Final Frontier: Problems & Issues (Post-3.13 Update Available)

This scenario is definitely one of the best that came with BTS! And the new system / planet preview screen is great. The scenario would be even better if some of the micromanagement hassle were ironed out:
1) production overflow roll over to the next item: a major improvement of civ4 was that you no longer have to micromanage to minimize lost production overflow. Could this please be fixed in FF ?
2) lost production when switching planets: if within a system you change an uncompleted item A on planet A to item B on planet B, if you change back right away it's OK. But if you want to complete item B first, when switching back to item A it starts from scratch. Could this be fixed ?
3) multiple production queue management: IMHO the main issue is the mechanics of having to select a planet on bottom right, check the build box on top right, then select item on bottom left. If there were a single click solution to determine which planet to build on and which does not require to move the mouse several times across the screen it would be great. Perhaps simply removing the build checkbox would be enough. But please don't inhibit or automate duplicate building placement, it's much more fun the way it is now, it's just the interface that needs streamlining.
4) when a system's population increases, it would be nice to have an option to make the system screen automatically pop up to let you place the new pop where you like.

I had a double leader, on a large map. Maybe you should add some more civilizations to take care of this problem. Also, some civs had too similar colours.

This is the first BtS mod that I tried. It's not bad for a mod and thanks for making it. I don't think it's quite as good as MOO2 but it's just mod not a full game.

Some of the issues that I had with it.

Since your constructor ships take a while to make a starbase the AI can come in and build a Starbase next to your constructor. If they do, their influence overrides yours, wasting your constructor. Also, starbases are a bit too strong right off the bat. They are strength 30. A battleship is only 24.

You can't seem to really do much about health and happiness in your cities. It seems to be beyond the control of the player. If you want to go the military route, your options are limited. Ships move to slow given all the distances they need to cross. There needs to be more options to make them go faster. It'd also be nice to have more information on the planets and stars.

Another thought. Is it possible to have the Construction Ships "mine" the asteroids for hammers ala chopping in regular civ?

Here's some bugs/problems I noticed.
Even though it sometimes took me several turns to approach a planet and several to beat the defenders, the planet never used it's large supply of missiles against me.
On the turn when an enemy capitulated to me all my starbases stopped generating their area of control. They went back to normal next turn and I didn't think to keep a save. Maybe I have one but it's among 30 others.
Trade routes seem to be irrelevant unless you're the syndicate, making the building that increases trade route yield a bad investment. Some technology or civic should give you more.
Lastly health seems to be irrelevant. Even with very bad health my colonies were still growing at a good rate. I only once or twice had build a health improving building. That also makes the survival value not very useful.
Otherwise this is a very impressive mod.

Well, I don't think it's a bug in just FF, but ScriptData doesn't appear to be read in properly in the FF mod. I had to modify CvWBDesc.py in order to get it to read more than one line of the ScriptData. The problem seems to be (at least in regards to FF) that a Plot's ScriptData is a pickled list. The pickled list uses newline characters to separate elements. The CvWBDesc.py has no multi-line loading capabilities. I ended up modifying the pickled list to replace newline characters with tabs before writing, and the reverse before when reading.

Can you add some kind of Future Tech? It seems once you reach the end a future tech like thing would keep research from becoming useless near the end.

I dunno if it is meant to be, but when I load up Final Frontier it gives me the Warlords expansion background.

Dwayne Wade said:

I dunno if it is meant to be, but when I load up Final Frontier it gives me the Warlords expansion background.

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I think it's some weird thing that sometimes happens when you select a different title screen for the main game. For some reason if I select the original Civ IV title screen it also shows up for Age of Ice instead of the default AoI title. It fixes itself when I change the title back to the BtS default.

I only seem to be able to do passive espionage. Is their a SPY unit so you can do active espionage?

Virulent said:

I think it's some weird thing that sometimes happens when you select a different title screen for the main game. For some reason if I select the original Civ IV title screen it also shows up for Age of Ice instead of the default AoI title. It fixes itself when I change the title back to the BtS default.

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I never switched the title screen though.

Is it just me, or does FF seem to run a lot slower than the original game?

Gatsby said:

I have CTD problems with a couple of the leaders (sorry I can't recall which ones) -whenever I meet them in-game or select them on the menu screen the game crashes to the desktop. Will this patch fix this problem?

