GC4 EA Feedback Live Branch | VERSION 0.45.188724a

(seems to be solved)  BAD Memory Leak in 0.45 when it was first released.

Version Alpha 0.45.188581

I am playing the GC IV on the Test version track after downloading the new test version 0.45 today. It has the new version of how to choose your next Tech to research. It also had a different setup screen for the game. I choose to play ARM with HUGE for Sector Size with 16 AI Races at I think it was gifted. I am using the Test version icon to start up a new game. So I am definitely playing 0.45. I am also playing on a rather large game map.

It started off with a few lags and slow spots, but it kept getting worse and worse, by May 2307 (only the 5th month of the game) it was unplayable. The graphics would stay frozen for many seconds with the music on a constant loop or repeat of small section of the music, then it would advance a couple of frames in the graphics and the music would update a little, then it would lock again. It kept doing this. It was even hard to save games when you tried to change the name of the saved game that I wanted to use.

I got off the computer for several hours and turned it off, and just came back (just before 10PM time in the Eastern Daylight for the USA. I live in PA). Now I seem to have no problems with the game.

From what I have read about computer programs this behavior is the sign of a serious memory leak in the program, i.e. variables or objects being created for use and memory locations in the computer's RAM assigned to them, but not deleted properly after they were done being used, to free up the memory that they were using. Over time more and more of the computer's memory is tied up in unusable form.

My computer is an Intel CPU with a quad core (that I got new about 3 years ago) on an ASUS motherboard, 16 GB of RAM, with the GC IV program being stored on a 480 GB SSD with Windows 10 on my boot SSD of 114GB. I have a NVidia GeForce Graphics Card, a 1050 Ti with 4 GB of Video RAM. My sound is handled via an external Sound Blaster that uses a USB port to link the computer to the sound generation equipment.

I do have several saved games but my Drop Box account is full at 2 TB, and I have not been able to figure out how to get Drop Box to delete most of those files that I used to download things, usually computer programs. If there is another way for me to send you a saved game file I will, if you want it.

William Ameling, (Masters degree in Physics) also know as Dray Prescot on Steam. (I do not mind connecting the two names, in my Steam Profile for Dray Prescot, I already give my real name.) I have been playing Galactic Civilizations since it first came out on Windows about 18 or so years ago, i.e. before even the first addon was released.

I am happy with my start in the new game as long as I can get it to play and respond reasonably. I got the Eyes of the Universe Wonder and have researched the first of the Subspace Streams Techs. So I can see the locations of all of the Home Worlds of Races with Hyper Drive tech, but at the moment I do not know the locations of the Subspace streams connecting to my Sector (I am looking for them), I have at least 2 Races in my Home Sector, the Drath and the merchants (Iridium or Iridia for HW).

I have already played several games of 0.4 on Large to Gigantic Maps with 16 Races, for several game years, i.e. at least 4 or 5 game years, and have been posting messages on the Forum and Discord for GC IV. My posts for GC IV have been using the William Ameling name.

It is possible that having Eyes of the Universe contributed to me having this problem, i.e. the problem may not have started until after I got Eyes of the Universe built. This is only a possibility, but I think that I saw signs of the memory leak developing, before I got it built.

Question: Can you get memory leaks in the  Graphics/Video Card's memory rather than the computer's RAM?

Maybe a better video card, i.e. with 8 GB instead of 4 GB would help me with GC IV. (I looked on Amazon.com and the cheapest 8 GB graphics cards are well over $500 to over $1,000. A little too much for me. )

added: I accidently declared War on the Krath by right clicking on one of their scout ships. So I went back to a saved game from about turn 12 and restarted. Now I am NOT having any of the problems that I thought were due to a memory leak, and it is turn 35. The game seems to be playing fine.

The only problem is something I had noticed in 0.4, sometimes when I get an survey/exploration result and get a new piece of equipment, particularly a Diablocatalyist, and I tell the ship to take the piece of equipment, it seems to end up on a different ship, probably another of my scouting/surveying ship that had an exploration result on the same turn. It is hard to be 100% sure of this, but that is what I thought was happening.

Could we get a garage where we can look at all the ship parts we've acquired over time? For instance, I would like to know how many drone bays I got.

Another thing I want to see is a guard command. I want be able to place fleets near enemy planets without needing to press spacebar multiple times per turn.

Just left click several times on the ship in the little window that shows the ship or fleet, and it will take you to a screen that shows all of the equipment that is presently on the individual ship, i.e. all of the stuff that you have added by exploring/surveying, fighting battles, etc.

Each Drone Bay will enable you to carry 2 more Interceptors, which can be lost in combat, and then gradually replaced. The window for the ship should show something like 0 / 2 fighters, which means that your ship can carry 2 of them, but currently has Zero of them. I have seen ships like the Discovery get up to having 8 or more Interceptors/fighters. Each one adds 1 to your Beam Weapons and usually 10 Hit Points (supposedly later in the game the Hit Points per Interceptor/Fighter will increase) to your ship.

