ooh, then i cant reproduce the problem

works fine here

same...

By the way I am also having issues with adding ships to an already created fleet. I end up just selecting all the ships I want in the fleet and recreating it. This is too much micro though...

mmm. the graphics are really great...the mouse movement isnt actually.

improving armor and damage really does help... in a 3v3 or something like that, it doesnt really look like much of a difference, but in a 30v30 its really quite obvious



there is a button for that. bottom left hand corner, you can right click the arrows to make it separate or together. its in the tut



I think for now they are just testing overall game balance and whatnot, im sure theyll add more in there, but you have to remember that they are trying to make it very non micro intensive



its a beta, not complete. btw, how would the mines discriminate between friend and foe?

P.S. having slight trubble with the quote feature, its putting the quote /quote inside the original text box instead of in the reply box

My thoughts on combat (before I begin I am totally aware this beta 2, not a demo or final release)

Combat

At the moment combat feels very similar to another 4x game, Sword of the Stars. What I mean by that is it serves no real stratgic purpose. Every time I play it devolves into who can spam as many frigates possible first. Theres no tactics involved, no sense of urgency or warfare.

My suggestions; up the scale or at least open the avenue for modders to-do this. The best example of scale used to great effect is the total war series. For a space exampe, Nexus / IG 3. Its space, its ment to be epic with huge lumbering battleships and nippy little fighters.

Tactics; rear, front armour - bonus for flanking around large crusiers. Modules - It'd be insanely awesome if you took a leaf from HW2/Nexus and had modules - engines, powerplants, weapon systems etc. This would make pirates a real threat...
eg. Oh my big shiney crusier will easy wipe out them pirates - oh shit they've used weapon X to wipe my shields, awww crap they've used bombers/frigates to take out my engines & powerplant (powerplant linked to main weapons) ahh crap they've captured it and now sending back at me! (guns blazing)

Probaly thinking that add alot of micro'ing but it'd force players to take into consideration fleet compostion, mixing the right units together for the best results.
On that note, fleets should be the most important element of the combat! I want to be able to set a formantion, tactics and anything else, I want to be able to name my fleet, have it gain experiance, pick a flagship (and name it) Carriers should be able to hold at least 2 wings of either fighters or bombers. Lets me build & plan ahead.

Limited 3d combat! Please space is not a 2d plane and I understand devs are not going for the full 3d (ala HW) but some 3d movement by both player & ai would really create alot of depth. Even if its fake 3d like Empires at war, it'd still look convincing.

Combat ship options; I'd like to have alot of ships for different roles or a streamlined amount of ships that have mutli roles. Eg 'Cobalt' Frigates would be more interesting if they had 3 weapon types (missiles,turrets & limited anti-shield weapons)

Finally after battle, debris is a climatic effect which can be produced quite cheaply, hunking hulls should become metal resource while smaller ships should leave a small amount of debris that fades away with time.

To sum up combat - Fleet options (custimaztion) , Tactical options (weapons/movement/modules)

If this is not part of the gameplan - Please for the love of Jesus / Allah/ Buddah - Please leave the option for modders to implent this.

Well thus far I've played through one map to completion and put a good 5 hours into another one. I'd like to point out some things I liked and didn't like.

I appreciate the ability to make a map with 100 planets and 10 star systems as I am a fan of the large epic maps in any strategy game be it turn based or real time. However I've got a gripe with the generation of the map. I made the 100/10 map and placed 3 AI into the slots, my hope was that it would give us each our own system to start in and we'd be slugging it out over the various systems in the galaxy. What ended up happening was 2 of us in one system and two in the other. I understand wanting to promote some kind of conflict early on but an option for another way would be nice.

I also noticed in this game that the AI did not spread to any system besides the starting one, I've killed the one in mine and the other two AI are just duking it out in the middle system. So out of our 100 odd planets only 20-30 of them are even seeing any kind of use. Perhaps something in the AI isnt working correctly to get it spreading out more.

I like being able to get my fleet to jump as one, however the phase where they are aligning the formation to depart could probably use a bit of tweaking, ive noticed ships getting stuck in some kind of twitchy limbo really slowing down the war .

The economy setup I like quite a bit, I do think that there should be two types of marauders, there should be pirates attacking trading lanes, for example the sun is often a place of trade traffic outweighing anything else but almost all pirate activity is just large frigate fleets being thrown at walls of defenses in well guarded planets based entirely on bounty it seems. I'd like to see something like bounty hunter factions trying to collect on that and then the run of the mill pirates, using faster ships to raid trade vessels.

Capital ships, I love that they are these behemoths of the battlefield and are relatively rare compared to the other ship types, I like the special abilities they bring to the battlefield, However Id like to see some more variety in the ships available besides them. As it stands now I end up with a nice variety of capital ships and nothing but LRM frigates and kodiaks or cobalts with a few flaks thrown in for moral support.

I'd also like to see some type of supercapital ship class, maybe something you can only have one or two of, a true flagship of the empire. A system like Galciv 2 for ship design but not as complex would be cool, keeping the same base model for things and just choosing the type of weaponry the chasis has would be cool. I dont know if that's a possibility with the models already created for the ships. I know it's the beta and not everything is in and so on but I still want to throw that out there.

