Slitherine

any news about this patch ?

Brazouck wrote:any news about this patch ?

It's in progress

Will be announced soon, then there will be more information.

How hard is to add discovered opponents planets to the list (economy/planets screen)?
Would be very helpful than plan a war. AI colonizes a lot of useless planets, it's hard to click through them looking for the (worthy) ones I want to invade.

bjgrt wrote:How hard is to add discovered opponents planets to the list (economy/planets screen)?
Would be very helpful than plan a war. AI colonizes a lot of useless planets, it's hard to click through them looking for the (worthy) ones I want to invade.

Not that hard.

Some more filtering options for the economy / planets screen would be very helpful too:

- list planets in owned systems
- list planets in neutral systems
- list planets in foreign systems

This would make it easier to backfill your own area, withhout having to check for every single planet if it is in your/neutral space.

ok

You color total number of resources red than critically low - it's good. Could you also change the color (to green?) than the resource reaches (or goes over) the storage capacity?

bjgrt wrote:You color total number of resources red than critically low - it's good. Could you also change the color (to green?) than the resource reaches (or goes over) the storage capacity?

makes sense.

So any word as to the DLC progress? I'd be happy to buy in early if you need any beta testers? Also is there a finalised list of content going into it?

Thanks for reading, as ever;
crimsonsun

crimsonsun wrote:So any word as to the DLC progress? I'd be happy to buy in early if you need any beta testers? Also is there a finalised list of content going into it?

Thanks for reading, as ever;
crimsonsun

It's still in progress. I did a lot in a "coding" part of the game - fleet planner, rally points, automatic replenishing of fighters, etc. - but the longest thing to do is a new race with its graphics.

Rally points would improve my game play immensely.

I only picked this game up this week and haven't even started playing seriously yet. Nevertheless I wanted to get a suggestion in early so it's possible this idea might not be workable or for all I know it might even already be implemented.

--Enhanced boarding party and ship capture mechanic.

At the end of the day all 4X games are essentially a spreadsheet obscured by a veneer of story/game mechanics. What differentiates a stand-out game from a mediocre one is the richness of that veneer, how well it conveys a sense of story. The tactical combat can be used to reinforce that veneer.

With that in mind I'd like to suggest that in combat it should be possible to disable and capture an enemy ship, possibly enabled by one or more required support modules (disabling could be achieved either by specific module or by targeting specific ship systems, boarding would require a special module). During the battle you can normally only move or retreat the ship you've just captured, not use its weapons, but there could perhaps be a low percentage chance of being able to use one (non-fighter) weapon system during the battle.

Having captured the ship there is then a good chance of recovering one or two pieces of intel from it as a consequence of downloading and analysing its computer banks. This may occur even if the captured ship is destroyed during the battle in which you captured it (it being assumed you downloaded its computer banks immediately during the battle).

If you are able to recover the ship back to a planet with a starport/starbase/whatever then there is an additional chance that you might receive one or two new technologies, or upgrades (miniaturisation or cost) to technologies you already have.

In the case of intel you might get that either immediately upon capturing the ship or a month or so later after sufficient analysis has occurred. In the case of the discovered tech you get that a month or more after recovering the captured ship back to your base where it can be studied and reverse engineered.

A final potential bonus from ship capture could be finding a new leader or story arc. Perhaps a captive on the captured ship with useful skills wishes to join your empire, or perhaps they don't wish to join you but can provide you with intel or access to valuable resources in return for their release. Lots of opportunity for compelling storytelling here (perhaps throw it open to the community to suggest story arcs).

P.S. I just read through the whole of this thread and it seems likely that the game is in need of more quality of life improvements and bug fixes before anything like this could be added. But I'll leave this here anyway just in case anyone finds it an interesting idea.

==New player first impressions feedback

I've heard really good things about this game so I took the plunge and bought it in the current sale. I was expecting the somewhat indie production quality so no worries there (I still play MOO 1 & 2 so less than AAA quality UI is no problem for me ), and I don't have a view yet on the game as a whole having only just completed the tutorial, although I do quite like a lot of what I've seem so far.

