annoyances and comments
Regarding the supply thing, i programmed a "point-of-no-return" thing into the resupply minister, so now when a ship/fleet under his command is about to reach its point of no return to get to a resupply depot it just goes.
this is cause if a ship hits low under hi,m normally it will turn round, BUT it may hav gone too far already
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Evilhamburger's Uber-Comp OneAlpha&Beta | Multiplayer rounds with a twist
http://www.spaceempires5.com/en-US/node/4887
Re: SEV Annoyances and comments
TURN PROCESSING SPEED! playing multiple AI's with balance mod or unnamed mod after about 40-50 turns the game takes 30+ minutes to process. this is unplayable. This is the biggest problem with the whole game. other than that I love it. but with this problem the game sucks. I have never finished a game yet because it is too frustrating. the stock version is faster but the AI is so retarded the game is pointless. plus on my computer after 20 minutes the screen saver kicks on and that causes the game to crash. unfortunately i use a work computer (shh) to play this game and i cannot alter the screen saver settings.
Re: SEV Annoyances and comments
I'm playing BM too, but even after the 100th turn it takes from 5 to 8 minutes a turn, with an old AMD2600+ 2GbRAM and more than 10 empires, perhaps you should check how old is the machine you're using...
Re: SEV Annoyances and comments
The game can certainly use alot of streamlining under the hood. SE4 wasn't nearly as slow.
Re: SEV Annoyances and comments
Regarding #5, it works that way for me - I highlight the "new aliens" message and hit goto, and it goes to. Sometimes I can no longer see the alien ship if they proceeded to move out of sensor range again.
A spotter satellite (sat core and sensors, nothing else) is a good way to keep an eye on your border systems...relatively cheap and quick to produce, and you always know when company's coming. Having enough time to set the table is another thing.
Regarding #6, the times I've done this it's opened the info pane (also accessible by clicking the question mark icon in the upper-left of the main screen) which sometimes has useful information, sometimes not. I agree there needs to be a better way.
Regarding #9, defensive PD seems to happen as hostile stuff comes into its range. Offensively, stuff that PD can target is often untargetable by a ship's main gun(s) so depending on the target, one or the other is all you'd see fire.
For #10, I've noticed the same thing on my new, faster computer but not on my older one. I suspect the graphics have something to do with it as that's the biggest difference between the two...my new computer has a 1440x900 screen (and much better video card) whereas the old one was using 1024x768. (I think - not sure) My old computer could go well over 100 turns at a sitting with no issues. People have also guessed that there is a memory leak in the AI routines causing larger and larger slowdowns as turns go by until the program is restarted. As I keep tweaking settings to try for a more challenging AI, I haven't been able to compare that between the two computers.