rants (bugs?), wishes, questions and observations...

...after playing MP for 6h and buying two games via Impulse

from Sins Forums

I don't know if this is the right forum to put this thread in, because it's not really beta anymore, but it is a feedback. furthermore I'm sorry if some of my points have already been discussed, but as I would have made up a new thread anyway, one or two lines more won't do no harm.

1. Let's start with Impulse: whenever I buy a game via Impulse using Paypal, two completely empty IE windows open. should they have contet or should they just not appear?

2. RAM: after playing for some hours, Sins quite quickly reaches the 32bit 2GB RAM limit (I have 4GB installed FYI) which causes lags in MP and input (see below). So, are there any possibilities (or dev plans) on reducing RAM usage and is there a 64bit version of Sins which can use more RAM?

3. Input lag: when RAM is full, I experience some quite annoying input lags, f.e. when building ships/structures or planet development and in the ingame menus which leads to

4. could you please add a confirmation dialog for quitting and surrendering? I did both of this now unintendedly because I clicked faster than the game reacted, which is not very funny when the last savegame is rather old, which leads to

5. I'd really, really like to be able to chose the auto save intervals. when playing online with my friend, we often have network issues and it would be nice if the last auto save would never be older than 5mins.

6. pathfinding: this game takes place in open space. it's called like that because there plenty of it, one might even say unlimited space. so why are the navigators sometimes so incredibly stupid? occasions which are espacially bad are: going to the oppisite side of an asteroid. the ships (esp. caps) almost always get stuck in the asteroid. same thing with structures and even other ships. furthermore they sometimes behave totally nuts when lining up for a phase jump. a new problem arises with mines: when your ships have to make a turn in open space and therefore can go right or left, but left is a mine fild, why the heck don't they turn right? does every captain in your fleet have suicidal tendencies? so a better pathfinding would be really apreciated.

7. priorities: when your ships idle in a gravity well and hunt down enemy trade ships just for the fun of it and suddenly an enemy fleet jumps in, not one of the ships changes its priorities to engage the military ships. come on, the pilots can't be that stupid, can they?

8. since I installed Entrechment, I sometimes can't unpin some of my planets. sooner or later the list on the left of your screen gets too long anyway, so having some totally useless planets in it doesn't improve the usability.

9. surrendering: AIs surrender way too easily. best thing for me would be to make surrendering a game option which can be switched off, because I don't like it.

10. when an AI surrenders, I think it would be best if all their ships and planet would turn to "neutral/pirate faction". because in my last game, one of the enemys had but one colo vessel left, but plenty of bounty on it. this caused the pirats to stay at home, because they had no planet to attack.

11. mines. especially defusing them: my last enemy was an Advent which used many mines. trying to disarm them would lead to a simple rule. one scout kills two mines by activating them!! did I miss something about disarming mines? it all went automaticly: scout goes near a mine, activates its ability, goes closer to shoot it, mines get activated, kill the scout. every time! so here's my proposal: either make scouts mine-proof, so that they don't activate them, just like trade ships, every decent minesweeper is build mine proof. or - second suggestion - turn the scout's ability into an aura which turns off every mine in its radius completely so it can't be triggered anymore by any ship, is unphased and vulnerable.

12. just a last question. Advent and Vasari SBs have abilities that use asteroids in their surrounding. does that mean that they can use them only when placed in an asteroid belt? or are they more effective when placed there?

4,149 views 11 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top

11: The advent homing mine/Minesweeping issue is being addressed in the next patch. The devs are increasing scout misesweeping range and attack range.

12: Advent, the projectiles simply appear from nowhere, so I don't think that the particular grav well you're in affects that. The Vasari ability, as far as I know, uses debris from destroyed ships/structures/etc...

Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top

5. Fairly sure that is a setting in the user.config file....

Groupy 2 - Organize multiple applications into grouped tabs on your Windows desktop
Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top

8.  Starbases are autopinned in Entrenchment.  You can change this setting on the options tab.

Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top

RAM usage, turn down some of graphics settings, helps alot. I play alot of large maps and they crash after awhile when playing on all high settings.

Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top

Thanks for your answers!

