First Game is Over: Weird AI Behavior and possible bugs

[Baron Wombat]

I just finished my first sandbox game, Version 1.00.06, and achieved a Conquest Victory on Turn 362. Played Terran, average size galaxy, with opponents Kala, Guardians of the Seed, and Okli-To Consortium. Basically I took the default parameters on everything. I chose the attributes Ancient, Peculiar, Creative, Collectivist (-2) which allowed me to select another +2 characteristic, Predator.

Some of the comment below might be incorrect because I overlooked something or misinterpreted something. Please feel free to correct me.

Weird AI Behavior and possible bugs
1. Kala, an ally and much stronger than me, breaks all of our treaties, but then pays me tribute and gives me all of their star systems except the Home World. They gradually withered and died. (I finally took their homeworld).
2. If you drop enough bombs the population can go to a negative number. I did this twice—a homeworld went to -6 and one of the colonies with to -1. Bug or feature?
3. A large, very important fleet just disappeared. Quitting and restarting didn’t get it back. Rolling back to an earlier turn did.
4. I attacked a ship guarding a world and it retreated. However, when the screen came up after the battle it was still there. I went through this about 3 times: attack-he retreats-he is still there. This sounds identical to the problem Bersercker posted (see above). The problem was solved when I quit and restarted.
5. There seems to be something very wrong with auto resolve of combat. Several times my fleet, 3x the size of the orbital forts I was attacking, destroyed them for the lost of 3-4 frigates. When I used auto resolve (just to see what would happen) my entire fleet of 27 ships, including 3 Titans was completely wiped out. This happened at 2 or 3 other worlds with other fleets. It seems to me the outcomes shouldn’t be so drastically different.
6. Splitting fleets is very complicated and confusing. When you click on an individual unit you are actually deselecting it. In other words if you have 10 ships in a fleet and want to send a frigate some place else, clicking on the frigate and then moving will do the opposite; 9 ships will move and the frigate will stay behind. To carry out this operation correctly you would have to click on the other 9 ships (deselecting them) and then move. This is counter-intuitive and very confusing. Developer?

Minor Gripes and Nitpicking

1. Graphics display at top right (victory conditions) obscures messages on data net.
2. I never could figure out what the “stardate” was for—adding flavor I guess. I tried to use it to tell me what turn we were on, but it is incomprehensible. I wish there was a turn # somewhere on the display.
3. The weapon mounts on the ship designs are hard to distinguish, especially on the larger ships that have a lot of them.
4. Heroes you don’t want won’t go away no matter how many times you hit the “retire” button.
5. Ship designs you don’t want won’t go away when you hit delete.
6. How to calculate score and might is not explained.
7. How big is a sector? Ships can go X sectors. Black holes affect 10 sectors. How far is this? A grid overlay might help.
8. If something is scuttled to pay your bills you aren’t told what just got deleted.
9. When an enemy ship parks at one of your worlds, blockades are announced but the effect is unspecified. Production halted? Freighters can’t come or go? What exactly?
10. My homeworld kept getting renamed to the name of the world I had just attacked. If I attacked Corvus II, now my homeworld was named Corvus II. It was easily renamed, but very annoying.
11. The priorities in the research queue would sometimes change without my permission.

[AtomicKaiser]

I just finished my first sandbox game, Version 1.00.06, and achieved a Conquest Victory on Turn 362. Played Terran, average size galaxy, with opponents Kala, Guardians of the Seed, and Okli-To Consortium. Basically I took the default parameters on everything. I chose the attributes Ancient, Peculiar, Creative, Collectivist (-2) which allowed me to select another +2 characteristic, Predator.

Some of the comment below might be incorrect because I overlooked something or misinterpreted something. Please feel free to correct me.

Weird AI Behavior and possible bugs
1. Kala, an ally and much stronger than me, breaks all of our treaties, but then pays me tribute and gives me all of their star systems except the Home World. They gradually withered and died. (I finally took their homeworld).
2. If you drop enough bombs the population can go to a negative number. I did this twice—a homeworld went to -6 and one of the colonies with to -1. Bug or feature?
3. A large, very important fleet just disappeared. Quitting and restarting didn’t get it back. Rolling back to an earlier turn did.
4. I attacked a ship guarding a world and it retreated. However, when the screen came up after the battle it was still there. I went through this about 3 times: attack-he retreats-he is still there. This sounds identical to the problem Bersercker posted (see above). The problem was solved when I quit and restarted.
5. There seems to be something very wrong with auto resolve of combat. Several times my fleet, 3x the size of the orbital forts I was attacking, destroyed them for the lost of 3-4 frigates. When I used auto resolve (just to see what would happen) my entire fleet of 27 ships, including 3 Titans was completely wiped out. This happened at 2 or 3 other worlds with other fleets. It seems to me the outcomes shouldn’t be so drastically different.
6. Splitting fleets is very complicated and confusing. When you click on an individual unit you are actually deselecting it. In other words if you have 10 ships in a fleet and want to send a frigate some place else, clicking on the frigate and then moving will do the opposite; 9 ships will move and the frigate will stay behind. To carry out this operation correctly you would have to click on the other 9 ships (deselecting them) and then move. This is counter-intuitive and very confusing. Developer?

