Alpha 10

I only had the time to start the game and click around a little, viewing all screens, this morning before heading to work. I noticed that the little move to the upper left when clicking on space is still there. Not that it means much for gameplay, but it's a little annoying

Well, I've been busy for a long time, but finally have a little bit of time again ...
Anyway, here we go:
Race customizing ... the '+' and '-' buttons still respond to slowly. If you want to experiment a little, and move all ten point from one attribute to the next, it takes pretty long. Annoying for a normal user who doesn't use the computer exclusively, and has a co-user with widely different race preferences.
This is also true for most other buttons in the game.

Enemy selection ... If you want to play with only one enemy, and deactivate the others and then try to select that race (to edit alignment and Intelligence), the race is deselected instead, and the Dregin are selected instead. I'd prefer if either the last race can't be deselected at all, or you can't progress to the next screen, until one race is selected.

You should also add a help function that explains to new user what the different attributes/parties mean. Few will read the manual before they start the game. People expect to start a game and at least understand the basics.

The last setting for Alignment/Intelligence should be saved, even if the race is deactivated. Instead I'd propose a button 'default' that activates all races, and restores their value to the default setting. Maybe also add the possibilities to save customized settings.

Economic screen. The update of the displayed elements takes place before the values are updated. (If you raise taxes by 1%, nothing visible happens, if you raise them another 1%, you see the consequences of the first raise in taxes.) The same is valid for all other buttons on that screen.

The Options Menu should be changed. The Exit at the bottom of the list is easy to be misunderstood as exit the option menu. I'd like to see it changed to Exit Game.

Calling up the options menu also causes the game to jump to the next turn. Don't know if it is desired, but I don't like it.

It is still impossible to start a new game, without restarting GalCiv. I'd think that that is a rather easy thing to change ...

While the settings for your own race and the galaxy are saved, the settings for the hostile empires is not, they are all set back to default, though the races selected are saved.

The social projects of the technologies are not displayed correctly. Nano frequency electronics give you lots of improvements, but they are not listed on the research screen.

When you have more than one ship, auto turn will be used, even if deactivated. That's rather bothersome.

Maintenance has to be paid even for buildings that have zero maintenance cost. Why can it be customized, if in the end the values are not used?

What has to be done to 'meet' a race? I'm flying next to their planet, and it still doesn't show up on the diplomatic screen.

There seem to be too many natives in the galaxy. I just colonized four planets, and two had natives on them. Seems too much. Given such an amount of natives, evil has a huge advantage by exploiting them. Btw, what advantages does good have?

Well, that's all for now. Hope this helps.

Regards
Stefan

I have had problems with the autopilot. When the destination is assigned, the ship performs the initial move, but following turns the ship doesn't move. Have not found the trigger that causes the autopilot to freeze.

I've experienced like problems, with the addition of the screen not "following" the selected autopilot ship.

I apologize for not staying active on the boards but my worksite installed some new internet filters that restrict my access to non 'official' websites.

Alpha 10 is looking pretty impressive.

Anyway, I was able to download Alpha 10 last night and ran into troubles already. I went thru race the game generation screens and started on turn one. I hit escape to bring up the menu screen to turn off the auto turn. I clicked on the main menu button and was taken back to the restore game screen. I then hit restore game and was kicked to desktop generating an exception reporting. I tested this twice and the same situation happened both times with a drop to desktop and an exception report. The exception report was overwritten by the problem I encountered this morning.

I tried to start up the game this morning and I freeze up at either the Stardock or the Gal Civ title screens. I cannot do a ctrl-alt-del reboot and have to completely shut down my computer. I've included the SE report for this.

