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

Is there any way you could have resources in systems or on planets? For example Exotic Animals, gives a +3 Happiness boost. So anyone who colonizes the planet would have access to that.

I suppose you could create a "world" wonder like Galactic Zoo that provided 3 of those as a resource. But to me it makes more sense to be able to get unique or rare planetary resources in addition to ones in space.

Also can you remove the "City of" references in the diplo screen?
 
One minor suggestion, which I really hope you at least consider because it kind of detracts from the attention to detail evident throughout the mod: custom graphics for the resources? It's great to see that everything is there, from new civics, to planets that light up as their population grows, to the 'robotic' diplomacy music, but the floating chunks of iron or marble are kind of jarring.

Other than that, it's a wonderful mod. Looking forwards to the next patch already.
 
I'd like some planetary resources too. Maybe they should have a tendency to be on the middle and outer planets of the system so that you don't immediately have them when you colonise a system.
 
One minor suggestion, which I really hope you at least consider because it kind of detracts from the attention to detail evident throughout the mod: custom graphics for the resources? It's great to see that everything is there, from new civics, to planets that light up as their population grows, to the 'robotic' diplomacy music, but the floating chunks of iron or marble are kind of jarring.

Other than that, it's a wonderful mod. Looking forwards to the next patch already.
I'm afraid there won't be any official art changes/updates in the future. Resources were one of the things which I added later in development and I wasn't able to get special art. So I didn't just forget. ;) Because of the no-art restriction, I'm limited in what changes I can make. That means no new civs, units (which is why I'm removing the Great General), Buildings, etc. It's a shame, but that's how it is. :) Sometimes it's better to be a modder than a real developer. ;) I'll do my best to fix bugs and make balance improvements though. There's already a thread in the Creation & Customization forum about altering Final Frontier and adding to it, so you may want to keep an eye on what they're able to do if you want more dramatic changes to FF.

Jon
 
Building Queues: It would take a bit of finagling with the UI but allowing the player to queue building to multiple planets i.e. first build a mine on planet A, then a factory there, then a mine on planet B, would make the game so much more fun, and take a lot of the tedium of constant queue adjustment out of it.

Timing: alright, its childish, but I enjoy banging a planet out to full development, and in the current way things stand, even on lighter difficulty levels, I barely get through a planet and a half in my home system before i finish up the tech tree. I don't expect to be able to build everything, and obviously building for its own sake is a bit juvenile, but reducing build times a bit, or slowing down the other aspects of the game would, i believe, make things significantly more enjoyable.

otherwise its damn fun, i love the black holes :} who disbands units anyways....
 
Build queue: I like the idea of being able to build imps in each planet, but it just gets too tedious having to select planet, click the build checkbox, then building, wait till it's complete, zoom in colony and do it all over again.
Instead, I thought of 2 things:
1) there are buildings like the Factory that apply global bonuses, so instead of having to select on which planet they have to be built and build them one by one you could just stack as many factories in the build queue as planets are available to you in the system.
2) Then there are buildings like the mining platform that apply bonuses only to the planet it's built on. For this you could be able to stack in the build queue as many of them as planets are available, and when they are finished have them placed automatically on the most populated planet that doesn't already have one (where the building will be more beneficial). In the case of the Habitation Dome, have them placed on the planet with highest :food: :hammers: :commerce:
I looked into adding a cross-planet construction queue yesterday and I knew it would be difficult to do, but unfortunately the queue system is so built-in to the game that I can't change it to be more useful for FF. I tried creating a completely new queue system to circumvent the default one, but there's no way for me to determine when someone clicks on something with the Shift or Ctrl keys down in the city screen... and without this functionality it kind of makes a new queue system useless (since you wouldn't be able to add or remove things like you can now).

Placing buildings on specific Planets is one of the cooler and more important features in Final Frontier so I'm hesitant to remove it or change it dramatically in order to fix the queuing issue. Choosing specifically which Planet to build a Nutrition Facility or Habitation System was always one of the more fun things for me, even if I had to babysit the queue. ;) Even switching to a new mechanic where you don't actually select what planet to construct Buildings on wouldn't help fix it as much as one might think because the default queue system still doesn't allow for multiple Buildings of the same type in a queue (which any FF version would need). I'll continue to look into the issue but I'm not sure I'll be able to figure out a way around it. Perhaps one of the community's illustrious modders will be able to figure out a way to fix what I couldn't. ;) :)

Jon
 
Here's a sneak preview at the screen I added which shows what Planets are in a System when you click in the star:
 

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At first when i read about Final Frontier i thought "just somesort wannabe galactic empire building, blah.."

