"Recall Raid Ships" Only an option with thoraxians? Lots of questions/feedback

[UnfriendlyBG]

Hi first post.  I'm really enjoying the game, but it doesn't provide information to the player about a whole lot of things.  I will be submitting bug reports soon.  I'm currently playing my second game. It's a hard strategic/normal battle ironman campaign. I'm trying to keep ALL the races alive and am also recording it for my 2nd TLF let's play and I have many many questions.

1) I've found a "Recall Raid ships" option under dealings with the thoraxians. Awesome! However,  why does it appear that no other races have this same option?  It doesn't even make sense for the Thoraxians of all races to have this option.  It's strange.

2) What actually constitutes a raid? Right now the Acutians are 'raiding' the Burlusts for a while now for no particular reason.  The Burlust population consists only of children due to I presume disease and being bombarded for years now.  The acutians are winning a ground campaign against the Burlust planet now.  They are not at war. Surely a planetary ground based invasion where you are slaughtering the children of a race cannot be categorized as a 'raid'.  Due to the aforementioned lack of options to stop the raid, I have to tank my rating with the acutians to fight their armadas. Again.  This 'raid' began the second the acutians became spacefaring.

3) Hard difficulty seems a lot more interesting than normal. However it seems like 'hard' also means half the solar system gets bad events and diseases constantly.  Whatever I can do to affect the RCI is minimal when compared to all these events, like as in literally doesn't matter.  When there's planets at -200 in everything even though I've kept them from even having a negative trend ever, there's nothing i can do. I mean I guess that's fine sometimes people just get screwed, but RCI in general seems to be something the player just cant influence.  I kept the thoraxians from having negative trends and made all their trade routes into tariffs to help their bad RCI.  They have probably cumulative -500 to -1000 RCI values, like 2 positive points a month doesn't mean a damn thing.  The dispatch missions for affecting RCI are not worth the time.

4) Can races end wars on their own?  I thought the player had to intercede am I wrong? Twice I've had races cease being at war for some unknown reason (the andors dont have any of the parties that let you broker peace in my game fyi). There is no notification, there's nothing in the 'all notifications' thing.  You aren't informed of it happening.  Whats up with that?  At the very least a notification would be nice.  Especially since they'll end the war but still keep their armadas attacking the planet as a 'raid'.  You have to constantly check the race relations or power grid to see if people are at war or not.

5) All you need is 20 bribe items to get the burlusts into a federation.  That was anticlimatic and cheap feeling in my first game.

Thats it for now, I'm going to save a lot of the technical things for my bug report. If anyone could answer any of my questions I would be very grateful! thanks!

[UnfriendlyBG]

Outstanding, just had a race take over another races planet via a 'raid'. I didn't think that was possible, I shouldnt have tried to research something.  There goes 5 hours of campaign gameplay of trying to keep people alive.  I'm pretty sure conquering another planet and killing an entire race should at least require a declaration of war. 

Also half the races in my game have a birthrate of 0, yet their population actually does go up. i just spent like the last 3 hours trying to figure out why they had a 0 birthrate and I have nothing concrete.  I think I'm putting this game aside for a while.  This lack of information is unbeliveably frustrating for a game of this type.  You can't just have things be happening without knowing at least THE SLIGHTEST INKLING WHY.  Oh maybe their birthrate is 0 because their medical score is low, hmmm well no the peltians have a worse medical score and they have a birthrate, well maybe its because they have a disease nope cure the disease and its still 0, maybe its because their race has no adults, oh nope now they have adults and its still 0. BUT THEN THEIR POPULATION STARTS GOING UP ANYWAY WHILE LISTING 0 I SWEAR TO GOD I'm GOING TO SMASH SOMETHING.  lol.

[Misery]

Allright, let's get with the answers here... or at least attempt to anyway:

1. My guess is that it's use is to concentrate the Thoraxian fleets all back at their home planet, either to defend against something, or concentrate on attacking a specific other planet.  Doing either of those while some ships are out raiding would naturally make either action alot weaker.   I dont know why other races do not have this.  Though for certain ones such as the Evucks or the Burlusts, it may not make any sense to have them.

