Hmnn,, Where is it

[wingte]

Ok,, what happened to the new demo..



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Wingte

[Machetti]

http://www.malfador.com/whatsnew.html

got postponed 'til friday.

[Baron Munchausen]

Just plain old ordinary bugs. Machine code is unpredictable and getting 1 megabyte plus of code to behave the way you want is not a simple thing. I am doubtful of the projected "gold" date for the game, too. I would not be surprised if they push it back a month or more.

[wingte]

I also doubt the final release date so I downloaded SE III and then registered it so I can practice on it just to get the "feel" of the game.

I hope SE IV cures what seems to be a problem in SE III where the Colonization and Population Ministers stop working when the game is saved and then later reloaded.
There also appears to be a limit to how far the Colonization minister will try to move a Colony ship in SE III and the Population Minister doesn't seem to have any qualms about completely depleting one planets population in it's zeal to populate another planet.
The Resupply Minister is also kind'a clunky. What good is it to creat a fleet if the Resupply Minister is going to slowly dismantle it by sending individual ships off to get supplies instead of sending the whole fleet. It is also disconcerting to set a fleet to guard a warp point and next thing you know,, all the ships are sitting at a resupply station two systems away. There also needs to be a Targeting Minister that becomes available when a specific level of technology is reached that would let me send a fleet after an enemy fleet without having to constantly monitor every move.
I didn't get the opportunity to really try the ministers out in the Demo but the little that I read in the SE IV help file makes it appear to me that the Ministers in SE IV are simply a direct import from SE III.

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Wingte

[Grumbling Grognard]

Ministers?

MINISTERS???

WE DON'T NEED NO STINK'N MINISTERS!



Never use the little buggers. Don't trust'em! As soon as you turn your back those little #@$%#@ will stab you in the back, kill all yo young'ens and appoint themselves Emperor!

...errrr, sorry. Forgot, it's just a game.

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The Grumbling Grognard

[Master Belisarius]

Wingte: the Ministers in SE4 still need to be improved...

For example the population minister, like to mix populations of different races, with different breathes, doing your planet useless (if you have a planet with oxygen atmosphere, and a race that can breath oxygen, your planet can support a lot of facilities). But if you drop 1M population of other race that can not breath oxygen in that planet, the planet only will support a few facilities (even though that would have millions of other people breathing oxygen at the same time on this planet).

Then, I'm with Clinton: not trust in your ministers.
Then,

[Baron Munchausen]

Yes, my most frequent complaint to Malfador about the game is the brain-dead population transport minister. It's really tedious to manually load population into a transport and send it off to a specific planet to drop them, then bring it back for more... etc., etc. But if you let the minister do it, the little bitty domed-colony planets with a hostile environment get filled up and the big 8 billion capacity planets with good environment get drained. The sensible way to do it would be to try to keep an even _percentage_ of population on your planets. Any planet that fills up while others are not full just cuts your over-all population growth. It often doesn't even check how MUCH population a planet needs and sends several full transports when only a partial load from one transport would be needed. Even worse, it will load a transport full of population and then if it decides there's no need to drop them anywhere they just sit there. While in a transport they are not contributing to your population growth rates, and if you NEED the transport for something else in the future you may find that all your planets are now full and you can't find anyplace to put them. It's as if the population transport minister is working for the other players. Grrr....

I wish this minsiter worked properly, it would save a LOT of the grunt work in the game. I don't use many of the other ministers. I can't believe anyone would use the politics minister, for example. Would you want to play a game not knowing if you might randomly find yourself at war with another player at any moment?

[wingte]

Well one thing I did notice in SE IV was that when you manually sent a colony ship out that was equiped with population cargo pods,, that the cargo pods would fill up with people. In SE III this doen't happen,, so,, maybe,, if the Minister in SE IV sends a colony ship out automatically,, it will also fill the cargo pods automatically and reduce the need for the Population Minister.

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Wingte

[jars_u]

Gold date going to get pushed back? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! Never used any of the ministers but after reading the Posts in this forum I guess that is a good thing.

[wingte]

The Colonization Minister is very handy and when it is working it is pretty good. It seems to be a bit biased toward colonizing the largest closest planets first but this isn't necessarly a bad thing since I prefer to put my resupply depote, space port and shipyard on the largest planet so I have room to put planetary defenses.

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Wingte