1. On Skirmish mode, on easy setting cause this is a new mod without any guidelines.
skirmish ai get 100,000 credits on easy mode and the human player get 10,000.... Absolutely NOT.
That's not even true, and I have pictures to prove it.
[Click Here]We don't control the starting credits for AI in skirmish. We can edit their build times and credit accumulation rates, but not how much they start with in skirmish. We make them start with a lot more in GC so they're less picky about how it's spent, and to make sure it does get spent.
so redo AI credit down to 20,000 if you really need the AI to cheat so bad on the easy level. let it where u have it for medium level.
Every game makes the AI cheat. They get free units and altered income, etc in the base game, and in virtually every other game in existence. In order to make the AI do what's desired, it's necessary. In fact, the only real difference between difficulty levels in EaW is the amount of cheating at each level.
3. it took 35 seconds for this skirmish battle to load up and i have a fast system.
so i timed how long it takes for the actual mod to load... it takes only 28 seconds for the mod to load.. that's pretty good.
SO why does it take your fiery demise skirmish map 35 seconds to load?
It's not like we code in load times and decided "map x should take this long, map y should take this long". You're comparing apples and oranges, it's loading different things. The only way for us to make it take less time to load is making the map smaller and removing objects from it, but we want that map the way it is. We're not editing a map we're happy with to save a few seconds of loading time.
If you have a problem with how the engine handles indexing or memory or whatever, you're taking it up with the wrong people. We don't have any control over the engine and system resource allocation, whatsoever. Petroglyph at least had the luxury of compiling the game files into MEG files, which we do not since the game wouldn't read them properly.
The Missing text on loadup is a legitimate bug, however, which will be fixed.
4. Change the pop cap back up to where you had it in 1.2. If the don't like it that high then they can change it themselves or learn to like hugh space fleets in battle.
This is RTS, not tactical crappy commands like call of effing duty with a squad of idiots... sorry if i bashed first person shooter games, but them.
The pop cap is exactly where we've had it since the first public release of Imperial Civil War, 40. You've mentioned a pop cap of 140 in another post I believe, but that would have been something you did if it's true. I don't see why your argument works in one direction and not the other. If you don't like it at 40, then you can raise it. There are several reasons for the pop cap being where it is. The team is happy with the 40, most other people seem to be as well, and I don't think it's considered good form to tell a mod team to change something in their mod and "learn to like it".
The maps aren't big enough to support 140 population per side and allow any meaningful movement. Above a certain point you're not going to have much control over it anyways at that point. The Galactic pop cap tends to not get much higher than 700 per side regardless, so if you actually filled all 140 slots for a single battle, you're probably in a rare situation, especially considering that that number has to be split between land and space. The AI is never going to decide to risk ~1/4th of its entire force on one planet.
5. if i place a squadron next to a buildable, it takes me more than 5 seconds to get it to turn color and give me the buildable icon..... that's too long. reduce it to no more than 3 seconds.
This is skirmish mode, that means fast decisions and fast buildables too.
Part of skirmish mod is being able to hold what you take. If you can't hold it long enough to build, that's all just part of the game. It's something most control/capture the flag gametypes get right in our opinion. And that's what this is, an opinion about what's better. This isn't a bug or some glaring conceptual error, it's a difference of opinion.
It also seems like the AI gets to build faster than the human does.... that's wrong once again for easy mode.
You want people to want to play the rest of the game.
I'll paste the exact code for the difficulty adjustments entries for easy mode on this.
<Galactic_Build_Time_Multiplier>0.8</Galactic_Build_Time_Multiplier>
<Space_Build_Time_Multiplier>1.0</Space_Build_Time_Multiplier>
<Land_Build_Time_Multiplier>1.0</Land_Build_Time_Multiplier>
As you can see, in skirmish their build rates on easy are the exact same as the player, in GC something that takes the player 10 seconds to build takes the AI 8. Once again though, I take issue with your characterization of this as "wrong."
also... what the hell is with the AI's ships moving twice as fast as the human player's ships?? You can see the fighters for the AI move considerably faster than the fighters for the human player.... This HAS to be fixed. It's not cool at all.
Zer covered this, but I just want to clarify the better commander thing. Many heroes give bonuses, including to speed.
Oh, apparently, you have these rotten settings for even if the AI and human is the same side. Bad choice; unless you only want the under 20 crowd playing your game...
Also if the mod is too hard to learn, they will just say Eff it.
The AI settings have to be the same whether they're on your team or not. I'd disagree with the "awful" characterization as well, for the reasons I've given above.
Really, just in general I have to take issue with how you've approached making your suggestions. They come across way more often than not as demands, not suggestions. We're always open to suggestions and criticism, but for one thing, this thread is for bugs. There is
another thread (<-- Click there) where we'd be more than happy to discuss balancing and AI, however your opinion that something should be changed does not make it true. Saying things like:
.... Absolutely NOT.
Change the pop cap back up to where you had it in 1.2. If the don't like it that high then they can change it themselves or learn to like hugh space fleets in battle.
This HAS to be fixed. It's not cool at all.
...Those don't sound like suggestions, they sound like demands.
Like I said, we're always open to constructive criticism, and you're even welcome to say something is "complete shit," that's how our team operates, and that's often a perfectly legitimate opinion to express, but making demands because of your own personal preference is not going to get you anywhere.
Frankly, in some areas it sounds like you're trying to lecture to a bunch of people clueless in the world of games and modding. We're not exactly new to this you know. In the almost-6 year history of this mod we've released 3 minimods, four open betas and two full versions of Imperial Civil War, with the third upcoming, not to mention the work of various team members on other mods. We're not perfect, far from it, but suggesting that in those 6 years and across all of those releases we've learned nothing about how to manage this mod or how to incorporate suggestions and feedback or that we've somehow missed the basic needs and wants of the mod community? Give us a bit more credit than that. Whatever anyone else may claim I think we have the fundamentals down by now. With all the feedback we receive via reviews, emails, comments, forum posts, etc each day we'd have to have our heads in the sand to not have some idea how this works by now. We don't do this because we think it'll make us famous or something like that, but regardless I think we can safely say we're past the point where we need to figure out how to build up a basic playerbase.
If you would like to discuss the AI or balance further, feel free to post in the discussion and feedback thread for the 1.3 beta, or make a new thread in Mod Discussion.
Edit: I've split this off into its own topic, so feel free to continue the AI discussion here.