Thoughts, comments, and issues

[professorel]

First, let me say I'm excited about what I've seen so far, and good job!
However, (as I'm sure you realize) there's still a lot to be done.
All the major bugs I encountered seem to have been already brought up, so instead, here are just some observations and thoughts I've had, in no particular order:

*The difficulty will definitely need to be balanced out and tweaked. I only ever played on Buzz hard and found it rather easy, and only once did I have a mission fail. Additionally there seems to be little urgency. I imagine that the eventual addition of long term/specific goals will address this, but still wanted to say. Also, at the moment it's very easy to meet the prestige goals, but I find it rather difficult to keep up historically without incredible rushing (which of course there is no incentive to do so, as I mentioned)

*I think you have the two main X-15 missions backwards. (that is, the descriptions vs the actual content of the missions)

*Having surveyor be the prerequisite for interplanetary missions seems a bit much, personally (and historically)

*Though I certainly wouldn't say there are too many choices, there seems far more missions than you could or would do in one playthrough, and there's little advantage to doing one over the other, especially between equivalent missions (sputnik/explorer), since the only major rewards right now are prestige points. (again, something I think goals will address)

*clicking all the way through the missions to get the schedule button can get a to be a bit of a hassle. Perhaps having a 'schedule mission' button by the 'manage programs' button could make things simpler, especially if you want to compare missions in different categories.

*Mission prerequisites seem too stiff, almost. For example, BARIS's penalty system was more of a "you *should* do this first", rather than "you *have to* do this first. Not that you should get rid of prerequisites, but as it stands at the moment, the few prerequisites act more like stairs than a gradual slope. But then adding more prerequisites would just make the game too structured and linear.

*Though I only once got a failure, I was disappointed at the BARIS like "you get a huge reliability penalty and have to spend a bunch of time working it back up". That's both unrealistic and frustrating, especially since you have R&D progression decline as the reliability decreases. I'm pretty sure this has been talked about before, and will be again, so I'm not gonna try and think of a solution, at least right now. Just noting this.

*Please tell me you're going to set up some sort of bug tracker at some point. It's already becoming a pain to sift through the forum to see what has and hasn't already been reported (and where we're supposed to put everything, I honestly don't know where I should have put this), I imagine it's especially frustrating for you, what with having to find them and fix them and record what you have and haven't fixed and on what version, etc.

*There are certainly other things I have to say (don't worry, that's a good thing!), but frankly I'm tired and busy atm. Another time perhaps.
Sorry if anything's unclear, or redundant in some way.