21-03-2003 07:12									#1
	605 Turn Game - Weirdness and Bugs Inflate your Upload Space

I decided to play a game with one simple goal: inhabit every planet in the galaxy. I ended up seeing all sorts of interesting behaviors.

I began as the Nommo in a huge 3-arm galaxy, lots of specials (ie Magnates), and 18 Civs. I played on a new (6 month) old Pentium 4 Dell machine.

Apart from the usual bugs (particularly with colonization) and not knowing about the 10-task
force limit that prevented me from invading a populated world rather than exterminating it, it took me 605 turns. I was unable to know the number of planets I inhabited (I wasn't going to count them manually). I conquered all the civs save for one planet of Cynoids on a mineral poor planet. When I decided to assimilate them, there were four 'uncontrolled' planets. Three of them were destroyed by a planet killer. The last one was Orion II, a tiny size two world with about 800 of my colonists and refusing to accept another colony ship (regardless of the AI colonial setting). My final victory score was 45,588,831 and the victory screen said I had a populataion of 89,515 (???)

Weird bugs:

PERFORMANCE: Time between turns degraded significantly. By Turn 550, well over six or seven minutes.

SITUATION REPORT: Lots of planets makes a long situation report. At some point I think the report 'wraps' around itself. That is, yellow report items appear overlayed over green ones over red ones. Using filters fixes the problem.

BLACK HOLES: Flyng a fleet into a black hole does nothing to the fleet. It just sits there in orbit.

LIMITLESS BATTLEOIDS? Strange buggy behavior or display problem? Around turn 525 I decided to create as many ground forces as possible in a single system (Battleoid Armies). I noticed no matter how many I made the available forces list either (1) never changed or (2) was empty, but allowed me to create armies anyway. It was possible that I had enough planets with nothing to do except make armies (since most ships were marked obsolete), and that I simply tired of the clicking before exhausing the supply - but the list indicated I had nothing left.

SCRAPPING SHIPS: After learning the entire tech tree and eliminating all but a tiny number of rival worlds, and having a large reserve of colony ships to finish colonizing all planets, I decided to mark all designs obsolete. Many of my systems had huge fleets of system ships (250 or more) and thanks to buggy AI a majority were system colony ships. I decided to scrap them all and save a bundle. However, once marked 'scrap' the ships remained the next turn. I couldn't get rid of them!

FINAL VICTORY: The Final Victory screen indicated more than one page, but it wouldn't allow me access to them.

	21-03-2003 15:50									#2
	Lose 30 kilos (of popups)

Sounds like you managed to overflow a few size limits

Incidentally, how much RAM do you have? That seems to have a big effect on how long turns take in big developed games.

	21-03-2003 19:50									#3
	Suffering from ads?

My longest so far was 320 turns or so and it was far from over when I got tired of playing it.

My turn times usually get unbearable every 20-30 turns. I reboot and it's okay for another 20-30...have to do that over and over. The strange thing in that 320 turn game was around turn 150 all the way to 320 the turn times never got worse, it was still pretty quick around 320. When mine gets slow I not only have to wait longer for the turns, clicking on a system or sometimes a panel will take a long time to load. Less than a minute, but defintely not as fast as right after a reboot.

	21-03-2003 21:46									#4
	Re: 605 Turn Game - Weirdness and Bugs Support Apolyton, buy Galactic Civilizations

quote: Originally posted by choinski ... BLACK HOLES: Flyng a fleet into a black hole does nothing to the fleet. It just sits there in orbit. ...

Same for Neutron stars....and the first time I set out to explore blackholes and neutron stars, I was hoping to find Antaran X's there...

As for everything else you mentioned, all I can say is wow! How long did it take to conquer the galaxy, and did you really gather all the techs in the game?

Quixote

	21-03-2003 22:12									#5
	Avatar Enlargement: We've got the solution

Sounds like you need to try the usual uninstall, defragment, check drivers and reinstall routine Radical. If that fails, try reporting it on the IG forums. If it was a common problem that affected many PC types I'm sure we would have heard about it a lot more.

	22-03-2003 00:14									#6
	Support Apolyton, buy Civilization III: Complete

I've had that unusual army creating problem where you seem to have limitless troops, although i seem to get it with any unit type. I tried counting my units, assigning them all and still i had loads of new troops that had appeared from nowhere! Still, as i play single player i didn't mind But it needs to be fixed!

