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Erik Rutins -> RE: Refund Possible? (4/14/2010 3:29:47 PM)
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ORIGINAL: Fishman Well, that is one policy, an understandable one. Others offer a policy in which any cause for dissatisfaction with a product is grounds for a refund, generally in the belief that people generally do not ask for refunds unless the product is unusable, as individually defective items are typically replaced rather than refunded.
I'm not aware of any company with digital download games that offers a better policy. Take movies as another example - if the movie you paid to see is shown on time and without technical glitches, you don't get your money back if you didn't like the plot.
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The expansion planner is a good way of doing so, but tends to offer no information about the actual abundance of a resource, so you may have just queued a constructor to construct a mining station on a place with 20% yield, and tends to provide little context as to where it is or what the environment there is like, so you probably just sent a construction ship to die at the hands of 50 Kaltors. There is also the tendency of the expansion planner to queue orders on the nearest construction ship, so ONE construction ship receives a dozen orders while the rest are left totally idle after their current task finishes. Lastly, the system is ineffectual for queuing non-mining bases, so if you wanted to build resorts, or defensive emplacements, all of the above concerns become compounded.
Actually, if you click on the planet in the expansion planner and click on "Select Potential Colony" or "Select Resource Target" you can see the abundance details without leaving the Expansion Planner.
Also, the display on top shows you which resources you currently do and don't have sources for and what your stocks are.
Regarding non-mining bases, those are generally built rarely enough that I haven't found it to be any issue to go to a planet and build from there, either from the map or from the colonies or construction yard screen, or to pick a construction ship and tell it where to build a resort or research base. Similarly, you can just leave a constructor automated or leave "Suggest" on and such bases will be built automatically or you will be asked if you'd like to build one.
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Using the Expansion Planner for colonizing shares similar flaws: The orders are queued on the nearest colony regardless of construction rates or queue-fullness, so most likely a half dozen colony ships are queued to be produced at some tiny new colony and will never complete within a reasonable timeframe. WORST OF ALL, the colony ships queued are not even your actual colony ship, but some made-up design that you do not want and often costs more than the design you HAVE made, or is missing critical features that will prevent it from safely reaching its destination.
Regarding where colony ships are built, there is an issue that can cause too many to be queued at a single planet. We're planning to tweak that. The second part, I have no idea what you are referencing there. If you are seeing an issue there, can you please post it in a new thread?
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Well, in order to use this functionality, even under optimal conditions, requires that you go into the expansion planner, a lengthy and often incomplete list, locate a planet with an inscrutable name you cannot remember, and then pick it out of the list.
I have to say that having played through entire games using the Expansion Planner, your characterization of how difficult it is just really doesn't make any sense to me.
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Most likely the user in question has spotted the desired planet visually, by seeing it as he follows the progress of an explorer ship or finding it next to one of his colonies.
I usually don't try to find such things visually. I do use the expansion planner. I filter by resource and sort by distance, then click on each one so that the map in the expansion planner shows me where it is. If I want to check abundance, I use the Select button in the expansion planner to check that. It's a one stop shop for me.
If I do wander upon it on the map, I can either sort by name in the expansion planner or right click on the planet and queue a mission from there without an issue.
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course, there are all the attendant caveats of order-queuing, such as that orders are not balanced between constructors. If the Order Queue were maintained in a constructor-independent manner, as an empire-level "to do" list, instead of a per-ship queue, this would probably not happen.
I find they are pretty well balanced across constructors actually, but I can see the value in an empire-level queue. Good suggestion, can you please put it in the Master Wishlist as well?
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Surely you jest. The ship trespass issue is probably the single largest factor to negative diplomatic relationships. I have seen values like -80 "your ships and colonies violate our space".
That's because of the colonies, not because a ship or fleet briefly trespasses. I'm not joking, give it a try when you have no colonies sharing another empire's system.
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Meanwhile, the AI gleefully performs the highly offensive act of colonizing in the human's back yard (which the game helpfully does nothing to inform you about, so you can't even SEE it happening until it is too late). If the human player is going to be able to perform some transgression that the AI is going to get bent out of shape over, the game should helpfully inform you when the AI is doing that to you, so you can share in the irritation and be offended as well, thus making the AI's behavior seem more reasonable and understandable
That's actually what the listed modifiers in the diplomacy screen are intended to communicate, so that you know what's bothering each AI empire. You may also note that on our list of improvements for the next update are some tweaks on how the AI deals with human players in this regard.
Regards,
- Erik
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