[0.60] Beta 3, no patch, no opt-in. A. Fun, fun, fun A1. Black holes are black . They no longer twinkle through the fog. Grumble. (Yaay!) A2. Sound effects. No problems yet. (As others have noted, some sounds are too long.) B. Major mechanism revisions B1. Approval is micro-free Approval is now
The changelog shows that screenshot of a map clearly larger than a Large. It's like a giant hex of six Larges stuck together. It's so big I think it shows the curvature of the universe ...
Basically the ship fabricates a colony/transport module from old comet parts and interstellar dust [e digicons]^_^[/e] Thereafter, you can always add pop the usual way, by landing on a planet hex and then moving off. Yor should be able to upgrade to a populated transport: they just build new Yor as part of the ship walls. Bonus: the ship would not need any doors or intake ports, which should give an armor bon
Heh. In David Brin's bonkers Uplift galactic civ stories (with Progenitor relic fleets ;)) , there are many forms of machine life (all independently arising, not related). Any one of them, at any time, could run amok and begin exponential growth, where they cannibalize local star systems and globular clusters into more copies of themself. But this has happened so many times in the past that ... ... all nearby machine life will immediately ally to
Can you zoom out to show the rest of that map? :D
[quote who="JacquesGauthier" reply="2" id="3509547"](In WWII, the U.S made improvements on their airplanes by studying downed zero Japanese planes. They used parts of various downed planes to try to rebuild an intact plane).[/quote] There is some truth to this, but the real story is even more fantastic. A Japanese Zero pilot tried to ditch on an ice field in the Aleutians, but the wheels dug in and the plane flipped onto its back, killing him. US ground forces found
I sense a great many Cartesian products in the ship Designer ... We might need more tabs and such. [e digicons]:thumbsup:[/e] Fleet, right-click, Show Tactical Formation (like a football play: 65-Baker-Cheep-Wheel)
I micro-manage everything, down to 0.1 increments. Yes, it is excessive. All queues are currently lossy (all excess production is lost). Paul's intent was that they should become carry-1 , which means they carry over up to (but not including) the next queue item's cost, so you could complete 1.999 things per turn, per queue. (Actually, Paul's intent was that queues should have been carry-1 since Alpha, and he was repea
I'll defer until an AI is actually implemented. Think SK Dungeon Master [e digicons]:grin:[/e] The current AI placeholder is as rudimentary as orcs in the Rogue dungeon crawl: { if (gold in room) moveto(gold.xy); else moveto(rallypoint.xy); }
Why, yes, it is [e digicons]:sun:[/e] I figured mid-December is a likely target for Beta 3 release (to avoid a self-inflicted holiday congestion), which means early December might have a combat viewer sneak peek while they freeze other parts of the Beta 3 bundle. Both alternatives are less plausible. So ... just guessing Thursday, 18 December. And no dev streams the following week.
Enjoy this while it's Beta :) This is ultimately a balance issue, which will surely get fixed (or nerfed) by radical changes to the numbers. e.g. real Tourism will almost certainly cease to be a Hakuna Matata panacea (and that will force everybody to actually think about money). If you can pay for it, and you don't get conquered like a bug while you're waiting for the payoff, then you deserve it. Remember the Zeroth Law of War: no strategy survive
The stream was 13 minutes late, grayed out by a nebula :) Combat viewer does not yet make Paul happy, so he's not showing it. He managed to crash his autoplay at least once, so we saw 3 different game starts. No streams next week (Wed 11/26 SK, Fri 11/28 GC3) for Thanksgiving. The good news: next stream will be Fri Dec 12/05 -- which is in December , which means we miiiiight get combat viewer!
