Beta 0.870 now out! (The Giant Revision)

[Cinth]

Does anyone else here play XACTIKA?  It's been a family favorite for a bit more than a decade in my family.  Well, my mom has always hated Spaceballs and Mel Brooks in general.  I love it, my wife and dad and sister like it pretty well, and my sister's husband also loves it.

Well, whenever someone would play "one star," (which is really like a tetrahedron or something), I'd say "LONE STAR... at last we meet... for the first time... for the last time..."  After the first time in a given night, it just became "LONE STAR" when playing that, versus "three balls" or "two cones" or whatever.

The last few years I don't even say it.  Now my mom does.  Mwa ha ha!

Had never heard of it until now.  I don't have to put up with this.  I'm rich!

[x4000]

Just remember to open it before you eat it.

All right -- goodnight all!  I'll come back in the morning and see what carnage of bugs await me.

[stblr]

Stream of consciousness first impressions as I played the first 200 or so turns:

Base-placing: Unclear what the flashing green icons represent. Are those best places to put down this thing?

The building placement sound is extremely loud, but maybe because there has been no sound/music to this point to indicate volume levels.

Map scroll speed is a little slow.

Unclear what the researchable buildings actually do before finishing their associated research and manually searching for them among all the building dropdown categories.

I don't know why I'm building certain buildings over others. I think this is because I don't know what the resources are or what they're used for besides constructing more buildings.

I have -222 unfilled jobs. Does that mean they're filled?

I notice that some of my buildings are "intentionally disabled" despite the fact that I have not disabled them myself.

When I inspect the Linguistics Center, I click "Requires Citizens in Housing" which states "0 in spacious or luxury housing (currently: 123) based on 0 of this building in this city". I have no idea what any of this means.

It would be nice to have a counter for each building of "number owned" or something. At this point I can't remember if I placed a police station and it's hard to tell what buildings do what at a glance in some cases.

Every few turns there's this computery bleepy sound effect when a new turn begins and I have no idea what it signifies.

It's awkward having left mouse click both place buildings and map scrolling. Multiple times I've tried to scroll and placed a building on a hex I didn't want to.

In the City Grid, it would be nice to have mouseover tooltips on the actual column headers. It's a little weird to have to mouseover actual values to see what the entire column represents.

I'm 131 turns in and I'm still not sure why I'm doing anything and I haven't run into any other races. I'm also not sure how to expand my vision of the map.

Unemployment is rampant, more than 60% of my population, and the only way I seem able to assuage it is to speak Holo Resort.

The Warehouse and Computing Cluster have 2 large circle icons on either side of them each. No idea what they indicate.

[ptarth]

Answers to help orient yourself. Read at your own risk.

Spoiler for Hiden:

Base-placing: Unclear what the flashing green icons represent. Are those best places to put down this thing?
>> The only place you can build

Map scroll speed is a little slow.
>>You can click on minimap and scroll by moving mouse to edge of screen.

Unclear what the researchable buildings actually do before finishing their associated research and manually searching for them among all the building dropdown categories.
>>Middle click should have revealed what they do. It isn't working on the technology tree in this patch, but does work in the build menu. Control + Left click should also work.

I don't know why I'm building certain buildings over others. I think this is because I don't know what the resources are or what they're used for besides constructing more buildings.
>>Building info with middle click will help with that.

I have -222 unfilled jobs. Does that mean they're filled?
>>You have 222 more people than jobs. I think.

I notice that some of my buildings are "intentionally disabled" despite the fact that I have not disabled them myself.
>>There aren't the necessary things available. For Embassy/Spy you need to get the building info and then select a target. Etc

When I inspect the Linguistics Center, I click "Requires Citizens in Housing" which states "0 in spacious or luxury housing (currently: 123) based on 0 of this building in this city". I have no idea what any of this means.
>>You need 1000? citizens per Linguistic Center to build them, but the first one is free.

It would be nice to have a counter for each building of "number owned" or something. At this point I can't remember if I placed a police station and it's hard to tell what buildings do what at a glance in some cases.
>>It should show up as a number on the build picture.

Every few turns there's this computery bleepy sound effect when a new turn begins and I have no idea what it signifies.
>>No idea. I play without sound.

It's awkward having left mouse click both place buildings and map scrolling. Multiple times I've tried to scroll and placed a building on a hex I didn't want to.
>>You can also scroll by moving to screen boundary.

In the City Grid, it would be nice to have mouseover tooltips on the actual column headers. It's a little weird to have to mouseover actual values to see what the entire column represents.
>>Yes.

I'm 131 turns in and I'm still not sure why I'm doing anything and I haven't run into any other races. I'm also not sure how to expand my vision of the map.
>>Building Info will help with that. The AI is mostly nonfunctional at this point and the tutorial system is waiting until the mechanics are more finalized.

