Bugs

General discussion for the game Anacreon
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Hussell
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There's a bug in the font with the letter sequence 'ffi', most commonly occurring in the word 'efficiency' and the planet name 'Graffias'. All I see is a little square instead of the letters.

I can't seem to trade tech (that is, establish a trade route with zero imports/exports) from/with planets that are autonomous, jumpship yards, or starship yards. This makes it more difficult to spread technology than seems reasonable. Why wouldn't an autonomous planet be able to import tech from a starship yard or another autonomous planet?

Some planets that have built an advanced habitat, then declined in tech, are penalized in population. Fiery worlds, for example, have ~6.8 pop at tech5 with a shielded city, but ~3.7 with a shielded arcology. This is yet another reason why habitat structures should be 'downgradable', one way or another. I'm also confused about the reasoning behind this: shouldn't an advanced habitat increase the population cap?

Why does tech level 10 exist? So far I haven't figured out any way for a world to benefit from reaching that level.

In large battles, some of the enemy forces' numerical displays are hidden off the bottom right of my screen and/or obscured by the bottom info-panel. Occasionally, this makes it impossible to manually target that last remnant ship after everything else has been destroyed, and often makes it impossible to manually re-target some of my own ships. Being able to click on the groups in orbit for selection and targeting would make things easy (I assume this is a feature already planned), but the group display elements still shouldn't be concealed behind other panels or off the bottom of the screen. Another possible fix would be to make fleets fire on targets of opportunity when their main target isn't in range, since that would take care of almost everything without the need for manual targeting.

Also, due to the angled edge of the bottom panel, some groups (and planets, in the main view) are visible, but cannot be clicked on. Straightening the edge of the panel may make things look less interesting, but it'll probably be less annoying for the players that way, and less annoying than mapping which parts of the panel should pass clicks through to the underlying interface element. That goes for the top panel too.

On the specific structure tab (e.g., Starship Yards production), when the production is less than 1 per watch, could we see how many are being produced per period or cycle as necessary? E.g. 'Producing 1 Victory-class starcruiser per period.' Right now, I can't tell the difference between slow rates of production and zero production until enough time has passed that some production should have happened.

Game balance: chronimium seems to be extremely easy to produce. One processor seems to be able to create enough to supply every planet its trade routes can reach. The amount of chronimium required by high-level products could easily be increased. Possibly the max tech level for chronimium processors should be decreased to 6 or even 5.

Lastly, and this is more of a request than a bug, there needs to be some way in the interface for the player to discover which resources are needed to build any particular thing. Otherwise you're going to end up having one of the most FAQs be 'Why isn't my infantry autofac producing exoarmor?' or variations thereof. (Answer: your infantry autofaq is on a barren world, which has no chronimium. You must import chronimium to start exoarmor production.) Ideally, we'd also be able to find out how much of each thing is needed. (How much trillum a consumer goods autofaq or a starcruiser requires, etc.)
george moromisato
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Hussell wrote:{good list of bugs}
1. Bug in fonts: Could you tell me what browser and OS you're using?

2. Trading tech: In the next Alpha release I'm planning on changing the way tech increases. Tying it to a normal trade route has some problems, as you've observed. My plan is to let you control tech advances explicitly in two ways: (a) build a structure on the planet that increases tech (at the cost of production); (b) build a university world and "export" tech levels to worlds (via special trade routes).

3. Advanced habitats. I have not seen a problem in which upgrading to an arcology reduces the max population (certainly not by design). A few things may be going on: (a) there could be a bug in the population tables; (b) perhaps there is a bug during the construction interval (perhaps the arcology is not yet built but the shielded city has been destroyed already); (c) max population may decrease at higher tech levels. If you increased in tech level (e.g., from 6 to 7) at the same time, you might have decrease in population.

4. Bugs in info pane and display of enemy forces: Thank you--yes, that definitely needs to be fixed.

5. Production when less than 1 unit per watch: Yes, I would like to do that work for the next alpha release.

6. Chronimium game balance: Good observation--thank you. In the future I will introduce more advanced units (tech 8+) which will require more chronimium. But it still may be that we need to increase requirements (or decrease chronimium production). We'll be able to tell better after the new advanced units are implemented (hopefully for Alpha 4).

7. Discovering which resources are needed: Yes, that makes sense. I believe the UI handles this for some cases but not others. I have to fix the other cases.

