Questions/Comments about 2.0

[Lord Xizer]

I notice that in Fractured Empire and The Stars Align, the IR seems to have some Katana Dreadnaughts when you play against them.

[Corey]

i let my son play it yesterday on recruit and he was dead in 10 minutes i tried it to i dont think the ai know what recruit or admiral means its either me or a bug great game but love it but i learnt some thing from ea just because it looks good does not mean its a good game

just one question why does it take 12 minutes to fire the imperial ground to air connon on a exicutor and it only loses like 1 maybe no thing at all in damage?

The differences in difficulty levels are based on income and AI contrast modifiers. The Easy AI tends to make a fraction of what the player does, and you can go around 15 weeks before even getting attacked the first time.

The Hypervelocity does a flat amount of damage, distributed over several hardpoints. On most ships this means two or three shots will take it out, but on an Executor there's more hardpoints to distribute the damage over. The cooldown is just over 2 minutes.

Oh you mean from that online pdf file I cant read because of third party apps? That manual?
 

By "online only" I'm assuming you're referring to the Scribd download, however that's only one of many ways we've provided to access the manual.

As Slornie and Enceladus said, the manual comes in PDF format with the mod, and most modern computers come with it already installed. If you don't already have it, the Adobe Reader is free and not at all difficult to find.

If you can't find the version installed or rar'd with the mod (it goes to the same place as the Imperial_Civil_War folder, and there's a prompt asking you if you'd like to read it upon installation) then you can also easily download it from the links we provide on our downloads pages.

It's available here in a rar if you want to get it without the mod and have misplaced the copy provided directly with the mod: http://www.moddb.com/mods/thrawns-revenge/downloads/imperial-civil-war-20-manual
(rar being another extremely common format that most computers come equipped to deal with, and with free software readily available to access it).

[rumiks]

The differences in difficulty levels are based on income and AI contrast modifiers. The Easy AI tends to make a fraction of what the player does, and you can go around 15 weeks before even getting attacked the first time.

The Hypervelocity does a flat amount of damage, distributed over several hardpoints. On most ships this means two or three shots will take it out, but on an Executor there's more hardpoints to distribute the damage over. The cooldown is just over 2 minutes.

fair enough i didnt think of it in that way

[Corey]

Please post bug reports in the proper forum.

[Lord Xizer]

Please post bug reports in the proper forum.

Oh yeah, sorry about that.

[Slornie]

Split off the bug posts into new threads in the correct subforum.

i dont know where to post bugs

You should post bugs in the ICW Tech Support subforum, either in an existing thread (if relevant) or as a new thread.  Your previously reported bug can now be found here.

[Eclipse]

I've just realized that praetor II has an octuple turbolaser fromw one side but it is not on the other side. Not sure if it's a bug or what, not important at all really but just wanted to let you know about it.

[Slornie]

I've just realized that praetor II has an octuple turbolaser fromw one side but it is not on the other side. Not sure if it's a bug or what, not important at all really but just wanted to let you know about it.

Are you sure?  Are you seeing a hardpoint fire an octuple projectile, or is the hardpoint just labelled as an octuple?

[Eclipse]

Yes i'm sure, and the same happens to a friend (i'm sorry it's not an octuple it's a quad turbolaser) I have an ingame picture of it but i can't upload it

[Duke]

Howdy devs.

Played the older versions of this mod some time ago, and loved them. Looking at the manual alone, 2.0 seems to round of the mod to an even more professional level, and I'll probably installing the mod and drowning a few hours here and there real soon. Fantastic.

Some questions on reliability however.
Has the path finding been addressed for Super class destroyers, or any capital ship for that matter? I've read just in here somewhere that they're a load of crap engine-wise- I don't expect that issue to be resolved, but has anyone tinkered with it a tad in this version? When your toys are doing loop-de-loops as your trying to play clever Grand Admiral one wonders how can this even represent strategy. Doesn't reflect on the mod of course, but on the original game.

Another: what is this freeze point? Can someone explain when, and in which campaign it happens? Why it happens?

And the last is to everyone: is the galactic AI sharper? I recall the original EaW puttering out very soon, and the high-octane mod AI blasting us with petite space battle so frequently that a training stormtrooper squad could witness three space battles before it completed. No hyperbole, and no snarkiness here.

Cheers,
Duke

[Anonymous]

Tinkering with the engine is practically impossible. It would also mean that it is not a mod but rather an actual game

[300]

There are only 2 complaints i have.

1) SSDs and Praetor-II's making a circle before they go to the point you want or have them attack. ISD's as well, but they aren't as annoying.

2) This one is more for me. I love the Venerator's class ships and would love to see them make it somewhere btwn frigate class and Capital ship class, preferably capital ship . Maybe updated weaponry, look, engines, a venerator-II maybe.. But like i said before, this is for me.

#1 would satisfy me knowing my ships don't need to do a happy dance unless they need to circle around.

[tlmiller]

There are only 2 complaints i have.

1) SSDs and Praetor-II's making a circle before they go to the point you want or have them attack. ISD's as well, but they aren't as annoying.

This is the pathfinding issue that we keep referring to.  Nothing the mod team can do about it.

2) This one is more for me. I love the Venerator's class ships and would love to see them make it somewhere btwn frigate class and Capital ship class, preferably capital ship . Maybe updated weaponry, look, engines, a venerator-II maybe.. But like i said before, this is for me.

Since it wasn't done that way in canon, it won't be done.  It would be neat, but for their age, the Venators in the game aren't bad.  Shields don't last long, but they've got decent offensive power and they carry lots of fighters/bombers making them EXTREMELY useful.  I base most of my fleets around Ventators as the PA.

