SaucePolicy, So would something like what I have now with the attack Icons, Red, Yellow, Green work for fleet transfer as well? And what kinda Icon would you suggest ,maybe a circle with a arrow coming out? This my friend is in the works, It will be a button under planet and will open a sub dialog where you can set what you want the planet to do on auto. Then when you press Auto it will engage in that function resources allowing. So great suggestion and has been mentioned by others so obviously a must have! I will get this corrected, when transferring the intention is only one ship remains behind a fighter. so Cap Ships should move, I will also remove the Cap Ship build Button from dialog if one already exists in orbit, good Call! Great Idea, let's talk more about it, I see the need but am uncertain how to implement it while maintaining the core gameplay which is "4x Casual" so any more input on how you visualize this is welcome!
How does the combat work in this game? User controlled like Master of Orion? Is it just something you watch, like GalCiv?
Battle of the stars.... Trystero, Combat is a function of several parameters, The base of any battle is a fleets fighter count and Offensive and defensive stats. Planets attacking or being attacked by you with higher stats will be harder to defeat, for instance you may have 6 fighters vs their 3 but they may have much higher offensive and defensive stats, we reflect this in the planets Fleet level rating, which you see when you click on a planet in the info string at the top of the game. Once you have decided to attack or are defending your position you enter into the prebattle screen.... From here you have to decide three things before entering battle, 1. Fleet formation, 2. Fleet direction 3. Fleet firing solution. Each of these effect how the fighters behave in the battle. Fleet Formation: Different formations provide advantages and disadvantages, keep in mind that ships in the front of the line hit first are the first to go, the wider your formation the more ships are at risk, but the greater your firing area will be, reversely the tighter the formation the safer ranks behind the front are, but you can only target smaller swaths of space in the enemy fleet Fleet Direction: Depending on the direction selected once you ships dewarp, you formation will move in that general direction, depending on your stats and what the enemy icon reveals about their movement you might want to press into or attempt to avoid them in engagement. Firing Solution: Options like fire ahead or spread patterns or to the top or to the bottom of the screen will determine how you target the enemy, you can attempt to land hits, or throw up a field of covering fire, standard rounds of the empirse if they collide cancel each other out. Something to keep in mind when selecting Note that in the top right of the screen you will see the enemies intentions for each category as you plan your battle. Once you selection is made you will dewarp and enter the battle, timing of when you fire can be critical, once you call for fire the ships will begin to fire till their ammo is depleted or no more enemies remain on the field. At the top you will see additional buttons that can call in Frigates and Capital ships into battle, during a engagement. You can not deploy these large ships intill your fighters have secured the front line, hence you can't start a battle with one of them on the field. These buttons also allow for activation of weapons systems you may have unlocked in your research. The planet that loses it's ships loses it's planet of origin. Hope that helps!
Well, after playing for some hours now I can say the game is great! If you are looking for a 4x fairly simple to grab and play, get this. Yes, you have to dedicate some time to understand how things go and to learn things such as if your planet level is lower than the planet you are trying to invade, you'll never win, but after you get how things go it's very enjoyable. The ship fights give some action to the strategy involved in developing planets and such, and in the end you have an amazing 4x title excellently suited for mobile phones. There are other 4x titles which might have much more researching and such, but in my opinion this one is the best for short bursts while you are waiting for the bus or longer developments and dedication when you have an hour or two to spare. So in a few words: Yes, this is a "fast-4x" game (I'm not sure if the developer used this word). Don't misunderstand me: a game can take hours to complete and it'll have a lot of depth, but you don't have to dedicate a whole month to learn how to get the first ship built... Lovely to see things are kept simple in the game. Great value for the money invested
Game looks nice. One for the "maybe" list for now. What is meant by a "4x" game? New term for me. Thanks.
Bug Fixes for Next update After reading all the various posts, we have added 98% of them to the to do list, But here the ones we will have (At this point) in the next update i hope to submit this weekend... -Fix Negative Search turn totals -Fix occasional missing empire in Quick Battle -Make a more immediate screen scrolling -instead of making buttons (Next and Empire) invisible when not useable we will make the semi transparent -Capital ship transfer fix -Set a planet to conduct various different functions on Auto selection besides just generating revenue surplus -Fast Forward button in Battle -Surrender Button Some of the other feature changes will take more code restructuring and as such will be in the update after the next one, If all goes well by this weekend we will begin inserting "Chapters" into the game, the first being "The Antik Artifacts" More news on that later. Thanks for all the input and ideas! keep em coming!
