StarDrive - Now with fucking Space Bears

Wrathcaster_sl said:

This is a real bummer. Developers need to cap custom sizes or at least add a warning that playing above X number of worlds and players will cause system instability. I'm no programmer/developer but I'm curious as to why 4x games all seem to have this problem- I've never seen a definitive fix for any of the titles I mentioned above beyond "play smaller games." Is it impossible to design a 4x game that can be played on huge settings that won't suffer from critical memory leaks and shutdown?

That being said, this is one issue I actually never ran into in SoTS. I could play this game with the most ridiculously huge galaxies and max players without problems. Can definitely remember having over 1000 fleets shuffling between stars without suffering crashes... I wonder what SOTS did that other games didn't?

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Not sure, SotS 1 was an awesome game, sadly Kerberos lost two of their main programmers somewhere during development for SotS 2, which is why it turned out to be such a mess. Game still has some stability problems and their AI needs to rise above toddler level, then it will be perfect (also, second expansion is supposed to have ground combat). Makes me wish for HW 3, thanks THQ for sitting on that IP for years then imploding.

Wrathcaster_sl said:

This is a real bummer. Developers need to cap custom sizes or at least add a warning that playing above X number of worlds and players will cause system instability. I'm no programmer/developer but I'm curious as to why 4x games all seem to have this problem- I've never seen a definitive fix for any of the titles I mentioned above beyond "play smaller games." Is it impossible to design a 4x game that can be played on huge settings that won't suffer from critical memory leaks and shutdown?

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It's not impossible in theory, just as it's not impossible that a major MMO is launched with zero server stability problems - it's just very, very hard to do. Bugs that take 20 hours to reproduce are typically pretty hard for programmers to track down. 4x games generally get exponentially more complicated the longer the game runs, even with perfectly scaling code, eventually you are going to run into problems like 32 bit memory limitations.

Someone posted on their forums that he was on stardate 1340 (about 4 and a half hours at normal speed) on the largest map size with 2000+ ships and playing smoothly at 4x speed still.

I played at max size, max races, for 8 hours yesterday... STRAIGHT. Not a single hiccup. It also stayed around 1G Ram the whole time.

What instability are people talking about? Are your PC's super old or something? It is just when on Max difficulty?

As for the game, its the best 4X I have played in ages. I have not been able to bring myself to try playing SotSII again, since its release week, as I was so disappointed in it that I am psychically scarred or something... So I can't compare it. yet.

Grimsark_sl said:

What instability are people talking about? Are your PC's super old or something? It is just when on Max difficulty?

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i7 860, 16GB RAM, win8 64 - so no, not really ;p

I don't know about if it's only on max difficulty, I only did the one test as requested - max size, max races, max difficuly, leave it on x4 indefinitely to see if it blows up. ( I made as many vulcan fighters as my start planet's economy would hold to stop me getting killed prematurely by the AI ).

It's quite possible that it's difficulty related though, given on normal difficulty relatively little happens in comparison to brutal, which quickly turns into a giant shitfight. At one point I had the opteris, the kulrathi and ry'leh all show up on earth with heavily escorted invasion fleets and then had a giant 4 way battle. It was kind of funny, someone else showed up with a fleet halfway through and then immediately warped out - I imagine the Lana 'noooope' voiceover ;p

I have been getting a feel for the game over the weekend... And I have taken a second look at my original insistence that its the best 4X I have played in ages.

Its definitely good (and could be awesome). But some of the automation quirks had me disabling some, and then pretty much ALL, of it. And the game quickly begins to show its wrinkles when the real time aspect becomes hyper-micro management in real time (pausing doesn't hep much for me), and the lack of an adequate fleet management menu (the one that exists is just a single mass list that needs to be scrolled through all at once each time you look in it) is inexcusable to me... Its bad enough doing this stuff in a turn based format.

Also the way the zoom levels are handled (scrolling a mouse wheel half a dozen times each way) is awkward for me over hours of play.

There is absolutely no rhyme or reason as to where and when random events occur. I had an 18.1 population ultra rich planet that I fully invested in, lose half of its stats due to a SINGLE volcano event. After which I was so irritated I just quit playing for the day. If there are going to be random events THAT BAD, there should at least be some way to overt/fix them. Perhaps with some major money/resource sink or something. But sudden, and irrevocable -50% to a super colony? WTF?!?

I am going to head over to the official forums and see if this is purely a beta thing and is headed for a change...

My game wigged out a bit too early, but my system is aging. I didn't do the tutorial or anything so it took me a while to figure out how to do some pretty basic shit like take enemy planets. I was in a kind of stalemate situation until I convinced the space bears to join my federation, and then I was top dog and coming in at my enemies from two sides. And then...crash with a gigantic error window.

The AI definitely needs work though. A lot of the automated stuff didn't feel very efficient.

Feels like a very lean Europa Universalis in Space. If you like this game I suggest you look into EU4 coming out late this year.

I really like stuff like the Owlwok freedom event and the remnant secrets stuff. Things that become available to you because of your activities rather than just following a generic tech blueprint. More of the tech tree should be like that so you're adapting to threats as they become evident. So there is actually an escalating arms race and not just "let's build that, but...bigger." As far as big shit, Draylok seem to really stand apart. Best freighter, best capital.

Agraza_sl said:

I really like stuff like the Owlwok freedom event and the remnant secrets stuff. Things that become available to you because of your activities rather than just following a generic tech blueprint. More of the tech tree should be like that so you're adapting to threats as they become evident. So there is actually an escalating arms race and not just "let's build that, but...bigger." As far as big shit, Draylok seem to really stand apart. Best freighter, best capital.

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Draylock have the best everything as far as hulls go. I read that there is still racial techs incoming, and then a balancing pass, so that'll probably shake things up a bit. Hopefully fix up things like it being impossible to efficiently use the opteris 'wings' for anything other than armor - that's an assload of wasted O spaces.

Anyone playing this now that it's released? What's the state of the game in regards to bugs etc...?