Author Topic: Upcoming Version - Preemptive Discussion - Abode of the Impatient  (Read 6432 times)

Offline x4000

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Re: Upcoming Version - Preemptive Discussion - Abode of the Impatient
« Reply #30 on: June 01, 2015, 04:56:46 pm »
This is definitely going to be a post-7pm EST release for me.  I had not anticipated that practically every tech on the stupid tree needs to be either tweaked or moved.  Holy freaking smokes.  I'm trying to get everything that I've had on my backlog at once, since I hate this kind of upheaval in the tree and the new commercial/industrial split has upset so much stuff spatially anyway.

And my estimates aren't ALWAYS wrong. ;)  It's just more memorable when they are.

Regarding starting a new game or continuing an existing one in the new game, I'd strongly advise starting a new one.  You CAN keep playing your existing one, but a lot isn't going to make sense in terms of how it translates over just because so many things are different.  Old savegames aren't invalid by any stretch, but they're not ideal after a change of this magnitude.
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Offline Shrugging Khan

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Re: Upcoming Version - Preemptive Discussion - Abode of the Impatient
« Reply #31 on: June 01, 2015, 05:09:58 pm »
Well, off to bed I am then. See you all tomorrow, with all our hot anticipation likely still intact  ;D
Kidding. You boss guys take your time. We want this to be good!

Still on my very first game and actively avoiding the forums as much as possible, but this thread seemed safe to look at without too much bias. Once this patch is available should I restart the game (if that's actually possible) or continue with this first game?

The patch includes some substantial balance changes, and there seems to be a lot of tech work as well. You can try to finish your current game if you really want to, but I recommend starting over.

Then again, my games always crash - so I never grow to attached to them  :P
« Last Edit: June 01, 2015, 05:12:22 pm by Shrugging Khan »
The beatings shall continue
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Offline Cinth

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Re: Upcoming Version - Preemptive Discussion - Abode of the Impatient
« Reply #32 on: June 01, 2015, 05:11:20 pm »
And thus proving why no one gives estimated release times/dates anymore.  Sure it's a target and an estimation, but missing them is never fun for anyone.  Least we didn't break out the pitchforks and torches ;)

This one is going to be memorable since you've missed it twice in a row (or is it three times).  Me, I'm going to check in tomorrow (kidding).
Quote from: keith.lamothe
Opened your save. My computer wept. Switched to the ST planet and ship icons filled my screen, so I zoomed out. Game told me that it _was_ totally zoomed out. You could seriously walk from one end of the inner grav well to the other without getting your feet cold.

Offline jerith

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Re: Upcoming Version - Preemptive Discussion - Abode of the Impatient
« Reply #33 on: June 01, 2015, 05:20:19 pm »
Time/effort estimates are hard. They're harder when there's a lot of complexity. This update seems to have all the complexity in it. I'm somewhat impressed Chris managed to hit the right week for it. :)

Offline crazyroosterman

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Re: Upcoming Version - Preemptive Discussion - Abode of the Impatient
« Reply #34 on: June 01, 2015, 05:42:46 pm »
This is definitely going to be a post-7pm EST release for me.  I had not anticipated that practically every tech on the stupid tree needs to be either tweaked or moved.  Holy freaking smokes.  I'm trying to get everything that I've had on my backlog at once, since I hate this kind of upheaval in the tree and the new commercial/industrial split has upset so much stuff spatially anyway.

And my estimates aren't ALWAYS wrong. ;)  It's just more memorable when they are.

