how are things going?.

[crazyroosterman]

personally I like to imagine that Chris is hiding in a dark locked room with a loaded shotgun while the rest of his team are trying to convince him to finish the patch and keep going

[ptarth]

Oh goodness. Have you guys seen the Acutians in this version... That's just terrifying.

[crazyroosterman]

not exactly I haven't had a chance to play the new version yet.

[ptarth]

I saw the spam thread titled:    "Where Can I Buy Generic deadly ebola a head and shoulders Cod".
I then thought, I really need to go work on the market item titles. That has potential, but isn't quite right. Plus, what's with that horrible capitalizing.

[ptarth]

• Anyone gotten a submission offer from an AI race yet?
• I've been lacking time and motivation to do a lot of general testing myself. I'm fairly burnt out at this point, unless something interesting catches my attention. I've noticed that the mantis additions have been trailing off as well.
• I recently ran across a reminder about Metal Marines. I remember playing it back in the day and it reminds me a lot of what SBR seems to be trying to do. Link if you are curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiiAUP1fG14
• SBR still needs more giant robots and not just flying saucers.

[jerith]

• Anyone gotten a submission offer from an AI race yet?

I remember reading that this hasn't been implemented yet, but I can't remember where.

• I've been lacking time and motivation to do a lot of general testing myself. I'm fairly burnt out at this point, unless something interesting catches my attention. I've noticed that the mantis additions have been trailing off as well.

Given the huge amount of work you've been doing, I'm not surprised you're burning out. Maybe take a couple of days off and let the rest of us get some changelog credit come back with fresh enthusiasm later.

I think Mantis volume is down mostly because of the International Incidents work. There have been fewer small fixes released recently and Kerfuffles aren't finished enough to throw up new and exciting bugs yet. I know I'm less motivated at the moment because of the known issues that haven't been fixed and fixes that haven't been released[1] -- that's the cost of doing bigger pieces of work during the beta, and it's fine as long as we aren't left hanging for too long. Once 0.816 is released, I think activity will pick up again.

As I've mentioned in another thread, Arcen has a stupendously fast release cycle and that keeps us going pretty much constantly. Slowing down to three or four releases a week instead of five or six has a noticeable impact, but I doubt anyone's going to get bored and wander off unless there's a much bigger gap between updates.

[1] For example, in my main game I'm facing an annoying Grial that keeps sniping buildings and is taking forever to kill. Not being able to easily tell what building I have to replace turns a minor frustration into a major one and I end up going back to building a new deployment system for my messaging platform.

[nas1m]

I am in my second game now and seem to run into the same issue(s) as last time, namely:

• A single disease being able to wreck my complete city of ~1500 pop. Is it normal that two major trauma centers and around 8 small hospitals are not enough to conquer "the Ooze"? Should I have pushed for Vaccine research more in terms of research?
• A full circle of hazmats apparently not being able to compensate for the pollution produced by two factories (not really an issue, more something that I just don't get)
• The AI races really not doing much instead of growing (I at least managed to "get in range" with a single alien race this time without having to go for them, though) - I know this is being worked on, so I am definitely looking forward to .816

One thing that especially bugs me is how "invisible" the actual alien races/leaders are in the game - at least until turn ~100-200.
Diplomacy is about the only place the races/leaders themselves are actually visible - and there is simply no incentive/reason to go there before the linguistics for at least a single race have been near maxed out.
Until then there simply is not enough interaction going on in the game in my book, especially with regard to interacting with the races (as opposed to their buildings).

Which is a pity since they are the major influx of flavor into the game - at least for me. The buildings alone only go so far imho.
It feels like I am interacting with cities, not people, which feels wrong to me.

I have high hopes on .816 to address  a good part of these issues, though.

[TheVampire100]

Are you using quarantines? This can reduce greatly the loss of citizens. Youw ill still loose a lot of them but if you manage it right you can prevent the downfall of a city.

[nas1m]

Are you using quarantines? This can reduce greatly the loss of citizens. Youw ill still loose a lot of them but if you manage it right you can prevent the downfall of a city.

Yes, enabling quarantine on the Lander always was the first think I did in this case.
It helped to slow/stop the increase in infections, but the combination of mortality (and thus staffing issues) and the time it took to cure the remaining population still was enough for my city to fail to "defeat" the disease, so to speak.

[nas1m]

Another thing I noticed is that the pure city management aspect of the game might be too easy.
In my two games I almost never had an issue with my city that could not be resolved by plunking down one or two buildings in the next turn, be it a police station, a hospital or something to provide employment/entertainment.

I only recognized how engaging this part of the game can be when things started to go wrong due to outside factors (yes I am talking to you, disease). I would love having to actually solve some homemade problems with regard to the way I built my city or managed it, as well.

