Capital ships seem hard to pick out when you're at 'icon' zoom level. This is exarcebated by the Kodiak frigates, I'm always thinking they are a capital ship for some reason. For this I have a suggestion: Capital ships should have brighter (or darker) icons so they can be picked out as a type.


Shields provide absolute protection against damage. From what I've seen I think shield mitigation is a mechanic to discourage concentration fire; the more hits a ship is taking, the higher mitigation it has.

The Empire Box scroll bar is in a terrible location. I scroll the screen left every time I try to use it. How about dumping it and just using up and down arrows in some other location instead, like next to the command console at the bottom of the screen? Also, it would be nice if, in the Empire Box, the name of the planet the camera is nearest to would highlight or change color or something. It would make it easier to quickly pick it out in the list.

Just a minor nitpick--why not make the pirate ship icons white to match their icon? The grey it is now isn't very visible under many circumstances, IMO.

The Beta1 runs well on my system and shows a lot of gaming potential but there are many issues that need work. Be warned, I've included a lot of points and suggestions in the following.


Problems and Suggestions


#1. Map and gravity well sizes are far too small. There is no room for tactical maneuvering/trickery in the game as it is now. The game's ships are so fast and travel such short distances that they are in weapons range within seconds of arriving in your system, which gives the game a frantic feel. This certainly kills any attempt at an EPIC feel to the game.

Recommendations:

-Make the maps and gravity wells MUCH bigger.

-Also, making sure that modders can modify map and gravity well sizes will go a long way to increasing the number of purchases and long term customer satisfaction.


#2. The present Phase Lane system allows newly arrived ships to immediately move a bit backwards and then jump through the planets gravity well.

Recommendations:

-Make the Phase Lanes have relatively small 3D entry/exit zones in each gravity well that directly face their points of destination/origin. This would force ships to travel at sub light through planetary gravity wells to reach specific Phase Lane entry points to the next system. It would also allow ships that accidentally enter a heavily defended map to simply go back the way they came in order to escape.

-To work with Phase Lane entry/exit points, Phase Space Inhibitors would have to be changed a bit. Perhaps instead of preventing Phase jumping totally, Inhibitors could instead GREATLY increase the time ships require to jump into Phase Space. Inhibitors can create a small spherical zone around themselves. Any hostile ships in that sphere would require a huge increase in time to be able to jump into Phase Space. This would also mean that you would need several inhibitors in a system to cover all Phase Space exit/entry points.


#3. The Phase Space Lane system tends to force a blockade/siege warfare mindset in players. We've seen enough forced bottlenecks lately in games like Empires at War, Space Empires I-V, and so on. It would be nice if this game could be more original and less limiting..which would again add to the epic feel. It is interesting how an old game called Star Wars Rebellion didn't need to use bottlenecks...unfortunately, that is about all that I can say was good about Rebellion.

Recommendations:

-All planet gravity well maps should have several (ie 4+) Phase Space Lane links to other planets. This would make the game more fluid and reduce the importance of fortifying Phase Space Lanes. It would also help prevent players from getting stuck in a corner with no hope of expansion (or at least prevent huge difficulties in breaking out).

-Certain techs could be allowed that allow you to ignore Phase Lanes altogether and simply choose your desired destination. If this is too overpowering, limits can be put on ship 'jump' range, or ship transversing speed, or even ship size/type.

-Of course, you could always just get rid of the forced Phase Lane idea altogether and let players jump to where they want to go


#4. Camera rotation has an irritating momentum effect. Some people might like it, but other won't.

Recommendations:

-Simply make it optional.


#5. Some ship weapons are firing beyond their weapon arcs (I noticed a few others had this complaint).

Recommendations:

-Check and fix weapons that aren't properly set for angle limitations.


#6. Weapon impacts from powerful weapons on small ships should have a greater effect (once again, noticed others posted about this idea).

Recommendations:

-Ships hit by powerful weapons should be pushed around a bit. Maybe the weapon impact graphic effects can be increased a bit for certain weapons.

