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Re: Will there ever be a manual?
Posted: Fri Jan 24, 2014 8:24 pm
by SephiRok
Parsing the language files to get an online equivalent to the compendium sounds very sexy.
Re: Will there ever be a manual?
Posted: Fri Jan 24, 2014 9:07 pm
by BlueTemplar
If you're serious about that, you might want to contact Rorschach, who has several years of experience in creating and maintaining the "unofficial official" wikis for Sword of the Stars 1 & 2 :
http://www.kerberos-productions.com/for ... file&u=176
http://sots.rorschach.net/User:Admin
http://sots.rorschach.net/
http://sots2.rorschach.net/SotS2_Codex
If I'm not mistaken, at some point they have used automatic extraction of game files to fill up the wikis.
Re: Will there ever be a manual?
Posted: Sat Jan 25, 2014 1:15 am
by kidpython
Crap. My favorite XML processing tools really don't like the HTML snippets that are embedded in the XML. The correct way to embed HTML in XML is to use the CDATA construct:
<xml>
<htmlData><![CDATA[<html>
<body>
Your HTML's body
</body>
</html>
]]>
</htmlData>
</xml>
Of course I stick to JSON in my day job since XML kinda blows.
Re: Will there ever be a manual?
Posted: Sat Jan 25, 2014 7:38 am
by Belanos
jamoecw wrote:try the ingame civilopedia equivalent, in any civ like game it is vastly more useful than the manual.
I'm finding the Compendium to be next to useless. It only shows me things I've researched or discovered, and there's a lot of areas that it doesn't deal with at all. I'd really like to get into this game, but I'm becoming really frustrated trying to figure it out without any decent documentation.
Re: Will there ever be a manual?
Posted: Sat Jan 25, 2014 3:12 pm
by SephiRok
If you let us know what you feel is missing, we can try to improve it.
Re: Will there ever be a manual?
Posted: Sat Jan 25, 2014 4:55 pm
by Belanos
SephiRok wrote:If you let us know what you feel is missing, we can try to improve it.
Well for one thing, it would be a lot more useful having the Compendium tell me what everything is beforehand rather than only have entries that come up as I discover things. I have no idea what I should be prioritizing since I can't tell what I should be be aiming for. The entries are also incomplete. I looked up the tech that gives you the Hellfire weapon and the entry didn't mention anything about that all.
Re: Will there ever be a manual?
Posted: Sat Jan 25, 2014 6:53 pm
by Belanos
OK, this is crazy. The morale in my capital city just tanked, my population there is dropping like a rock and nothing is getting done, yet I have no idea why or what to do about it. The Compendium mentions nothing about how to keep my citizens happy or what conditions affect Morale. The only thing I've seen is a Hot Springs improvement while exploring the map. This game really needs to do a better job of explaining basic concepts.
PS: Great, I just lost my capital city to Morale failure yet I have no idea why or how I could have prevented it. The game looks interesting but I can't play it if I don't have a clue what's going on. It looks like I just wasted $30.
Re: Will there ever be a manual?
Posted: Sat Jan 25, 2014 8:15 pm
by jdmillard
Before I begin, forgive me if I say some stuff you already know. It's been a while since i first played this game and I cannot remember what is covered in the tips.
First, if you are suddenly losing population every turn, there are a few things it could be:
-You ran out of food (cities will lose 1 population size per turn). this would also account for a sudden -20 morale. Allocate more labor to farmers and/or terraform some farms to make the current farmers more efficient.
-You accidentally clicked "raze city" mode. which purposely slaughters 1 population per turn and would account for a sudden -20 morale. Simply click the "raze city" button again to disable it.
-You are getting nuked every turn (but we know that's not the case because it's early in the game, and -trust me- you would know it when you saw a huge mushroom cloud).
Perhaps I misunderstood you and what you meant by "losing population every turn" is that some growth from each turn is being lost to emigration (as in- you aren't decreasing in population, rather the growth rate has been decreased). If this is the case, don't worry. The emigration is to your other cities. Emigration among your cites is influenced by 2 things: Habitation and Morale. A city with lower habitation and lower morale will lose some growth every turn to cities with high habitation and high morale (naturally smaller cities). You are not losing any people! The people are just moving around. Growth may be slower in your capital, but the smaller cities are growing faster. Seriously, don't worry about.
