Thoughts after playing my 4th game

[angelofwrath]

I am now into the 4th game I have started and played through. I am hundreds and hundreds of turns in and having a blast. Combat is still very very very very boring and needs something added to keep me engaged. Make it non turn based or something, where I hit space bar to pause the game to react to the enemies actions or something. Also allow me to target specific weapons or the engines of the enemy. Give me a drop down window for commands to give to the ships that is way way more detailed so that I can give them a list of things to like do x, then do x, then do x, and then do x. Something along those lines. I need to have time to react to the enemy and I want and NEED to be more involved.

I enjoy the planetary manager and think it is awesome I wish there where a few more options for planetary defense. Also the pollution reduction does not seem to have any benefit clean or neglected I make more or less money is all that seems to change.

I love the tech tree system. Maybe give more info on each tech and how it is useful so that I can decide which to research. Without actually wasting time researching a tech and then looking at it you have no clue what it will do beforehand. Also I would like to be able to know what techs are coming in a given tree later down the road. I waited and waited and then guessed that terraforming was going to be in construction and was very wrong. Would have been nice to know which tree it fell in so I could focus in that tree to get to terraforming sooner. Now I know.

FYI at around turn 350 I am making over 45tc per turn and have 754tc not billion TRILLION. Money has no meaning. In the beginning it is some what difficult to get going but around turn 25 it starts going smooth and then by turn 50 I can't spend my credit as fast as I make them.

The AI is still very glitched and randomly attacks me. I had an alliance and then the AI just attacked me because I was expanding too much. No warning nothing just attacked destroyed some ships and demanded I stop expanding. They stayed in the alliance though and did not break any treatise. This makes no sense. They seem to be mental and just do things randomly some times. I was being attacked another time by the Kamzak and they entered the SOL system attacked Earth and after the battle opened the Diplo/dialogue screen and traded me their planet. WHY? They then attacked the planet they just traded me since it was surrounded by all the ships that had been in orbit. I have a hard time getting them to enter alliances and stay. I have a hard time getting them to not accuse me of entering their space when they clearly are entering mine. They attack my ships and then accuse me of attacking theirs. It is quite funny when I have a fleet of Mother ships and a colony ship goes nuts on me. It has no chance but there it goes opening fire and then they yell at me and demand a planet or credits for attacking them. Anyways these are just some of the things I have run into and a few of my ideas.

[angelofwrath]

Also later in the game once you acquire terraforming it is very tedious to go back to all the systems that you already have and colonize the planets that you could not colonize before. Is there anyway to speed this up such as if one planet is already colonized in a system and you have a starbase in that system then you can just click on another planet in the system and shuttles will be sent to the planet to colonize it.

[DimitriFilichkin]

Well they are ALIENS, personally I really hope they each have really weird and odd ways of doing things. Maybe one race doesn't see an issue with killing a few people if they trespass?
I just like the idea of first contact being a series of semi-fights where each side has no idea what the other wants. After that it's just a matter of figuring out how they think, which I would hope would be much, much different then the human way of thinking. I love the non-humanoid designs, though I personally wish that a few more were less recognizable, like the rock-men (forget the name) or the Gargals. I don't see why they would be humanoid since one evolved in the ocean where size/bone structure mean almost nothing, and the other looks like a sentient rock, after I saw the tentacle-slug things and the Har' kan I was super hyped for some shogoths and space horrors. I have to admit when I found out that most of the races were humanoid I was just slightly disappointed. I really hope they make up for it by having them behave in weird ways with alien motivations and objectives. As is it just seems way too easy to become best buds with space squids then it logically should be, but that's just me.

[Xenotron]

Small hint: you can see all benefits from this or that research if you Right click on its name.

Diplomatic AI is quite strange. It doesn't matter whether alien race demands smth and you fulfill their request, or its their initiative to give you smth and you accept - your relations will be improved
Also I don't understand why my relations could be drastically improved or worsen without any interaction from player side. I don't have communication with that race, my ships or colonies aren't any near their systems and still some changes in our relations happen.

[Cumberlow]

I am now into the 4th game I have started and played through. I am hundreds and hundreds of turns in and having a blast. Combat is still very very very very boring and needs something added to keep me engaged. Make it non turn based or something, where I hit space bar to pause the game to react to the enemies actions or something.