Regarding starting a new game or continuing an existing one in the new game, I'd strongly advise starting a new one.  You CAN keep playing your existing one, but a lot isn't going to make sense in terms of how it translates over just because so many things are different.  Old savegames aren't invalid by any stretch, but they're not ideal after a change of this magnitude.
1 if my understanding of the time zones between here and were you are are correct then that's pretty late and I guess ill miss it unfortunaly 2 like every one else has been saying take as long as you need on it Chris us rooster men are a patient  species 3 ill try out my old save games regardless it'll be jolly and fun and a good way of seeing if these changes are going to work as intended.
c.r

Offline x4000

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Re: Upcoming Version - Preemptive Discussion - Abode of the Impatient
« Reply #35 on: June 01, 2015, 06:43:05 pm »
I am just signing back on now to get back to it.  As of this writing I should have the patch out within 1.5 to 2 hours at most, hopefully more like one.  But we know how that's been going so far. ;)

Still, I have the first third of the tech tree organized, which is the hardest, and that took about 40 minutes.  So I'm probably in the right ballpark.
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Offline crazyroosterman

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Re: Upcoming Version - Preemptive Discussion - Abode of the Impatient
« Reply #36 on: June 01, 2015, 06:59:48 pm »
if that's the case then I can stay up a few hours hour I'm looking to bitching about all the bugs ill invariably find when its.
c.r

Offline x4000

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Offline Zebeast46

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Re: Upcoming Version - Preemptive Discussion - Abode of the Impatient
« Reply #38 on: June 01, 2015, 09:22:21 pm »
I am just signing back on now to get back to it.  As of this writing I should have the patch out within 1.5 to 2 hours at most, hopefully more like one.  But we know how that's been going so far. ;)

Still, I have the first third of the tech tree organized, which is the hardest, and that took about 40 minutes.  So I'm probably in the right ballpark.

Well, it is 1.5 to 2 hours later and and the patch is not here  :P so I am going to assume that the patch is coming out tommorow, it is about 9 am here on the sast coast of Canada so I am not sure what time it is in your time zone, but anyways, to anyone who is reading, have a good night.

Edit: RIGHT in the middle of me typing this I get a message saying that there has been a new reply, but I guess I am going to post this anyways.
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Offline x4000

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Re: Upcoming Version - Preemptive Discussion - Abode of the Impatient
« Reply #39 on: June 01, 2015, 09:54:52 pm »
Have a good night!  It will keep until tomorrow for sure. :)
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Offline ptarth

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Re: Upcoming Version - Preemptive Discussion
« Reply #40 on: June 02, 2015, 02:34:32 am »
Added note: why have crime based on buildings AND population?  Simple: it doesn't overly encourage either style of play.  Playing with next to no buildings is not a huge advantage over playing with next to no population.

Eventually you'll just accept I'm always right and life will be easier. Well, mostly. Or, maybe just sometimes.  ;D

Note: This post contains content that is meant to be whimsical. Any belittlement or trivialization of complex issues is only intended to lighten the mood and does not reflect upon the merit of those positions.

Offline Cinth

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Re: Upcoming Version - Preemptive Discussion
« Reply #41 on: June 02, 2015, 02:36:13 am »
Added note: why have crime based on buildings AND population?  Simple: it doesn't overly encourage either style of play.  Playing with next to no buildings is not a huge advantage over playing with next to no population.

Eventually you'll just accept I'm always right and life will be easier. Well, mostly. Or, maybe just sometimes.  ;D

Let's go with sometimes.  :P
Quote from: keith.lamothe
Opened your save. My computer wept. Switched to the ST planet and ship icons filled my screen, so I zoomed out. Game told me that it _was_ totally zoomed out. You could seriously walk from one end of the inner grav well to the other without getting your feet cold.

Offline ptarth

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Re: Upcoming Version - Preemptive Discussion
« Reply #42 on: June 02, 2015, 02:52:28 am »
fishing boats - I want a reliable food source. An unreliable trickle isn't going to cut it. Either make it reliable or remove it. Aquaculture is a thing, so I'm not worried about the reliability of fishing.
We have farms and hydros for reliable.  This just adds options.  Also managing you population well and it won't drop off.
It doesn't add a legitimate option. The effect is too small and inconsistent to be anything other than a distraction. It's the same reason that I don't like hospitals adding .01 vaccine per turn. It just doesn't impact anything, but is still taking up physical and mental resources.

