[Dev Team] 2.0.2 Beta Patch updated [8.3.2018][checksum 5b9d]

[Jamor]

Hey guys, just checking from home. That massive error log thing is definitely not right, I'll make sure we check it out when we're back in the office. We'll push a fix as soon as we have it. Stand by.

 

[Ikatsu Shokohima]

I'm really trying to get used to the fleet manager. But its buggy as hell. Please fix!

This Screen for example, it does not notice it's own 20 corvettes and offers me to reinforce them but they are already in there:

It's not new to this beta, have this bug since 2.0 started

 

[Ur-Quan Lord 13]

I just downloaded the beta (was playing 2.0.1 before) and the Coilguns technology has been set to Propulsion category. Pretty sure it should be Materials and wiki agrees. I have a scientist with Materials bonus that I also don't get when picking this Coilguns with Propulsion symbol.

That change was in the 2.0 patch notes. Rocketry was renamed to propulsion, and kinetic weapons were added to it.

Some feedback on assist research Unity changes:

In my current game I had unity output of 750ish, with about 7 scientists assisting research. Immortal machine Empire, Level 10 leaders, though most haven't reached that level yet. After the update unity was at 460 a month. (I also had to re-unlock that discovery tradition, though I suppose thats part and parcel of participating in a beta, so I don't mind). Now, this isn't criticism, just a question: Is that serious a nerf for everyone going for a sort of "science Utopia" intended? Cause before you could stack some serious boni, with a single scientist producing up to 20 unity (rivaling entire planets worth of output), not to mention that science buff.

Edit: Well maybe that tech unlocked unity reward is also strong, though I don't entirely get it. Do you get that bonus for every single tech?

Yes.

This is not why you take assist research. You take it so that your backbenchers can gain experience, which means you have more backbenchers with more specialties.

Although I forsee large energy surpluses being used to generate disposable but custom-ordered scientists for those STILL WAITING AFTER 2000 HOURS FOR THE DAMN RNG TO GIVE AN EARTH IN A WORLD WAR SO THEY CAN START USING MODS.

Ahem... I don't know what that was.

I was tired of this as well. I'd found WWII Earth once before, but my ethics did not let me invade primitives.

So, after a long drought, I opened up my new game's savegame file and searched for Sol, and checked whether Sol III had a machine age primitive empire on it. Was lucky, it did on the first attempt, but basically you can ensure you only play a game where finding WWII Earth is at least possible.

Of course, you still have to be the first one to find it (which triggers the actual war, I think), and then invade it before WWII ends. In my case, they were literally the only star completely hidden behind a xenophile FE.

Since I don't know how the event works, and was worried the war would end or they'd go to space age before I found them, I actually edited the savegame file to move Sol to my neighborhood. You can skip that part though, obviously

I am kind of wondering if anyone in PDX studio is playing an optimized game. Or at least 'I want to win' style rather than 'I will just do random stuff for lolz' kind of play. You see, Wiz said that he wants to expand on the exploration phase of the game. The whole 'thou shall not explore with corvettes' was a big thing some time ago.

The problem is he kind of forgot to leave any incentives for exploring beyond the area the player wants to claim. Anomalies? Majority of them give tile bonuses. To the AI that will claim the system. That's assuming the player will get any. In moderately populated galaxy systems within 10 jumps from me are already being surveyed by another AI and it gets worse from there. So what's left? Well, EXP for the scientist I guess. With assist research locked behind tradition leveling scientists will be painful.

Here is a little tip for Wiz. If you want our lives to be even harder for no particular reason then do something about leveling the governor exploit. You can demolish a building then rebuild it for the governor to gain EXP. I do that with dozens of habitats as their buildings do not have levels and cost quite a lot of minerals.

Back to the Discovery. It is a good idea to level scientists, but it's better one to reroll them until you get Spark of Genius and then get that guy/girl/hermaphrodyte/neuter/guy identifying himself with girls/girl identifying herself with guy/hermaphrodyte identifying itself with neuter/neuter identifying itself with hermaphrodyte/ and that guy identifying himself with AH-64 attack gunship to work. He will get some levels that way. Someday. Probably.

Before this, I took Discovery, rushed the tradition giving bonus science and sent out my race to go where they have never gone before. Now my scientist, singular, will just roam around his home and when he's done with that job he will spend the rest of his days on a couch. It's unlikely that he will live long enough for me to unlock Assist Research. Which is another problem. We have lost bonus research points, lost bonus unity produciton, and had Assist Research be locked behind a tradition, which means that for all intents and purposes it's now lost. What did we gain? Some unity every couple years. Yes, years. Unless you have one system with dozens of fo habitats and a science nexus you will spend years unlocking repeatable tech. And it will only get worse as they definitely do not become cheaper.