Thank you for these bug reports!
Hussell
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I'm using Firefox on Windows. I'm not sure what the technical term for it is ('kerning'?), but certain letter sequences get moved closer together for readability, or may be replaced by a single glyph. 'ff' and 'fi' are two of the most common. On my browser, 'ff' is changed to a single glyph, with no space between the two 'f's, and the 'i' is under the overhang of the 'f' in 'fi'. Probably the 'ffi' glyph is missing from the font Anacreon is using. I've confirmed that I can edit the name of a world and get the Gra■as bug to appear just by typing 'ffi', and disappear by deleting a letter.

Advanced habitats: you can replicate this by bringing a fiery world up to tech 7, building all the habitats, then designating it a trillum extractor. The tech drops back to 5, and the population will end up around 3.8. A fiery world that starts at tech 5 and only builds the habitats available at tech 5 will end up around 6.8. See, for example, α Cancri 6 and Dour, right next to High Dirag in the Fallen Worlds Alpha I. Edit: I've just discovered that ocean worlds which build a planetary arcology and then drop to tech 7 also suffer. The population drops from 11 to less ~7. At least this can be fixed, by destroying the planetary arcology and rebuilding the floating city and ocean arcology.

Edit: Aha! I have an idea of what's going wrong: habitats requiring higher tech than the world possesses are disabled, much like a plasma tower network won't build anything below tech 8. Back when habitat upgrades didn't replace the lower-tech version, this was fine, but now it's trouble.

Edit the second: That's not it after all. I've got two underground worlds, both at tech 8, both with planetary arcologies, one maxed out at 11 billion, the other (which built its arcology at tech 9, then regressed) maxed out at 9.4 billion.
george moromisato wrote:Thank you for these bug reports!
No problem! Figured I'd get my two cents in while I could.
Hussell
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Well, I built my first sector capital and blitzed the 56 worlds that came into range. So I have some comments about the combat system now.

First, I'm playing on an older computer and a slow internet connection. Going from 82 to 138 worlds has caused my system to hit a bottleneck. Surprisingly, the bottleneck isn't bandwidth, it's CPU. Every action takes 10+ seconds to resolve, now, and 99% of the CPU is used for about half the time. Transfers in particular are becoming quite difficult. Sadly, I may have to abandon my empire.

Defenses: satellites don't appear to be firing at attackers. I'm seriously considering scrapping all my autocannon and armored constellations. Even Titans don't seem to do anything! GDMs do very little damage before exhausting their ammo. I'm considering scrapping them, too. Hypersonic missiles are good. However, the missiles take the same amount of time to reach their target, no matter how far away they are. This is only counter-intuitive, not a game-breaker, but it would make defenses more dangerous if they could overwhelm missile-defense at close range. Perhaps GDMs and Hypersonic missiles should be distinguished by speed rather than ammo? HEL cannons and plasma towers are awesome. They dealt the majority of the damage to my attack fleets.

Defending ships appear to be performing poorly. I was able to capture some starfrigates and starcruisers without trouble using only jumpships. I suspect they aren't adjusting their orbits when their target moves, and thus move to a distant orbit while their targets move in close to attack the defenses.

Offense: When the attackers outnumber the defenders, most of the attackers don't participate in the attack. This results in many more casualties for the attackers than would happen otherwise. For example, in my first few battles, only Adamants attacked, with all the missile-defense equipped Stingers and chaff-like Vanguards staying out of range. If everything had attacked, I would have lost only a few Vanguards to HEL cannons. Instead, hypersonic missiles destroyed a lot of Adamants. Every attacking ship should participate! They already do when the defenders are well armed enough, so it isn't a performance issue. At the very least, all missile-defense ships should participate when missiles are present.

All ships and defenses in battle should fire at targets of opportunity. Both the defenders' and the attackers' performance would be much better if they did this.

Oddities: ships attacking satellites move into a low orbit, so that they overtake the satellites, instead of a high orbit where the satellites overtake them. This unnecessarily exposes the attackers to ground defenses.

I found a fleet with 0 ships in it (Nukes Empire 1514th fleet). Can't attack it. Possibly there are 1 or 2 Vanguard-class explorers in it, and the report is rounding down the number?