I know that when you are working on software as a dev that it's very easy to overlook some issues simply because you are so used to them that you don't don't even see them anymore, but as a completely fresh user they slap you right in the face. So here is a list of things that slapped me right in the face when I first picked this game up. I hope it is useful.

I'm not sure whether this is the right place for this, but since this is a discussion about an forthcoming patch, and since the dev is actively answering questions here then I think I'll post it here for now where it can get best visibility, feel free to move it though if you think it's in the wrong place.


--Screen resolution UI

First time the game loaded it didn't get my screen resolution correct (games on a flat panel using non native resolution always look terrible), but it wasn't at all obvious that the resolution was wrong because on the settings display the slider was at AUTO which doesn't give you any indication of what resolution it is using. So I had to manually select the correct resolution, which is normally trivial but in this case the UI again made that very awkward. My screen apparently supports about 90 different resolutions and the only way to select them was via this slider, and nudging the slider just a couple of pixels would select a new resolution. So I had to inch this slider backwards and forwards pixel by pixel trying to locate the one resolution out of 90 that matched my screen's actual native resolution.

There is a reason why nobody these days uses a slider to select the screen resolution and this is exactly why. A scrollable listbox or scrollable dropdown combo like every other game will work just fine please


--Fuzzy panel background

The information display backgrounds and popup windows have this fuzzy dithered looking background which I personally find really nasty. I don't know whether it is supposed to look like some sort of CRT white noise effect or something but it's not at all easy on the eye to read text on top of this fuzzy noise and I don't think it suits this type of game either. I want to feel like a space emperor looking at a slick sophisticated spacey or alien UI, not some kind of hacker nerd looking at a badly tuned in CRT.

Also these info panels are often displayed alongside maps with starfield backgrounds, and the effect of that is a fuzzy background with fuzzy foreground info panels too. It's quite jarring.

I'd have thought a better background would be a dark shade of blue or grey/black with an alpha or colour gradient or a subtle refection effect. At any rate the fuzzy background is pretty radical and in your face so it would be nice if it were configurable with a few other options.


--Ginger zombie humans!

Loading up the tutorial the first thing you are confronted with is the avatar for a human owned planet. Now I know some people think that gingers are in league with Satan, but personally I've got nothing against them. Nevertheless must we have one representing the whole race? The bigger issue though is WHAT HAPPENED TO HIS EYES!!! Most humans have iris and pupils but this freaky ginger avatar has the pure white eyes of zombie spawn from hell.

Give the man his eyes back.


--Planet view

Production

On the right side of the planet view is the production overview. This information could be greatly improved.

The first section is titled 'Production' and lists the amount of production of various commodities on the planet. The first thing missing is timescale and units. Food production is listed as 364k but what does that mean? 364 kilos? Over what time period? Similarly research and production are 4.57 and 8.59, what is that man months per week, who knows. This is followed similarly by Gravitioniun, Reidium, metals etc.

This might seem like nitpicking but it's not. In any kind of strategy game like this there are going to be numbers, but it's really important that those numbers actually mean something to the player right off the bat, and the planetary production screen is a central to the game. As a new player 364k food means nothing, its just numerical noise, on the other hand 364 tonnes of food a month means something tangible. Similarly research of 4 means nothing to me, but as someone who manages people IRL research of 4 man weeks of research per day instantly means something. Meaningful units enable me to attach more significance to these values and helps me build a better picture in my head of what I'm dealing with, which in turn adds to the immersion and makes me care and enjoy the game.

Next section is 'Consumption'. But with no time frame specified it doesn't mean anything.

Next section is 'Explored Mineral Deposits'. Presumably this is important, but again the numbers give you no clue as to what it means. The tooltip you get hovering over the individual items under 'Explored Mineral Deposits' just repeats the exact same information that is displayed when you hover over the items under 'Production'. This is a badly missed opportunity, instead the tooltip when you hover over an item under 'Explored Mineral Deposits' should explain what 'Explored Mineral Deposits' actually means.