Unemployment is rampant, more than 60% of my population, and the only way I seem able to assuage it is to speak Holo Resort.
>>Factories and other buildings should help with this (see building info). Not sure about balance in this new version.

The Warehouse and Computing Cluster have 2 large circle icons on either side of them each. No idea what they indicate.
>>They convert resources into bonuses. Resources are harvested with... harvesting resource buildings.

I hope this helps you get oriented.

[Cinth]

Stream of consciousness first impressions as I played the first 200 or so turns:

Base-placing: Unclear what the flashing green icons represent. Are those best places to put down this thing?

Map scroll speed is a little slow.

Unclear what the researchable buildings actually do before finishing their associated research and manually searching for them among all the building dropdown categories.

When I inspect the Linguistics Center, I click "Requires Citizens in Housing" which states "0 in spacious or luxury housing (currently: 123) based on 0 of this building in this city". I have no idea what any of this means.

It would be nice to have a counter for each building of "number owned" or something. At this point I can't remember if I placed a police station and it's hard to tell what buildings do what at a glance in some cases.

It's awkward having left mouse click both place buildings and map scrolling. Multiple times I've tried to scroll and placed a building on a hex I didn't want to.

I'm 131 turns in and I'm still not sure why I'm doing anything and I haven't run into any other races. I'm also not sure how to expand my vision of the map.

Unemployment is rampant, more than 60% of my population, and the only way I seem able to assuage it is to speak Holo Resort.

The Warehouse and Computing Cluster have 2 large circle icons on either side of them each. No idea what they indicate.

Welcome to Beta
Just going to hit a few points, we are all relearning with the massive changes going into this version...

Base-placement icons:  This represents the area in the district you can build on.  You decide if it's a good spot or not.

Map scroll: Try zooming out a bit and scrolling then zooming in to where your cursor is.

Buildings:  Yup.  Until those get added in, its ask questions here or learn as you go.  Beta discussion sub-forum is a good place to ask, btw.

Housing: Spacious is granted by Condominiums (it's in the tooltip) - Luxury by Luxury Housing.  You need a certain number of people living in these types (one or the other, depending on the building) to be able to place more.
Building count:  In the build menu there is an icon and a number off to the right.  That's a building count (for that building).

Map Scrolling: Right-click to clear the build selection or use WASD to scroll about.

Vision: Interior Ballistics tech opens up Scout Stations.  Those scout the above ground.  Sonar tech opens Sonar Surveyors which map the underground (TAB switches the view).  AIs are getting worked on soon.  Learn city building while you can  >D

Unemployment: Holo Suites occupy the unemployed.  To make lazy people work, check "Staffing" on building you want to place.  Buildings like "Shrine" staff 60 people, Factories staff 175.  Create jobs and soon your people will work (instead of "Thanks Obama" it will be "Thanks Stblr")

Buildings like Warehouse use gathered resources to give effects to building built around them. 
Example: 

Spoiler for Hiden:

Spider silk, gathered by Harvester, grants a bonus to wind power production.  Once you build the harvester and the warehouse, middle click on the warehouse to bring up the info screen.  Bottom right is a drop down where you can select the silk.  Build wind turbines around your warehouse to get the effect applied.  Mousing over the resources tells you what it effects and how to gather it.

[Cinth]

Ninja Skillz

   Ninjaed by Ptarth...

He is a good one to ask for answers.

[Shrugging Khan]

Impressions:

• Autosaving. Yay!
• Free building placement makes towns look a lot better.
• Industry and Commerce feel a lot better.
• Districts do not show their range on placement. Poo. They also can't be torn down. Double-poo.
• I don't know what happened to the AI, but the whole world was full of saucers after about 30 turns. Annoying.
• Memory use seems improved. But is it my imagination or is overall performance a lot worse now?

[Misery]

Okay, I see there's alot of changes here, TL;DR because I'm lazy and dont understand half of them anyway... time to start a new game then, I think.

Immediately I see:  My starting area, there's STUFF around it.  I'm not in some blank plain or something!  There's even a mountain tile by itself. 

Starting in a jungle kinda seems really bad.... EVERYTHING takes many, many turns to make, and there appears to be nothing that can be done about it (particularly as it didn't exactly give me much choice about where to put the main base...); that part may be just a tad way beyond my limited patience, I might mess with it a little but then restart until it doesnt do that.  So that could be a pretty big issue.  Heck, the number is so exaggerated it almost seems like a guaranteed lose-the-game situation, due to the very dramatic slowness at which you'll proceed. 

Tech tree still looks like it has the "just do them in order, no point in changing it" issue.  I can already see what order I'm going to be selecting them in, and I have no idea what half of them do.



