Sounds good! I'm in.

Welcome Zelrik!
The new game format sounds interesting. And it's good to see that all of you still put so much work into this wonderful game! :)

I'm VERY interested in playing in this scenario. :)

This is really cool :)

Great idea with the giant melee as beginner playing ground. About the 20 bug fixes - is there a list somewhere of what was fixed?

Hi Saimud, they were all marked as "complete" in the feedback system over the last couple of days.

Love it!
Welcome on Zelrik,
Great to see additional dev team memeber, can only be a good thing for the future enhancements :)

Great! Good to see that Zelrik starts as a ?second? developer on Nu.

Nice idea will try it at once. Is the ship limit also intact? 30 players thats around 16 ships each, that needs good planning. Espacially for the races with weak low and medium tech ships.
Welcome Zelrik!

Where do we report the issues we find? Because I just encountered a big one.

I saw an open slot in the Cheeseball System game and hopped in as the Lizards. When I opened my first turn, it would appear that the player who left my spot was a Privateer player because I found myself in control of a shiny new BR5 and MBR.

I will clone MBRs every turn for as long as I can, but since this is a Beta, I thought I should report it.

travelscribe, normally the player slot shouldn't have been open, the killrace didn't function correctly which we are looking at. Enjoy your MBR and good luck.

I REALLY like the circular map. Thank you.

So, I guess this is kind of the MMO version of planets.
Does this game use the normal ship limit and building que rules?
Is there a set victory condition?

Potential problem; if a Cyborg player builds a large empire then resigns, that failed empire could leave behind a large resource "desert", any new players spawning in that location would have very little to work with.

Wellcome Zelrik

Will not let me join it keeps saying Join as unknown?
how do you pick a race?

@regicide, there is a dropdown menu when you click on Join where you can pick your race. You are not the first one telling me about this issue, you may need to log out and back in/refresh your page/empty your cache.

@regicide, this happened to me with Chrome but Firefox worked fine.

thanks for the help,
Got it working. I did as zelrik said and all working now. I was using Firefox.

Something is still wrong. The gamedescription tells us you cannot rejoin, but in 33876 the log writes:
2/11/2012 12:39:14 AM Turn 1 jaloke has resigned from The Fascist Empire.
2/11/2012 12:39:21 AM Turn 1 jaloke has joined the game in slot 28 as The Privateer Bands.
Sorry jaloke, i don't want to blame you. I just want to know what happens.
Also the host time delayed, i think

Very happy about the updates to map(circular - why was it ever square?) and HW positions.

The melee is a nice idea! Hello Zelrik!

Map generator: Teamgame homeworld positions are spoiled!
The team used to be neighbours. We just joined a new one 33690: Australis System and my team is spread across the cluster. This would mean every team will need a Borg or at least a hyperjumper. If there are different kinds homeworld positionings in the future this should be shown in the game description. It is crucial to know this before you pick your races. I guess we have to drop from this game again. This is a pity because our third member got his 1-year-premium account as a birthday present and who knows when the next team game will start.
Anyway, how will team homeworlds located in the future? Neighbours or random?

Hmm, grand melee + stellar cartography + explore map would be a pretty nice move. I'd say add in host999 + fleet combat, and you'd have an awesome extension to classic vga planets.

Hope this experiment goes well.

In the meantime I'm just going to have fun in my grand melee game, could care less if I last.

+1 to veldan's suggestions

+ 1/2 to veldan. I would like to see the stellar cartography add-on.

Hi developpers,

could you tell if now all teamgames will have distributed team homworlds or if you go back to neighbour homeworlds for the next teamgame. I think the later is more fun and allows more race combinations.

Thx!

I think the number 1 fix for these games is letting us scroll on the PE list. It is nice not having people able to put me as their primary enemy (why they would, I do not know?), but it probably isn't fair . . probably.

Is the ship limit still 500?

In the line of mjs68508's suggestion: the same goes for minefields. E.g. 'Robot minefield:', yes, but which robot?

