Main menu elements order (OK, now Galactic War talk)

We don't know those stats. But Jon Mavor does know those stats since he's worked on all three games that I mentioned.

But the most important thing is that PA played is mainly against the AI.

Spring and FAF don't matter when the majority of PA players play against the AI.

i probably made 60% of those. (also arbitrary)


you have to launch a bagillion games to test your mod, it's the worst chore. while making my icon mod that's what i had to do.

these numbers are worthless if they count all the mod-creation process which requires you to run a bagillion hosts to test it, none of those in multi.

No, there's a mod that comes already with PA that makes it so pressing alt+p? I don't remember the key combo, whatever. The point is- there's a premade mod that allows refresh of all mods in a game.

Mod developers are an incredibly small fraction of people who play PA.

Not large enough to skew the statistics.

don't try to test my knowledge on this matter

trust me I wouldn't have wasted my time if I could have afforded not to. This is why I so vehemently pressed for Sandbox mod releases from @wondible

that mod saved me cumulated days of time, ...literally.

the icons (and this is still the case today) are loaded when the game starts up and only then, (you can tell by the error logs the game puts out when you run it, and you'll get to see those when and if you switch to linux ) F5 (that’s what it is. (see? I know my stuff)) does not refresh the icons.

Dat parenthesis stack.

my schwartz is definitely large enough to skew statistics.

anyways I get your point I can't have done all that alone but modders most definitely have a big percentage of those AI games, it's sheer logical outcome since you can launch more games if you're only running the game a minute or so compared to the guy who plays one match an hour.

'tis how I rotate ^=^

Tatsujb, the only opinion that makes a difference on this one is Ubers' as it's their game! If you *really* hate it that much I'll bet you can make a mod to rearrange it though.

Still, I don't really see a good reason for Uber to change this here. I mean look at it this way, if you could pick just one thing to change or fix regarding PA, are you honestly telling me this is it? If the answer is something else, then perhaps your efforts would be better spent in championing a more worthy cause?

Except there's maybe a dozen or few modders and thousands of players. Especially since modders can refresh the mods without creating a new game.

Doesn't change the fact that you have no data, the developers do, and the developers say the majority of games are against the AI.

And we have arbitrary data with the replay list, it may not be the most accurate and COULD be skewed, but it most certainly helps with the assumption that what Uber says the stats are, are true.

just taking the time to humor this.

no, of course not.

the one thing that matters most to me in "fixing" or "changing" PA is that it be regarded as an engine and not a game, as I had originally understood by subtext in the Kickstarter, was the original intent.

this would mean making it run.
making it run fluid.
and making it run fluid while doing alot.

Measuring Schwartzes here (since I have decided, is the theme of the day) we'd want to see :

• how far you could zoom in and out (total scale)
• size of units to their planets (relative scale)
• how many units run and fire simultaneously (unit cap for 1.0 simspeed)
• how many players you can have
• 64/32bit
• multi/single core
• how many graphical technologies (point light, HDR, 3D FX, tesselation.. ect)
  
• what graphic libraries
  
• server-client/float-point P2P
  
• scripted AI/neural networks AI
• ect.

and out of those, obviously the element of the engine that I find to be most lacking in PA is the scale.

And seeing by experience I have learned that a loving community and much time can fix a game and make it amazing but no amount of community love or time can fix a game's engine, this is what worries me the most in PA's current engine (which comparatively with all of the other elements of another simulated-projectile RTS engine, say FA, for example is pretty damn well-off ) : scale.








of course (and as you can see in the O.P.):

realistically I'm only hoping for a mod on the matter of menu elements order, but I'm glad you asked that question because I feel it does deserve answering.

What does OP actually stand for? Original Post? Original Point? I understand what it /means/ but not what it stands for.

