For the second time I haven't been able to do the Quest for Knowledge interactive mission. I get to the bit with "hack the computers" or "make them talk" (which is written incorrectly as "make them to talk" btw). I try to hack the computers but the security alarm goes off and it fails. I tried to make the prisoners talk 6 times at an expensive 25 turns apiece but they all failed!

I know it says "the chance of failure will be a lot higher" but I think that's a bit ridiculous, particularly for a 25-turn cost. Every other mission I've tried only needs one or two tries to pass. Can I suggest maybe increase the success rate or lower the turn cost for that one?

ahydra

What's the point of research if you don't have planets. I suppose it could become an asteroid mining fest but having planets in there would make it more fun IMHO (raids, conquering etc).

30 days off gold membership time is a bit high also given it costs $20 for 365, so 18 days for $1.

Don't allow alts at all, increase the worker production rate, 2 turns/min instead of 1 and most of all, make it all about big ships blowing up other big ships

ahydra

Unfortunately the logs have disappeared. I can promise you it was right though.

Perhaps SirEmi can clarify the neb rules? For instance, I'd also like to know what determines the amount of neb time, I've had 24hrs, 20hrs and today only 16.

ahydra

Well, the display on the page should be accurate, right? I know it's only a matter of refreshing the page but it's still technically a bug if it displays the wrong info.

Hate to add another one, but I accidentally clicked the logout (instead of the items button) after doing an encryption mission. When I logged back in I got the reward but not the biofarm income for the 1 turn used. (This is a bit more serious than the other ones, it actually costs money, but I'm not going to demand it back) The best way to fix this would be to rearrange the order of events again - do the 1 turn use before generating the combat for the mission.

For "stupid crap" I could go on for hours. There's plenty of spelling errors, interface design inconsistencies, information display problems and goodness knows what else that doesn't actually matter _at all_, but since they rank even lower than the bugs I've posted above I haven't bothered to list them yet. Sorry if you see me as a perfectionist but space MMORPGs are a competitive field and repairing such minor issues can only help to improve the reputation of the game. Of course, as I've already said, the more important stuff must come first and this list is here for after.

ahydra

Nah, I got nebbed after several small attacks in a row (none were >= 20%). Whatever happens it seems to be 20% of total power required in terms of damage anyway

True, these bugs don't affect the playability of the game an awful lot, but they're still bugs. This thread can still be added to, even if (quite reasonably) it isn't looked at until there is nothing better to do.

Another one: mining suffers from the same "not adding turns before page loads" problem as segment building.

ahydra

I'd like to add message flags to the above list. It says "you have 1 alliance message waiting", then you go to the Alliance page and it still says that. Ideally it should clear the flag before displaying the Alliance page, not after. I think the same thing happens with "mail box" as well.

ahydra

I'm not sure if this is in reply to my post but if it is, we're both saying the same thing lose 20% of Total Power over one or more (7, 100, any number) attacks and you get nebbed.

What I was puzzled about is, if you build ships/workers/gain credits after taking say 10% damage, does a further 10% neb you or does it reset to needing 20%?

ahydra

I think you don't have to lose the 20% of power in one attack, it can be spread over several. I lost 23% before I got neb'd but that was over seven attacks.

As such I guess things like building new ships/segments/workers will reset the "damage taken" count (so if you build a new ship you can be beaten up 20% of your new power), but I'm not sure. What about things like doing a mission and getting a few extra credits, or stashing away some credits?

ahydra

This is my stash screen atm:

344.676.773
Interest Rate: 0.02%

but the text underneath says 0.01% for every 100M, so it should be 0.03%. In fact up to today it's been working fine (rounding appropriately) but for some reason it now seems to have frozen at 0.02%.

ahydra

edit: it's now 399.991.787 and showing 0.04% (correct). Not sure what's happening
edit2: I donated, got a bunch of credits and it's gone wrong again.
12.302.110.395
Interest Rate: 1.22% (should be 1.23%)

Looks suspiciously like floating point rounding problems - suggest using a 64-bit integer type for the stash credits (and regular credits etc) and then dividing this down to 100x the interest rate first, then converting to a float, rounding and dividing by 100.

Taken from the ranking list as of now:

55   <name> (#xxxxxx) 19873 -37    ONLINE 51.676.677

This guy has -37 ships!

ahydra

Thanks for the help. Having just lost a very expensive ship because several fleets of small ships picked at it over the course of the battle, I'm including defence on my next design

ahydra

You'll notice I already took that into account, I added 300 on for each point.

ahydra

Could someone advise as to how the "defence bonus" on specials and computers work? Do they add directly to HP eg 10% bonus on 1M hp = 1.1M hp, or does it only add to actual "defence" eg 1M hp + 1000 defence + 10% bonus = 1M hp but 1100 defence (which I read somewhere is actually 5500, one defence point can take 5 damage)

Thanks,

  ahydra

You may need to check the order of some events (add turns, calculate, check, subtract turns/credits) for some actions. Most actions go in that order but some have problems.

The main one I noticed is when building biofarms (and possibly other segments). The turns aren't added first. For example suppose you can build 25 biofarms per turn and you have 1 turn. If you wait 1 minute then ask for 50 it says "not enough turns". Of course the page refreshing causes the turn amount to be updated and hence you can now build 50, but the turns should be added first like in other actions.

One other strange thing about biofarms is the way that they all generate once you build, meaning that if you can complete multiple segment missions in 1 minute you gain more from waiting for enough turns to build them all and then buying them all at once, rather than buying as many as possible with each minute. For example:

can build 25 farms/turn, have 1 turn and 150 segments
if I build them all 25 at a time, I gain (1+2+3+4+5+6) x 25 x 10 = 5250 credits
if I wait until I have 6 turns and then build them all, I get 6 x 150 x 10 = 9000 credits

I'm not sure if this was intentional but it seems counterintuitive somehow (a farm giving a full turn's output immediately after being finished rather than requiring 1 turn to get going).

I recently levelled up my commander by buying 3 exp points (having been annoyingly stuck on 2997). The cost for one exp point is (current total * 300), so it should have cost 899,100 + 899,400 + 899,700 = 2,698,200. However it seems the order is wrong here as well - the exp was added before the cost was calculated and it charged me 2,700,000. (I'm not going to complain loudly about the loss of 1800 credits, but if I'd bought more and lost 18M then it might be different ) A correct formula would be

(c/2) x p x (2t + p - 1)

where t is the exp you have to start with and p is the amount you purchased, and c is the cost increment per point (currently 300). I think there was a minimum cost at the low end though which may screw this up slightly.

It would also be cool if you could refresh/update the main screen to show the new amount of credits/workers/whatever when you use one or more items. I guess this is more of an "interface upgrade" suggestion though.

ahydra