Trade and production: the problems producing enough durable goods have been mentioned, so I'll skip those, but there are many similar problems. For example, 1 positron lancer and 1 S100 reactor is required for each Defiance starfrigate. However, positron lancers are produced much faster than S100 reactors, so there's always a useless surplus of positron lancers. Same for heavy missile launchers and N8 reactors (starcruisers), and light missile launchers and heavy jumpdrives (Adamants). Heavy missile launchers can also be used to build Titan battlestations, but few get used this way. In general, exporting worlds need to be able to balance their production to match demand from trade routes. Worlds that can't produce particular defenses due to lack of resources or tech level should not spend any industrial capacity on producing those defenses.

Requests: have autonomous worlds use their surplus industrial capacity on defenses. Allow players to designate worlds as autonomous. Trade routes to supply life support essentials (air filters, radiation shielding, etc.), and world designations to specialize in producing same. Automatic movement orders for ships. E.g., allow me to set up a trade-route-like thing that automatically sends any ships docked at world A to dock at world B. A search function for worlds. Useful for empire management as well as discussing plans with allies. ("High Dirag? Never heard of it. Where is it?") 'Transfer all' buttons (one up, one down) on the transfer dialog.
Hussell
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These aren't exactly bugs, just little details that had me scratching my head and stretching my suspension of disbelief a little too far.

Most of the largest cities on Earth have populations in the 5 to 10 million range. 25 million tops, if you stretch the definition of 'city' sufficiently. The smallest planet population I've observed is 93 million (Try destroying a sealed arcology if you want to see a really low population.) Building a domed city or a floating city or any other habitat structure typically increases population limits by about a billion. So they should probably be called 'habitat cities', 'pressurized habitats', 'hypermetropolises' ('hypermetropoleis'?), 'urban arcologies', 'planetary arcologies', and so on.

World names: one of the common patterns is <Star Name> <Number>. The number refers to the particular planet (Earth would be 'Sol 3' or 'Sol III'). The problem is that you can find, e.g., 'Graffias 2' and 'Graffias 4' in the same game, widely separated. By the naming convention, those should be two planets in the same star system. I'm not really sure how to fix this, other than writing some custom code to prevent the same star name from turning up more than once. Star names can also take the form <Greek Letter> <Constellation>. You shouldn't find 'Alpha Ursa Minoris VIII' and 'Alpha Ursa Minoris X' in the same game either.

Like I said, trivial issues. But irritating enough to mention.

I think I'll mention a little thing I've had fun with now: we can rename worlds using Unicode characters, including ☃☠☢ ಠ_ಠ and more.
Hussell
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Delays in response to actions in the interface have become very bad. In particular, designating a world, removing a trade route, setting percentages on a trade route, creating a new trade route, building a structure, and destroying a structure are all but impossible due to delays in excess of a minute before changes show up and occasional freezes and "Error: Timeout" messages. I conquered 50+ worlds in one day last weekend, but still haven't managed to get 40 of them integrated into the economy. Constant frustration.

Edit: after looking more closely at the networking and CPU load, I'm beginning to think the problem is in fact with bandwidth. The actions I mentioned above all trigger a spike in network activity. There's also a regular spike in network activity approximately exactly once a minute. The biggest problems seem to occur when I try to perform one of the above actions during one of the regular updates.
AnacreonNetworkActivity.png
AnacreonNetworkActivity.png (2.71 KiB) Viewed 8005 times
Yes, I have a slow network connection (64kB/s). Still, Anacreon appears to be sending ~1.5MB once a minute. Could easily be better.

Edit2: CPU bottleneck appears during battles.
george moromisato
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Hussell wrote:Delays in response to actions in the interface have become very bad. In particular, designating a world, removing a trade route, setting percentages on a trade route, creating a new trade route, building a structure, and destroying a structure are all but impossible due to delays in excess of a minute before changes show up and occasional freezes and "Error: Timeout" messages. I conquered 50+ worlds in one day last weekend, but still haven't managed to get 40 of them integrated into the economy. Constant frustration.

Edit: after looking more closely at the networking and CPU load, I'm beginning to think the problem is in fact with bandwidth. The actions I mentioned above all trigger a spike in network activity. There's also a regular spike in network activity approximately exactly once a minute. The biggest problems seem to occur when I try to perform one of the above actions during one of the regular updates.
AnacreonNetworkActivity.png
Yes, I have a slow network connection (64kB/s). Still, Anacreon appears to be sending ~1.5MB once a minute. Could easily be better.