2. As far as I can tell a raid is basically similar to what the player does when stealing technology or taking an outpost.... they're out to do some damage or something similar, but with the intention of withdrawing once they've completed their goal.  Irritates the race they're bothering, but not meant to be a direct "go straight to war" idea.  Or at least, that's the concept anyway.  Raids seem to last much too long, which I suspect is part of why they then get out of control.  The reasons for a raid arent very clear either.  These things could do with a fix.  Unless it's pirates doing the raiding, which they do because they're pirates.

3. RCI seems to me to be massively unbalanced right now.  Various actions and other stuff seem balanced for a scale where 200/-200 is super great and super awful respectively, but instead right now the numbers are 2000/-2000, which also means that small changes simply dont have much effect.  You can see the evidence of this incorrect scale in the dialogue box that pops up when looking at a planet, where if you have a score of say, -50 for one of them, it might say "really awful" or something next to that score in the dialog box.  And that.... doesnt make any sense.  Definitely seems set up for a different type of balance entirely.  By that scale, -2000 could be "entire race already obliterated by robot bees while getting nuked and having horrible diseases."  Very unbalanced right now.  It's one of the things I most want to see fixed.

4. They do seem to end wars on their own, at least from what I've seen.  Why they do it is never clear.  Not being at war though will indeed not stop basic raiding.

5. Burlusts need an overhaul.


And the population bit, I keep wondering if that's a bug, because those numbers often seem incorrect.  So that might be what's going on.

[UnfriendlyBG]

http://imgur.com/a/sYv68

Thanks.  The RCI is just crazy because its a snowball scenario. Check out these screens from my game (i actually took them before i made this second post because i thought it was nuts how many bad events these races were getting).  Note that on the graphs that the 100 and -100 don't actually correspond to the real values i think the real values are actually over 200, maybe its a % thing who knows.  But how are you supposed to deal with this stuff?  Look at the declines versus any sort of measures you can take to raise them....  The thoraxians are literally like getting more disasters than techs (aside from ones I believe the game unlocks based on time for each race)

Maybe I'm playing the game wrong.  Like in this game I had a goal of 'I want everyone to live'.  Maybe thats not how you're supposed to play, maybe you need to just take what the game gives you and work with it.   Which is kind of messed up because I don't believe you even get to see any information about the solar system before you make the choice to either dock and give up 8 techs or kill the spaceships in the first mission... I guess if the thoraxians are going to get shit on by events constantly then hug em, just let someone that likes you kill them instead of trying to devote your entire game to helping them.  I don't really think that's how it should work ideally, but since I can't really do much to affect things it, it seems like thats how it is.  I feel like I'm just along for the ride in this last game.  Especially since like all of the actual important events (aside from disasters) happened when the races were not spacefaring, or immediately upon them becoming spacefaring.  The acutians spawned probably 2nd to last with a bunch of armadas and immediately raided the galaxy and never stopped.  Cool, I had 0 impact on that as the player.  The evucks were doing it too in the same manner until the RNG shit on them with planetary events. At least they actually declared a war originally.

I still cant believe I lost a whole race because of a 'raid'.  That recall raid options needs to be with everyone, or at least make fullscale planetary invasions not be considered raids.  Have it go through the proper channels so I could have a chance of stopping it aside from force.  The race that did is one that I actually one I have pretty decent influence with, but I can't keep them from terrorizing the galaxy aside from killing them myself, which only delays it.  Since nearly everyone else in the damn game has terrible RCI I can like count the total number of armadas that have been built since becoming spacefaring on one hand.

[ptarth]

If you can put up a save of the race with 0 population growth, we can take a look at it.

[UnfriendlyBG]

If you can put up a save of the race with 0 population growth, we can take a look at it.

Sure. Are you a dev?

Also when a race has a disease the display on the planet screen is wrong. It will say like 'number of effected people 182' or whatever when I think its supposed to say 182m because the total population of the planet was 182 million.  I'm not sure if anyone has a disease still in this save though.


There should be several races with 0 birthrate: the boarines, the thoraxians, the burlusts, the evucks, one of the robot races I believe.

[ptarth]

Nope. Just a busy body.