This is more of an aesthetic gripe, the research tree upgrades, would it be possible to have some kind of graphical indication that you've upgraded your weapons. Different models for missiles, different effects for projectiles and lasers as you advance your technology. I just find it slightly awkward that I keep piling improvements on everything, new armor, new shields, new weapons, and it all remains the same throughout. Also more pronounced shield effects would be fun, many times it seems like stuff is just pinging off this invisible wall. It would be cool if the frigate class ships not based on lrm did some bobbing and weaving in combat as well to liven up the action a little bit

One technical bug I noticed has to do with the noise the robotics cruisers make, for one it's kind of annoying on it's own but whenever i come in contact with one of these things, the sound effect it makes kind of overrides everything. Since the computer uses a TON of those things, I've had entire battles where all I could here were those blasted cruisers.

The AI itself could use some work on fleet composition, in the rare event i manage to find a fleet or get attacked it's usually composed of 90% light carriers and robotics ships. At first I thought they'd created it to counter my fleet which had little flak protection like galciv AI would do but ive seen that fleet trend in all my games thus far. I did see somone posting we should see some AI changes soon and I'm looking forward to it, but I figured I'd share my observations.

I also think you should release the other two races so we can help with the balance there yea that'd be nice

All in all I'm having fun, not really finding any bugs in my play, it runs smooth in all the matches ive played so far and I appreciate the chance to test and improve what's looking to be a great game.

Especially when the enemy AI attacks you with like 12 of them

I'd like to see a feature/option to have ships in a fleet wait for the rest of the fleet to clear the gravity well before jumping. It might actually work better if this applied to any multi-ship selection instead of just fleets. On a related note, the Akkan battlecruiser seems awfully slow compared to the rest of the capships.

I've played multiple games on medium and hard difficulties and I have a couple of suggestions:

1) Allow the player to modify the game speed (if I can, it isn't well documented and I haven't been able to find it) - Generally, IMO, the game plays too slow, and I find the end-game (moving from system to system with large cap ship fleets) to be somewhat tedious. As a general rule, I will typically walk away from the game for 10-20 minutes every few hours to do something and let the game play itself so that when I come back, I have enough resources to make purchases, or wait for the culture of a defeated faction to decay so that I can colonize their previously controlled planets.

2) Give the AI teeth - They rarely build capital ships, and it seems they are very passive aggressive; intent on funding the pirates, but not attacking openly. For example, I thought I would try 9 on 1 (set all the AI to team 2) for a challenge. I then had to walk away for over an hour, and nothing happened, except my cap ships leveled up like crazy as my choke point intercepted waves of massive pirate incursions (since I was the only faction collecting a bounty), and I had a ridiculous amount of resources at my disposal.

3) This is related to #2 (not sure if this is a bug or a gameplay thing, but I'm putting it here as it's probably a little of each); when a teammate is eliminated don't give the whole team a loss. In the above example, imagine my surprise after I climate just one of nine, and get the "win" screen.

4) Increase the rate of decay of culture, particularly for utterly defeated factions. I don't think this mechanic really serves a purpose, except to slow the game down (related to #1).

5) Allow (or require) fleets (ctrl-grouped units) to jump together.

6) This isn't a suggestion per se, but I find the game is generally too easy. I'm not sure if it's my tactics or that the AI doesn't really attack, or that defensive structures are over powered, it's probably a combination of all three. Basically, I quickly grab 3-5 systems, fortify them with 5-10 heavily packed Gauss Cannons, and 3-7 hangars with Bombers (and I place the hangars inside the radius of as many cannons as possible). For whatever reason, this configuration can repel any invasion I've ever encountered, allowing me to concentrate on building cap ships. Once I've built 1 Akkran (for colonizing purposes), I build 3-5 carriers, and 3 or so additional Kol's. This configuration allows me to lay waste to everything and I can methodically go through and take out faction after faction. It's rare that I loose a capital ship, even on hard. Hopefully this will change significantly once human players are involved.

Since you asked us:

Top three techs:

Any of the teraforming abilities (i.e., increasing population sizes on planets)
Any of the ship upgrades (e.g., shield/armor/antimatter/weapon damage) upgrades
Any of the infrastructure techs (e.g., refinery, trade port, increased cargo holds)

Bottom three techs:

Any of the frigates or cruisers (I find them utterly worthless in the face of a cap ship, even with numbers)

Thanks for listening. I think this has the potential to be a very good game, hopefully someone finds this feedback helpful.

[quote]



Select the group you want to remove the unit from and in the empire tree hold down shift left click on the unit then control + whatever number you used for the fleet.

Hope this helps.

There's a few ways of doing this:

1) Shift-click to add more units to an already existing group
2) You can select all the units in a system (if that's what you wanted to do) by left clicking on them in the system list on the left hand side. The first set of boxes is the system strutures, the second set are the units in the system, and the third set (if there are any) are the hostile forces in the system.

Hope that helps.