I've encountered what must surely be a bug—no pun intended—in v. 0.45.188581

In order to get this wildly unbalanced trade, I responded to an incoming trade offer, rejected it, then offered the tech they originally wanted, then asked for all their credits, an obscene amount of weekly credits, and all their colonies.  I was able to get them to accept the trade.  Persuade and Threaten were not used.

Trading planets is a known bug. The AI seems to treat them as though they had negative value. The last I checked, you could get all of their planets, except their homeworld, in a trade deal.

I just got a random event involving some religious sect or cult, where my choices were (1) get a leader, (2) get credits, and (3) gain a cleric citizen. Since I didn't know what a cleric citizen offered, I chose that one, but none of my worlds gained a cleric. So the choice didn't work.

I got another event where a secret outpost was discovered with an alien that had been spying on me. The choices were to gain a diplomat, gain a class 5 colony, and gain 50 research. I chose to gain the class 5 colony, but the colony I gained was not class 5 but class 2.

Typo: The citizen approval tooltip says "There is to much crime" when it should be "There is too much crime".

That event was causing a similar problem in 0.4. Just take the free leader is what I do, rather than get another very small colony world that is a drain on Food supply usually. That event existed in GC III, there you did get a small colony/oupost with 5 population on it, that you had to move off before they died (at a rate of 0.1 per turn) to other Worlds that you owned. This was easier with the colony ships that could carry 3 population in GC III. In GC III that event's greatest value was the free extra population that you could use to build more colony ships or put on good Worlds that needed more population.

I just built my first constructor and got this message:

What is "reserved" or "unreserved" colony population? What is the minimum ship load for a constructor? I would assume it would be one. But the core planet its being launched from has 3 population.

The tech "Hyperdrive Optomization" is misspelled.

Colony ships, constructors, and troop transports need a citizen in order to launch them. What has likely happened is the world you are building the constructor on only has 1 citizen. You need at least 2 citizens to fill a ship with 1. A planet should have have at least 1 citizen (not having one often means that no population growth can happen).

No, as I said in my post the core world it was launching from had 3 citizens.

Had Yor Mission to find out what happened to their ship. They told me not to look at the data. Once I found it by searching anomalies it gave me an option to look anyways - which I did. I told them I looked at it gave a new pop up box about thanking me for my loyalty. Which on the surface seems odd since I technically betrayed them. It could have been sarcastic but hard to tell.

Anyways the bug is - after they said this there is the click box like all other mission stuff but it was greyed out and unclickable so I was stuck on the screen. Esc key wouldn't close the box and nothing I clicked worked anywhere. I had to end up alt-tabbing and closing the game via task manager

In version 0.45, You have to have a Full (i.e. 1.00) population point for the World, that is the "reserved for the World" population.

Then you need another Full (i.e. 1.00) population point to load onto a Colony Ship, Constructor, or a Troop Ship, which is the "unreserved" population, that available to be moved elsewhere.

So to launch a Colony Ship, Constructor, or a Troop Ship from a World, you HAVE to have a full 2 (i.e. 2.00) population points on the Core World (Colonies no longer help provide population like they did in version 0.4) with no rounding upwards. If you have 1.95 population point, sorry NOT Enough to launch the ship. You will have to wait until it grows that last 0.05 population point. The problem is that you may not realize that you do not have the full 2.00 population points before you start building the ship. But the ship will remain in the shipyard or on the planet until enough population is available. Also what you see on your screen (UI) may be a rounded figure rather the actual figure for the population on the Core World. I do not know how many decimal figures the game keeps track of for population and other quantities, i.e. how many digits after the decimal point.

added: Maybe the World had 3 partial (i.e. less than 1.00) population points of different Races, and needed a Full Population point of the same Race to launch the ship.

If that comment was directed at me, I had 3 colonists available on the core world that was launching the constructor. So it can't be a rounding error problem.

On Discord it was pointed out that one or more of my colonists might have been revolting because of low morale. That's possible, the approval was pretty low, primarily because they were starving.

Anyway, the UI needs some work to not be confusing, especially to new players. The messages need to be clearer, for one.

Thank you for the feedback everyone! We are reading it all.

SUGGESTION: Surveillance is Ideological.

Regarding Ideology, it seems a bit... off... to me that building the Bureaucratic Offices adds to Authority, but building the Surveillance Center doesn't add to any ideologies.

For balance and flavor reasons, it makes sense that a building that adds Control should also add ideology points to Authority.  What Control does just makes that make sense.  But I'd suggest that Surveillance is closer to a form of Control (and thus Authoritarian) than Bureaucracy.  Sure, bureaucracies can be co-opted, but an Authoritarian state thrives on Surveillance of the population.

My suggestion is that the Surveillance Centers add Control and Authority, and a separate Public Safety or Police building be responsible for the Crime reduction function that the Surveillance Centers currently perform.

An alternative suggestion would be to keep both buildings mostly as they are in the current 0.45 build and simply adding Secrecy to Surveillance Centers, which would also seem to fit.

Either suggestion would have the added advantage of adding flavor to Surveillance Centers.  

