Conquering planet in enemy area gives it back to the enemy.

Yea I've noticed this too, it's rather annoying.

What I think should happen is that all the culture around the planet belonging to that faction should get removed when the planet is neutralized, say up to about half way along all the connecting paths. Destroying the population of a planet should destroy it's culture, that's kind of common sense. Of course if they have a planet next to it that is generating culture then it should start to spread again so that eventually they'll get it back if the invaders have no cultural presence of their own by then.

In any case, the switch back definitely shouldn't be instant like it is now.

Agree, sounds like a good solution.

Btw. does the Gameplay Feedback Thread still get read, or should we open new threads? Just asking, since that thread is kind of crowded.

Just want to bring the following from said thread to attention.



It also seems that the AI is now unable to retreat its capital ships because of that. Destroyed plenty of Kol Flagships today thanks to this "feature".

Yea, I just made a new thread about that issue

AI prioritising auto-cast

The Kol keeps trying to use it's attack ability (railgun I think, still learning all the names) on your ships. It's trying to run away but auto-cast ability keeps over ruling the order to run.

I noticed this a lot in the game I just played with my own Kol, when arriving at a planet to find loads of defences right in front of me I'd tell my whole fleet to move out of range of the guns. Every ship would do so except the Kol which stubbornly would insist on attacking the defences with it's ability.

You can't colonize planets and expect to keep them if they are under strong enemy culture. This is working as intended. You have to counter it by either taking out his culture centers and/or out culturing him. If you could defeat it by using colony ships (as per the suggestion) then people will just leave colony ships around as "culture shields" instead of using culture. I agree, the values may need some tweaking.

*The autocast ability fix will be included in the hotfix due tommorow or shortly after.

Thanks for the reply but I don't think the culture is working as intended.

As it is they just have to make a broadcast centre at a planet to make it impossible to capture once it's spread it's culture a bit.

I doesn't matter at all if they have built any other broadcast centres at any other nearby planets or not, the planet in question is uncapturable due to the culture it produced its self before being decimated.

In the game I just played I wiped out two of the factions before they built any culture but the third had just started building broadcast centres. I couldn't capture their closest planet because of this so I ignored it and then when further into their space and took their starting planet where they'd not built any broadcast centres (it was 1 jump from the uncapturable planet).
I went on to find they'd got broadcast centres up at all their or planets and asteroids so I couldn't take any of those.

I destroyed everything they had at all their planets and built as many broadcast centres as I possibly could at all my closest planets. I didn't wait around to see just how long it would take before I could actually claim their worlds, partly because it was already taking far too long but also because them game kept crashing.

I'll have to try playing a few more games and see if they keep crashing as the game gets near then end.

PS: Is it normal for the victory condition to trigger after killing only two of the three enemies in a small galaxy game?

Sorry for the double post.



I'm not sure what you mean by this .. what I'm saying is if you destroy everything around a planet and then destroy all it's population and infrastructure then you should be able to capture it if there is no culture being produced by any neighboring planets.

Or rather I'm suggesting you could capture it briefly even if there is culture being produced by neighboring planets but that culture would quickly spread back and flip the planet if you didn't produce your own culture to counter it.

PS: Despite these issues the patch seems to have made a huge improvement on the gameplay from my perspective.

Hmm, I'll have to look into it further - thanks for the additional information. As for the only killling two or three of the enemies victory bit, that bug should be fixed in the hotfix. If the game keeps crashing, please send us the dump file so we can take a look at it - unless you already did (most email addresses are different than forum usernames).

Yeah I agree if culture is strong its good to neutralize it as a meathod of fighting back, but I had all but wiped out the enemy, their last 3 plants were mine, and they had nothing left, but I still had to wait a good 10 minutes to colonize them. In general culture seems to last too long, and when an entire enemy is wiped out, his culture should diminish at a very fast rate. 10 minutes is a long time...

In MP definitely. Otherwise this seems like a nice way to slow the campaign. I guess.

This should increase the revolt level and not prevent you from conquering the planet.

The issue I encounted last night was after defeating an AI, there were some residual culture left that prevented a friendly AI of mine to colonize the now empty planets after I had bombed them to bits.
So even after they were obliterated completely from the game, the defeated AI received a new planet when my team AI colonized a planet within their culture zone.