The last patch (last Wednesday I think) added in a revamped maturation system. Previously, children took 1 month between birth and adulthood. That was changed to allow longer childhoods. As you see, it isn't working right with the rest of the system. Looking at your save, most likely what was occurring was:

• Birthrate may have been positive, but less than 1 million. This would be consistent with the slow planetary growth rate. However, too many children were being born which does not explain the birth rate numbers. I'd see 8+m children births per month, which isn't consistent. My guess is that the children production rate is being calculated based on complete planet population and that the visible birthrate is based only on adults. That's pure guess though.
• Looking at the planets, they all were massively negative when it comes to medical (perhaps environmental, I forgot to check). This increases the death rate.
• Your adults were dying off very quickly, but children were being born to replace them.
• The problem seems to be that children are immortal and that death rate only happens to adults aka the "old people".
• Once old age death rate gets turned into regular death rate, we should see a more logical progression where both kids and adults die.
• Once it is fixed, planets in this cycle should quickly devolve into 1 million population plague worlds.
• The Boarines caught some illness which then wiped them down to 1m in just 2 years of watching  your game.
• Also, you are correct. The population displays haven't been cleaned up to consistently have proper unit labels.
• Yeah. It's a bit buggy. Arcen will probably fix it  in the next patch, if you want to make a mantis entry that would help things.

[UnfriendlyBG]

Thanks. Yes I spend 60 to 90 minutes (2 or 3 videos) going through the process of trying to figure out what's going on with the birth and death rates and came to a lot of the same conclusions that you did.

At first I was like 'Holy shit, the thoraxians are going to literally die in 3 months (they have like an 80m death rate and 180m pop) and so are the burlusts!'.  This was kinda exciting and I was like well what can I do to save them immediately?! I forgot what I did but I came up with some plan.  Then I notice that the population wasn't dying... And I was like well ok thats good I guess maybe they fixed up some issues on their own, no still zero birth rate. 

So then I look at the death rate and I see that only applies to elderly... citizens and I was like ohhhhhh that makes sense why they arent dying at least the children don't die.  Then that made sense as to why the burlusts had ONLY children. 

So then I'm like well we obviously need to get this birthrate up what can I do?  Medical obviously right?  Thats what I had going on earlier all positive trends in medical as that affects the birthrate. 

NOPE!

I dig through the numbers more and see theres something like 'effective medical' blah blah its by the RCI indicators and I see that this is a multiplier based on the RCI value and also the races uhhh I forgot what its called, compatibility with the planet. So this was at like what I believe is the lowest it can go .05 for the thoraxians, this multiplies the birthrate, so they have a 5% birthrate of normal.  Well what determines planet suitability?  Well the environment RCI subtracts .02 from the compatibility rating for every point below -50 or 0 or something like that.  I did the math and the thoraxians were being penalized by 3.24 compatibility I believe. In a game where no one had compatibility over 1 that is HUGE!  Their compatibility would never get above .1  when their environment is at -200 (my first game I had races with like 3.9 starting compatibility).

So off to improve environmental scores then.... Well terraforming tech first but apparently that only exists for a few types of planets sigh.

So you get into some weird kinda thing where Environmental RCI overrides basically every other RCI because it ends up factoring in to all of them via compatibility.   Therefore a situation just simply doesn't exist where a race could have for example good medical ratings in a bad environment and be ok.  Well I mean there probably is a break even point but not in my game with such initial low compatibility for many of the races.

So that whole thing is unintuitive. I spent the whole early part of the game trying to increase medical ratings when they dropped to raise the birth rate when I actually should have been increasing environmental.  Not that it would have accomplished anything anyway.

I have a feeling that that makes environmental RCI completely out of whack with all of the others and much more valuable.

So I don't think the death rates should include children. No way.  In my current game what, 4 or 5 entire races would have been completely wiped out in less than 10 years by the RNG?  They survive millions of years and manage to create thriving societies on 8 completely separate planets..... only to have 4 species living on separate planets be entirely wiped out within 10 years of each other?!?!?!

I think that says a LOT if you just take a step back and realize how ridiculous that is.  How the hell did they manage to have a space faring society on a planet that they are so incompatible with that they essentially automatically die the moment the 'game' starts?

