Beta Feedback

First, let me congratulate the team for a well developed game. It was very rock steady with just a few CTD. Why I say so even though there are CTD? It’s because I was gaming on two pc with ATI HD4850 and ATI HD4830 respectively. Both graphic cards are well below the minimum system requirements. In fact, I managed to complete 2 medium galaxy game with 3 AI (one game with all settings maxed at abundant).

There’s only 1 CTD happened in the 2 medium games. While the third large galaxy (all abundant, 3 godlike AI) has persistent CTD at around turn ~230. Can’t complain really.

With the formality gone, below is a list of issues I’ve found over three games:

Beta 0.40

1. [CTD] For the medium map CTD, it happened when I try to attack a ship 1 tile away from a planet with a ship with just 1 movement left from the planet itself. I did not try to reproduce this though.
2. [UI] Planet Screen - Oceanic planet trait was not updated in UI (max food is still written as 8mt, while oceanic gives -25% max pop cap). The trait works though as I can’t get above 6pop at all.
3. [UI] One per planet improvement has to be labelled clearly. There is no label now and you won’t know if it’s worth bee lining to it first. Case in point, I thought that Social Matrix is a 1pp improvement (it was not) and didn’t bother to research it until a little later.
4. [UI] Allow disable auto-upgrade at global govern screen as well. Now, I have to open each individual planetary wheel screen and disable it. It was annoying.
5. [UI] On loading list screen, please sort by time last saved as default. Save time just to load the top save.
6. [UI] Show auto status on ship, i.e. auto-explore/survey.
7. [UI] There are two Buy buttons in the planetary screen. It regularly stopped me in the track briefly while remembering which one is the correct one. The above one is meant to show the hurry cost of improvements on the list above. It is better to remove it and show the hurry cost on mouseover on the improvement in the list instead.
8. [UI] In a similar way, the Build button is also redundant as it’s easier to select an improvement from the list, and then double click on a tile. Using the Build button requires the player to select an improvement from the list, select a tile, and go back and press the Build button.
9. [UI] Remove and add sponsor is too troublesome. Now I need to follow the trail from the planet to currently assigned shipyard (pan, pan, pan), then double click the shipyard, scroll down to desired planet, select it, and then press remove. Consider allow remove planet from shipyard on clicking planet.
10. [UI] When there are multiple fleets on a same tile, a lot of things cannot be done. It obscures a lot of actions (i.e. upgrade, construct, etc.). I initially thought the GCIII is adopting a 1 fleet per tile design.
11. [UI] The production <> military slider in the production wheel screen (not the global one, the planetary one) didn’t show any icon. So, I have to remember which is which.
12. [UI] Clicking on mini map is not accurate. It zoomed to the wrong place (a dozen tiles above the click). In the mini map, the trapezoid is about a half a cm above the clicked area.
13. [UI] If a planet built a shipyard, prompt if the planet wants to be a sponsor or not (remove it from currently assigned shipyard if yes is selected). Else the shipyard could stay forgotten for a few turns.
14. [UI] Show the distance of a planet in the shipyard sponsor list.
15. [UI] Specialization tech. If one of the specializations has been researched, fill up one of the star and so on.
16. [Option][UI] The end of galaxy map is unclear, especially in early game (In later turns, it is bearable as the influence will shows dotted line when it bummed into the limit). Can you make it a toggle option to highlight the end of the galaxy map?
17. [UI] On clicking the planetary tile with bonuses, the bonuses will be shown on the top right hand side of the planetary UI. There are two items there namely a green up arrow (bonus for improvement on that tile), and another is a yellow circular arrow (adjacency bonus). I initially treated these as an either or bonus since I have never seen a yellow circular arrow anywhere before. It was later on that I know that it was an adjacency bonus. It's inconsistent with the icon shown on mouseover of an improvement (the adjacency bonus on mouseover show green up arrow). So, please replace all those green up arrow with yellow circular arrow for consistency.
18. [Hotkey][UI] Very inconsistent escape hotkey. On planetary wheel screen, pressing escape will go straight up to main galaxy map.
19. [Hotkey] What the yes (y), no (n), and unhide game menu (esc) hotkey are for? It’s better to consolidate them into cancel (esc) and done (enter).
20. [Hotkey][Question] spewShownWindow hotkey (pageup). What's that?
21. [Tech] Iridium Acquisition tech gives nothing. Not sure why we need an empty buffer tech.
22. [Tech] Drengin got 2 tech with enables tourism +1 (Tournaments, Slaughtertorium). It doesn’t stack, so please remove the latter.
23. [Tech] Pulse cannon tech got a starbase improvement stated "not in alpha". We’re no longer in alpha.
24. [Ship Designer] Upon upgrading the design of a ship in the ship designer, prompt if the player wants to upgrade the ship currently in production queue. Upgrade the queued and not in progress ship if yes is selected.
25. [Bug] Hyperion Logistic System is supposed to reduce logistic cost by 1 in this system. I’ve tested it with a constructor (cargo) and paladin (medium). The logistic cost is still 6 and 5 respectively. So, it doesn’t work. Secondly, the adjacency bonus of HLS is +0.1 log when it was supposed to reduce log. So, perhaps the code was not updated to use the shipyard sponsor (old code build from planet) or the adjacency bonus of +0.1 causes problem.
26. [Bug] If there’s a few fleets on a tile, after one fleet is destroyed, the next fleet was not rendered. It shows an empty tile. On left clicking a tile, the fleets are still there. If I sent a fleet over the tile, the combat will still occur. (On a sidenote, after I invaded a planet and cleared the system, I leave the system and proceed to attack another system. A few turns later, the enemy ships emerged from their non-rendered state (invisibility) and conquered back the planet.) Note: not sure if it’s due to my old graphic card though.
27. [Feature] Allow destroy shipyard and starbase. Sometimes I build a shipyard to reposition to a more strategic place and the old shipyard is then useless. It's just a waste of space and worse, it causes the dreaded shipyard orphaned issue. While for starbase, I regularly build starbase as a jumping point to improve my range and they become useless later on. Or sometimes, it was mistakenly built on the wrong tile. So, I need to be able to kill it since it increases the cost of future starbases. In my latest games, I have 40+ starbases and a mistake effectively cost me thousands of bc.
28. [Feature] Allow remove module in a starbase. There are times when I wrongly built an economic module in my starbase when it was supposed to be a mining starbase. Like the above, it is very costly. It’s enough to punish me with a lost constructor and opportunity cost (rebuild a constructor and time).
29. [Feature] Once a terraform tech has been researched, highlight planet that are producing project and has terraformable tiles. Else, these planets will produce project indefinitely.
30. [Feature] Allow select auto-eject point for newly constructed ship. My colony ship (3 moves) was ejected 1 tile away from an empty planet (3 tiles away) and so are my constructors (1 tile away from starbase). This is even more so since the ships need to evade stars/planets/asteroids in their path.
1. I know from one of the developer stream that there is a nifty ability to select a ship in a shipyard/planet/starbase and right click on the destination. It allows the ship to eject from the nearest point to the destination. But for newly constructed ship, that ability just couldn’t compensate as they are two separate issues. Please allow to select auto-eject point.

Btw, how do I insert pictures? Must I use dropbox, steam sharedfiles, etc? I still have some more issues, but it's better explained with pictures.