I quite often am getting several, even 4 or 5 or more, survey results per turn, since I am exploring in several Sectors with a lot of tiny ships. There is a problem that I noticed even in my 0.40 games, as well as the 0.45 game I am currently playing. I usually want to keep more of the equipment found by the Discovery, than I do on/by my tiny surveyors (who also have Infinite Range in my design for them), and I will tell Discovery to take a piece of equipment instead of selling it, while if a tiny surveyor was offered the choice I would often tell them to sell it rather than keep it. Many times when the next turn happens, Discovery will not have the new piece of equipment, and instead it appears to have gone to one of my other ships (who all have the same name, i.e. the name of the ship design, probably being one of the ships who also had survey/exploration result on the same turn. Most of my tiny scout (surveyor) ships have the same name so that makes it difficult to track if the ship that got the equipment was the same ship that had the surveying event choice that generated the equipment. So I generally noticed when Discovery did not get what I thought it should have gotten. Discovery has acquired and installed a number of new pieces of equipment and/or upgraded it's speed and sensor range.

This is not a random rare bug, I think that I have seen happen several times just today, in just the last couple of hours, as well in several/many games of 0.40 before today. I am only about 60 or 70 turns into my new game of version 0.45.

Some of my ship designs when I build them, do not get an individual number assigned to them after the name of the design when I build them. It would be helpful that adding such an identifier, usually a number, be the default behavior of the game. If I want them to have a number after them name I usually have to do it manually, on a ship by ship basis, which is tedious and time consuming. Other ship designs do get such a number assigned to them. Why the difference in behavior by the shipyards when new ships get built?

On occasion, I encounter a civ that has invested in orbital drones ideology (drones would appear about 2-3 turns after being destroyed). I designed a transport ship that were mounted with missile weapons. I was hoping that when I start invading a planet, the armed transports would destroy the drones and resume siegeing a core world. It didn't work. I my progress was reset every time the drones were replaced.

I'm still conquering planets that have no population.

I was getting horrible horrible crime on my homeworld for a while. Its seems that I was getting about 10% crime from every colony. I kept getting events that revolved around crime, like giving my police military grade weapons or allowing a dark knight vigilante to run around fighting crime. I'm not sure what happened, but the crime disappeared after a while. Maybe it was some tech that reduced crime by 1000%, or maybe it was because I got a new core world and many of colonies changed where they were sending goods thus reducing crime on my homeworld.

Also in my new game of 0.45, the Pirates, Space Monsters, and the Precursor ships are totally inactive, they do not move or attack anyone, even if they are only a couple of tiles away.

My game is on an Arm size Map with 16 gifted Alien AI races.

I colonized a class 17 precursor planet and got a colonization event where one of the choices was a free constructor. I chose that and built a starbase, and was then shocked to see that the one and only citizen I had on that planet was now on the starbase. I now have a colony with 0 population and 0 growth. I tried sending another colony ship from Earth, hoping to transfer the citizen to the planet and reload the ship after the colony had grown a bit. No luck, I can't find a way to get the citizen on the planet.

Anyway, I don't think the game should booby trap new colonies like this.

Try invading with larger forces of troops and hope to get the invasion finished before the orbital drones come back.

I think that in my last game of 0.4 where I was fighting a War with Xeloxi I had some multi turn invasions get aborted because a new warship got into the World, possibly from a nearby shipyard belonging to that planet.

The problem with trying to invade with larger number of Troops, is that the Troop ships on Cargo Hulls need 8 Logistics Points, so two of them would need 16 Logistics, and 3 of them would need 24 Logistics.  Possibly you might want to design and build Troop ships on Medium hulls which only need 6 Logistic Points, so 2 of them would need 12 Logistics, which is a lot easier to have than 16 Logistics Points.

When I was doing my invasions, I had 39 Logistics Points ( 20 from Orbital Deployment Mastery, and 5 from a heavily defended anomaly, and 4 from the 1st Tech that gives Logistics Points)

Perhaps they were soldiers who got killed by your invasion force, leaving you with Zero population.

OK, I numbered all of my Scout ships so I could track what was happening with Survey results that seem to be going to the wrong ship.

I just had a turn where 6 ships (in a row) found an item from a survey result that they could bring on board, and ALL of the ships did NOT get the item they were supposed to get, instead it looks like the NEXT ship to get a survey result got the item, and the 6th and last ship in the 6 ships was the Discovery and it did NOT get the Defensive System that I specialized to Field/ Shield. It got the Diablo Catalyst that the previous ship was supposed to get, and I think that none of my ships got the Defensive Field/Shield that the Discovery found.

So it seems to be a consistent bug, where when you have a ship pick up a piece of equipment in a survey result choice, that ship does NOT get the item, instead the next ship to get a survey result that turn gets the item.

So you should be able to verify this bug yourself easily with a game of your own. Please FIX this BUG. I have been noticing this problem for several games of 0.40, i.e. for several weeks, and it is still in 0.45.

added: apparently I misunderstood how these add on s work, and they are kept track of on a Race (or Fleet) wide basis rather on a per ship basis, with the experience level of the ship determining if a ship can add an extension/upgrade.

added: Apparently I completely misunderstood how ships were earning and getting upgrade.