What is the problem with SE5?

[se5a]

What slick said, and also to some extent spaceempires suffers from the same thing as what uncle joe said, "most of the buyers play single player"

[Q]

At the moment (I might have answered that differently at the release of the game) it is definitely the extremely weak AI.

[President_Elect_Shang]

Awesome Q thanks! I think the AI needs work too and us modders can do that. I haven't taken a good look under the hood at the AI part yet but it looks sort of nuts. Anyway the AI can be improved in updates but there is nothing we can do about the out-of-box sale. I was under the impression many more people played this game in MP than solo. In fact I thought I was one of the last solo players left. In fact I have always been playing with myself ( no pun meant) since I first found this game. I didn't even pay attention to a MP option till SE4. Maybe I should take a pole because I can't really agree with you there. Now had you said most members play mixed, some MP and some Solo I would agree wholeheartedly. Maybe I will start a pole later today, or someone else here can.

[Mephisto]

The UI. UI shows that Aaron doesn't play his games which he confirmed several times in the public. It lacks streamlining, doesn't provide the infos I'm looking for and don't place the commands that I need next to the item I want to manipulate. Take ship design: Se4 was much more streamlined and easy to use. Now its something I avoid which is most sad for a SE game!
Besides the UI what stirs me are features that add nothing to game play but make it more complicated for nothing in return. Why place components on ships when it does near to nothing (ships blow up so fast that the directional damage doesn't come into play anyway).
Why add a maintenance cost to the most basic facilities? If my Mineral Miner Facility earns 1000 and costs 100 per turn, why not just earn 900? It is much easier to understand and to calculate (for the AI, too...).

Aaron should play his games for at least 150 turns in a row. to avoid UIs like this one.

P.S.: Yes, I'm somewhat bitter!

[Azselendor]

The Reason why I bring up UI as being the key flaw in SE5 is that without an easy, intuitive interface, the overall playability of the game dies off rapidly. Atrocities touched upon most of the UI issues.

As for things like bugs, Aaron is directing his efforts onto that and the AI can be fixed by us --the we can form an angry mod and force Aaron to adopt it into the next patch.

Another issue I'll point out is something that SE5 inherited from Starfury is the lack of ease in developing new race styles for the game. If Aaron does an SE5 Gold, it must MUST have a ship-modeling program that exports to SE5.

[Slick]

I'll also add these questions with no intent to hurt anyone's feelings:


Given the following:

- SEV was built from the ground up to be extremely moddable. (As I mentioned above, maybe even at the expense of making other things better.)

- Everyone agrees that the AI could be much improved.

- I am not a modder due to time constraints and just not finding it fun.

- It has been shown in SE:IV that even with lesser modability, the AI can be greatly improved (TDM, for example)

- We would be hard pressed to make a list of SEV mods longer than a 10. I'd hope that all this modability would be embraced by more than a handful of people.


My questions:

Why is it that, now, 3 months after release it appears that nobody or at most very few people are working on improving AI's? (This doesn't count the time that the beta testers had access to the game, nor should it due to their duties to support testing.)

Do you think that MM wasted time putting in all these text files to be modded buy just a handful of people seem to be using them?

Do you think that people are:
a) waiting for the game to get better (patches) before attempting AI improvement?
b) just too frustrated with the game to bother?

[Tim_Ward]

Actually, the major problem for me at the moment is how sluggish the game feels on my machine. The glacial turn processing, and the infi-small delays whenever you click on something, really detract from the experience. All the other problems people mentioned don't help either.

I think the fundemental problem is that Aaron is trying to achieve something with SE5 that can't be achieved by one person in any realistic time frame. I hope he hires a few people for SE6, if there is to be one.

[Santiago]

For me the UI mainly, but as others have said a lot of little things add up rather quickly.

As for Mods- Mods should enhance the playability of the game, not become the game.

[thorfrog]

So what Aaron's take on what is going on with SE5? Is he reading this message board? It would be nice to hear his thoughts on the game as it stands now.

[Captain Kwok]

The primary problem with the AI is that it isn't finished. There are numerous "placeholder" functions that are waiting to be filled in with actual instructions, plus other functions that were hashed in quickly. The difference in AI performance between SE:IV and SE:V has little to do with the change to scripting from hard coding, but just the degree of completion. Aaron is returning to AI work, particularly with the last two beta versions, so improvements are pending.

The actual level of control is superior to SE:IV for modders, but the learning curve is a little steeper. Of the testers I know that would-be AI modders, the most common response has been the fun factor for them with the game - which has hurt their desire to work on AI. The current condition of the stock game is discouraging those that are modding AIs from doing it with stock.

You would have been hard pressed to put together a mod list greater than 10 for SE:IV at this same point in the game's development - so I wouldn't worry about that.

In terms of performance the items hurting it most is the drawing of 2D screens and the pathfinding routines. Yes, multiple chase combats can extend turns, but that is much easier to workaround.

And lastly as Tim as nicely put and I said earlier, it's really too much for one person to achieve in the timeframe we demand.