ShottyMonsta’s Gal Civ III notes

ShottyMonsta’s Multiplayer Issues Report

My location: Newcastle, UK

22/04/14 Hosted game: US player joined (location uknown). Took around 3-5 minutes for us to both connect to the game session and we had several disconnects.

23/04/14 Hosted game: EU player joined (location uknown). Took around 20-30 seconds for us to both connect. Crash to Desktop after around 30 minutes. No option to send error report. The crash occurred when I attempted to use a Guardian to attack a survey ship which was defending a planet.

24/04/14 Hosted game: The same EU player as 23/04/14 joined but load time was much much longer. He reported hearing two instances of the background music playing over each other. Restarted and rehosted and game loaded in.

Anecdotal User Reports About Performance

These were gathered through speaking with other players during multiplayer

General Issues I’ve noticed

Seeing mysterious borders of Civ’s in unexplored territory.

Choosing a race – Hovering over races starting techs doesn’t show any info about what the tech does. Also hovering over “abilities” and “techs” should show a tooltip that explains these concepts to people who have possibly never played this game before.

Multiplayer – selecting a race gives me no information about what the races abilities and starting techs are.

Placing buildings feels weird. If I double click it automatically assumes I want to start placing the next in the queue so you get a “Ghost Building” effect which feels like you’ve placed 2 buildings even though you only meant 1.

Text chat in lobby UI – the cursor “|” is too low.

Being able to rush your own buildings/units on the enemy player’s turns is a good thing. It keeps the game flowing and will definitely keep players engaged in bigger maps on multiplayer. In fact each player should be able to plan his entire move out while his opponent is taking his go. In effect this will mean by the time the turn comes to player X he will just hit “end turn” and see his planned movements carry out and then it’s player Y’s turn who then already has HIS moves planned and just click “end turn” etc. This will cut so much time out of the awful “waiting game” usually inherent to 4x multiplayer. Good job!

Single player – Setting up a game, I want to go on a team with 1 ai against a team of 2 ai’s. I can’t select what team I am on.

“Idle Ship” button doesn’t make it obvious enough which ship was idle. Should have a short lived, large indicative circle around the idle ship that appears for a second.

Sometimes you may forget which ship is selected and right clicking causes it to move straight away. It’s frustrating, the player should right click twice; once to specify the tile to be moved to, and once again to confirm that they want to move. You would then have an option to turn “move confirmation” off in the menu.

When the player right clicks to move a ship it becomes set on its course. It is frustrating that I cannot right click again to amend the initial path. This is exasperated by the fact the there is no second “confirmation” click so it happens quite a lot where I realise I moved the wrong ship but it’s too late to stop it or alter its course.

Sometimes I can’t select a ship unless I zoom right in. It usually occurs when the ship is in an asteroid field.

When the player tries to move a ship out of his ships movement range, an alert sound or alert message should pop up as it’s not immediately apparent that the dotted lines represent the movement range of ships (maybe I’m a noob).

Unexplored space has tiny white specks flickering on it. Not sure if meant to be stars or not, but I get a lot more of them on the right hand side of the map than the left… weird? (I’ve sent an AVI file which demonstrates the issue to "bclair@stardock.com")