I realize I'm playing on hard, but there's nothing 'hard' about 4 races being wiped out from random events in 10 years.  I literally cannot do a thing to stop it.  What am I supposed to do when several races RCI values just tank from random events?  Now that I know you have to fix the environment basically first that's even more ridiculous.  Assuming -200 RCI values for environment and medical, that's 400 points of negative RCI - for EVERY RACE THAT GETS RANDOM BAD EVENTS.  The race with the ark or whatever is freaking screwed as well.

400 points of RCI is 400 months, or 33.3 SOLAR YEARS PER RACE of dispatch missions just to get environment and medical to ZERO!  And that's assuming no bad events, and another race not deciding to take their armada-less planets (without even declaring war no less). Considering the thoraxians have had like 3 diseases and 5 bad events in 15ish years in my game I highly doubt 33.3 years would go by without a bad event.  Never mind how ridiculous the thought of spending freaking 30+ years doing a dispatch mission for one race is. I researched something for 10 months and the peltians got wiped out without a declaration of war!  30 years for each race lol.... All to keep them from going extinct from basically getting 1 negative event at the beginning of the game. You see the graphs I posted, you've seen my save.

I might be overstating things, but not by much.  If a race gets a negative environment event near the beginning of the game, unless they conquer another planet, it's essentially a death sentence. I'm sorry but an entire race should not go extinct because there was a nuclear plant explosion, that's ridiculous. We've had how many on earth? Plus several atomic bombs... I realize its not apples to apples but still.

Anyways, in my mind this whole system is blatantly broken and gamebreakingly so in my case.

I do agree they have some sort of under 1 million birth rate though as population ticks up every 2 to 3 months.  And whatever their base birth rate is, its being multiplied by .05 so that's probably the number.  On that note, when a race is being bombarded there needs to be something in game alerting you to the change in their birthrates.  Theres just too much information that is not viewable for the player! Grand strategy is all about cause and effect, numbers etc... At least imo.  If I can't see WHY something is happening, how do I know what to do about it?  Did I make a mistake?  What could I have done better? Etc...  Instead right now it's spending 90 minutes digging through numbers to try to make sense out of them to then be met with display bugs or missing information or things you flat out can't realistically affect.  I mean imagine if your game of crusader kings just had counties or even entire countries changing hands constantly for no discernible reason.  You would get frustrated say 'what the hug is going on?' and quit.  I think The Last Federation should strive to hold itself to that standard (which frankly isn't that hard right now, paradox completely broke crusader kings for a week or 2 with it's last expansion, and its still messed up. EU4's last patch introduced its fair share of problems as well). The Last Federation has a TON of potential and character  and really really active devs, but I'm kinda honestly shocked at a lot of the bugs and gameplay stuff I'm running in to.  And I've only played 1.3 campaigns and didn't play until version 1.018! 

There is a reason youtubers with 10's of thousands of subscribers like Arumba and Mathas have just abandoned their Let's Plays of TLF.  It's because you're not provided with the information you need to make informed decisions even as someone doing their due diligence. It is documented precisely NO WHERE NOT EVEN IN THE WIKI OR BY GOOGLING that the skylaxians will not bomb from orbit. I got lucky and someone from the steam forums happened to read that somewhere on these forums and explained what was happening.  I mean that's a gigantic piece of information.  In the current state of the game the skylaxians will simply never ever be able to beat the burlusts or thoraxians in a war. That's a pretty big piece of information the player should have!  I couldn't even find after actively noticing and looking for it.

I've played 30ish hours. Even if I never start the game again I don't regret my purchase, this isn't some sort of rant in that regard.  I just think the game could be really really good, but its marred by a lot of blatant problems.  It needs honest feedback though and I'm honestly trying to explain how frustrating it is right now. I mean it actually ruined my night tonight.  Thats my fault for letting a piece of entertainment software bother me that much, but it was that frustrating for me.  I felt like I was peeling away layers of an onion digging through the numbers which was great!  Then it turned out at the core of it there was some gross bug (heh), or simply nothing at all.