Someone even did the 'math' on the unity front. Let's see it.



30 unity means between 13 planets (12 times +2 building, 1x +4 and +1 from capital) or 6 planets minimum (6 times +4 buildings and +6 from capitals) without bonuses. Remember, no assist research to boost our production.

Let's go with 6 planets. That's 25% research penalty from planets alone. About 10% from systems. We are assuming a very minimalistic empire here.

The cheapest tier 2 tech will cost 1350. To research it in 25 months you need 54 research per month. On average you will have 2-3 research from a lab (we are splitting them equally between three fields) so 18-26 pops working in labs. Let's once again cut it in half as some of those five systems we have are bound to have some research.

We have optimized our planets to have 5 pops on them to upgrade the capital. 9-13 pops work in science. 6 in capitals, another 6 in unity buildings, to feed those pops we need at least 5 farms. Good thing our capital buildings give us some energy as we would need even more pops to pay for all of that. That's almost 30 population. AND we need someone to work in mines and power plants to keep the rest of the empire running.

Is that early game? Maybe for some super growth/unity oriented build.



Early game leader assignments.

1 governor
3 scientists working on science
no admirals
7 scientists left to explore/assist research (we have +1 leader tech by now, it's very important for assist research-based build)

We have six planets in this scenario, but leaving only one scientist on exploration seemed wasteful before this patch so let's go with two. 5 scientists will boost research.
That's 5 unity month per scientist level. Standard maximum at that point is 5 so 25 unity. Max 50 with improved assist research. What we do get is 11. In a very optimistic very science heavy scenario.

Obviously, I am not taking dozens of modifiers into account, but this is a very simplified scenario and not a real game. I have picked the cheapest tier 2 tech and a very tiny empire with little to no negative modifiers to science cost. I have even assumed that they had very science rich systems. The more realistic situation would have multiple positive modifiers to research along with much more expensive tech and more penalties from additional systems/planets along with less science from stations. Those 2 energy systems come to mind here.

What I am trying to say is that 25 months is not doable. I was playing several science heavy empires. I had finished Discovery and +10% ambition. Leaders with Spark of Genius and still couldn't get those magical 25 months on next tier technology. Not without crashing my economy by dumping 90% of my pops into science labs. Which I cannot do the early game as the AI will eat me alive for being weak. And I WILL be weak. Minerals are THE priority. WIthout them, I cannot do anything.

What's doable then? 50 months. for high tier tech. Which cuts the unity gained from this new, shiny tradition in half. You do not get 11 unity per month, you get 5.5. That's two low level scientists. I already pointed out I will have five of them on the job. And the number will grow with higher technologies.

But you will say 'unlock Paradise dome to get more unity and use them instead of farm'.

I will say that I will get +2 leader and two more scientiss doing assist research. Increase EXP growth and max level. My current game max lvl is 10 for everyone in my empire. Advanced genetic engineering FTW! Or Sythethic Revolution. Those guys can do that as well. Normal empires can do that with the ascension perk and little genetic engineering.

BTW, this nerf made the leader based ascension perk rather useless for more optimized play. People took it to get more scientists. Oh, that +2 leaders civic is also quite useless now. Which is funny as it was nerfed not so long ago.

Domination... another nerf for you. Guess I will have to do with 7 ascension perks in my next game. No need to bump unity ambition costs.


When I was writing it someone gave hard late game numbers. Let me give you mine:

760 unity after. Over 1k before.

About 60 months to unlock next repetable tech.

Every 20 months I will get 2.2k unity. I could get over 6k from assist research.



tl;dr

Unity generation nerfed by 20%. Exploration not worth it. Multiple scientists useless.

Weird. My tech heavy empire can currently research a level 1 repeatable tech in... 19-32 months, depending on category. And my unity without assist research is 3.3k. So, buff to me. (Level 5 repeatable takes 52 months in 1 category, level 6 takes 49 months in another). And I've had the minerals to build 62 habitats, 2.5 ringworlds, half a Dyson sphere, and a science nexus, by year 2406.

But, for reference, the way to go science heavy early is: place labs on every non-mineral tile, and use trade hubs for energy. Rush star fort tech. Get voidborne ascension perk. Switch planet output to minerals (I skipped this part but I had a lot of space mineral output by then.) Build first habitat, full science. And easily snowball from there.

If tall means to you 7 planets and no habitats, yes this is a nerf to unity for you. If tall means every inhabited system has 1-2 planets and 5-8 habitats, then it's better. In very early game, it's more likely to be a nerd, but my tech heavy empires tend to go through a phase in mid game where every tech takes 12 months (that's +75% unity generation in that phase); occasionally one will take longer, but occasionally I do a short one I've skipped till now that takes 3-6 months. Did you take those into account, btw?