The problem is, it makes it impossible to conquer enemy planets in the late game, since all of them will have at least some culture on them. And if you have allies, they will insist on trying to colonize those empty planets, which gives the enemy its planet back which forces you to have some siege frigates on every empty planet behind your frontlines or to break the alliance and kill its colony ships.

As for using colony ships as a culture defense. This doesn't really work imho, since you first have to bomb the planet back to oblivion, recolonize it and build up its infrastructure again, which can make it quite expensive.

If this is not enough of a determent, you could also flip some orbital structures with the planet (lets say, half of them, randomly chosen) which would make an enemy culture flipping your planet quite costly.



Yay!

I disagree that destroying a people destroys their culture.

One need only study Earth history to conclude that it is not that easy to "destroy culture". Heck, it's not even easy to actually destroy an actual people; they tend to live on among the new societies that arise, but their culture is usually stronger than the survivors themselves, because of the infectious nature of culture.

Besides that, besides the wishful thinking and the "logical" and historical aspects, culture-saturation has a gameplay use in this game.

However, I do believe that a new upstart colony needs some time of grace before succumbing to the permeating culture.

The way you, as a new colonizer, can fight this, is of course with more culture. Think of it as a multi-level game: You need to fight on the economical scale, then on the cultural scale, then on the military scale. One cannot simply air-bomb every problem that arises. Want me to cite examples from recent history?

This issue, extended my game by about 40 minutes or so

There is an easy way to get around this problem;

1) build some broadcast stations yourself
2) Destroy your enemy's broadcast stations

I like the fact that you can't simply rush in and take a colony the instant you bomb it to pieces; it makes culture absolutely critical for an assault. The only thing that I would change is having culture begin to disappear on it's own if the enemy has no more broadcast stations, if for no other reason than to speed things up a bit.

I had the exact same thing happen to me. I just bombed the planet to oblivion and told my colony ship not to auto-cast colonize. I did not think about what would happen if you had allies. I kill my allies so that wasn't a problem for me, but it was still annoying.

I've come across a new bug related to this.

I was able to eliminate a player before he could get enough culture around his planets to prevent me taking them, except for his very last planet I came across. I took the planet and eliminated him from the game but his culture still remains. The game keeps constantly warning me that the planet is about to switch allegiance to the dead empire and the audio cue keeps playing saying that I just lost control of the planet but it never switches because that side has been wiped out already. It repeats the message something like every 15-20 seconds.

Fixes forth coming

oh man that made me laugh of loud big time

If he has strong culture, don't send down your missionaries - they won't be coming back

hehe so true, I felt bad killing my own people minutes after they colonized the planet for the enemy....

lol i think its funny   

It is funny when you think about it.. The AI is having his last laugh at your expense

Till i figured it out i had the same problem, I had to make my Akkan stop autocasting colonization after a world flipped back 5 times.

What i do since my empires economy is pretty much set is the next world i take i build nothing but broadcast centers, and wait for my culture line to touch the next world before i invade it.

I also whisper the same stupid things it whispers to me back like "I advise you to evacuate Cassini....NOW!"

The problem I have with this is that the empire that controlled the planet can be completely dead, as in no planets, no ships, no anything, and yet the planet still turns to them and then does nothing. Yes I know that in reality culture can outlast the political extinction of an empire but this is a game and therefore some realities need to be unrealistic. The second annoying thing about culture with the new patch (at least I think its new with the patch) is that culture takes the same time to cross a short phase jump line as it does to cross a long phase jump line. I.e. there is a planet that is a 30 second jump away from my broadcast center planet and a planet that is a minute and a half phase jump away from my broadcast center planet. Both planets are only one phase jump from the broadcast center, but the culture created by the broadcast center reaches each of them at the same time. Shouldn't culture cross time distance at the same rate rather than cross the phaselines at the same rate. I am just drawing this conclusion based on the fact that it takes ships different amounts of time to cross different length phaselines and I am assuming that ships (even if they aren't shown in game) are what transmit culture across the phaselines. If it isn't ships that transmit culture through the phaselines but is in fact a transmission, why does the transmission have to follow phaselines?

I would think that in a situation like that where the enemy is completly gone already is that the world should be in a state of anarchy. Maybe not exactly flip to the other dead side, but instead prevent anything from happening. This is also something that could effect the entire rest of the game with culture. Like you cannot build new structures or higher building times on a world where the enemy's culture is so much greater than your own, or even as far as enemy sympathisers smuggle half of the world's tax and resource yield to your enemy instead.