Single Player bugs and crashes v40 plus (SVN) - After Oct 2019

I have actively avoided Stellaris to keep from being distracted from here. lol. It looks amazing. And yeah, I played Elder Scrolls back on Morrowind and it was enough to get lost in as a second life for months on end so I know how that goes. It just keeps getting more beautiful as they go so again, I avoid it to keep from being distracted away from this project, which is really starting to shape up in some ways for some of my pet projects finally.

There's been a lot of very interesting discussions taking place on the discord channel that are reminding me a lot of the project discussions the team were involved in about a new game platform. After all this time I'm still so novice at even comprehending some of it. You might be interested in joining in the chats there.

https://discord.gg/u8SWfZ

 

I still want my current game to work LOL. I will grab it from that link and hopefully that will fix the problem.

 

@Thunderbrd
Looks like an interesting discussion. I will have to check it out in more detail this weekend. School is starting up again so pretty busy during the week.

 

Latest chat has been in the dev talk page there. At least the stuff that relates to how to construct the mapping. He's wanting to do a simpler flat map rather than a globe but I think you may have more constructive feedback than mine and you guys are both just astronomically awesome programmers so could really have a strong meeting of the minds there.

I'm personally intensely interested to see what we'd need to do to start building out a game framework around the mapping program you've been working on as that kind of globe approach is just so dang cool!

Unfortunately, the bad news is that your current game is probably not going to be compatible. We have broken comp a few times since the version release which is one reason we're going so long between releases this time around.

 

So 40.1 games don't work? I think that is the version I have.

 

SVN version 11132 breaks saves. If you get the SVN and want to continue a previous save, get version 11131. There's a chance your bug will be fixed in it, although it's still quite outdated now.

 

Below is 2 screenshots of my latest game with latest Git. Unit upkeep is still imhpo too high . 1st is finance screen, 2nd is overhead view of my fledgling empire with 3 cities, on Emperor diff and Normal GS. Notice that at 0% Research I am still going red rapidly.

I will add another screenshot shortly that shows how expensive a 2nd level LE unit in the Preh era is. 4.5 gold upkeep vs the old level means as the game progresses and you Must add more LE to fight the every rising Crime you will not be able to afford enough LE, Health, or Educators. Your cities will be crime and disease riddled and ignorant in a very short time.

Another Bug, every time you hit Print Screen to capture a screenshot the game will freeze for up to 45 seconds. This started a week or so ago. Is anyone else seeing this?

 

At least screenshot works for you, some reason print screen always take a picture of what ever is running behind it for me. I have to use Steams function.

 

Probably gotta increase the base free upkeep gold from population some. Perhaps add some free upkeep to the obedience civic.

Would be nice if you included the tooltip for the unit upkeep in that finance advisor screenshot.

Doesn't happen for me, maybe your system does something when you hit that button (full system freeze, not only game, maybe).

Yeah, that's annoying with steam. GoG doesn't have that issue fortunatly.

 

Okay that explains it, I thought I broke something.

 

What you will be finding once the land unit rebalance and naval unit plans come into play is that these units won't be standing out quite as much for being expensive. They represent a more common increase in unit upkeep, in part planned to help cut down on 'unit glut' as you've complained about previously.

It will be expected that we can be a bit more giving from civics afterwards to compensate.

I think the larger shock here is that they not only stand out as expensive in comparison to other units (because they got an earlier review than most units did) but also that they've been this expensive for a while now. There IS also a modifier for difficulty level scaling Toffer added that is making them seem even more expensive at higher diff levels.

Pretty sure many of us would like to see unit upkeep become one of the most expensive things to maintain in the game, as it is really in RL. Look at the % of Fed expense in the US that goes to military upkeep... it's some 60% of our overall budget.

 

Current Finance screen with Unit Tool tip. 5 Turns from Sed Life and after stripping out 40% of my military and a LE unit and building every building that gives Gold I've almost stopped the bleeding. If I put the Capitol on Meager wealth I can have a + 8 Gold. But I need a story teller to keep my Education at +1 and that will cost 2 Gold to start. From the Capitol alone I stripped out 3 obsidian units, 2 slingers and an LE Enforcer. Now I only have 3 obsidian units left to defend it plus 4 LE Enforcers and a trained dog. All other young cities have 2 or 3 defenders with a dog unit. I also had to delete all roaming obsidian units that were hunting and fighting random barb units. Now the barbs are much freer to proliferate, along with the Neanderthal NPC.

This is affecting the AI Civs as well. Scouts are still the main roaming units for them in conjunction with trackers. Not too many have upgraded to hunter. Which they normally do before I can.

This uptick in Unit costs will most definitely change all the early civics. And the longer GS will have a much easier time because of it. Only the faster GS as I see it are being hit the hardest now. Balance is gone.

 

Did not do this until about a week or so ago. Before that no freeze at all from using Print Screen. And No other game I have does it either.

I suppose I could just use the SVN and not Git to see if it does it with it as well. Currently a Git Final release game can not be played with the SVN and vice versa. They come up with incompatible save game format pop up.

 

How did you get an uptick exactly? What difficult level are you at with this? Is it in the upper ranges? If I'm guessing, things were set to be pretty much as they were except there's a new difficulty scaling factor that might be playing in. Though wouldn't the AI be unaffected, being at noble level? Just to be clear, I'm not asking out of doubt, more that I didn't think there would be a noteworthy difference at this point.

@Toffer90? care to comment on how there's such a noted uptick taking place just so I can understand what's happening at this moment?

 

@Thunderbrd ,

 

Huh, you don't have any free unit upkeep, that is strange... Have you modified the global define xml values related to upkeep?

Could you upload the save for me to tinker with?
0 free unit upkeep is definitely a bug.

Here's some screenshot from one of my latest test games (used to debug a recalc bug we have for buildings in cities).

 

Ok, so sure that would be a bit of a jump up. Still, that it's making the AI have to staff less is concerning since they're at Noble. And yeah, while it makes sense to have some difficulty variation, maybe it needs to not be as severe for now - the unit upkeep values can only adjust in cludgy integers at base and I wasn't expecting to have to factor in a % increase on difficulty. Still, if we can get the initial civics to not have to penalize gold and make the advancements all in the positive from the first improvement up rather than a -5% being an improvement over a -10% then it would be nicer for the player to understand more easily and this is certainly one way to earn the margin to do that. Also would make the gold buildings a lot more meaningful if it really meant the difference in how much military could be staffed.

I'm just thinking outloud here. Again, I didn't think this change would really mean anything to balance at first since it was my understanding it was going to mostly be equivalent but just give us more handholds on which to modify things there.

At this point I think this is a balance issue rather than a bug and maybe we should consider moving the chat on this subject.

 

Not sure I see why GS would have much to say in any way...
All of my tests with the new upkeep system has been on the ultrafast gamespeed.

Difficulty adjustment to the final unit upkeep cost is the same now as it was before the changes..

 

I have done nothing to the Globals. This is a new game started yesterday off the latest git desktop using Final release. Updated this morning.

I have found that testing on Ultra gives widely variable results. Example you are researching Apiculture in Ancient era but you are generating +90 gold with a treasury of over 16K gold. Can only assume that the Difficulty used is Noble or less to get that. Most likely Settler. Would never get that on Monarch or above.

Save attached.

EDIT: I always use the SVN version that matches the git for reference in the games name. Hence the SVN11200 A name.

 

Yeah, that test game was on noble as it was a pure autoplay save, so I wanted all players to be on the same level, human or not.

Thanks for the save, gotta figure out why you have 0 free unit upkeep.