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The same thing happens to me. I go to start the game, select the Avowers of Knowledge, and it immediately crashes.

First, this mod is an absolute blast to play and isn't at all what I expected when I first fired it up. Of course I now have no idea what the rest of BTS contains since I found this shortly after installing

I've played several 'coop' style 2-player games and overall it's been very stable and hasn't suffered from more than a few minor issues, most of which have been described by other posters. The only real problem we encountered is more of a matter of preference I suppose. The home systems are a bit too random for MP games, the typical end result was that one of us would have a really good home system and the other would have a really bad one. With all of the other random factors affecting the early game (proximity/quality of other systems and wrecks mainly) it lead to some very harsh differences bewtween players. Now in a single player game this was fine, the challenge of starting out a bit handicapped is a fun challenge to overcome against the AI but in a MP game the result is either swift defeat or a lot of waiting while the player(s) with better starts do things that you can't due to lack of production & growth. The AI was also a bit on the passive side in nearly every game we've played to date.

Since I'm not big on complaining without providing some solutions here are the two changes I implimented to resolve these issues:

First, in CvSolarSystem.py I added a check to ensure any planet created in a homeworld was a minimum of size 2, the remaining checks already in place were more than adequate. It's a simple three line change in the definition for createRandomSystem() (sorry, no line numbers in wordpad)

Replace:
With:

Next, I wanted to make the AI a bit less passive. Based on the old AI changes I did for TAM I took the easy way out and simply made the AI less friendly with each other so they would have an equal chance of declaring war on each other as they would to declare war on a human player. In CIV4LeaderHeadInfos.xml I set the three following tags to the same values for all leaders except the barbarians:


I wrote up a tutorial that's posted on the forums here explaining this change in detail but the basic effect is that the AI all has a +4 bonus to relations with each other by default and these values change that so they can have anywhere from +2 to -2 with each other, adding a touch of randomness to the state of AI<->AI relationships.

Sorry about the wordy post, and again it's an awesome mod to play single or multi player.

Sorry that I haven't read all of this... I'm kind of in a hurry.

I have encontered two problems:

1) I have build a starbase and I had open boardes with an AI-Civ. He has started to build one round after me one space away. I thought that would not be a problem and let him. It was a problem. My starbase was build - everything was ok.The round after when HIS starbase was ready, he got a small band of influence on the far side - everything was ok ( ok, except that he was on one of the ressources). The round after, the situation was reveresed and I got the small band. I declared war to get my influence back (and the ressources - anyway, the resources where near me - it was half the card from his territory away, so I dont know in the first place why he did it), but than my starbase vanished. (The comp tried to get all my ships out of his sphere of influence - but a starbase can not move, so it vanished...)

2) We have played Multiplayer and everytime a starebase fired, the syncronisation was lost. We had to relod it, but thats no game, so we abondoned it after this second flaw.

I hope you can fix it, it could be a cool mod.

The hard-coded building attributes need to be changed to XML in your next update, Jon. Mostly it's an easy thing to accomplish, but you may have to add something to the building schema for PopCap. Here is what I did to address most of the hard-coding.

At one point in the game, a weaker civilization offered to become a vassal state of my civilization. After I accepted, the cultural area around all my starbases disappeared and as a result, I lost access to resources where I had already built an extraction facility. Consequently, total health and total happiness went down in all my solar systems. I can provide a saved game of before and after the fact, if necessary. Great mod though, aside from this 'undocumented feature'.

I just won an Ascendancy victory and the game locks up saying "Daniel has won a Human Ascendancy Victory" while the bottom screen says "waiting for other players". Nothing happens after this this screen is just locked, can't access menus or anything, just the ingame screen with the planes spinning in the background.

Edit: Wrong, I just realized I can access the menus but do nothing in my current game except from that.

I did an experiment with delaying the building of the final piece of the gate one turn and it worked out normally.

Other than this little thing I'd just like to see the AI alot better. The AI is the only reason I will not be playing this mod more for now. For instance, last game I played Alvarez declared war on me and when it was showdown time I had like 10 Battleships while he only had one single one. Also they don't use missiles at all. Slightly slower teching would be awesome too, as mentioned by others. Very good mod, but AI needs alot of work.

Paradise's 'flag' shows up as a hammer and sickle instead of the two snake medical thing that it should be