While this past week has seen a multitude of releases, we are about to hit a lull due to some extended code refactoring which currently has the game in a state where ground combat and orbital bombardment are not functional. Once we have those systems refactored, we will work on a push and making some visual refreshes to those menus. I am sure you all have noticed that it has taken several weeks to update these systems. We want to provide to more information in this week’s update on what is taking so long with these systems and other work we already have completed and ready for release.
Orbital combat and ground combat have been undergoing very extensive “brain surgery” that will give players a more optimized, consistent, and fully feature implemented experience (universal antidote working with bio-bombs, etc). These changes have also led us to rethink how we are calculating data in the game overall. This is no small thing - LoR (and really any 4x game) at its core is a massive stat calculator with all species traits and technology being modifiers to those calculations. A lot of things were being calculating by code functions within widgets rather than a centralized system of functions. Often how something was calculated for the player and the AI were different as the AI does not need to deal with player input or additional information from the UI. We are now consolidating these player and AI functions, checking functionality, and optimizing code. The optimizing is what has taken additional time because we have also moved from dynamic calculations in some places to have some data be more static and centralized and then using it to be displayed or used for additional dynamic data generation.
In the midst of this process it became clear that the AI was not calculating research correctly in a number of games nor was it doing so very efficiently. While going through logs to troubleshoot ground combat stats for the AI, it became clear that the AI was sometimes not getting the research that it was selecting and the process it used to select research was not efficient. Some benign functions were causing over 10,000 pieces of information to be checked by the time the AI had made research selections for all species. This is now down to a couple hundred loops and the AI is getting the research it is completing. In the process we also developed some tools to help us get logs from the game to better understand what the AI is doing to troubleshoot when and why good or bad decisions are made.
All of this to say that it will be maybe a week before we can release another update that is in a state we feel comfortable releasing. That release will invalidate all previous saves – players will need to start new games because their old saves will not work. We will also be asking for players to send saved games to us for analysis when they are experiencing a weak AI opponent(s).
Lastly we have been working on some other fixes this week that we are excited to be releasing on the next update. This will include a tactical log (see below) for players to see specific data in tactical. We also will be working on a chase camera that should help with player management of ships and add some immersion to tactical in coming updates.
Again, we encourage all of you to report your experience with the game both good and bad as well as provide feedback on hotfixes and quality of life improvements. Please let us know if there are specific technologies or systems not working or unclear which can help us focus on systems to work on.
Thank you for your continued support and feedback and we continue our journey through EA!