And the domination tree, with the naval capacity gain from vassals nerfed so hard, is not viable at all. I wish you would improve it by allowing me to own starports in my vassal's territory, and increasing starport capacity, at least. This is quite sad for Authoritarian empires whose pops will not be happy without a vassal, who can either commit everything to vassalize an empire (when they could conquer just as easily) or vassalize one of their own planets (and sacrifice production).

I thought so too, at first.

First, having an entire tree be viable for just one reason is not a great situation to be in.

Second, getting 600 cap from one tradition was definitely too much.

Now, my empire with vassals gets 40, and my empire with many protectorates gets 60. And, while that is a huge nerf... Isn't it kinda what you'd expect from a tradition? The 5 starport Ascension perk gives like 180, a tradition giving 1/3rd of an ascension perk is about right.

And you may say "I could just take that territory and get way more naval cap, and minerals and energy too."

Sure, but what do vassals, tributaries and protectorates provide without that tree?

Protectorate: .25 influence, stackable. I have 7 willing protectorates in my game.

Tributary: mineral and energy income, without increasing your unity and tech costs whatsoever.

Vassal: a fleet that will come at your beck and call, again without any tech or unity cost. In my 5 vassal game, each fields 10k-40k fleet power for me. I don't have to build it, command it, even think about it.

Getting 40-60 fleet power on top of this seems like exactly what a single tradition should provide, rather than completely replacing the reason to get vassals.

 

[RandomZach]

Looks like, but that line is the same 2.0.1 so we should have seen the same bug in at least 2.0.1 as well.

That would be true if we expected this event to fire as often in 2.0.1 as we do in 2.0.2, but that's not the case. This is a pirate reinforcement event. it requires an existing pirate spawn to fire with a MTTH of 100 months. 2.0.2 has entirely changed pirate spawn mechanics and enabled them for the AI. This means many more pirates. Additionally, if I'm understanding the code correctly, the pirates would need to be successful before this bug started being an issue, and if they are destroyed it should terminate. So in 2.0.1 only the player could get this event, and even when they did there was a high likelihood they'd correct or contain the problem on their own.

 

[GloatingSwine]

It's not new to this beta, have this bug since 2.0 started

Turn off autogenerate designs and auto-upgrade in the ship desginer.

Then it will go away. (or at least it will only be odd when you manually update your design and haven't upgraded the ships to it yet).

Also the autogenerated designs are hot garbage.

 

[Ellife]

* Clicking your own empire shield on colonized systems in the galaxy map will now open planet view and cycle between colonies in that system

Regarding this kind of usability design i was also thinking for a while now that it would be nice if right clicking on the "station" icon in the system name with a fleet selected would send the fleet to orbit the station, so it was possible to do so without going into system every time. (just for that docking price reduction quick trigger)

 

[Peko?]

That would be true if we expected this event to fire as often in 2.0.1 as we do in 2.0.2, but that's not the case. This is a pirate reinforcement event. it requires an existing pirate spawn to fire with a MTTH of 100 months. 2.0.2 has entirely changed pirate spawn mechanics and enabled them for the AI. This means many more pirates. Additionally, if I'm understanding the code correctly, the pirates would need to be successful before this bug started being an issue, and if they are destroyed it should terminate. So in 2.0.1 only the player could get this event, and even when they did there was a high likelihood they'd correct or contain the problem on their own.

I enabled pirate spawns for AI in 2.0.1 and it's been in earlier versions of the beta so it seems like this should have shown up before.

 

[Hyomoto]

Today's QoL feature is awesome. Completely, totally awesome. In the spirit of continuing this world of awesome you are creating, can you also make clicking on the megastructure icon behave the same way?

 

[Bhruic]

That would be true if we expected this event to fire as often in 2.0.1 as we do in 2.0.2, but that's not the case. This is a pirate reinforcement event. it requires an existing pirate spawn to fire with a MTTH of 100 months. 2.0.2 has entirely changed pirate spawn mechanics and enabled them for the AI. This means many more pirates. Additionally, if I'm understanding the code correctly, the pirates would need to be successful before this bug started being an issue, and if they are destroyed it should terminate. So in 2.0.1 only the player could get this event, and even when they did there was a high likelihood they'd correct or contain the problem on their own.

This is a bit inaccurate. One of the ways this could fire is via reinforcements, but it's not the only way. It looks like after the initial spawn event, every pirate spawn afterwards at some point will use create_pirate_fleet. So this absolutely would have happened frequently in 2.0.1/2.0.0 if the files were identical.