When i got the game i didnt give much thought to Final Frontier mod, but few days later i thought i would give it a try. I was shocked when i realized how well it has been made, totaly different game based on Civ4 engine.

Final Frontier is the very best mod for Civ4 i've ever played or seen.

But there are some minor fixes:

1. scouts are too slow, scouts should be fast but weak. speed at least +1.

2. In conoly screen there are no colony managment buttons, there should be at least for food, production and commerce. And also button to prevent growt.

3. AI civilisations are so stupid they hardly give any real challence, they build colonies too far away from each other and are usually overrun by pirates. And they build trade lanes just too slowly. And are generally, confused. normally only 2-3 AI civilisation are building colonies near each other and are able to defend them. And the AI really dont know how to use missiles.

4. Game's AI sometimes wont let my ships who has 2 speed and 1 movement pont left to go futher into radiation clould or black hole gravitation field tile, it just bouches away to safe tile. Should it be so?

5. for some reason, my great general exp does not increase, should it? And if, how?

6. There are some texts that should be rewrite, for example: if you have state value in a colony and you check hapiness of the people, they say "in our religion we trust". It should be something different, dont you think? And also those city of - and some others texts. Certainly these are not a gameplay issues and are not so top priority, than some other fixes.


I generally like to play with these options:

size: huge
speed: marathon
star systems: very dense
features: very dense
hostile features: normal

and these enabled:

city flipping after conquest
raging barbarians(pirates)
agressive AI
no tech brokering
new random seed on reload
lock modifier assets
requide complete kills

all victory options

I just love the Red Syndicate, with those extra trade routes and + food and production per trade route, and increased production with some commerce buildings...

How you guys like to play?

Other thoughts:

how about cheap probe units? something like: you can only give them a direction then they just rush in that direction whit speed of 3 and stop only when are destroyed.

Debula should not be impassable, but any unit inside nebula at the end of turn have something like 75% chance to disappear, and they could only see adjacent tiles and move only 1 tile. The reason to go inside nebula? Forgotten and lost treasures of cource, and add promotion to decrease chance to disappear, And ability to build beacons that have certain radius which also decrease ships chance to disappear.

Starbases should have ability to use huge cannon which will clear asteroids on targeted tile, probly more than one shot would be required. And why i cant rebase missiles to starbases?

And about those asteroids, they are only usable for hiding and for random resources. How about ability to build platforms that would give + 1 production or commerce.
And yes, ability to build many different platforms in space or on asteroids:

mining +production
farming +food
recreation +happy
junkyards +healt
trading centers/space markets +commerce

and what else?

those platforms should be on certain radius of that colony to add the resources and maybe a limited amount. With my luck i never get any good healt/hapiness resources nearby, most of them other side of the galaxy. Those platforms could help a little bit.

At this point, i have nothing else to add.

Some ideas might be impossible or too difficulty, or just too stupid...

comments, please...

Btw, thanks for the very best mod for Civ4... :)
 
Just a minor annoying bug:
When a star system finishes building a unit/building and I get the pop-up "what should we build next" ... I click on a building and sometimes the list pops-up a second time and then I click again and it goes away.

Suggestion:
Maybe make the upgrade costs cheaper. It seems kinda crazy that upgrading some units costs more than a starbase! It's ludicrous to do an upgrade if you can just build the new unit in 2 turns also.

Thanks.
 
Can't Python run C++ compiled code. So couldn't you speed up the AI that way? It seems like much of the AI code for military stuff in BTS would work fine with Final Frontier. Sure, some changes need to be made, but overall it much of it should be good (stealth stuff, combined arms, large forces working attacking at once).

Is it me or is there no tech or building that increases the number of trade routes? Also the lack of specialists of some sort seems a bit strange, but maybe the lack of health is supposed to compensate for it somewhat. It seems odd that extra population beyond what the planets use is absolutely useless (or even bad). I see how the lack of new art could be a problem....what about letting you "overpopulate" a planet, the first point of overpopulation adds a unhealthiness and unhappiness to the system, the next one adds an addition two of each -- for a total of three, the third one adds an additional three, etc.