Okay, a bit further, more stuff:

Still a bit slow to start.... 50 turns in, and hardly anything has been done.  I have a ton of irrelevant techs that arent going to do anything remotely soon, and some that COULD do something... if there was something for them to do it on.  The mining stuff for instance... I dont know how these really work to begin with, but they come pretty early, but cant do a single thing.  Unplaceable absolutely everywhere.  Mountain and such says "mining bonus" and whatnot, but it cant interact with them, so currently, and probably for the forseeable future, it's useless.  Social points trees still seem pointless, I'm just clicking whatever.  City growth is slow.  The terrain isnt mattering nearly as much as I'd thought, particularly as the boundaries are still very static.  A couple of very specific tiles, maybe 2 of them, actually have some effect on something, only one of which I can do something with using the science buildings.  There's not too much thought involved there though... currently, at least at the point I'm at, the terrain is still at the same level of not mattering as before.   EDIT:  Okay MAYBE I was looking at the wrong mining thing.  There is something to do with the mountain and such after all.  I'll have to work out what the other bits do though.

Building placement though.... this is so dramatically better.   It's interesting now.  I'm alot more involved in this part so far.

[tadrinth]

Are there any caps on logging camps other than their pollution production and the fact that you have to build them on forest?  They seem like an extremely strong early economic boost if you don't mind the pollution, because you can just keep building them.

[x4000]

Hey guys -- anything that we need to clarify that is something that is actionable, please put in mantis!  Otherwise it's going to get lost to the sands of time.  Anybody who can help out with that has my gratitude.

Cherrypicking stuff that needs a reply from me, although I've read everything.  Writing back takes like 100x as long, so please excuse me.

• Memory use seems improved. But is it my imagination or is overall performance a lot worse now?

In what sense?  Loading speed, interturn speed, framerate, hitches every few seconds?

Starting in a jungle kinda seems really bad.... EVERYTHING takes many, many turns to make, and there appears to be nothing that can be done about it (particularly as it didn't exactly give me much choice about where to put the main base...); that part may be just a tad way beyond my limited patience, I might mess with it a little but then restart until it doesnt do that.  So that could be a pretty big issue.  Heck, the number is so exaggerated it almost seems like a guaranteed lose-the-game situation, due to the very dramatic slowness at which you'll proceed. 

Ouch, yeah, that does suck.  For next one:

* The construction complexity added by forest and jungles is now vastly less.

Tech tree still looks like it has the "just do them in order, no point in changing it" issue.

You are pleasantly vastly incorrect now, but anyhow.   This has more valid branches and side cul-de-sacs now than most similar strategy games.  The very very early stuff is pretty much all required, but the unlock order is something that you can vary substantially even there.  And later on a ton of stuff is optional.

Building placement though.... this is so dramatically better.   It's interesting now.  I'm alot more involved in this part so far.

Nice!  Glad to see that general sentiment from a lot of folks.

Are there any caps on logging camps other than their pollution production and the fact that you have to build them on forest?  They seem like an extremely strong early economic boost if you don't mind the pollution, because you can just keep building them.

There are no limits of that sort at the moment, no.  You make an excellent point.  That said, I do intend for the planet to get pissed about pollution, so we'll see how that goes.

[Misery]

And I'm done with my session for today.

About 100 turns in, other races shooting at each other for who knows what reason, but as none of that has to do with me I've ignored it.  An international incident happened to me, except that it didn't appear to do anything.  Involved the Boarines.  Whom I havent met, let alone communicated with (and I have like, one linguistics center anyway...)

Mostly, at this point, there is just confusion.  That "no idea what I'm doing" sort of confusion.   I apparently need a good 900 more jobs for the city, except that it wont let me build many relevant buildings such as malls because there arent enough people yet (), among other problems.  Currently I'm still in the same area with what I'm thinking is a half-assed mess of almost a city maybe.  I have one harvester thing out doing who knows what, but that's very close to the city.  There's still a bunch of buildings that I dont know the purpose of, and now that I get to this point in the game, I dont know just what I should be doing or going after.  There's no diplomacy yet, as A: I cant talk to anyone, and B: there isnt any reason yet.  Unless I wanted to ask why in the world everyone is shooting at each other, but I'll just leave them be for now... 

As it is, with no idea (and no explanation) as to what's going on or if I'm even doing anything right, I dunno that I can go much further, because at this point testing further is going to get to the point of not producing any results that actually make sense.

So yeah, that's all very baffling.   Even more confusing than I'd originally found TLF's solar map stuff to be during the testing for that.

I'm still just clicking tech stuffs in order, much out of lack of knowing what they do currently.  I dont seem to be able to see what a tech does or is for?  Just building names of things that could do anything.  I mean, yeah, some are obvious, like hospitals and whatever, but others are... I dont even know. 