	22-03-2003 07:22									#7
	Support Apolyton, pre-order Civilization IV

To answer your questions:

I have 512 MB RAM. The machine I’m playing on is new and was defragmented shortly before installation. However, the makers of MOO should be making this game playable on as many machines as possible. I can’t play it at all on my 3-year old HP Pavillion.

The game took about 20 or so days. I’m unemployed, so I had a lot of time. The last day (6 hours?) was so slow (about 12 turns) I lost patience and did not wait for that last size 2 planet to grow from colony to planet before assimilating the last race’s planet.

I also wanted to end the game before the real war in Iraq started. It didn’t seem right to play war while a real one was happening on my living room TV set.

	22-03-2003 15:52									#8
	Increase Your PM Length

quote: PERFORMANCE: Time between turns degraded significantly. By Turn 550, well over six or seven minutes.

Ack.

	23-03-2003 17:43									#9
	Inflate your Upload Space

I have than three year old gateway windrow me with 256 meg of memony. Pent III with 730 MegHtz speed. Than it run MOO3 with graphic setting change to Medium.

	26-03-2003 05:04									#10
	Support Apolyton, buy Call to Power 2

quote: LIMITLESS BATTLEOIDS? Strange buggy behavior or display problem? Around turn 525 I decided to create as many ground forces as possible in a single system (Battleoid Armies). I noticed no matter how many I made the available forces list either (1) never changed or (2) was empty, but allowed me to create armies anyway. It was possible that I had enough planets with nothing to do except make armies (since most ships were marked obsolete), and that I simply tired of the clicking before exhausing the supply - but the list indicated I had nothing left.

Yeah, I've seen something like this...but it wasn't limitless for me. Basically I was creating some armies (can't remember what type) when I noticed that I could create another one even though I couldn't see any available in teh reserves. Upon closer inspection I found the reserves displayed are limited...it only displays a max number, after that it doesn't show the others.

Changing the reserve list from All to Battleoids or whatever will show if you have any more Battleoids in your reserves though it might not be all of them.

So in short when you were getting these limitless battleoids were you seeing All Reserves or just the Battleoids reserve list? If it was All Reserves it was probably clogged with Magazines, Commandos and Hackers etc.

My 2 cents

	26-03-2003 13:16									#11
	Re: 605 Turn Game - Weirdness and Bugs Support Apolyton, buy Call to Power 2

quote: Originally posted by choinski PERFORMANCE: Time between turns degraded significantly. By Turn 550, well over six or seven minutes.

Aha turn over, time for another coffee break

quote: SITUATION REPORT: Lots of planets makes a long situation report. At some point I think the report 'wraps' around itself. That is, yellow report items appear overlayed over green ones over red ones. Using filters fixes the problem.

SitRep has limit of some 255 entries or so It would maybe be enought if they've given us more filter options. Odd thought that beta's did not notice SitRep message overlap in testing...

quote: BLACK HOLES: Flyng a fleet into a black hole does nothing to the fleet. It just sits there in orbit.

probably both black holes and neutron stars are just a left over of a feature not implemented durring developement.

quote: LIMITLESS BATTLEOIDS? Strange buggy behavior or display problem? Around turn 525 I decided to create as many ground forces as possible in a single system (Battleoid Armies). I noticed no matter how many I made the available forces list either (1) never changed or (2) was empty, but allowed me to create armies anyway. It was possible that I had enough planets with nothing to do except make armies (since most ships were marked obsolete), and that I simply tired of the clicking before exhausing the supply - but the list indicated I had nothing left.

You can have unlimited number of units but for some odd reason the designers made tf/gf list size some 1.5-2.5 pages long leading to situation where most of the units do not show in the list and available only thru auto design/building. Why they did just show same identical ships/units show up stacked (Marine (Sauron) *13976948) is beyond me.

	27-03-2003 03:27									#12
	Remove this text

The simple answer they never thought about it. That why NASA with all of they commitees where able to land man on the moon. No one person of a small group of people can think of all possible answer's to all problen's. This doesnot mean 100,000 people working on one program will make it a better program most likely it will crash and burn when run.

The spacesuit that are worm in outerspace where design by many different commitees working together. All of the Science & Mechanic and handman magine article on the spacesuit where wrong. Over 99 % of then would have never work at all. Many of these same magine said that NASA spacesuit will never work either.