@gotyaoi: good to know they are working on this, although I find my proposals still better ;)

@Hack78: Where do I find that file? searched for it in the game folder and in appdata but couldn't find it

@DKM2: so they basically made the game better than it should ever possibly be because of limitations which even the best PC could never ever overcome? strange things happen these days....

Reply #6 from Sins Forums Top

Good list, my support for all of those items :-)

Reply #7 from Sins Forums Top

8. since I installed Entrechment, I sometimes can't unpin some of my planets. sooner or later the list on the left of your screen gets too long anyway, so having some totally useless planets in it doesn't improve the usability.
End of quote

 

You can turn off planet autopinning in options under user interface, I believe.

 

EDIT: If anything in that planet's gravity well is pinned, the planet shows up in your empire tree whether you pinned it or not.

Reply #8 from Sins Forums Top

@Hack78: Where do I find that file? searched for it in the game folder and in appdata but couldn't find it
End of quote

Depends on if you have Vista or XP.

IIRC for me (Vista) it is something like c:\documents and settings\<user name>\localsettings\appdata\ironclad<or something like this\<maybe some other folder here???>\user.config

Reply #9 from Sins Forums Top

Quoting Hack78, reply 8

IIRC for me (Vista) it is something like c:\documents and settings\<user name>\localsettings\appdata\ironclad<or something like this\<maybe some other folder here???>\user.config
End of Hack78's quote

the path is

C:\documents and settings\[user]\localsettings\appdata\Ironclad Games\Sins of a Solar Empire\Setting\

and the file name is user.setting and not user.config, that's why I didn't find it when I was searching for it.

anyway, now I could change it, so thanks for your help

Reply #10 from Sins Forums Top

Sorry for DP, but the last post has been some time ago...

So, last day and night (8 hours so far and not half way done) I played with my friend once again and so I just wanted to add some points or stress some still valid nuisances.

 

#1: Now that you can finally queue your starbase improvements while it's still being built, please add the possibility to queue strike craft building as well, when you upgrade your hangars on a starbase

#2 I had 4 SBs on a star and as it was heavily sieged, I ordered some drone hosts to deploy mines in that GW. As you can put 500 mines next to a star, this resulted in an huge "red bar" coming from the "list of planets" on the left (does that thing have a name?), which reached almost half into my screen. Is there some way to keep mines out of this "bar"? After half an hour I scuttled all my mines, because it was so annoying. Which leads to

#3: Could you please add an option to scuttle all selected units/structures/mines/whatever at once? Scuttling 500 mines one by one wasn't that much fun.

#4: When I have a fleet with a cap as a flagship and I assign a number to that fleet (CTRL+1) and I later add another cap, which I want to be the new flagship (and it gets the "star" for being the leader), I have no chance to make it the focussed ship when I select that fleet by pressing "1". The focus always stays on the former flagship. Could you please fix it, so that the focus is on the ship which has the focus when you assign the number to the fleet?

#5: Now this is almost new content, so mayby keep it in mind for the upcoming add ons: Could you please add an option to your fleet options not to chase trade and refinery ships and maybe not even scouts. It sometimes takes ages for a fleet to get to the border of a GW in a good formation from where you want to jump in a few moments and then you focus on another GW and when you come back, the whole formation is lost and the ships are scattered all over the GW chasing trade ships or scouts.

Now some points which I already mentioned, but which are still valid:

#6: I still haven't found the option to unpin starbases. Could someone please explain to me where exactly that option is?

#7: Improve the **** pathfinding. Again several times, whole fleets got stuck in planets, trying to reach the other side of the GW. Or caps on the run were blocked by oncoming trade ships and hence got destroyed. I'd almost be willing to pay for an addon which just adds perfect pathfinding to this game, because it's so damn annoying.

#8: So you improved the scout's behavior with mines. At least for Vasari and TEC mines. With Advent mines, the survival chances of my scouts still drop from 90% to 50%. Could you please reconsider my proposals above (No. 11). They wouldn't break the game but save many scout pilot's lives.

So, that's it for now, your comments?

Reply #11 from Sins Forums Top

for the mines, use this combo= Scouts+Flaks. Make a fleet with the Scouts as the fleet leaders; also make sure to have about 2x-3x as many scouts as flaks. You want the flaks to actually destroy the mines, since they fire in multiple directions simultaneously. The large number of scouts is in the event of attrition.