[I-KP]

Just popping in to echo sentiments that the RCI system needs a re-think.  For a mechanic that is written into the heart of the simulation – at least, it seems to be – it’s a bit odd that it’s still so unintuitive. 

The numbers need to convey ‘worth’ to the player and not just value.  For example, “+150” means nothing to me and furthermore generic terms like “awful” don’t tell me anything useful particularly when the difference in value between generic terms seems to be so small given the full range of possible RCI values.

The RCI system itself seems to have minimal impact even when a value is being described as being “awful”.  Having a modified planetary stat of 2.21 instead of 2.3 because it is being ‘hampered’ by that “awful” RCI stat seems like a marginal influence at the very, very worst.

I still turn off the RCI display when I play this game because not only does it provide useless information, worse, it often serves up misinformation.  It should not be left to the player to cognitively adjust what the RCI is telling them because RCI means different things with differing planetary suitability; if the Economy RCI is only adjusting that planet’s derived stat by ‘-2%’ I want to see the Economy RCI reporting that ‘-2%’ and not a meaningless “-150”.

In my opinion RCI has a serious communication problem; it is trying to tell me useful things but somewhere between the simulation maths and the presentation layer the message is getting lost.

[lifehole]

Just popping in to echo sentiments that the RCI system needs a re-think.  For a mechanic that is written into the heart of the simulation – at least, it seems to be – it’s a bit odd that it’s still so unintuitive. 

The numbers need to convey ‘worth’ to the player and not just value.  For example, “+150” means nothing to me and furthermore generic terms like “awful” don’t tell me anything useful particularly when the difference in value between generic terms seems to be so small given the full range of possible RCI values.

The RCI system itself seems to have minimal impact even when a value is being described as being “awful”.  Having a modified planetary stat of 2.21 instead of 2.3 because it is being ‘hampered’ by that “awful” RCI stat seems like a marginal influence at the very, very worst.

I still turn off the RCI display when I play this game because not only does it provide useless information, worse, it often serves up misinformation.  It should not be left to the player to cognitively adjust what the RCI is telling them because RCI means different things with differing planetary suitability; if the Economy RCI is only adjusting that planet’s derived stat by ‘-2%’ I want to see the Economy RCI reporting that ‘-2%’ and not a meaningless “-150”.

In my opinion RCI has a serious communication problem; it is trying to tell me useful things but somewhere between the simulation maths and the presentation layer the message is getting lost.

You've said it a thousand times, but basically, yeah, this is what needs addressing. Once that is in, it can be rebalanced even further.

[UnfriendlyBG]

You've said it a thousand times, but basically, yeah, this is what needs addressing. Once that is in, it can be rebalanced even further.

I can't totally agree with that. The numbers are already there, theyre just kinda hidden on the planet screen.  If the player was drawn to them somehow I think it would be ok.  But I think even before the display fix that the RCI needs to be rebalanced asap.  It is quite literally game breaking depending on your goals and the universe you spawn with.

If your goal is always to win in the most efficient way as fast as possible then it probably wont bother you.  But if you have some sort of goal like 'I want the Boarine to become the preeminent race in the galaxy' going in to the game, you can have a plague of locusts and a disease hit them and they'll never realistically be able to do anything aside possibly defend themselves.  I've won exactly 1 campaign, I did it with the peltians-skylaxians-andors. I have exactly 0 interest in doing that again for the time being.  I was actually really disappointed when I realized there aren't more options for forming the federation.  Grand strategy games are all about setting personal goals and having emergent ones, this one is a little different because there is a win condition so it's a little less open.  But no one would play Crusader Kings 2 if every game was ireland with randomized power around you.  I mean they might, but it wouldnt be the frankly ridiculous success it has been for the genre.

I dont want to do away with randomness infact I love randomness, its why I love roguelikes. The game would be boring if you could actually accomplish everything you want every game unless you play perfectly down to the solar day. But there should be a little bit of counterplay to the randomness aside from 'this race is now completely fucked even if the player babysits them the entire game'.  Changing display values on the solar map isn't going to fix that.  I'm not just whining because a race I like is on a shitty planet. literally half the solar system is in death spirals where if the birth and death rates actually worked as you would think. they would all be dead within the first 17 years if not sooner  all regardless of any action the player could take.  It's precisely because I do not think that this occurrence would be uncommon that I'm so troubled.  Bad events beget more bad events, starting on incompatible planets is I'm assuming just as likely as starting on compatible ones.  This makes the randomness actually completely non random.  If there's a good chance that a few races are just completely fucked every game when you press play, it's not a random and fun or interesting thing.