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Disease - The ramping up of curing rates is too complicated. Just have the initial outbreak be proportional to infection rate and have cures work at 100%.

Play with it first then see how you feel about it.  10-12 turn diseases make it a little harder to develop vaccines ever time.

Sure. I will. But looking at the math does provide you with an understanding on how it will turn out. Plus this thread is all about looking at the patch notes an making wild guesses on what will turn out poorly.

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District Limit - 1 + Social/2. This seems a little low, but we'll see. X + Social/2 is sounds more reasonable.
Plus possible techs and each has a buildable radius.  A lot of flexibility here (just from looking at it).
There is. How many districts you want and need is completely unknown right now.

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Shallow Mines - Just call them mines ;)
I counter with Deep Mines ;)
I try to fight the little battles first.

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Crime Building count at 300+ buildings - I still think this is completely unnecessary.
Maybe, but at least we aren't getting kneecapped at 100 anymore
True. But it still isn't a reason automatically cheer for this.

Also, I saw your (Chris's) cheap shot about crime and city size management. I'm betting I still have the largest SBR city ever made.

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Limited Range Scouting - I've always hated this. It adds complexity (is it within range). It doesn't really add much to the game rather than needing to bulldoze and rebuild the scout stations to expand their reach. Now, if you made scouting range proportional to transport range + X, that would be more interesting. Then I can just leapfrog helipads and teleport stations and my scouts can start their journeys from there.
One and done buildings are also terrible.
Sometimes. It's context dependent.

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Building Counts - So much effort has gone into this, and I still dislike the entire mechanism. Population Count or Total Tile Count should be sufficient.
Looks like building count is gone (too me anyway).

I'm actually okay with both citizen count and tile count crime. I think they are both useful. I dislike that they didn't matter before because the other crime sources outweigh them by 100 - 1000 fold. I would actually like to see residential  crime, especially caused by density and crime. However, I don't have anything more to add than the other Discussion thread on it.

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Planetary Rage and Monsters - I still think generation should be roughly 100 fold what is now.
Agree to disagree.  You can easily go overboard here and make it way frustrating and not fun.
Sure. But right now Monsters do not make much of an impact, let alone rage. My best strategy for Chris is to keep saying things over and over and claim that other player hate them. It is a propaganda war (re: Chris do not look at the giant wall of quoted text. Nothing to see here).


re: Chris and Math. If I have to listen to one more person say how math isn't informative. I'll generate 10 pages of text no-one will read with appropriate figures. But this time, I'll fake everything after the first paragraph.
Note: This post contains content that is meant to be whimsical. Any belittlement or trivialization of complex issues is only intended to lighten the mood and does not reflect upon the merit of those positions.

Offline Cinth

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Re: Upcoming Version - Preemptive Discussion
« Reply #43 on: June 02, 2015, 03:59:12 am »
fishing boats - I want a reliable food source. An unreliable trickle isn't going to cut it. Either make it reliable or remove it. Aquaculture is a thing, so I'm not worried about the reliability of fishing.
We have farms and hydros for reliable.  This just adds options.  Also managing you population well and it won't drop off.
It doesn't add a legitimate option. The effect is too small and inconsistent to be anything other than a distraction. It's the same reason that I don't like hospitals adding .01 vaccine per turn. It just doesn't impact anything, but is still taking up physical and mental resources.
You don't use Hospitals for vaccines (or births), you use them for wounds and cures and employment.  I saw the +food here as a supplement to the income generated.  If I need food, I'm building farms anyway.

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Disease - The ramping up of curing rates is too complicated. Just have the initial outbreak be proportional to infection rate and have cures work at 100%.

Play with it first then see how you feel about it.  10-12 turn diseases make it a little harder to develop vaccines ever time.

Sure. I will. But looking at the math does provide you with an understanding on how it will turn out. Plus this thread is all about looking at the patch notes an making wild guesses on what will turn out poorly.

I'm not complaining about the math (I'm a math guy), I wanna see how it feels.  I know what it was expected to do and I just didn't care how it got about doing it.  I'm not about to go dissect all the math in the game (or any game).

