The purpose of this thread is to briefly examine what works in the game and what should be the top priority in the Egosoft's checklist. I will be, with your help, adding a list of bugs and problems with possible workarounds and listing them hierarchically based on player's progression. This should give us a rough estimate about start / mid game / end game features, whether they work properly and how critical the bugs are. I will be also listing mods or fixes which could potentially improve the experience and make the game playable.
This thread serves for pointing out the most critical sections of the game, that need to be fixed before Egosoft decides to do anything else.
Start
Player mostly focuses on doing missions and saving up to buy first trader or miner.
Repair signal leaks mission
Severity: Low
Workaround: Complete mission as normally. You will get rewarded for less work.
Description:
- Counting leaks starts from 1 instead of 0. This results in having to fix one leak less than asked.
Severity: Medium
Workaround: Accept it the first time it is offered and move on with whatever you please. You can continue the quest at any time.
Description:
- The scientist will not contact you ever again after denying the mission the first time. The result is that you can not get an HQ
Severity: High
Workaround: Wharf Workaround
Description:
- The wharfs are not getting properly supplied. If you are not fast enough you will not be able to buy a ship.
Start status: Working
If you stick to exploration and doing missions, there is nothing broken as far as I am aware. We can mostly assume that the start works as intended.
Mid - Game
You already have a few traders or miners. You continue doing missions and saving up to expand your empire. Piracy is already an option here. You focus on improving your ship and your combat fleet.
Trading AI
Severity: High
Workaround: TaterTrader
Description:
- Trading AI is buying only few wares, not filling up its storage and then proceeding to sell, which results in only extremely small profits making then pointless.
Severity: High
Workaround: Manually empty the cargo and assign only single ore type.
Description:
- If AI is assigned with multiple wares to mine, it would mine those that it is unable to sell, causing it to get stuck at full storage until emptied.
Severity: Medium
Workaround: Turret Gains
Description:
- Turrets still have bad target leading. They aim at the target directly rather than aiming ahead resulting in most shots being missed. This has been improved with patches a bit.
- The damage is laughable. Turrets work as support weapons at most, unable to take down even fighters. The damage of an L turret is lower than it is MK1 gimbaled counterpart.
Severity: Medium
Workaround: Enter each ship that has marines manually (Major annoyance especially if you do not have teleportation). For the second part simply remove every order from your fleet and tell them to fly away. (Again terrible annoyance and micro management and makes boarding in a busy warzone impossible)
Description:
- Commanding your fleet to start boarding operation usually results in not launching the boarding pods until you enter the ship yourself
- The fleet ignores the commanded course of actions during boarding operation. Commanding the fleet to maintain distance has no effect. They keep shooting the ship until it blows up. Same results for any other command.
Severity: High
Workaround: No universal workarounds. Going out of sector and enabling vsync was one of the suggested course of actions.
Description:
- Boarding certain ships will freeze the game forcing you to kill it via the task manager.
Combat AI & wings
Severity: High
Workaround: None
Description:
- Ships do not maintain proper distance during escort. They usually end up way too far. Reason being that they avoid using travel mode. The travel mode is only used when initiated by the player. Result is massive distances between the fleet and the player (Usually a sector away and once they enter the sector, they simply fly in normal mode. You have to wait ages before they approach your position)
- Formations from my observations have no effect. It is completely ignored by the AI
- Ships like to suicide a lot. Mainly because they do not follow the formation and usually end up flying into a squadron of enemies getting ganked.
- Do not fight close to the gates. The ships will start randomly warping around, taking highways to sectors 2 gates away, completely getting separated from your squadron
- Follow up. Ships will also chase enemy ships inside the gate, getting annihilated.
The core aspects of the game barely work here. If you stick to doing missions and making money by having a squad of miners passively generating income then this stage of the game works. But once it comes to anything else, it is pretty much a bugfest.
Additional notes: As it currently stands, the interface is lacking mass management features. There is no proper method to mass set default behavior of ships, no way to mass transfer marines or other crew (Fixed with Workaround: Mass Move Marines), no fast method to control your wing without opening the map, and selecting them all. No drag and drop method to edit the command priority queue (You have to manually click your way up to the top).
Generally the AI lacks command prioritization. If you set the AI to follow you, then that is the only thing they will do, even if their lives depended on it. They will not defend themselves or attack unless told otherwise.
This part of the game starts focusing more on your empire instead of yourself. And since the AI is barely working, you can not expect this game stage to work either.
End - Game
Huge fleet and station chain. You mostly play through the strategy map and manage your empire. Sometimes you join fights and support your squads. During this stage, the game basically turns into an RTS.
Station Trading AI
Severity: High
Workaround: TaterTrader
Description:
- The traders assigned to stations are horrible at decision making. If they do sell wares they sell very little of it. They supply the station with unneeded resources, and avoid supplying it with needed resources. Without using the workaround, the stations are basically not usable
Severity: Low
Workaround: Set the modifier before adjusting available credits.
Description:
- Adjusting funds for building also adjusts global price modifier.
This is where the interface really hits you in the nuts.
The currently implemented interface is simply not built for supporting such a huge fleet. Managing your empire is extremely difficult (Not without huge amounts of micro management). The game is supposed to be RTS at this point, but we are lacking the tools to properly manage. Every second you spend here makes you tear your hair out.
If you want to do something other than making money passively, then forget it. You will not be able to do that thanks to the non-functional AI and management problems.