Edit2: CPU bottleneck appears during battles.
Thank you for doing this--I thought this is what could be causing it, but now you've confirmed it.

In the next release (coming in a few days) I've added compression to the data stream. This should reduce the bandwidth by at least 8-fold (the data format is JSON--very inefficient in some cases).

The trade-off, of course, is CPU, and it looks like you also have a CPU issue which might get worse. I recommend that you use Google Chrome. Its JavaScript engine is 30-50% faster than Firefox, which might help things.

Beyond that, I've got future plans that will also improve things, but they are NOT in this coming build:

1. I will add user-options to disable certain optional graphical effects (images in map, trails in combat, etc.)
2. I will alter some of the algorithms to decrease the amount of data sent each minute (this will help CPU also, since the computer will have less data to process each minute).

Thanks for testing this.
Hussell
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Comments on Alpha 4 changes:

Foundation worlds go into civil war almost immediately. I'm not sure why. Also, let me just say that it is incredibly dangerous to let your foundation world rebel, because it can cause the worlds it was uplifting to lose their tech levels and trigger a chain reaction of declining production across your whole empire. Edit: actually managed to crush a rebellion on a foundation world. They've gone straight into another civil war, despite there being no changes to imports, defenses, tech levels, etc.

I've managed to build some of all the high-tech units. Haven't tested them in combat yet. Chronimium demand, especially from the jumpships, is now insanely high. With the increased ease of hexacarbide and trillum production, 90% of my resource worlds need to be chronimium processors, and there just aren't enough chronimium deposits around. I'm not sure if I feel this way just because it was so easy to get enough chronimium before, but possibly this is too hard now?

Ship maneuverability: haven't had the chance to test this in combat yet. However, I will say that if it's important, you should be able to find out the ship's maneuverability rating somewhere on the interface.

Changing the allocation of defense industries seems to work reasonably well. The allocation seems to decrease permanently if there isn't enough room, though. It should probably keep trying to increase it each watch so that the player can just set up trade routes without having to re-allocate the defense industries. Militia bases disappear completely if you allocate them to 0%, and you can't get them back. Militia bases produce 1 infantry battalion per watch per 75 industry, whereas infantry academies and fleet HQ need 250 industry. Players can exploit this by setting a militia base to 100% on an autonomous world. Either militia bases should produce at the same rate as infantry academies, or they should produce a lesser unit.

The production of individual units and goods can be temporarily discontinued, but can't be rebalanced (the imbalance is evened out every watch). And may I just say that messing with consumer-goods autofacs in the current setup is incredibly dangerous. If a consumer-goods autofac is set to produce 0% of something, any shortages will result in a rebellion, and shortages of organic food will cause a rapid decrease in population (3 million: new record for lowest population observed). I woke up this morning to discover an organic food world declared independence, resulting in three durable goods/luxuries worlds losing all their population and declaring independence, which forced a foundation world to make all its own consumer goods, which caused the tech level of a good chunk of my empire to plummet...

The designation icons look great. The only one I'd alter would be the consumer-goods autofac icon. The face does not say "luxuries" to me, it says "content". Maybe put the food in front?

The combat trails seem to work alright for me without too much CPU load. All combat groups are attacking and switching targets in a reasonable way, but I haven't tested this much yet. I've observed some satellites firing now, but never at targets in a lower orbit, even though the ships below can fire up.

The data compression seems to be working well. This doesn't mean there are no delays for me (my connection is at the lowest end of what anyone can have these days), but they're short enough for me to ignore for now.

The 'ffi' bug is fixed. The font is still a little odd in places ('eXtractor'), but nothing normal people will complain about. Edit: I recommend the DejaVu font family for its readability and low price. (I guess this means I'm not normal.)

Random change I noticed: an infantry academy now refuses to produce armored brigades due to not having a trade route to import armored vehicles, despite ~25,000 being on-planet. During Alpha 3, the academy would continue to produce so long as the necessary items were available.

Oh, and the things-disappearing-mid-transfer bugs seem to be fixed. I'm not sure I can express in words just how glad I am.
Hussell
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After the last update, a whole lot of old capitals showed up. When selected, almost no information shows up, and the white ring that shows a planet is selected doesn't move from the previous selected world. When fleets arrive, they can't attack.