Leaders
It seems to me some of the leaders are badly unbalanced. Some of the abilities are great (+food/+hammer from trade routes), and others are really awful (-2 happines/-2 health). Seems like some leaders have the short end of the stick.

In any case, perhaps give the leaders multiple names so in a large multiplayer game you won't get a whole bunch of people with the same name. That makes espionage really hard (can't tell who you are targeting). Perhaps slightly different civs two (Paradise, Utopia, Eden, etc; Red Syndicate, Crimson Syndicate, Red Cartel, Crimson Megacorp, and so forth -- just use a thesaurus).

Great General
Hmm, it would be nice to have a great general. Perhaps a simple recoloring of a scout unit would be sufficient (maybe make it gold)? That is basically no work. Just make it so that it is only used on units.

Minor Resource Thoughts:
Water gives you access to oxygen (and hydrogen, though hydrogen is already very common). What about changing Oxygen to Platinum, since Platinum is used in filters and to help catalyze a number of chemical reactions -- having it increase health makes sense. Then change Hydrogen into Methane (and perhaps give it a water-like liquid appearance). Methane is a handy way to store hydrogen fuel, and you don't quite trip over it going through space.
 
Here's a sneak preview at the screen I added which shows what Planets are in a System when you click in the star:

Great job, Jon! That helps a great deal, with deciding which systems to colonize first. I am sure that it pleases everyone that you are spending time with the community to work on bug fixes and game-play updates!

I noticed one thing during my walkthrough game, that I have 7 colonies established now, while my competition only has one each. I have the game set on "Warlord Difficulty" and that might have something to do with it, but I wonder if even on the lower difficulty it should be like this. Maybe, I should have cranked the difficulty up a couple of notches, but I wanted to be able to talk about all aspects of the game-play and that might not be possible on harder difficulties, due to scaling.

Keep up the great work! The "Final Frontier" module is the most fun to play, even before your planned updates!

Cheers!

Hamarabi
 
While it's already been discussed elsewhere that you can get around it...

It'd be much easier on map-makers if the FF mod used the ScriptData in a WBS, rather than randomly regenerating systems every game.
 
Major Bug for Me And Ill get a screen shot next time I have my comp. But the LoS Or revealed map space is off. Meaning The area revealed on the map is to the NW NW NW of where it should be. I.E. right when i start a game the 9 tiles for the city radius is all black (as if I havn't been there) but to the NW*3 there are 9 revealed tiles.
 
Ideas on new units and such should go to this thread:
Final Frontier Modding

I agree that the units needs to be balanced. Especially the scouts. Strange that the last scout only moves 2 wheile many other get 3. Maybe also change scouts to be able to attack and have a withdraw.
 
I just noticed that you did put the ScriptData loading/saving into it for the systems / planets. I don't know how I missed it before. I guess what I wanted is pretty much already there, so disregard what I said before. Unless, of course, you want to add a WB interface to the editing so I don't have to do it through the python console. :p
 
Hey all, just poping in with my two cents- first of all top notch mod, definatly pushing the envolope with this one!

My first point is, well -as everyone else- planetary buildings.

In normal civ I have to make choices between money, production and food when I'm improving the tiles but in FF I can have my cake and eat it by building mining and farms etc. on each planet...

What if each planet was only able to build one type each?

So I could either build a farm or a mine or a commercial site on each planet- and building a different type would demolish the first.

Yea I know what your thinking, a planet is a big thing and should have plenty of room for both, but specialisation is the key to maximum production- even if your talking about whole planets!
 
Yea I know what your thinking, a planet is a big thing and should have plenty of room for both, but specialisation is the key to maximum production- even if your talking about whole planets!

The problem is the transportation of the "production"... If you specialize your planet, any transportation problem may lead to huge shortage in food, manufatured goods or anything your planet don't produce...
the planet are allready specialized : some produce 3 :food: or more and other produce 3 :hammers: or more
 
In normal civ I have to make choices between money, production and food when I'm improving the tiles but in FF I can have my cake and eat it by building mining and farms etc. on each planet...

On the other hand, specialization is already highly encouraged by the fact that extra copies of a building within a system cost progressively more. You can build all improvements on each planet, and in an ideal world would, but they get more expensive with each one, and eventually you'll probably have better stuff to build than that ultra-expensive 5th Nutrition facility. Personally, I like soft caps like that, that nudge you in a direction without outright forcing you. Civ4's health system being another great example. :)

And as eoghammer says, planets are already inherently specialized; buildings only do so much.
 
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