It's possible that things might be different at the 100 turn point if I'd started somewhere that isnt a jungle; I might retry that later with a new game and see what happens.  That nasty initial turn cost might have damaged progress even more than I thought at the time.   So some of this stuff I'm mentioning here might be related to that, I have no idea...

Ugh.  I'm really much better at just exploding things, so this game will continue to give me trouble, I'm sure. 

[Shrugging Khan]

Performance is worse in terms of overall frame rate.
I also agree with Misery on the tech tree - it may be better than others on paper, but I still end up just taking whichever will be the quickest to research, since there is often no important building to unlock.

Also, completely unrelated to anything...I have repeatedly received over-the-shoulder comments that the visuals are way too detailed, and although I didn't really notice it at first (I am not a graphics person), I now have to agree. When playing zoomed out, as I almost always do, everything is completely unrecognisable. Even when completely zoomed in the visuals are still very messy due to the high level of detail, and they also look kind of silly when 18 Condos are on-screen at the same time and they all look perfectly identical with all their many details. Funny observation: Things look perfectly fine in the building detail screen, because there's no repetition there and the higher zoom makes it less messy.

Also, I keep getting blue "Building is not actually really seriously in City range" popups over some tiles. What are those? Is it because multi-tile buildings stick out of a district or something? They still seem to work.

[Cinth]

Ouch, yeah, that does suck.  For next one:

* The construction complexity added by forest and jungles is now vastly less.

That is going to make playing Tropic/Temperate Forest maps a lot better!

Also, I keep getting blue "Building is not actually really seriously in City range" popups over some tiles. What are those? Is it because multi-tile buildings stick out of a district or something? They still seem to work.

Multi tile buildings are adding an extra ring of icons to placement that aren't valid to build on.  It has been mantised.

Guys, I'm not getting the tech tree comments, the pace of science feels a bit slower overall.  I've had to go back and change my research techs quite a few times because I needed a tech yesterday, and it's 3 techs down on a different branch.  Might just be me or that playing on a temperate forest slows everything down that much to create that immediacy.  I dunno.

@ Misery:  I'm sure you'll figure it out sooner or later, but Office Buildings are the old Shopping Mall.  Banks are still Banks and Malls are now kings (as I see it).  I didn't find employment to be different in this version over the last, you still need Holo Resorts and a healthy mix of industry.  Having a variety of terrain types nearby seems to be a good thing.

[topper]

I haven't played this game for like a month.  Sounds like I'm in for an interesting experience...

I'm actually really glad to have you gone and then back in that way, since it sounds like it wasn't grabbing you before.  Hopefully with a lot of distance and enough of a reset here, it will have a different effect this time.  We'll see!

Yeah, I have been in and out too, and not played at all for at least 2 weeks. Should I hop back in on this version, or should I wait for a few of those unfinished details you mentioned?

Starting in a jungle kinda seems really bad.... EVERYTHING takes many, many turns to make, and there appears to be nothing that can be done about it (particularly as it didn't exactly give me much choice about where to put the main base...); that part may be just a tad way beyond my limited patience, I might mess with it a little but then restart until it doesnt do that.  So that could be a pretty big issue.  Heck, the number is so exaggerated it almost seems like a guaranteed lose-the-game situation, due to the very dramatic slowness at which you'll proceed. 

Ouch, yeah, that does suck.  For next one:

* The construction complexity added by forest and jungles is now vastly less.

I think a decent penalty on certain terrain is a good thing, then terrain actually matters and cities will follow natural geographic lines. If you start in a jungle, expand out in the direction to get out of it as quickly as possible.

As long as every terrain is good for something/someone, then it is interesting. Like from civ5, if you start in tundra you are more motivated to spread to warmer climates faster, but at the middle/end of the game the tundra has oil and was useful.

[x4000]

Comments:

1. In general, all tutorials and a lot of documentation are missing.  So... confusion on that front is not entirely unexpected.  Though it obviously needs to be dealt with.

2. * Tweaked some sprite batching code to hopefully have a more happy medium between performance and RAM use.  Honestly it's not a direct tradeoff, because actually the higher-RAM approach costs some performance in some other ways.

3. On the tech tree, I think that opinion may change once you get into it further, but I suppose we'll see.  There is definite meaningful strategy there, and tradeoffs.  Whether people feel the need to get to that level of... I don't want to call it micro... but I guess "micro" for lack of a better term, we'll see.

4. We're not doing a graphics overhaul of all the buildings; I'm sorry that it's not to the tastes of some.  But there's nothing I could do about that even if I agreed: that's almost a year's worth of work represented there.  When you're way zoomed out there's not a whole lot to recognize in a lot of games (SimCity, Civ).

5. @topper: It's to your preference on when you want to hop in.  If the early game bothers you without enough AIs harassing you, then you probably want to wait.