I can understand your frustration, not knowing the intricacies of the city management, but give it some time. Everyone's first game is basically the trial to figure out how growth, morale, emigration, and food works. Once you figure that out, everything else is intuitive (workshop, production, expansion, warfare are all self-explanatory). Just remember this: the tooltips (hover your cursor over something) are GOLD! Seriously, if you wanna know what's causing poor morale, go to the city, hover your cursor over the bad morale, and it will break down everything that is affecting it. It might be pollution (there's a building for that, forests help too); it might be lack of habitation (there's a building for that); it might be the tax rate... There is also a building that grants a raw morale boost, so it won't necessarily solve a pollution or habitation problem, but it can bring your morale right back up to where you want it.
How did you lose your city to poor morale? I'm fairly certain that is impossible. I think you got the "city unrest" notification which naturally makes you panic and think that they all grabbed their torches and pitchforks and threw you out of town. No. That notification is misleading. It sounds intense but all it's saying is "hey, morale is a little bad." They really need to adjust the trigger point for that notification. Just ignore it for now. If the city disappeared, then either they all starved to death, got razed to death, or aliens attacked it over and over until the city was destroyed. If the city is a different color than it got invaded by your enemies.
Here is the powerful question: So if morale just affects how people move around among my cities, what's the point of trying to keep it high? Great question! You don't have to. But at the same time, I'm wrong. Here's why: For every point of positive morale, it give you a % bonus to the output of farmers, miners, production workers, and scientists. Negative morale has the opposite effect (which explains your "nothing is getting done" comment above). A few positive morale points makes a huge difference especially towards the end game and over time. Also, if your morale is really good, you can get away with higher taxes which is more money for you (there's no Laffer curve in this game, which deserves it's own thread).
Take a minute and hover your cursor over everything in the city control window and look at the details. Hover it over food, minerals, production, research, growth, habitation, morale, ... EVERYTHING. And soon it will all make sense. There are also some very, very detailed threads on this site where we discussed how growth works, how to increase growth rate (no, increasing your food does not increase your growth rate, as long as you have positive food, you are good).
If you'd like to continue this discussion, let's start a new thread.
Re: Will there ever be a manual?
Posted: Sat Jan 25, 2014 9:51 pm
by Belanos
jdmillard wrote:
If you'd like to continue this discussion, let's start a new thread.
OK, I'll start a new thread.
Re: Will there ever be a manual?
Posted: Sun Jan 26, 2014 1:07 am
by BlueTemplar
You get a Laffer curve if you "build credits".
Re: Will there ever be a manual?
Posted: Sun Jan 26, 2014 7:51 am
by jdmillard
The version of a Laffer Curve that the game currently has is this: Morale does affect tax revenue in a given city. So the rational is that if you increase the tax rate to 100%, the revenue will increase, but the negative morale penalty of that tax rate will start to affect revenue negatively. Therefore there a nonlinear relationship between the tax rate and the tax revenue and therefore technically, there is a curve but it's not a Laffer curve by definition.
By definition, the Laffer curve suggests that both 0% and 100% tax rate will both yield zero tax revenue. The game does not reflect this (not even close). I think that the relationship between tax rate and the morale penalty ought to be inverse (and offset by 100). This way as you approach 100% tax rate, the morale penalty will skyrocket, driving your tax revenue downward (among other things).
Seriously, to me it doesn't make sense that it's so easy to pull off 100% tax rate with marginal and negligible side effects. But then again I also firmly believe that there are bigger fish to fry in this game right now (diplomacy, AI, ect.), which is why I never mentioned this before. Should it be adjusted? Yes. Do I care that much right now? No. This game is a strategy game, not an economics game so we should drop it for now. Also, it's proven that the vast majority of people don't understand basic economics so I can't expect too much (forgive my narcissistic condescension). If and when this discussion is addressed by the developers, we can argue about the shape of the curve... but things will get political and juicy. I can't wait.