But currently pollution, crime, power etc. never seem to pose too much of a problem without some external issues complicating stuff.

Now that I think of it, this may simply be caused by the fact that crowns have always been in ample supply in my games without me having to do much to earn it.
So this might be more of a balance issue.

I will create a spin-off thread for that.

[ptarth]

re:nas1m

• How many Birthing Centers?
• That's actually more hospital care than I have typically for 10k people.
• The Ooze shouldn't be that deadly. Not sure what's going on, post a save?
• Race Contact varies a lot. In my last game I was 20 hexes away from 3 races.
• Hazmats clean up last turns pollution. This will be changed in the next patch. Visit the Pollution thread for more details.
• AI logic isn't not very functional atm.
• Chris mentioned that the AI was triggering submission request too frequently in his notes and has a save. Wasn't sure how that happened.
• Crown income has never been too little for me, then again, I like to build.

re:jerith

• Build more missiles?
• The Grials I have like to eat Police Stations.
• Have you noticed that it sometimes doesn't eat a building successfully?
• If you can move over his location when you end turn, you can watch his attack and figure out what he ate from there.
• I give you guys at list 15 minutes to report bugs before I have to say something.

re:general

• The City building mechanics are pretty straightforward, but I also apparently have a lot of hours into the game now.
• I'd like to see more things unlocked by tiers as you advanced, but it there are really only 3ish levels of buildings (2 in most cases).
• The new employment numbers for buildings (e.g., Engineering Firm) is going to make a big impact on things.
• What are people's power productions like? I typically focus on All Solar, until I get too big and big a Nuclear plant to catch up.
• Any preferences for Wind over Solar? The Solar is higher density energy, so I end up picking it over wind.

[nas1m]

re:nas1m

• How many Birthing Centers?
• That's actually more hospital care than I have typically for 10k people.
• The Ooze shouldn't be that deadly. Not sure what's going on, post a save?
• Race Contact varies a lot. In my last game I was 20 hexes away from 3 races.
• Hazmats clean up last turns pollution. This will be changed in the next patch. Visit the Pollution thread for more details.
• AI logic isn't not very functional atm.
• Chris mentioned that the AI was triggering submission request too frequently in his notes and has a save. Wasn't sure how that happened.
• Crown income has never been too little for me, then again, I like to build.

re:general

• What are people's power productions like? I typically focus on All Solar, until I get too big and big a Nuclear plant to catch up.
• Any preferences for Wind over Solar? The Solar is higher density energy, so I end up picking it over wind.

• No birthing centers. Didn't try them yet. I was going for slow growth.
• Will post a save with regard to the Ooze once I get home.
• Weirdly, disabling all my factories, letting the hazmats do their job and enabling them again afterwards still causes pollution to drift over my city, even though my reduction exceeds pollution production according to the tooltip. Cant't really wrap my head around how pollution works, really.
• I tend to use Wind for fear that smog might rob me of my Solar power, I yet have to encounter this as an real issue, though.

[ptarth]

Reduction is total reduction summed across all tiles (not very useful). Pollution is removed at a set rate per tile, so excess pollution tile coverage does nothing. Hazmats remove 1/10*Scrubbing power of pollution from all hexes within range.

[crazyroosterman]

personally I've been waiting for the super patch before I really start playing again also I agree that trading currency is to ample at the moment in my current evuk game(which is my first won game yay me!) I don't even have a stock market and I am having absolutely no trouble also some of my older games don't seem to be getting any were because I keep getting wrecked by disease and by the time I kick those diseases up the ass and get rid of them I end getting infected by more disease and so on and so on.

[jerith]

• Build more missiles?
• The Grials I have like to eat Police Stations.
• Have you noticed that it sometimes doesn't eat a building successfully?
• If you can move over his location when you end turn, you can watch his attack and figure out what he ate from there.
• I give you guys at list 15 minutes to report bugs before I have to say something.

• I should, but this is on the edge of my territory and there aren't very many open tiles that aren't within attack range of the Zenith, Spire, or Dutch Peltians.
• This one does too, which makes things even more annoying. I have some overlap, but not enough to handle adjacent stations turning to plasma on consecutive turns.
• Yes. I'm losing about three buildings in four turns.
• Yup, but unless I take a screenshot before the attack I'm not going to remember what was there. I can figure it out if it's a police station or something with a visible effect, though.
• You can wait fifteen whole minutes before reporting a problem!? You have a lot more restraint than I do... (Although I do look for duplicates before creating a new ticket.

It's sufficiently annoying that I'm more inclined to catch up (and maybe even get ahead) on day job work and wait for the fixes I know are coming than keep playing for now. This is a normal part of beta testing and I'd be very surprised if there weren't periods like this. (Also, my boss would be unhappy.)