Alright, I only have 27 hours of this game under my belt. Im no professional, but im also not completely oblivious to this game's basic, or even more advanced, mechanics.

My recent experience in a MP game however, revealed to me some very.....serious concerns and questions about certain design decisions that are minor and can quickly be changed, except for my initial gripe, and so prepare for a read.

So I know full well about the current lack of Host Migration or whatever, but honestly should this even be a thing? Other games like Company of Heroes, Supreme Commander and what have you, all ran on MP servers and didn't basically make everyone BUT THE HOST have pings greater than Zero. Everyone had pings relative to the central server, not everyone have pings in relation to whomever the Host is, or later becomes(Which I know you guys are working on host migration). Currently the situation, as i've seen it, relies too much upon the hardware of the one hosting the game, where essentially their ping is 0, and therefore has the greatest advantage out of everyone.

My game progressed as such, since I cannot supply a replay due to another irritating design decision. Game begins and I set down Scientific and immediately snag a triangle of steel factories and an aluminum mine once the black market opens up and I get another claim. The game is of course causing me to have significantly delayed actions and responses, somewhere between 10-30 seconds and it only gets worse as the game progresses. I've played many MP matches, and there are games where there is only smooth play, this was obviously not one of those games.

By the time I hit level 3, I soon began buying 4-5K shares of my stock, and began buying out a new player who's debt made his stock really cheap, and a couple other people's stocks. It was clear that financially I was significantly ahead, and I didnt have as much concern to rush level 5 seeing as I bought myself some time and the offworld price nerfs. Eventually I hit 5, but other players began using sabotages on me, but no problem since I was scientific I was able to absorb them without much issue. Take note that by this point, the delays between actions were 30 seconds plus, and it didnt matter how many times I clicked on something, the host was always going to beat me to it. I had patents that allowed me to store power, and I had all life support requirements fullfilled with no debt whatsoever. By this point however the host begins purchasing my stock, no matter, I owned 6K shares and he only owned 4, and i had no debt and my stock price was almost $35.....I was fine, right?

Well despite having no way of actually acquiring debt, to my knowledge, and hardly any auctions had gone on all game, my debt suddenly spiked to 77K after a night on Mars. Power prices were under 10 bucks, and remember that I owned the patent to store power and consumed half of it. I was consuming no fuel due to Teleportation and I had surpluses of Food, water and oxygen......I raised an eyebrow and carried on until the following night cycle came around and my debt suddenly spiked to 199.2K and the host suddenly bought me out immediately after finding this out. Am I suggesting the host was hacking? No idea, he could have, or for all I know the lag was so bad that the numbers weren't being communicated properly...I don't know....what I do know is something fishy occurred, and I cant figure out what it exactly was.

So I go and try and play the replay, only to find out that none exists, and since I had never had once hosted a Multiplayer game, I was curious since it was optional to save a replay or not for single player. I then confirmed that the HOST can optionally disable replay save creation. Why is this a Thing? It should be either my own decision to save replays, or just make it automatically do it, because now i'm incapable of actually displaying proof of my little story here, or figure out if I was missing something and could have saved you all this read by determining if it was my own fault or not.

In summary, the things that really need addressing are:

-Less reliance on Host's hardware for game stability, one person always having 0 ping is not even remotely fair for a game like this. If Starcraft can do it, you can do it, you guys aren't new to game development. I know this is likely low-priority, but in the distant future....this really needs to be addressed.

-Creating Replay Files, let each player decide for themselves if a file is created or not, not the host.

Id say look into possible hacks too, but its a game fresh into Early Access, and so I fully expect people to do this, because people are....people, and its not really your fault that this could already be happening. Just know that its likely already beginning, and to keep it in mind.

Thank you for reading through this page of text, and I hope I helped contribute a little beneficially to the future of this game. I really do enjoy it, and I just don't want to pull my hair out over crap like this, but rather my own mistakes as a player.