 

[unmeiged]

Unsure if bug, but definitely seems like it. I've been in this war for ~15 years now. Literally nothing has happened: no battles, no conquests, no occupation. I haven't even seen one of the enemy's ships, yet I'm sitting at 100% WE (and suffering the negative Unity/Happiness negatives for it).

 

[RandomZach]

@Peko? it's not 100% reproducible in the current build, and even then not everyone notices it. You may have just been lucky or simply not noticed. I could very well be mistaken, but it seems to be the only thing that could be leading to a scope error. At the very least it doesn't seem like pirate.2 is coded correctly. If you have any better ideas, i'd be happy to hear them.

@Bhruic The issue I'm talking about isn't in create_pirate_fleet, it's specifically in the event pirate.2. create_pirate_fleet seems to expect the event target 'pirate_home' to be a planet. In all the other instances where create_pirate_fleet is called, pirate_home is set to a planet except for this one instance.

 

[Velaroz]

My gripes at this point are in regards to stations and civilian ships, and their inability to make use of psionic shields or dragonscale armor plating. Makes having them a tad disappointing if your civilians and your greatest bulwarks never bother using some of your better contraptions.

In regards to FE buildings and the Resource Replicators: Are RRs supposed to be the thing for normal empires to go after as a replacement for mining facilities, if they have the energy? What's the point of the +Minerals research, since the modifier doesn't apply to them as they aren't a tile-based resource and just a modifier on planet? Why do the +Empire Minerals/Energy production, and Dark Matter's +Physics apply to Orbital Stations & Megastructures, but the researches for +Energy and +Minerals only apply to pops working tiles?

Could we get strategic resources akin to Dark Matter that give +Society and +Engineering research, and a similar bay on Starbases for +10 Engineering or Physics for certain phenomena--around black holes they get the Black Hole Observatory for +10 physics... Maybe around Neutron Stars & Pulsars they get Engineering +10 and systems with uncolonized habitable worlds they get +10 society?

I understand Wormholes for border-checking, but why do Gateways? Other empires can control whether or not you come through those, even during war time, unlike wormholes where during war time, you can just dive through and slam into the enemy like a tidal wave.

Aside from those gripes, I feel like we have a superfluous number of Ascension Perks now, where many are like false-choices to players.

And lastly, I feel like if you make Vassal states out of segments of your own Empire, there should be other relationship perks to it--like Puppet State or something with extra opinion bonuses.

 

[rexx]

Niceee thanks all pdox dev team for the constant updates :-D

@Wiz any chance torp corvette meta will get a look in in this process? not fussed about it(its still better than doomstacks n balance is difficult at the best of times) but I hear dropping missile/torp damage and increasing pd effectiveness has been quite effective at removing it as a total victory meta but leaving it as a viable thing.

 

[Njordin]

Still no changes on forced status quo and WE? Just flipping over the whole system and then patching other stuff. Whats the thinking behind this?

 

[Peko?]

@Peko? it's not 100% reproducible in the current build, and even then not everyone notices it. You may have just been lucky or simply not noticed. I could very well be mistaken, but it seems to be the only thing that could be leading to a scope error. At the very least it doesn't seem like pirate.2 is coded correctly.

It lead to lag that was quite noticeable when compared to that same save before the update so I believe I'd have noticed if it was there before. Also, as I said earlier I'm trying the fix you suggested and that same save now runs smoothly again. It's weird is all I'm saying.

 

[Ariphaos]

Hey guys, just checking from home. That massive error log thing is definitely not right, I'll make sure we check it out when we're back in the office. We'll push a fix as soon as we have it. Stand by.

The error log actually shows quite a few scripting bugs in any given game. Is there a policy to just let observe run for awhile and collect the bugs that show up in the error log?

 

[Rayzen10]

Thx

 

[RandomZach]

@Peko? it definitely is weird! It's also possible that it's a combination of effects from this patch. For example, there is this bug report that pirates can spawn through unopened wormholes. That could have an impact here as it would let a pirate base sit around basically indefinitely. I hope my solution works for you but I'm not 100% convinced myself.

@Ariphaos Just use the console, type in 'observe', unpause the game and let it run. Make sure you disable mods first, though!

 

[Arnovitz]

Hey guys, just checking from home. That massive error log thing is definitely not right, I'll make sure we check it out when we're back in the office. We'll push a fix as soon as we have it. Stand by.

Oh god, please send help. My log was over 50 gigs.

 

[Ariphaos]

@RandomZach no, I'm asking if they have a policy for doing this.

Look in the error log in any normal game and you will see a dozen or so scripting bugs like this. Some of them have been there for a very long time now.