I'm going to ramble a bit about the production/economic aspects, since that seems to be what takes most of my concentration, and not in a good way. Also, I hate making comparisons to other games, but I will anyway. Blair asked specifically to post my opinion on this, since I guess you guys disagree about it a lot...

Now, a lot of this could be alleviated by some UI improvements, which I don't think we're supposed to provide feedback on yet, so I'll shove those comments to the bottom. The main source of my aggravation is having to, constantly, stop what I'm doing whenever I get enough $$$ to build a ship, find an unused shipyard, and build it. Not doing this is wasting my production capacity, and letting my opponents build ships/research tech/whatever sooner while by buildings are idling. The two obvious ways to alleviate this is the SupCom way, which might be a little overkill (and require a lot of UI work in addition to coding), and a global production queue way.

The SupCom way, for those unfamiliar, is that building something drains the resources out of you over the construction time, so if you have a $100 ship that takes 10 seconds to build, it drains $10 per second. If you run out of money, construction on everything slows to what you can afford. So if you're building 3 of these ships in 3 different shipyards, and are broke but are making $10 per second, you'll finish building all 3 in 30 seconds (or you could pause/cancel two to finish the first in 10 seconds). This is actually a lot like how most 4X handle spending, now that I think about it. Bonus points if you could intentionally slow a facility's build rate and loop build queues, so that you could say "I am going to spend $5 per second on ships at this factory, and build 3 scouts, 2 flak frigates, and a siege frigate over and over".

The global production queue, I'm not sure if I've seen before, but it's something that could be more directly thrown on top of the standard RTS resource system. Everything works normally until you try to spend resources you don't have. When you try to build something that you don't have the resources for, or if something is already in the global queue, it gets thrown into the global queue. As soon as you have enough resources to pay for the oldest thing in the queue (whether ships, research, facilities, whatever), the resources are paid and it is removed from the queue (construction starts as soon as the constructing unit becomes available). So exactly like now, except that you can queue up stuff to build once the funds are available. You should also be able to add stuff to both ends of the queue, so that you can go "I need these things now, and then go back to whatever I had queued up before." Now that I think about it, actually being able to bring up a display of this queue, maybe pop in/out horizontal bar from the sides, to manipulate it would be awesome. Like middle click to zoom-to construction location, left+click+drag to reorder, right click to remove or something. Yes... for this game, I might actually prefer that.


Minor random UI stuff. Could list lots of things if I wasn't trying specifically not to thing about it
Icons indicating whether a planet is has idle constructors or shipyards. An indicator of infrastructure level would be nice, with an additional indicator if population is at maximum while infrastructure is not. Indicators on ships with unspent ability points/unallocated squadrons without having to select them.

yeah sorry should have been more specific, i have seen that particle affect but it is temporary. i have seen the plus signs but i always group my ships and there is a plus oven all the ships in the group i was wonder what they where i will see if i can get a screen of it for you.

I’ve managed to find the time to play a bit more last night and I have a couple of suggestions.

UI
I would like to see some indicators that blink where each warning message is coming from. On large galaxies it’s quite difficult to discover where the action is. I would like ships to blink on the strategic view whenever they are under attach or about to jump. I would like some sort of visual recognition if a planet detects inbound enemies.

Queue-able build orders would be great too without needing the supply of money beforehand.
The ability to give an infinite build order for certain types of ships. As is the case in Galciv. I.e. just build flak frigates till the end of time.

Graphics
Larger size variations, I would love to see different sizes of ships. Scout-frigate = small, siege frigate = 2 * Scout-frigate, destroyer = 8 * Scout-frigate, battleship = 16 * Scout-frigate.

At the moment the largest ship is roughly 4 times the size of the smallest ship. Which adversely affects the felling of the game. A battle ship should be the apogee of military, economical and industrial might, at the moment it’s visually just a slightly more impressive frigate.

More blinking lights would also be appreciated. Also city lights would be cool, especially if they grow with the population.

But other than that It’s an amazingly stable and enjoyable demo. Congratulations to everybody who worked on it.

I’ve tried to create a number of screenshot for text problems but even the low res ones seem to be insanely huge in JPG format. Probably something tot do with the 2560*1600. I’ll see what happens if I cut down the resolution.

Once you take all the planets I guess you win, lol... It was mentioned before having a capture and hold certain planets for a victory point type of game, but I forget where I saw it on this forum....

Regarding the point about having to stop, find a shipyard and build something, I might have agreed with it when I first started playing the game but I now find myself going straight to the empire control panel on the left, selecting a stardock or construction frigate and building from their control panel at the bottom of the screen no matter where I am in the system rather than jumping to the planet. Its much easier and is (Im guessing) the way it was intended to be used? If thats the case then maybe the question should be 'Is everyone picking this up? Are people finding that an easy way to build across the solar system all at once? In reference to an earlier point, more distinctive icons for each ship / module type in the empire panel would make this easier.

I agree with TherilAlPenn's point on idle unit icons, perhaps they could be a different colour in the empire panel to make them stand out? This would be handy for your construction units in case you miss the announcement regarding construction finishing, especially if in a fight at the time and/or having queued construction.

I found the inverted horizontal rotation to be very annoying. I think that at least there should be an option to switch it to normal.

My Specs:

AMD Athlon 64 processor running at 2.4 Ghz
approx 1.3 Gigs of RAM
128 mb integrated graphics card

I think that an auto save function should be added in, for when glitches mess up the game, and for other instances.

Great Game

Two things - First the mouse control feels a bit odd the zooming in and out doesn't feel as smooth as the way Supreme Commander's works - for some reason sometimes when I go to zoom in it doesn't always go exactly where my mouse pointer is - it'll end up just a bit off (if per say the mouse pointer is at the far left but i'm already halfway zoomed in) - the game really needs to prefer to strafe (move the camera left/right/forward/back) over zoom in.

Secondly - not really a beta 1 issue but - has anyone noticed what 10 bombers does to ANY fleet sent against you?

I agree sjet, an autosave would be great.

A small thing that would be nice also is to allow us (when we start a custom campaign) to choose the color of the background of the solar system we start in. So far I preferred the Blue and Dark one, I think the red background reduced the visual impressiveness of the battles. So would be great to choose.

Not sure whether this goes in Gameplay or Technical, but: how come I can't access games I've saved manually from the main menu? The only games I can load there are autosaves. I have to actually start an autosaved game and then access the Load screen from within the game to load a manually saved game. Also, "pause" persists over game loads. Iow, if I pause the game and then load a saved one, when it starts up it's paused as well. I'm not sure whether that's intended or not.

Thanks for your input! There have been several other related comments about the empire tree as well. We have some helpful fixes in the works that should make the tree easier to manage for you.

I've noticed that I can issue build and research orders while paused, but not movement orders. Maybe that's intended, I don't know, but in either case the scroll button on the Empire Box should work while paused and it doesn't (the button moves but the list doesn't). Also, when saving a game, a list of my previously saved games isn't visible. I can only manually type in a name.

What exactly do shields do(i know they protect the ship) are they simply an extension of the health bar. i see on the info card about shield mitigation but the hull does not seem to go down until all the shields are gone.