[tlmiller]

Playing Essence of War as the PA on Admiral.  Was attacked by an EOTH fleet having 2 Victories, 2 Chaf, several Kariek's and whatever they're corvettes are.  With only 3 Venators, Light Frigate Shipyard and 2 hypervelocity guns on the planet below, I was able to successfully defend the planet.  I lost all 3 Venators, but still.  With the HV's ripping through the Vic and Chafs, the bombers were able to crush Karieks because of how many I had, while the TF/A9/TI's made sure that no bombers touched my Venators.

Old ships, but they're still incredibly useful.

[Corey]

Some questions on reliability however.
Has the path finding been addressed for Super class destroyers, or any capital ship for that matter? I've read just in here somewhere that they're a load of crap engine-wise- I don't expect that issue to be resolved, but has anyone tinkered with it a tad in this version? When your toys are doing loop-de-loops as your trying to play clever Grand Admiral one wonders how can this even represent strategy. Doesn't reflect on the mod of course, but on the original game.

The basic problem here, is, as people have said, that it's unmoddable. There's nothing available to tinker with. It has nothing to do with degree of skill or difficulty, it's just untouchable. If we were to edit the engine and try to fix it to any degree, we then couldn't release the mod. It has to do with how the engine treats objects in the first place.

Another: what is this freeze point? Can someone explain when, and in which campaign it happens? Why it happens?

The freeze point is where the game essentially stops tracking unit control, losses, etc. It's another problem inherent to the engine, and the best guesses of the community essentially are that after a certain amount of units have been ade, processed, and destroyed, it hits a certain cieling and can't keep track anymore. Since it's a bug with the game itself, it's present in every GC if you give it long enough; go play a base EaW one and let it go long enough and you'll eventually get it. Because of how large many of the mod scenarios are, and how many active factions and units there are it happens earlier than in the base game, but for most it's not an issue.

The only ones where you really have to worry about it are From the Ground Up where it seems to occur around week 280, Art of War around 300 and Essence of War around the same time. We've had games go much longer and sometimes much short than this though, it just depends on the specific situations and progress of the game.

And the last is to everyone: is the galactic AI sharper? I recall the original EaW puttering out very soon, and the high-octane mod AI blasting us with petite space battle so frequently that a training stormtrooper squad could witness three space battles before it completed. No hyperbole, and no snarkiness here.

It will occaisionally get into the small attack loops, but that's very infrequent. More often thannot you're going to get really large attacks with some breathing time in between.

2) This one is more for me. I love the Venerator's class ships and would love to see them make it somewhere btwn frigate class and Capital ship class, preferably capital ship . Maybe updated weaponry, look, engines, a venerator-II maybe.. But like i said before, this is for me.

Venators are by this point around half a century old, in some points of the mod even older. Even when they were new they weren't great frontline ships. As it is they're still quite powerful, especially considering how they come with masses of pretty damn good fighters depending on the era. We get a lot of people saying the Venator should be more powerful, but it has nothing to do with what the Venator actually is, it's just because they like it. If we just made a second version of it so it was as powerful as everyone wished it was, it'd easily be the most powerful ship in the mod. As it is, it does its job, it does it well (as TLMiller's post shows), and it's balanced where it should be canonically. There's no reason to make a new one.

If we were to balance the mod around how people *wished* ships performed just because they like the ship, then the Syndic would be untouchable.

[Willhelm]

This mostly applies to skirmishes but  GCS as well... due to the fact that things like Golans and space stations have no rings around them preventing hyperspace drops around them so its ridiculously easy to destroy these structures... For example, in skirmish its quite easy to make one SD and then hyperspace it in right behind the enemies space station and then just have it sit there and shoot at the space station till it dies with no resistance because they A.I is silly and just attacks your mines.. and then boom you win. For GCS it just means you can drop like three syndics right in front of a golan and then win, greatly reducing golans fighting power. so could space structures and hyperspace drop preventing rings around themselves?

[Thrashia]

Is it just me or did shields get ridiculously more powerful? Also, I noticed that the targeting acquisition of a lot of ships is sluggish or slow. Once they destroy one hardpoint, they keep firing at that spot for a bit until the gunners are like "oh, yeah, we already got that one."

[Eclipse]

It's not that they keep firing, the ships have a lot of new hardpoints( weapons) and they make such a large barrage that when they finally destroy the enemy's hard point a lot of other proyectiles are in half way to the enemy's ship

[yutpaeksi]

Is it just me or did shields get ridiculously more powerful? Also, I noticed that the targeting acquisition of a lot of ships is sluggish or slow. Once they destroy one hardpoint, they keep firing at that spot for a bit until the gunners are like "oh, yeah, we already got that one."

This has always been a problem with the EaW engine. In a real fight, each battery of guns would target different sections of an enemy ship. But there's no way to do that here. Since each ship has many multiple hardpoints, more than most of the vanilla ships, a LOT of shots are really wasted once you bring down shields. You should try to rapidly click at multiple hardpoints when attacking, this spreads the damage a bit more efficiently. This is especially true when taking down SSDs once their shields are down.


The only game I can think of that truly captured the feel of a fight between spaceships was Nexus: The Jupiter Incident.

[Eclipse]

I've noticied that in era 5 Daala commands a venator star destroyer, Does it makes any refference to the Maw irregular fleet? And if it does, as far as I know, shouldn't she have more powerfull weapon sistems? just a suggestion.