I have to disagree with you on non-turn based combat here. If you want that then there is plenty of other games to choose from; stardrive, endless space, Sins of the Solar Empire etc. What distinguishes this game is the turn based combat and that personally attracts me as its different from the rest. That said it does need a lot of work to make it more user friendly, but this is alpha.

Things I would like to see are:

1. Addition of a zoom function via the mouse wheel so I can get a better overview of the action (the mini map in the bottom left corner can't show enough detail as it covers the whole battlefield and the main view is often too close so I spend a lot of time scrolling around looking at the red dots on the mini map and trying to work out where my ships are at)

2. The ability to group ships into squadrons/custom groups in the battle view that you could then issue orders to as a group, which would make battle flow better as the click count would be decreased. i.e. group my bombers together so I can issue one bombing command and group my escorts together to they can target incoming missiles together and move in formation. Creating a large fleet but then having to move and fire each ship individually in battle can quickly get tedious.

3. More a gripe but often I find my ships scattered around the map at the start of battle and so have to spend a lot of time regrouping before the action can start (sending them in piece meal is a recipe for wiping)

[angelofwrath]

I have to disagree with you on non-turn based combat here. If you want that then there is plenty of other games to choose from; stardrive, endless space, Sins of the Solar Empire etc. What distinguishes this game is the turn based combat and that personally attracts me as its different from the rest. That said it does need a lot of work to make it more user friendly, but this is alpha.

True it is alpha and I was not necessarily saying make it non turn based. I love turn based combat. I loved the original Fallouts 1 and 2 and I like this game very much, but I played the combat for maybe an hour on my first play through and then it became boring all I do now is hit auto and then fast forward through it. I hate that I do this I want to be able to fight each battle and be able to enjoy them is all I was really saying. It needs improvement. Mainly I would like to have more time to react to the enemies actions not hit done and then BOOM they are here and in your face.

[angelofwrath]

Small hint: you can see all benefits from this or that research if you Right click on its name.

Thanks for the info I tried and tried different things just never right clicking . I guess the flaw here is in the tutorial not being clear enough or maybe I was just tired. Still I think that you should be able to hard click a tech and have the window in the bottom left give you all the info on that tech. Or maybe hover over the tech to see what it does. Also I feel that there are not enough difference in some of the techs to even make them worth going after. I think each tech should have more subtle things that it does and have more synergies with others so that you can come up with combos of techs for different effects.

On a separate note is it possible to entirely respec a current ship without scrapping it. This is one of the reasons why I say some of the later techs are not worth the time. I have like 30-40 mother ships and I can't change from say fusion to hydrogen power sources, that I can see, without scrapping them all and rebuilding them. This is not what I want and is very time consuming.

[Traker]

Got to agree that I like the turn based as well and is the reason I got it in the first place, but then again moving a large number of ships from the edge of the battle screen to the battle nearer the middle of the screen is a very time consuming task, but as each ships turn are based on initiative I cannot really see a way around this unless the whole fleet moves as a group at the slowest ships speed untill the longest range weapon come into range or sensors first pick up a target then goes into individual ships initiative turns, Or maybe you can click group ships you want to move together at the slowest ships speed untill sensors pick up something or weapons come into range.
Just a thought as I like the current system except fot the very tedious and long movement at the begining and is only really a problem when i had a large amount of ships attacking a planet (ie I had 3 fleets attacking which was about 30 ships to move just into attacking range individually)

[frostlad]

Got to agree that I like the turn based as well and is the reason I got it in the first place, but then again moving a large number of ships from the edge of the battle screen to the battle nearer the middle of the screen is a very time consuming task, but as each ships turn are based on initiative I cannot really see a way around this unless the whole fleet moves as a group at the slowest ships speed untill the longest range weapon come into range or sensors first pick up a target then goes into individual ships initiative turns, Or maybe you can click group ships you want to move together at the slowest ships speed untill sensors pick up something or weapons come into range.
Just a thought as I like the current system except fot the very tedious and long movement at the begining and is only really a problem when i had a large amount of ships attacking a planet (ie I had 3 fleets attacking which was about 30 ships to move just into attacking range individually)

It wouldn't be that bad. Just be able to give a ship 2 or 5 or whatever turns worth of movement direction at once. Sort of like at the star map level. If I want to move all the way to the middle, let me click in the middle and just make the ship do it automatically when its turn comes up (and give me a way to cancel it).