(I noticed this in a teamgame with multiple lizards, robots and crystals. I'm sure this goes for giant melee as well.)

Something is wrong with the running start function. In my game, any slot without a player at the first host run was marked dead any any player that misses a turn is marked dead. We've lost 12 players in the first two turns.

Nice creative twist!

Hmm do you really expect 30 people to join a melee and play it every day? I think the only full melee there is the very first one crated. Perhaps the schedule should be different?

Do melees count towards the leaderboard?

Yes they do.

Perhaps is the ongoing changes, but my 4 turns in melee 34252 aren't showing in my junior facist officer records.

How about a 4th game?

I find it very disturbing that when a new game type is introduced for testing that fundamental changes are made before the game is completed, hell this was even before turn 15. Now instead of racekill it's now racekill to benefit privateers. Seriously, I have never playtested a game that had the rules changed during the game. It's been my experience that you play the game as released, make notes and gather feedback. Then you make adjustments to the game. Repeat that process until you have a polished game.

I'm guess you've never developed a game or product before. If you recognize what you perceive as a flaw, you correct it. A scenario was brought to the developers attention, that they agreed with, and adjusted the scenario accordingly.

@seveiht

Well you guessed wrong. I have indeed worked on development of games. Now in the future you may want to keep guess work out of matters. That makes for very poor development with any product ;)

I know an issue was brought up about privateers, my whole point is that you should not change a game in progress, wait until after the game has completed then make suggested changes. Then test the changes and get new feedback. Knee jerk reactions are not good for a development cycle. Period.

Now if you have ever indeed developed a successful game or product you should know that.

Changes mid stream are annoying - you sign up for one thing and someone moves your cheese which can have unforeseen consequences like destroying your strategy. I hate that too. I find changing the victory conditions especially annoying.

However, in this case there is a "beta" attached to this new format warning players that they should expect some changes. This doesn't make sudden changes any less annoying, but it is a big red flag screaming that there will be changes. In the beta games/products I've tested there were always changes and sometimes crashes at especially annoying times. . . We didn't like this but unless the "beta" was part of a marketing ploy, this was part of the development process. As is your feedback.

On of my computer science friends once told me this joke: How do you tell who the pioneers are? They are the guys with arrows sticking out of their backs.

-V-

I think the change is good - waiting for 3 turns for killrace to kick in. This gives time for someone to take over a good position, yet clears the area soon, if no one is willing.

However, the rationale is poor. Scuttling fleets in surrender is the rule. You never saw sailors abandoning ships after a war and letting them float around in the ocean. Even if scuttling was disallowed in a surrender treaty, local commanders usually scuttled, anyway.

In scifi, the self-destruct button is a time honored tradition.

In addition, the Crystal were xenophobic and were quite happy for you to destroy your ship.

To change the rule for better game play is a good idea. But, to change it for the Privateers/Crystals is just silly.

your underlying assumption here is that the original race kill decision was to be a skuttle to keep tow captures from happening. Since the developers corrected that move it was obviously not their intent.

If you are also missing the leaderboard points for the melee games please vote here: http://planets.uservoice.com/forums/136520-general/suggestions/2617980-bug-melee -not-adding-to-leaderboard

Not getting my points here.

So how is the killrace benefiting privateers? Where does this discussion on special treatment come from? Did I miss other forum entries on this?

I do think Crystals and Privateers suffer from nearly captured ships disappearing under your nose just because the player gave up.

kedalion:

The discussion was in the Cheeseball game where Joshua is. Killrace doesn't help anyone. The Killrace was change from next host to the third host after dropping.

I think it is a good idea from a gaming standpoint. It allows replacements some time to join. Yet, it clears the ship queu pretty fast and doesn't allow people free ships after 3 turns. The reason given was silly, though, as what happened was, in essence, that the Privateers and Crystals will benefit from people dropping out while other races shouldn't. Actually, the lizards and fascists will also benefit as they will have more turns to capture weakly held star bases. The Empire will be helped as they will be able to zip over and capture any SB with an SSD.

