Aside from the issues of actually starting a game I've noticed several issues once the game has loaded and is about to begin. 1: Sometimes my commander spawns in a spot I did not select. In this situation I select a location and hit the start button and then my commander simply spawns somewhere else and usually it's a much worse position in a completely different starting zone. 2: Sometimes I'm not given the option to chose a start location as soon as the map is loaded I spawn and the game begins. 3: This is probably the same as #2. I just played a game where I lost. I watched the replay in chronocam and realised that my opponent had 1:30 seconds of play before I started doing anything. The match had simply started before it had finished loading on my machine. I didn't get to chose a start location either. It was my first loss too. :'(
I never got to choose a starting position so far, and I'm wondering that because the start always takes suspiciously long it might be that the game already starts in the background while I still see the loading screen.
I suspect this is what's happening. It may explain all three issues I've been experiencing, each occurring because of the different timing created by entering games of differing sizes.
I can confirm darac's points #1 and #2; must be a bug, it has happened to me a few times now. I've been meaning to search the bug tracker to see if anyone has reported it, and report it myself if it hasn't been, but not done so yet! Played a game against TheWrongCat last night and we both ended up spawning in locations that we had not chosen. It has happened to me against the AI as well.
It's happening from time to time. It's certainly related to starting time, which may be related to memory leaking.
I had a quite interesting game this weekend. The generated system was with two moons and curiosity (can I crash both of them into each other if I load both with Delta-V-Engines? And which one survives?) Game started and all went fine until I searched for the last -suspiciously peaceful- AI. I found the Commander in a crater where he had built two generators and one metal storage but then ran out of space and couldn't get out... Easy victory and I think I nice tell that the spawn of AIs needs a bit work. Maybe make the system treat craters like mountains as you can't spawn on those?
I also experience this during my AI gameplay, my other concern is getting landing locations with no metal nodes in around or near my starting location, yet discover the AI landed on 8-10 ... also I believe theres an issue with internet syncing and the game server, for example if I load more then 2 additional AI's my game loading time takes seriously longer, and after I select my landing zone, I wait... a good 1 minute to 2 minutes before I finally appear, meanwhile the AI has constructed a lot of stuff. One time I landed only to discover an AI player already destroyed!
What is happening is that there is an automatic timer for selecting a location. If you don't pick a location before the time runs out, the computer picks one randomly for you. So if your computer loads slowly then you will have missed the time to pick and the game starts without you and you join in later.
I find that I rarely get more than one starting position to choose from. Is this normal? Is it because the planet is too small to give me multiple options?
The problem of not being able to choose your starting spot has been around since alpha and is do to the game begining before you load into it. Problems will be reduced when uber irons out loading further. Only real bug is loading is hapening during lobby, as loading had been moved to background lobby functions to reduce these problems. My advice is to not hit ready till the colored dot next to the starting planet in the lobby is green. This signifies the system has already loaded @eukanuba: this is generally due to size. What size planet are you on?
Mostly small ones, I find the late game isn't very good yet so I try to avoid anything which might degenerate into a tech rush. That's probably it.
Funny, but small planets usually evolve around a tech rush. My advice is to play on scale 3 planets, build air early on and scout your opponents, send small groups of bots to harrass their econ. Great games all around. The larger planents will also add more spawn points.