Opening Post I believe, although all 3 definitions work imo

RTS games usually have an awesome singleplayer. It's not hard for me to believe most players stick to singleplayer as I myself used to do this.
Still, since I play multiplayer a lot on PA, for obvious selfish reasons and the reasons you posted in your first post I voted to put multiplayer on top

good of you to point this out, I'm going to go ahead and develop on this. The thing is PA currently does not. Now everyone hold your horses on calling me out on this, because I never said it won't I said it doesn't and I'm saying what we currently got is likely what's in for us at release.

Is PA's Galactic War any good from my experience? No. It's boring. FAF's Galactic War and campaign (plus co-op campaign) beats the pants off it. It really needs some serious iteration and I'm saying this because it's what people are thinking deep down and are afraid of saying. It'll help the developers more if they know.


conquering a map of a galaxy in and of itself is a sufficient driving force and a great start.

from there (if I'd had the mast) I'd have orientated towards having all of the systems of the galaxy be part of a whole, but individual system states stored, not active and live, as it's unrealistic to hope to be running all the data from all the systems in that galaxy on a single computer (for offline singleplayer) and why not a version where all the systems are live, like FAF's Galactic War, where conquered systems send over units to neighbouring systems and all fights are live and tied into one, because here it's realistic to be hoping to have a powerful enough server that feeds all the data to each player, FAF's GW, on the other hand, is different (because of the non client-server architecture), it requires only a tiny bit of data interactions in between each system (as there aren't huge amounts of units that are teleported (the price per-unit is VERY high) and the "planets" are running client-side, so there isn't much for the server to do. ...I believe FAF's GW server is a single NAS, or something ridiculous, so, yea different story but, done well, a massively active, interacting Galactic war would be fantastic and so interesting!

it could also be done to make a fixed, heavily toned down compared to reality, output of units for each conquered system, so as to be able to run a "live" version of the galaxy and conquer it in singleplayer.

there are tons of ideas and I'm not the master of ideas.

but I feel the card gimmick is largely disappointing, and anyone wanting this could play Hearthstone instead, having themselves a much grander time.

Make the order randomized based on the phase of the moon!

Someone make a mod to control ordering and add that as a 1. april joke

I'm away on holiday at the moment so this may have changed and I've just not noticed, but ..
I'm one of those players who plays mostly against the AI, and to set the game up I have to choose Multiplayer; Single Player is just for the Galactic War campaign.

On that basis I voted that Multiplayer should be the top option.

Of course I'm unable to play at the moment so if this has changed in the last week or two, ignore me for spouting gibberish.

I agree. It's a sequence of games vs the AI in which you and the AI are restricted in using the already poor unit roster. I can create a system and think up an scenario vs the AI that would be far more interesting than any game I played on GW so far. The galactic view offers nothing strategicaly. It's just dots for you to conquer, each with a couple of lines of meaningless lore (not trying to offend the lore guys on the forums, but it doens't add to the gameplay).

Funny that this should come up, since I was thinking about that. GW is not very compelling in its current state. At least for the medium and small sized maps, you wind up tossing nearly all of the techs you find, either because you have no free slots or, more rarely, because they're a duplicate of a tech you already have. This kills any sense of progression and there's never a point in single player GW where player has the entire tech tree (or even a reasonable portion of it) to play with.

Some things I'd like to see to shore up GW are:

• Guarantee finding a number of specified slots by the time you reach the endgame. For smaller GW maps, this may mean giving out a slot alongside a technology every other planet.
• Eliminate duplicate technologies.
• Storage structures should be included in the base tech loadout. It's not worth consuming a tech slot for it in and of itself but playing games without it is just irritating.
• If the player doesn't have a game-ending tech (SXX/Anchor, Halley, nukes), the AI shouldn't be permitted access to it either, at least at the normal AI level.

A preferable long term solution would be to implement a simple resource model, along the lines of Brian's or my thoughts in an earlier thread that lets you make use of every tech you find.

just eliminate the card gimmick completely! it needs to be a live galaxy, is what I say!