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Yes, black holes in FOW still show

First time to start the game took forever, I thought it was locked up. I was finally able to get in, started a new game on a huge map with the Krynn. Moved all my ships, etc. as soon as I click my home world to manage, crash. It wasn't repeated in a second attempt to start a new game either, but I it looks like it is not Earth dependent.

The manufacturing queue has never updated correctly from the govern sliders and I agree it would be nice

I agree in the alpha, and still in the beta, benevolence is OP. Of course, a lot of the other level 2s in pragmatic and malice are disabled, but I would probably choose the benevolent tree at this point anyway.

As to planet choices, pragmatic seems decent many times. I have actually chosen benevolent because of the tree over the benefit to the planet at times.

My own observation

I had an event where the said dust of some kind of sentience descended on all planets of all races helping orbital building. However, the description of the effect was a penalty on orbital manufacturing of 20%. There doesn't seem to be anything in the tooltips of the starports to say one way or another, but moving the slider to 50-50 on military vs construction of a 12 production planet shows 5 going to the shipyard, so it looks like it is indeed a penalty which is the reverse of the description.

I see lots of text display errors where the text is cut off sometimes on the research tree at the top when looking at an improvement for that tech. If I close the tree and come back, it displays correctly.

The planet build queue on the right has text to long for the one line field and wraps showing 1/2 the top line and 1/2 the bottom line. I noticed this on Xeno Research Laboratory.

Anyway, I only had an hour or two to try it out. I will play more later, like Hamilmac.

Thanks for the beta, hopefully a few of the things are small enough for a quick fix.

More Beta 2 Feedback (turn 146)

Before you read the additional comments, please know that I AM having fun and I DO like the direction the game is going.  The Dev team have done a great job!

(Playing on Huge map as Terrans)

Diplomacy:

Way too easy.  I know this will be balanced in future patches.  I prefer the GC2 model where other races are reluctant to trade early in the game.

I can use the information on the diplomacy screen to gain WAY too much intel on my opponents (number and types of ships, colonies, etc.).  I would prefer a lot less knowledge until some level of espionage is attained.  Then, after achieving that level of espionage, they would tell you “How did you find out about that?  Well, okay, we DO have these other [colonies, ships, starbases, etc.] we might be willing to trade.”

I found some of the options (i.e. Exploration Treaty) a little confusing.  Are they mutual treaties (it appears so)?  I would prefer the Civilization model where each side would give up the treaty element (i.e. both sides have to give open borders for it to be mutual; same with exploration and the other treaties, except non-aggression pact). [Edit] So most are individual, just like Civ V.  Wasn't immediately obvious.  I'm hoping non-aggression pact is mutual, because I found you can get a lot of stuff by offering it.

Other:

When using the Govern/Commands menu, updating what is building in the shipyards does not update the entire queue, only the ship currently being built. [-Edit] No, it's actually adding a ship to the queue, which is not what I was expecting.  I wish the ships would auto-upgrade in the construction queue like they did in GC2.

Before

After

The minimap colors for the Kyrnn and the Iridium look too similar.

Colonizing is currently a free-for-all just like GC 2.  Because peace is the default relation (I think it should be race dependent whether to start at peace or war to spice up the game), I threw caution to the wind and just built colony ships until everything was taken (mostly by me).

Influence is too powerful.  Following the benevolence ideology (and because I’m colonizing twice the number of planets as the other powers), I was able to get the +100 influence bonus fairly quickly, leverage that in the United Planets to get the HQ which increased my influence another +50% and I’m now converting worlds (3 so far with another 4 soon) too easily.  I personally dislike influence victories—they’re boring.  Even though I haven’t selected the influence victory condition, at this rate I might convert most of the galaxy.

Relics are overpowered.  +500% modifier is too much in the early game.  +50% would be better, and could be improved with new modules/techs as the game progresses.

I'll provide more comments as I continue to play.

Thanks again!

I've noticed long load times every time I start the game after logging in to a new Steam session.

I wonder if it is a time of day thing, reflecting the number of people trying to access Steam, or some other traffic?  I am in a hotel in China, using a VPN, over wireless, with a business laptop, and both the time it took to download the update and since then to start the game have been quicker than expected. The total time to connect to Steam and load the game is less than it took with Beta 1 in the USA on a buff landline connected to a 8-core super tower.

New bug.  When a planet flips to me, the planet still looks like it belongs to the former player until I add/upgrade an improvement on the planet.  Lola0307 II below has flipped to me and I can open the planet menu, but still looks like it belongs to the former owner.