Minor Gripes and Nitpicking

1. Graphics display at top right (victory conditions) obscures messages on data net.
2. I never could figure out what the “stardate” was for—adding flavor I guess. I tried to use it to tell me what turn we were on, but it is incomprehensible. I wish there was a turn # somewhere on the display.
3. The weapon mounts on the ship designs are hard to distinguish, especially on the larger ships that have a lot of them.
4. Heroes you don’t want won’t go away no matter how many times you hit the “retire” button.
5. Ship designs you don’t want won’t go away when you hit delete.
6. How to calculate score and might is not explained.
7. How big is a sector? Ships can go X sectors. Black holes affect 10 sectors. How far is this? A grid overlay might help.
8. If something is scuttled to pay your bills you aren’t told what just got deleted.
9. When an enemy ship parks at one of your worlds, blockades are announced but the effect is unspecified. Production halted? Freighters can’t come or go? What exactly?
10. My homeworld kept getting renamed to the name of the world I had just attacked. If I attacked Corvus II, now my homeworld was named Corvus II. It was easily renamed, but very annoying.
11. The priorities in the research queue would sometimes change without my permission.

Hey Baron. Congrats on your first victory and most of all, many many thanks on your feedback. This is the kind of stuff that really helps out iron out the game quirks. So special thanks for that! I will go into detail for each of your points then:

Weird AI Behavior and possible bugs
1) It seems the Kala felt threatened by your. What was your score? They do not take only into account how many ships you have, but more importantly their might and your industrial base(how many you can produce to replace loses)
2) This is most likely a bug, I will look into it.
3) This is a very weird bug. Do you have a filesave before that happens? I guess you do, since you got it back. Please post it then so I can take a look. It'd help to know if you got a sabotage message as well. There was a bug in which an operative could destroy a whole fleet, but that was fixed in the last version, or so I thought.
4) Yes, this is a bug. It has been fixed internally and it's coming in the new version shortly.
5) I will take a look into the function, the randomization has been lowered a lot, however it might be too strong compared to the player's skill. Autoresolve however should always give worse outcomes than the ones the player can get by himself, nevertheless the scenario you describe is clearly too extreme.
6) It is designed to ease the use of fleets when you don't have to split them, you just left click to select and right click to move. You only need to deselect ships when you are doing a split. If all ships were unselected, you would have to select the ones you want, everytime you desire to move the fleet. We thought it best to cut extra clicks, that's why it is works the way it does.

Minor Gripes and Nitpicking
1) The notification is cropped to make sure you realize there are more, despite having the bar visible. We found it caused confusion sometimes, causing players to think there were not as many notification as there were, however we'll look into it again.
2) Stardate is just for flavor, you get a text indicating the turn at the beginning of it, no sense in having it at any other time in the screen.
3) We might be able to increase a bit the resolution here, but not by much
4) You can only retire heroes you have hired first.
5) You can only truly delete custom designs, default designs can not be totally removed and will come back each game.
6) These concepts are explored more in detail in the manual, but the exacto formulas are as follows:
Score = (TotalConstruction * 0.15) + (PopulationCount * 0.2) + (TotalSpaceMight * 0.15) + (TotalGroundMight * 0.05) + (ResearchedTechs * 0.1) + (Colonies * 0.1) + (((Metals / 4f) + (Organics / 2f) + Rares) * 0.15) + (Treasury * 0.1)
Might = ((HullTotal * 0.02) + ((ShieldsTotal + ArmourTotal) * 0.02)) * (DamagePerSecond * 0.01) + SpecialSupportModulesMight(calculated via industry cost * 2);
7) A sector in game is roughly the size of the biggest O type stars you find in the game.
You are not told, but you do get shown it's icon on the notification.
9) Production is halted and the colony doesn't share its resources with your empire. Only food is computed to feed its population.
10) This is a rare bug we have fixed internally. The fix will go live with the new version shortly.
11) When did this happen? Did you trade for a tech perhaps or got one from an event?

[Baron Wombat]

I may not be of much help since I was just winging it for most of the game and not paying much attention. Plus, I regularly delete my saved turns—it seems like games load faster if the save folder is not bulging with dozens of old turns.

#1 Kala Quit: We were allies and had just about every treaty you can have. Okli-To declared war on me and several turns later I nuked one of his worlds. Kala immediately broke all of our agreements but did not declare war. However, the next turn they wanted to pay me tribute. I was very confused (if they’re mad at me why would they do that?) but I said OK. Over the next 3 or 4 consecutive turns they gifted me their star systems and colonies until only the homeworld was left. I was ahead on colonies, population and production. They had a higher score than me and their might was about 3 times mine. They actually had a large fleet in my territory on it’s way to attack the Seed People, who they were at war with. If they had attacked me right then I would have been toast. It reminded me very much of other games I have played where a human player doesn’t want to play anymore, so they give all their stuff to another player and drop out. An emotional decision that I would not expect from an AI.

#3 Disappearing Fleet: I had wiped out the orbital fortresses guarding an Okli-To world. When I tried to invade the world the fleet was frozen (other things in the galaxy worked fine). The ship icon was next to the star but I couldn’t give it any orders. When I clicked on “Fleets” it showed up, with a message saying “awaiting order” but did not say where (like all the other messages do). Like I said, it would not accept any orders. I advanced the turn and now it was completely gone. Icon next to the star was gone and it no longer showed up in the “Fleet” panel. I did not get a sabotage message. I quit and restarted but that didn’t work. I rolled back about 5 turns, carried out the attack same as before, and now everything was back to normal.

#11 Tech queue changing priority: Let’s put this on the back burner. It’s very possible I inadvertently changed it myself without realizing it. I just remember several times having the reaction of “wait, why are they researching Proton Cannons, it was supposed to be hydroponic gardens.”

I will be starting a new game soon (this is a great way to spend my time in quarantine) and will try to pay more attention. If something strange happens I will try to remember to save the turn.