Here's a question about killrace. What happens to the infrastructure (mines, factories? presumably defence posts get destroyed)

mjs68508, I can see that argument, but naturally it is only valid if it wasn't the priv or the crystal working the race down until they quit.

For example imagine a Crystals player webbing the whole space and trapping the enemy fleet. The opponent drops out and now the Crystals have to run to get the ships in time? They are safe and sound stuck in their webs already (maybe not fully depleted of fuel yet, but not way of escape and just a question of time).

If it works like the old kill race it just sets natives to 0, crew of ships to 0 before host run. Then all ships are lost and infrastructure starts to decay.

I take it that this pace of 1 turn per day is for the whole game and not just the first 15 turns?

Uh-Oh.

It was posted somewhere, that it will go for 30 turns, then drop to 3 turns a week.

Thanks. I found it. It is in the Cheeseball System, the alternate official Melee thread.

I destroyed a MDSF and did not get destruction points for it. Are we supposed to get destruction points in Melee games?

(Orkney System)

Could we get some statistics on display on the game page?

-Total Priority Points gathered
-Number of ships destroyed
-Total KT's destroyed
-Etc...

Would be nice to see!

+1 to turssi's idea!

Turssi your idea would be nice also for following along the championship games. You should post it on the feedback page.

Hi!
I would like to try out the giant melee format. But a hosting every day respectively 3 times a week is too often for me.
Would it be possible to set up a giant melee game which is hosted twice a week?

These games need to rise the ship limit to 999...

Also, how do we give away ships? I tho the fc worked from gs1 to gsU but it seems not...

The receiver must:

1. Have a ship at the same location at the beginning of the turn.
2. Have a clan on the ship or have a clan transferred to the ship during the turn.

I have a question abit gsX friendly codes. How are they supposed to work? For example, I want to give ship to race in spot 25 - how to know the right "character"?

Thanks in advance!

Here's a suggestion.

On the list of players in the game screen.  Instead of listing them by number, list them by their code.
ie.

1-9, a-z
instead of 1-30
Will make it very clear what code identifier to use for the races, and for the particular player.

Uppercase or lowercase letters? I remember it being lowercase, but saw some uppercase examples above...

Super Refit mission on my Nova did not work in Giant Melee Game http://planets.nu/games/33942 Gotti's Hideout.

Nova Class Super Dreadnought #427 left my SB #101 with mission set to Super Refit. I wanted to upgrade the 10 mark4 tubes with the 10 mark8 tubes and also hoped for the 235 mark8 torps to be loaded to the Nova as stated @ Donovan's.

This turn the ship has 0 torps and the tubes are still mark4.

@development team: can you fix this?

Looks like a SB related bug. Now I cancelled my Loki building order and all the parts allocated for the build disappeared.

I reset the turn and the build sceen at SB #101 continues all messed up.

It does not list the hull / components of the Loki being built and as stated earlier Super Refit mission did not work for my Nova.

@Joshua: Thanks for fixing my SB!

Looking at the three first Giant Melee's all at turn 50 with 10/30 races still going strong.

Look's like a clear trend. Anyway, in my game many Crystals are dominating. All EE's died very quickly.

What races are strong in the other Giant Melee's?

Thats interesting, I was just thinking yesterday in Cheeseball most of the 7 Crystals died early.

Where there 7?? no wonder i was surrounded by them. I had thought the races were limited to a maximum of 4 of each.

But I was surprised to have survived this long as the sole rebel player. I had expected to go down fast in close quarters with lizards, privateers and crystals.

Were there 7?? no wonder i was surrounded by them. I had thought the races were limited to a maximum of 4 of each.

But I was surprised to have survived this long as the sole rebel player. I had expected to go down fast in close quarters with lizards, privateers and crystals.