The lack of this information is especially confusing because the Production section indicates I'm producing 2.38 Gravitoniums, while the 'Explored Mineral Deposits' states 0.79 Gravitoniums. So on the face of it this would seem to suggest that I'm producing more Gravitonium than I've actually found on the planet, which doesn't make any sense. I'm sure there's a logical explanation for these numbers and I expect that if I search the forum or the wiki I'd be able to work it out, but the point is that the game should make this obvious without the player having to go looking for it.

Fundamentally I want to spend my time actually playing the game, not searching the web trying to find out what the random numbers in the production UI mean.

The remaining section here 'Research Opportunities' and 'Planet Bonuses' have the same issue of just repeating the exact same tooltip for each production item without telling you anything useful about what 'Research Opportunities' or 'Planet bonuses' actually means.


Population

Lower right section of the planet view is Population. Tooltips explaining the effect of Available Population and Unrest would be nice.


--Tactical combat map

The vast majority of the worlds languages write from left to right. In film cinematic screen panning is always from left to right. Every side scrolling computer game ever made scrolls from left to right. Every previous 4X space strategy game with tactical combat has had the player starting on the left. So why in the name of all that is holy does the tactical combat in this game have me starting on the right? I just cannot get my head around it, instead of me attacking the enemy it feels as if the enemy has sneaked up behind me or that I'm going back to where I just came from or something.

Please, please, please, add the option to reverse tactical combat starting sides.


--Tutorial

During the tactical combat tutorial neither F1 nor Escape enable you to exist the tutorial. I did eventually work out how to auto-resolve the rest of the tutorial to skip it but it would be nice if the F1 button worked as advertised.

I'd love to see a "more spreadsheet-like view" of colonized planets that takes up the entire screen, where Planet Names are in the first column and other values (Planet Type, World Role, Population, Production, Orbital Production, Mineral Production / Unproduced Minerals) are in the other columns would be great. You'd want to be able to sort by any column.

I'm not sure you have the screen real estate to fit all 18 (20?) such columns on one page, so maybe you'd need a toggle to differentiate between Explored Deposits and Mineral Production, but only being able to see 4 or 5 planets at a time when I might have 50 - 150 planets in my empire makes it hard to manage.

FarAway Sooner wrote:I'd love to see a "more spreadsheet-like view" of colonized planets that takes up the entire screen, where Planet Names are in the first column and other values (Planet Type, World Role, Population, Production, Orbital Production, Mineral Production / Unproduced Minerals) are in the other columns would be great. You'd want to be able to sort by any column.

It exists. There is a triangle "view" switch next to (and a bit down from) a gears picture on the "economy" screen.

Got it, thanks! I was wondering if I'd just missed it.

However,

the one thing I keep wanting to know is where my orbital shipyards are. That is not on the spreadsheet view today, and it would be nice to have.

JocaRamiro wrote:However,

the one thing I keep wanting to know is where my orbital shipyards are. That is not on the spreadsheet view today, and it would be nice to have.

It is there. Look for the Production -> Orbital Production icon. For example, click on this icon to sort your planets accordingly.

Help me a bit more perhaps.

I did see that, and noted that it showed me where ships were being constructed - clearly a giveaway that a shipyard was present.

What about shipyards that were sitting idle? Would these be evident? Note, these are the ones I would most like to see.

JocaRamiro wrote:Help me a bit more perhaps.

I did see that, and noted that it showed me where ships were being constructed - clearly a giveaway that a shipyard was present.

What about shipyards that were sitting idle? Would these be evident? Note, these are the ones I would most like to see.

Shipyards are the only buildings producing "orbital production". The icon is a hammer in a grey circle. If you sort all planets by this kind of production, you'll clearly see what planets do have shipyard. Those that in the same time have nothing in the production are those idle you are looking for.