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District Limit - 1 + Social/2. This seems a little low, but we'll see. X + Social/2 is sounds more reasonable.
Plus possible techs and each has a buildable radius.  A lot of flexibility here (just from looking at it).
There is. How many districts you want and need is completely unknown right now.
And would be dependent on map size too.  It's another feel type item to me.

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Shallow Mines - Just call them mines ;)
I counter with Deep Mines ;)
I try to fight the little battles first.
It was meant to be humorous.  Naming stuff, meh.  Every now and again I'll hit a gem.

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Crime Building count at 300+ buildings - I still think this is completely unnecessary.
Maybe, but at least we aren't getting kneecapped at 100 anymore
True. But it still isn't a reason automatically cheer for this.

Also, I saw your (Chris's) cheap shot about crime and city size management. I'm betting I still have the largest SBR city ever made.
Maybe, maybe not.  You've been here a lot longer (this beta) than I have.  You've seen more changes.  .840 was where I started learning.  The 100 building crime explosion basically pulled the rug out from under me.  I was just getting used to the caps when .870 was about to be pushed out.  Largest city kinda loses validity with the rule shifts and changes.  It might serve as a reminder, but that's about it.  Do it with this rule set.  (BTW how big?)

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Limited Range Scouting - I've always hated this. It adds complexity (is it within range). It doesn't really add much to the game rather than needing to bulldoze and rebuild the scout stations to expand their reach. Now, if you made scouting range proportional to transport range + X, that would be more interesting. Then I can just leapfrog helipads and teleport stations and my scouts can start their journeys from there.
One and done buildings are also terrible.
Sometimes. It's context dependent.
  There aren't many instances of one and done buildings that are truly useful unless they provide some ridiculous buffs (Civ wonders).

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Building Counts - So much effort has gone into this, and I still dislike the entire mechanism. Population Count or Total Tile Count should be sufficient.
Looks like building count is gone (too me anyway).

I'm actually okay with both citizen count and tile count crime. I think they are both useful. I dislike that they didn't matter before because the other crime sources outweigh them by 100 - 1000 fold. I would actually like to see residential  crime, especially caused by density and crime. However, I don't have anything more to add than the other Discussion thread on it.[/quote] Density impacts crime.  I dunno.  I'd rather most pop management issues be rendered moot by mid late game.  By then you should be working to your victory conditions, not hand holding your citizens.

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Planetary Rage and Monsters - I still think generation should be roughly 100 fold what is now.
Agree to disagree.  You can easily go overboard here and make it way frustrating and not fun.
Sure. But right now Monsters do not make much of an impact, let alone rage. My best strategy for Chris is to keep saying things over and over and claim that other player hate them. It is a propaganda war (re: Chris do not look at the giant wall of quoted text. Nothing to see here).
You want barbarians, I don't  :P  Hence the tricky part in balancing it.  I don't like random encounters (outside of my jRPGs).  It's one of those things that may well need a lobby option.  To me it doesn't add value to my game.  iIt's there to make me waste time and resources on something that has zero effect on the end game.  I'd rather be building/teching and playing a minimal amount of diplo to get to where I want to be.

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re: Chris and Math. If I have to listen to one more person say how math isn't informative. I'll generate 10 pages of text no-one will read with appropriate figures. But this time, I'll fake everything after the first paragraph.
Eh?  I never said math wasn't informative, I just don't care what the math says in most cases.   ::)
Quote from: keith.lamothe
Opened your save. My computer wept. Switched to the ST planet and ship icons filled my screen, so I zoomed out. Game told me that it _was_ totally zoomed out. You could seriously walk from one end of the inner grav well to the other without getting your feet cold.

Offline x4000

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Re: Upcoming Version - Preemptive Discussion
« Reply #44 on: June 02, 2015, 09:16:19 am »
Added note: why have crime based on buildings AND population?  Simple: it doesn't overly encourage either style of play.  Playing with next to no buildings is not a huge advantage over playing with next to no population.