[I-KP]

...
In my opinion RCI has a serious communication problem; it is trying to tell me useful things but somewhere between the simulation maths and the presentation layer the message is getting lost.

You've said it a thousand times, but basically, yeah, this is what needs addressing. Once that is in, it can be rebalanced even further.

Well, perhaps three times. 

[ptarth]

You pretty much have the problems identified. Arcen made some major changes to the scaling of things early on in the post-release patching. However, the scaling wasn't propagated consistently through all of the systems, and it ends up pretty broken. We've been encouraging them to fix the lack of transparency in the information displayed in game as a priority, and they have been working on it. However, they have limited programmer hours to spend on the problem, so progress is slow relative to larger companies. The game difficulty levels are also not working very well, they effectively multiply the negative effect of the things that don't work, so you get massive swings of problems. Normal/Hard is probably the best game currently.

[UnfriendlyBG]

You pretty much have the problems identified. Arcen made some major changes to the scaling of things early on in the post-release patching. However, the scaling wasn't propagated consistently through all of the systems, and it ends up pretty broken. We've been encouraging them to fix the lack of transparency in the information displayed in game as a priority, and they have been working on it. However, they have limited programmer hours to spend on the problem, so progress is slow relative to larger companies. The game difficulty levels are also not working very well, they effectively multiply the negative effect of the things that don't work, so you get massive swings of problems. Normal/Hard is probably the best game currently.

I'm not trying to crucify the devs here, in fact seeing their level of support was a large part of the reason I purchased the game.  Compare that to paradox who has been recently consistently breaking their games with expansions and patches.  There's simple one line text file fixes that have already been identified for paradox by the community that have gone unfixed since sometime last year in eu4. 

The other reason I bought it was honestly watching arumbas let's play (that he has since at the moment abandoned) and seeing the self aware humor of the tutorial and the voice clips.  Which is why it bothers me so much that there's crucial info not given to the player as the tutorial is so good especially for the genre.  The part where this game isn't as big as a paradoxgame and i ccan't even Google the answers to questions I have is rough.  I couldn't even register for these forums until I
used a proxy because of some over zealous spam filter, who knows how many people there are out there with questions they can't even ask.  I'm lucky misery accepted my friend request on steam....

Anyways, I'm not trying to throw a tempertantrum and be like 'my issues need to be fixed now!' but if after not even 1 campaign I can tell some areas of the game are borderline broken I think you have a problem.  I definitely think a pretty widely acknowledged to be screwed up major mechanic like rci is more important to check out than pirate frequency for example.

[PokerChen]

There seems to me that one of the clear bugs is disease, which is partially responsible for ruining your game. Almost all your 0m growth planets have had diseases that are not being recorded on the planet info, and you don't have a science outpost to speed up cure research (the races aren't building them to help fix it either).

Skylaxians caught Black bubbles in 3000. You fixed that pretty quick.
Burlusts caught Teethworms in 3000. You researched a vaccine with the Thoraxians, but the Burlusts suffer from it.

Andors caught LxA in 3003. Never fixed.
Burlusts another in 3006 (more teethworms?)
Thoraxians another in 3006. You fixed it.

Maggot Poxes started with the Burlusts and spread to Boarines. The initial notification is there, but I can't find any trace of it.

They transmit to other worlds as well in the mean time, which results in Acutians/Peltians being unscathed. Each race can survive with ~ one disease, but when a second disease appears or is transmitted their stats go tanking. This should be one of the main reasons your RCI values are nothing like what I've seen. I'll transmit your save to Mantis and couple it with your issue.

= = =
 Having had a further look at it, you can clearly say the plague of locusts is the worst offender against your RCI values. Followed by disappearing rainforests. They occur in chains so that the planets rarely recover.