Stardock SmartException Logging Information
-------------------------------------------

OS Version : Windows ME
Video Card : NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 200
Application Exception code: C0000005 ACCESS_VIOLATION
Crash Addr: 0043D2DF 01:0003C2DF C:\PROGRAM FILES\DRENGIN.NET\GALCIV\GALCIV.EXE

Processor Registers (x86):
EAX:DDDDDDDD
EBX:84A68E34
ECX:DDDDDDDD
EDX:01E9C9EC
ESI:84A68D54
EDI:00000202
CS:EIP:0177:0043D2DF
SS:ESP:017F:00A9F538 EBP:00A9F588
DS:017F ES:017F FS:472F GS:0000
Flags:00010206


Current Application Call Stack:

Addr Frame Logical addr Module Name
---------------------------------------------
0043D2DF 00A9F588 0001:0003C2DF C:\PROGRAM FILES\DRENGIN.NET\GALCIV\GALCIV.EXE
0047B088 00A9F5E8 0001:0007A088 C:\PROGRAM FILES\DRENGIN.NET\GALCIV\GALCIV.EXE
0042E788 00A9F6B4 0001:0002D788 C:\PROGRAM FILES\DRENGIN.NET\GALCIV\GALCIV.EXE
00426455 00A9F820 0001:00025455 C:\PROGRAM FILES\DRENGIN.NET\GALCIV\GALCIV.EXE
00427E24 00A9F878 0001:00026E24 C:\PROGRAM FILES\DRENGIN.NET\GALCIV\GALCIV.EXE
00425FC6 00A9F8D4 0001:00024FC6 C:\PROGRAM FILES\DRENGIN.NET\GALCIV\GALCIV.EXE
0047F1D5 00A9F928 0001:0007E1D5 C:\PROGRAM FILES\DRENGIN.NET\GALCIV\GALCIV.EXE
00434541 00A9F980 0001:00033541 C:\PROGRAM FILES\DRENGIN.NET\GALCIV\GALCIV.EXE
0043DB44 00A9F9FC 0001:0003CB44 C:\PROGRAM FILES\DRENGIN.NET\GALCIV\GALCIV.EXE
004AB80D 00A9FA64 0001:000AA80D C:\PROGRAM FILES\DRENGIN.NET\GALCIV\GALCIV.EXE
004ABAA7 00A9FACC 0001:000AAAA7 C:\PROGRAM FILES\DRENGIN.NET\GALCIV\GALCIV.EXE
004A7790 00A9FB44 0001:000A6790 C:\PROGRAM FILES\DRENGIN.NET\GALCIV\GALCIV.EXE
004CB6C4 00A9FBC4 0001:000CA6C4 C:\PROGRAM FILES\DRENGIN.NET\GALCIV\GALCIV.EXE
BAABDFF6 00A9FBF0 0001:0001CFF6 C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\DDRAW.DLL
BFF63613 00A9FC10 0001:00002613 C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\KERNEL32.DLL
BFF848F7 00A9FC24 0002:0001B8F7 C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\KERNEL32.DLL

I'm currently uninstalling galciv and trying to reinstall to see if that helps.

Have you ended that turn? Usually ships on auto pilot should move after you end your turn.

Oh, some more problems:
After I end the game, restart the program and start the game (whether by starting a new game or restoring the last game), the options menu is open (with new game it is open in the customization screen!!) and the research screen is called up (even if not necessary in a restored game.

You need to build a colony ship capable of interstellar travel to colonize a planet in the same solar system. That is a huge waste of resources.
Also, I'd like to be able to build ships without interstellar traveling capacity for defense purpose. Without FTL drive, and less need for maintenance capability, less crew and supplies, the ships should be pretty cheap, compared to interstellar ships of comparable combat capabilities.
Another standard ship that should be added is a fast, lightly armored vessel (for hunting down enemy civilian ships while avoiding his combat ships).

But back to the colony ships. If you produce them, you can immediately colonize another planet in the same system. But you can not move population to the ship first. So those colonies begin with a population of 0. Thankfully that causes no crash, and the population grows without problem.

Earth seems to still be a democracy. That means that there'll be quite a lot of interplanetary vessels in any solar system that has two or more planets settled. So it would just be logical to have the ability to move colonists between two planets without having to have a transport ship (though it might cost a bit).

