posted 02-21-99 04:04 PM ET        

The first bugs are straight operational bugs. The later bugs are
interface bugs - they don't stop the game, but they confuse and
frustrate the player and take the sheen of an otherwise great game.

Real bugs:
1) On the workshop screen, choosing probe with speeder will give
you a infantry unit image in the chassis screen.

2) pathfinding on territory edges gets very confused.

3) path finding does not always follow the monopole rail thing
and will sometimes meander off onto a road, which is not
free movement

4) Aircraft need to be smarter about diagonals

Possible bugs:
1) You can move out of a city to another square where both squares
are in a units ZOC. This killed me, as I had just build a city
and hurried a garrison while a mind worms stomped up. I decided
to try and capture it with the garrison, so tried to move onto
it but the mindworm was on a steep hillside, and it was not clear
what square it was in, but I figured that if I hit the wrong key,
I would be ok as I was in it's ZOC - wrong. I wound up with the
garrison outside next to the mindworms, who promptly trashed the
city .... grrrr.

Interface issues:
1) the interface should NEVER, EVER, EVER have more than one
purple ok button onscreen. If pressing a button in brings up
another screen with a purple ok in it, EITHER the new screen
and button should entirely cover the first button, or the
first button should be recoloured. This is so that the user
only have to look for a purple button to go on when response
is needed.

2) the ok button should always be on the left or on the right.

3) The workshop interface is VERY inconsistent. Prefered
behaviour would be that when you click on an option, only
those that are valid a lit. For example, if I have a speeder
chassis and click on equipment, I should not see the planet
buster option as lit.

4) Workshop again - If my engineers propose a design, and I change it, and hit
apply, this should change the actual design, NOT create a
new one and leave me with the original. For example, once
I have armour, I virtually never want to produce units without
armour bar transports.

5) Workshop again - For the side arrows on the bottom bar, make them move the
whole bottom bar on SCREEN width sideways, not one UNIT sideways,
so that I can get through the 64 units in about 6 clicks, not
60.

6) Still in the workshop screen, when I retire a design that I have
units for, the warning message should be highly visually
distinguishable, including colour change, from the normal "do you
want to retire this design ?". Yes, I have retired far too many
units.