I just dredged up an exemplar where "sensor range" (ahem) did help me "win". It was ... utterly vile in dastardly ways. istillbragaboutit Unix Empire: multiplayer, brutally realtime (1 update every 6 hours x 2-4 months ), no graphics, all alphanumeric. Played on terminals. Map of squares. You designate sector types (one per square). Civ and mil are numeric attributes within a square (no units). Sectors grow
Well, not quite: it's only quadratic , being simply proportional to the area of a circle of the same radius [e digicons]:fuzzy:[/e] This is one of the weirder ways in which GC*'s abstractions leak. GC* components give linear increases in effect, with no per-ship component limits. Obviously, we all do this with weapons. You can also do the same with engines (and speed-boosting starbase effects) to create slingshot zones in you
Heck, Google and IBM combined don't do that yet. It's good that somebody's envisioning grand goals, but reality wields cruel pruning shears. It would be fun to create an academic research group and explore this niche for a couple of decades. (Ahem :)) Nothing like it exists yet in the CS / AI / gaming literature. Basically, take any one sentence out of that paragraph, and by itself it's already far more complex than, for example
They are distinct. "Manufacturing" are the orange hammers. "Production" affects all 3 queues (manuf, research, wealth) next turn, and is not shown in any tooltip list. You can deduce your "Production" bonus by multiplying your pop by your rp% wheel setting and comparing it to your "Raw Research". Any discrepancy is due to your previous turn's sum of Production bonuses. Planet Manage UI will surely be improved later, maybe Bet
... and it was easier to conquer Drengi than to just build your own [e digicons]:rofl:[/e] we loves Beta
Paul's chat comments were that Brad would supervise a team of devs who actually do the GC3 AI implementation. They 'd bring him reports of the AI's emergent behavior, and he'd steer it one way or another. This applies to the overall GC3 AI; I don't know what you mean by a "Combat AI" specifically (or if there is even such a thing). Brad would not actually code the GC3 AI himself, as his coding cortex is already
Actually, this could be elegantly handled by adding one "inter-game" element: a Persona . Physically, it's just another kind of saved profile. A Persona persists across many games. It acts like a database / repository / record of your karma, behaviors, actions, deeds, etc. Whatever you want a future AI to "know" about your tendencies based on past history you've actually done will be saved here, in whatever format. On new
Space Empires 3,4,5 have always had this. 3 planet types (rock, ice, gas) x 6 atmospheres (including "None", for which you can actually design a custom race of robots that "breathes" it and implodes under any kind of gas atmosphere ... uh huh.) This has inscrutable effect on game play. The possibility exists (like a half-remembered dream) that you could ally with your first 5 alien AI neighbors if they happen to breathe different atmospheres, and jointly b
I'm a CS geek, of course :) Currently a grad student, finishing up. I'm also an amateur astronomer (which means I own a telescope and actually look at stars with my eyes). (Astro)physics is a niche part of the hobby.
[quote who="charon2112" reply="18" id="3506080"] ... why is it that black holes have such immense gravity that even light cannot escape it once it gets close. [/quote] Briefly: Because it's dense enough. Density is just a way of compacting mass into a tiny radius. And -- Any mass (or energy divided by c^2), shrunk below its Schwarzschild radius, is dense enough . That's exactly how
No, the black hole's gravity does not suddenly increase just because the mass got concentrated. Same mass, same gravity. If you were in orbit around the star that used to be there, and the star became a black hole with no loss of mass, you'll stay tranquilly in the same orbit around the black hole without even a bump. The "surface " gravity of a black hole is much greater than the surface gravity of a star of
Heck, why not have the galactic map be a snake-like path made up of tiles? Each tile = 1 vast square (or whatever shape), as big as the map size 2 sizes below what you choose. These tiles are then laid out like a golf course or floor plan, with random relative placement. Galaxy generation could be fractal, where Small = 7-9 Tiny tiles, Medium = 7-9 Small tiles (recur!), and so on. Exploring the galaxy would be like a dungeon crawl through an ant colony [e digicons]:g
[quote who="charon2112" reply="13" id="3505917"] I believe the compactness of the mass is a factor. [/quote] Indeed, this is correct. Compactness lets you get close without being already inside. It doesn't change the "total strength" of the gravity (curvature, in GR), but it does let you get closer to it and still feel the full "local strength" (slope of the curvature, at that radius). Black holes (and neutron stars, to a lesser extent) do