On the colony screen, you can (by clicking on the arrows) scroll through the planetary systems you colonized. It would be nice to have that function also on the 'left arrow' and 'right arrow' keyboard keys. And have either 'up/down arrow' or 'page up/down' to scroll through all of your colonies (not just systems).

And there is something about balance ... I have one planet level 20 with 110 pop, producing 14 income, 13 spending, and a level 18 planet with 2 pop, 7 income, 10 expenses, and one level 18, 0 pop, 0 income, 7 expenses. Shouldn't income be proportional population? And what determines how much can be spend?
I mean, if a colony with 2 population units, produces over 70% of what 110 produce (while on a planet two classes worse), and generate already 50% of the income, there has to be some kind of screw up in the economic system. Or maybe there's a wisdom behind it that I can't see...

Stefan

Add on to my first post ...
The game only generates a new turn, when I click on the menu button on top of the screen. If I bring up the menu by pressing ESC, this does not happen.

Stefan

I've noticed the same thing with autoturn as the others are reporting with one exception. If all my ships are on auto-pilot or sentry, guard duty then the turn button has to be pushed to advance the turn. Otherwise, if I'm moving one of my ships myself then the game acts as though autoturn is on and advances by itself.

I think I was mistaken about this new error causing the exception report I included in my first post. I looked at the date/time for that file and it corresponds to when I was experimenting with the options and restore game menu.

I uninstalled the game and reinstalled. However, am still experiencing game lockup. If I try to use any keyboard or mouse inputs during the title screens the game freezes immediately. If I don't do anything the game loads the stardock title screen and the gal civ title screen and then I encounter the black screen of death. I can move my mouse but cannot ctr-alt-del out.

Prior to this I deleted the SE report so I could have a new report to submit. However, this problem does not seem to be generating an exception report now.

Woha, lots of stuff.

One thing to note: The race setup screen is going to be removed and replace by two screens:

1) Player setup
2) Galactic setup

This way we can more cleanly display the information and provide a more intuitive interface.

Lots of good ideas Drake!

One thing I hasten to point out is that there is always a tug of war between making things that make scientific sense and things that keep the game from becoming overly complex.

For example, moving colonists between planets and colonizing other planets in your star system. While it's not uncommon for a star system to have multiple habitable planets, it would requie a whole new type of star ship or interface extension in order to do something special for that type of colony. Our solution has been to just keep the cost of a colony ship low.

Hyperdrive is relatively cheap, the cost of a colony ship is in providing all the goods, servicices and infrastructure necessary to build a colony. A colony ship actually becomes the core of the colony itself (it's a moving city). That's why the colony ship disappears once you use it. It becomes the basis of the colony itself.

Anyone else with Windows ME experiencing what Cunak has seen?

I kept trying to start the game and rebooting my system between attempts. I finally shut the computer down and waited about 5 minutes and was able to get back into the game. No idea what was going on.

In the player/race setup screen, you can't highlight the default entries and replace in one go. you have backspace over all the characters of terran.

I've no idea what is going in the attack phase. My little planets keep getting attacked and the attack screen shows that although I defeated the invasion, I lost 4294967.000 Bil. I didn't know I had that many people to big with. The loss is alwasy the same even on different planets being attacked.

When looking at a system with the planets displayed on the right hand side, hovering the mouse over the planet picture doesn't do anything. Surely when hoving over the planet the nice little picture at the bottom should appear and not just when hovering over the black space beside the planet picture.

No crashes yet but then I haven't been able to colonize many planets.

The sliders for selecting how many from the pop that will go on a ship isnt always movable. The buttons are, but sometime the slider itself are stuck.

There should be a way to move the people on a ship to the surface so one can disband it without losing people. But then the colonyship turns to a kinda transporter..

I play with autoturn off, but sometimes it does autoturn anyway. If I move a ship, the last in the queue probably, the ship moves its turns - and then it moves the new round turns too. After that comes the GNN anouncments up. A bit strange..

The find-button andvances a turn aswell. Even tho autoturn is off.

The options arent saved anymore. I changed the autoturn and the GNN option, but after exiting and starting a new game they had their old values.