:)

This is the place, tell us about the bugs.

Whop! The whole team standing by for bug reports, how cool is that !?

Oh, right. I did read this but obviously not carefully enough.

I have been playing 1.50.9 with ICE-X 16 and I noticed the following problems:

The radiation event does not work properly, i.e. planets are not radiated.

The hyperspace event does not work at all - the message says, ships cannot enter hyperspace, but they can.


Then, there are some balancing problems playing 1.50.9 with ICE-X 16, but this might just be my very own experience and opinion:

I am not sure, whether the Doom Star works as intended. It has a higher initiative rating than smaller ships and seems
to be harder to hit than smaller ships.

The ship mounted Stellar Converter's auto hit seems overpowered to me.

Both combined seem imbalanced to me - Doom Stars always go first and always hit everything. At least the AI uses this, too.

Very much so. And I am very impressed by and thankful for your work!

allright, some questions in return;
- the radiation event; do you mean the Nova event or the industrial accident that leads to planet being 'irradiated'? in latter case the planet does not become radiated climate.
- the hyperspace flux event; you still can enter hyperspace if you are playing as trans-dimensional, was it the case?
- about Doom Star i am not sure what you mean or what it could be. If you have a save game, i can take a look. you can upload files directly on gog, just need to change extension.
- Stellar Converter is very strong indeed. A nice end-game weapon.

Well, I might be ill-informed.

The industrial accident - I thought the climate becoming radiated was the point of the event?

The flux event - yes, you are right, I had trans-dimensional in my latest game.

The Doom Star - maybe I do not understand how initiative works. I thought, combat speed was the relevant factor here. And I always thought that smaller ships were faster. So, it makes sense to use smaller ships for better initiative. I just learned that the ship attack value also influences initiative. Using a better computer leads to better initiative? And unused space makes your ship faster, too, and thus initiative gets better. Therefore, higher initiative of smaller ships is only due to the base speed only. And, a faster ship has better ship defense, too. Taking into account the bonus of unused space, one can build Doom Star more nimble than any Frigate can ever be, simply by not putting too much equipment on board (edit: not true, empty Frigate has higher combat speed than empty Doom Star). Size plays no role. Am I getting this right?

No problems;
- So industrial accident causes some pop & buildings to cease to exist. Only the Nova event can make a planet radiated.
- Indeed the initiative is a combination of speed and attack value as follows (in 1.50): beam_attack + speed * 10. The base speed difference between a frigate and DS is 7, so thats 70 points delta for initiative in favour of a frigate. Keeping space free in Doom Star helps for initiative, even though this empty space speed advantage has been halved in ICE compared with standard mode. Hope this helps!

This has been very helpful, thank you.

I have not yet tried ICE but I must say that halving the speed bonus for empty space onboard is hereby very much approved by me. Keeping at least one space empty when fitting out a ship has long been a standard trick I have used since '99.

If one wanted to make smaller hulls more attractive, one might change the speed the drives apply, e.g.:

drive nuclear_drive = 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 99 8 6 5 4 3 99 13 11 10 9 8 2;

This would make the frigate very fast. A better scaling would be necessary.^^

Are there other possibilities to change the hulls' base values. When I am looking at this:

hull frigate = 20 25 4 4 4 1 2 1 1 0 0 0 50 4;

- I take it, the last six values are only relevant for AI vs. AI and in case tactical combat is turned off?

Is there a way to add better beam attack or defense directly to ship hulls for tactical combat?

No, just when tactical is off. AI battles by tactical rules if tactical is on.

There is no way currently. It's possible to add some new per hull modifier, but that'll make formulas even more obscure and I doubt it'll improve the game.

You can tune hull hp/space to make it more attractive, ICE does it.

Here's a fun one.

The player has a fleet en route to attack the colony of Tammech. During the battle, the player's fleet will be destroyed, but the enemy battlestation will be captured and will destroy the other planetary defenses. After the battle, having "won," the player will be prompted with a bombard/invade/cancel screen, but can take no action because they have no ships left.

SAVE1.GAM

This one is less fun.

On the next turn, a fleet of six Antaran Harbingers will warp into the galaxy. Vanilla game settings!

SAVE2.GAM

And another one, 10 turns later! This shit is bananas!

SAVE3.GAM