A neighboring empire to mine had his capital captured before the update, and a new capital was automatically established elsewhere. He re-captured his original capital, and turned it into a sector capital. It has now become one of these unselectable worlds for me. I'm not sure if he still owns it, or can select it himself, or not.
Hussell
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I'm unable to change the production of infantry at my Fleet HQ.

When something other than the main industry of a world is selected, its trade routes become un-highlighted and the 'Import From' button ceases to work.

Occasionally a state where the trade route percentages don't add up to 100% can be created, e.g. by deleting one of two 50% demand trade routes (the second route doesn't take up the slack). I have also accidentally created a situation where one of my worlds was importing 150% of requirements, but I haven't quite figured out how that happened.

When a world drops in tech level (an all too frequent occurrence with foundations as unstable as they are in this release), and something can no longer be produced (e.g., X9 reactor and Grond launcher at a starship autofac), capacity is not redistributed to things that can be produced. I'm not sure whether this is a bug or a feature, since the production level is saved until the world's tech level can be raised again.

In the production tab, some stockpiles aren't shown (when there's no production, consumption, or trade routes), even though there's a substantial amount present. At the moment, the only way to find that the world has, say, a pile of several thousand heavy jumpdrives, is to park a fleet over the world and attempt a transfer. This situation can come up after capturing a world from another empire (or an independent world that used to belong to an empire) and after changing the designation of one of your own worlds. A related thing is the way things which a world has a trade route for, but is not importing, show up in the production tab as blank panes. For example, when importing heavy missile launchers to build battlestations, all the other products of a starship autofac will show up even though the world has none and wants none.

The list of ships on a world can now drop off the bottom of the panel. The list of defenses can also stack so high now that it overlaps the tech level. Generally speaking, the interface is running out of space. Perhaps, since screen resolutions are almost universally wider than they are tall, the information panes should be on the left and right with vertical designs, instead of on the top and bottom? That would leave a central area closer to a square than a rectangle for viewing the starscape. (I realize doing this would involve quite a bit of work, and boring work at that. However, I think the benefits for players will be high enough to justify the cost.)

Some worlds continue to produce a tiny amount of something they are importing, even though the exporter has plenty of extra. The unnecessary production of the importer has always been below 1/watch so far.

I've been having some minor trouble with the quantity input field in transfers. It doesn't seem to behave the way the other input fields do (allocating industry to defenses, percentages to trade routes, etc.) Pressing backspace triggers my browser to go back a page instead of deleting a digit, and trying to type a number doesn't work until after clicking on the field.

I have a lot of trade routes. A lot. I've had the mid-point of a trade route right underneath a planet. I've even had two mid-points right on top of one another. When that happens, it's quite difficult to select the trade route that is "underneath". A possible solution: when the user clicks on something, and that thing is already selected, instead select the next-nearest thing, if it's close by.
Vachtra
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Playing for a little while now and I have a Jumpship Yard. Production says it is producing 2.3 Adamant class ships a watch but none are being added to the total.
"Have you guys ever watched the show?" ~ Guy
Hussell
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Structures will tell you how many they could produce if they had the necessary resources, but if you check the production tab, there will be a box among all the other resources telling you how many are actually being produced. Hope that helps.
Hussell
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I'm finding it a little odd that I can conquer a world, dump 50,000 brigades on the surface, and have them all join the revolution 3 minutes later (18 hours in-game). Not a bug, exactly, but a game mechanic that's over-stretching my suspension of disbelief.
Hussell
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I've had some problems attempting to drag the starscape while zoomed out. It's a bit hard to have to find open space to click on. Possible solution: wait to change the selected world until the mouse button releases, and if the position of the mouse changed significantly between button-down and button-up, drag the view and do not change the selection.
george moromisato
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Hussell wrote:I'm finding it a little odd that I can conquer a world, dump 50,000 brigades on the surface, and have them all join the revolution 3 minutes later (18 hours in-game). Not a bug, exactly, but a game mechanic that's over-stretching my suspension of disbelief.
I did find a bug here. You're never supposed to lose more then 50% of the force through defections. And the percent defecting is proportional to how bad the revolution index is (at the low end, only 5% defect). Because of the bug, ALL troops were defecting.

The more subtle issue that you raise is still there: it's still hard to believe that any significant percentage of troops would defect after 18 hours. Unfortunately, this is too hard to model: I would have to store a average age value for each kind of troop for all worlds. The memory and compute requirements are probably not worth the gain (certainly not right now).

Thank you for reporting this.
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