3g Devices Indeed We are aware of this issue, To fix it I have to move several of the sub menu elements and gfx into what we call A separate frame, to cut down on the memory used in the galaxy frame as we stuff all of those elements in together, As soon as I can figure how to quickly load and save the data without writing it to the save file I can separate. This way the engine isn't trying to store all the planets, stars and galaxy gfx and hold in memory the empire backgrounds , build buttons, avatars etc. It's high on the list, but its more likely to be a update 2 item! I will focus on fixing that for you ASAP Gwarmaxx
Something like the attack icons would work just fine, which I realized just after I posted. I know that you're color coding them to indicate threat level, which wouldn't be necessary for the player's fleets. They could just be a neutral color. What I would like to see is a visual difference between attack ships and colony ships or they can just be positioned in different quadrants around a planet-- fleets in the upper right, colony ships in the upper left for instance. To me, all that's important is that I have a quick visual indicator of where my movable ships are without having to click on each planet first. The icons can appear around a planet as soon as the player has enough ships to use the transfer option. Quick and easy. That's awesome. Woo! I haven't seen an enemy fleet with more than one Cap ship either, but I am pretty aggressive so maybe they don't get a chance to build more. Here's one approach. Let me know what you think: Create two new commands, RALLY SET (or something like that) and RALLY, probably in the DEPLOY menu. Select RALLY SET, then click on a planet. An icon shows up (the common iconography is a flag, but whatever works) Select RALLY SET again and click on a new planet, it moves the rally point. If you select the existing rally point, it turns it off With a rally point set, the RALLY command is available, which acts as sort of a group TRANSFER command. Once selected, any planet with a fleet large enough to move (that hasn't moved or attacked already) immediately executes the TRANSFER command to the next closest planet to the rally point automatically. Like moving a colony ship, this ends the turn for both the source and destination planets. Why I mentioned that this would be a significant task is that you'll have to code some additional pathfinding so that fleets will take the most efficient route to the rally planet, but otherwise it seems like it would work without increasing complexity signficantly. That said, just the addition of friendly fleet/colony ship icons is the biggest bang for the buck. I'd classify this as a wishlist feature that speeds up fleet logistics when making a big offensive push or trying to defend a hotly-contested planet. It's largely intended to streamline the process of moving reinforcements, and wouldn't help players fight battles on multiple fronts. That would still require micromanagement. Yes, to follow up on my very first post, I definitely see why frigates and cap ships deploy manually now. I've seen the AI send in cap ships first and fool me into thinking they didn't have frigates as a backup. It's a nice touch.
Just to clarify my words about the interface buttons disappearing: the bug doesn't appear as long as you don't choose to research a technology with a negative development time value. If you stick to choosing tech research with positive dev time values, the game plays perfectly and you don't need a fix. In fact, I played it for two hours last night and didn't get the bug because I never chose the -1 day tech. Of course, if you're as me, who thought "hey, this tech with -1 will develop as fast as lightning" and chose it, then of course you'll get the bug
The Tech bug came in before and I thought I had fixed it, the way it is supposed to work is if at any point their is a tech that can researched with one turn, then the tech option to improve research performance is not suppose to show up. In any case you will have a (-1) research free game in the next build, first thing I fixed! May the Might of the Titans enlighten you! -Ancient Dev'orn saying (Roughly Translated)
Auto Mode OK! So some of you where asking for the addition of being able to select what each planet does when you select the auto command. It is a excellent idea, so tonight I implemented it. Under the Planet menu I added the Set Auto selection, when you click on it you are presented with this screen, where four to six options are available, Capital and Frigate ships may not be available depending on your research level. Then as requested when you select Auto each planet will conduct it's assigned functions. My question to you guys, is on Capital Ships, you can only have one in Orbit, So if you have set it to build a Capital ship and you have one, currently it does nothing, Should I eliminate it as a option all together or leave it that way?
For me it's great, but please correct the text "capital", because you typed "captial" instead ;-) as for the capital ship, I'd eliminate the option so that there's no chance of mistake. In fact, What's the point of auto build capital ships if you can only build one?
Kisguri, I'm playing a game at the moment in which the galaxy map says there is still one reticulan planet, but I can't see it on the map. I guess it's a bug. I'll try to finish the game by conquering the rest of the planets and exterminating the races left, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to finish the game because of this. I'll keep you informed (it's still my first game!) Now I notice that "casual 4x" doesn't mean "fast 4x". I'm enjoying the game a lot anyway!!!
VirtualBoyFreak, Are you playing conquest mode or Quick Battle mode in your current game, and what race are you playing as? Thanks!
Kisguri, I'm playing conquest mode (the long one). I play as humans and on easy difficulty. I noticed that reticulans had one extra planet not shown in the map since the beginning.