Eventually you'll just accept I'm always right and life will be easier. Well, mostly. Or, maybe just sometimes.  ;D

Let's go with sometimes.  :P

Hahaha.  ;D  You guys crack me up.

I'm actually okay with both citizen count and tile count crime. I think they are both useful. I dislike that they didn't matter before because the other crime sources outweigh them by 100 - 1000 fold. I would actually like to see residential  crime, especially caused by density and crime. However, I don't have anything more to add than the other Discussion thread on it.

I disliked that those were so outweighed, too.

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Planetary Rage and Monsters - I still think generation should be roughly 100 fold what is now.
Agree to disagree.  You can easily go overboard here and make it way frustrating and not fun.
Sure. But right now Monsters do not make much of an impact, let alone rage. My best strategy for Chris is to keep saying things over and over and claim that other player hate them. It is a propaganda war (re: Chris do not look at the giant wall of quoted text. Nothing to see here).

As often is the case I'm doing None Of The Above. ;)  I think that increasing planet rage a ton would indeed be frustrating for a variety of reasons, because it would just make it feel like you are being penalized all the time.  That's not to say that we don't need more monsters and so forth, though -- that's not at all to say that.  But it is to basically say that the Planet Rage concept as a whole is dodgy at best and something I intend to rework a lot so that monsters are more of a factor.

re: Chris and Math. If I have to listen to one more person say how math isn't informative. I'll generate 10 pages of text no-one will read with appropriate figures. But this time, I'll fake everything after the first paragraph.

Eh?  I've never said that.  My points boil down to:

1. My goal is designing complex systems with emergent behavior, and to do that I have to set up multiple quasi-related math systems that will interact with one another in hopefully funky ways, and then make other rules to stop the "bad funky" stuff that happens from that.

2. Thus looking at a specific part of it and going "that's needlessly complex" is missing the point, because the idea is to introduce chaos, but then to prevent that chaos from spilling over into Armageddon accidentally.

3. So from that standpoint, looking at part of the math is not a very informative bit of information.  Even knowing all the math, it's extremely hard to predict emergent behavior in systems like this.  Because you aren't dealing with one formula, you're dealing with a bunch of them interacting in randomized ways with unknown inputs, etc.  It becomes like predicting the weather, or worse.

4. On the other hand, if we're talking about a single formula for linearly calculating something, obviously we're on the same page.  But disease specifically is meant to be a realistically chaotic system that acts within certain constrained bounds, and hence my comment.

You want barbarians, I don't  :P  Hence the tricky part in balancing it.  I don't like random encounters (outside of my jRPGs).  It's one of those things that may well need a lobby option.  To me it doesn't add value to my game.  iIt's there to make me waste time and resources on something that has zero effect on the end game.  I'd rather be building/teching and playing a minimal amount of diplo to get to where I want to be.

I personally feel like barbarians are an important part of the game in terms of it feeling like a 4X, but I also respect the option to turn off barbarians in the game setup screen.

I think you're looking at barbarians how I look at the disasters in SimCity, though: all they do is wreck something that I care about in a way that is really frustrating, so I turn them off.

But looking at them from a Civ barbarians standpoint, they serve a couple of purposes:

1. Gently test my defenses in a variety of places, and remind me to put up defenses, so that when the big enemies from other races drop by I am not caught flat-footed.

2. Add some more tension and interest to the start of the game in particular.  Arguably there are a lot of things in the game that don't contribute directly to the end-game, but they are all obstacles to overcome.  Right now it's been focused on internal ones -- crime and disease being the two big ones -- but threats from external sources are just as valid and hopefully interesting.  My goal has been for it to be interesting even without those external threats, but not for the game to exist in that sort of state for most people.

3. Like crime or adjacency bonuses, barbarians help to shape your city.  They provide yet another factor for how you'll build your city, and I think that the more factors, the more interesting and unique cities become.  So a city without those external threats is a little lonely to me in some regards. :)
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