#7. Game should have a clearer size class difference between ships (instead of Frigate and Capital Ship). A lot of players would like to see a Frigate/Destroyer/Cruiser/Battle Cruiser/Battleship system.

Recommendations:

-Frigates are fine as they are, but the game should implement Destroyers, Cruisers, Battle Cruisers and Battleship classes. Just make sure that the increase in abilities of the larger ships don't totally remove the use for smaller cheaper/nimbler/harder to hit ships.


#8. As it is, the differences in size between a Frigate and Capital Ship is way too small. Based on the game's present size difference when compared to Frigates, Capital ships would be classified as somewhere between Destroyers and Cruisers.

Recommendations:

-Ship classes need to be scaled a little more realistically. Your big super ships should look and feel like they are big super ships.

#9. Planets are too small. This takes away from the immersion and believability of the game.

recommendations:

-Planets, asteroids and stars should be increased in scale.


The Following from this point on are just features I would like to see included in the game.


#1. It would be cool if some planets were bigger and were more valuable than others. They could even have bigger gravity wells.

#2. Some planets could have moons that offer additional resources. The extra moon could even increase the gravity well zone.

#3. 3D tactics and strategies need to be offered to take advantage of the 3D maps. While some might say 3D tactics and strategies would make the game more complex for the average gamer, it is important to remember the average gamer isn't into Science Fiction Space Empire building games. I would guess most of us interested in this game also played and loved the Homeworld series, and 3D tactics would not be a problem for us...in fact, we would prefer complex 3D tactics.

#4. Speaking of Homeworld, I used to love the blinking navigation lights. They made the ships look so lonely and added a lot to the game atmosphere. I hope SoaSE will also be adding navigation lights on ships and structures.

#5. Fighter Craft really need to dock before jumping into Phase Space.

#6. Ships that are grouped with the Ctrl function should stay in formation, and should jump into Phase Space at the same time.

#7. I find the present level of ship durability in the Beta is fine. I don't see any need for changes in that regard.

Wow, that was quite a bit. I hope that this post helps the game developers in making an epic game that is a hit for YEARS to come. Thanks for letting us help through the beta guys.

This can be activated by turning AutoSave to TRUE in the user.settings file. There is not currently a way to do this from within the game.

Tactics yes. But really the strat map should remain 2D. as long as you have phase lines a 3D map wont add any gameplay complexity other then obscureing your view and makeing it harder to navigate. I dont know why people get the idea that a 3D map gives more options.

A planet with 3 phase lines to and from it in a 2D map, will if moved to a 3D map, still be just that... a planet with 3 phase lines to and from it.

- They will automatically dock when their home is issued a jump order, but they often wont make it and will become homeless and eventually asplode.

- Just to check: you know about right clicking the phase jump order? Doing this automatically would decrease your flexibility a lot unfortunately.

My observations from my last Sins session:

Embargo appears to be used against destroyed enemy planets on occasion. Also, it should be auto-triggered if enemy trade ships are present in the sector, colony or no.

Repair Platforms will empty their antimatter on unbuilt modules. At the least, they should prioritize hurt built items/ships over things that arn't built.

Stolen credit income doesnt appear in the drop down list when you mouseover your credits.

The AI shouldn't focus on attacking vulnerable colonies so much. Every game i get enemy fleets who jump through 4 of my systems (getting pounded by bombers and ships the whole way) just so they can hit the one colony without any defenses.

It seems that you can always head off AI attacks by attacking one of their systems; their ships will usually jump back to defend. A conniving player could exploit this to keep the AI ships out of action. Not sure if that even needs to be changed.. but worth observing.

We plan on adding more lights and effects on ships/structures in future builds. Just to makes sure they are working properly for you, can you check your repair or broadcast center?

is there the possibility of adding more than one object that can be colonized per gravity well i.e. maybe 2 or 3 planets with some distance between them as well as some asteroids this would serve to make the well bigger, slowing the game down a little.

I can't speak for the OP, but I don't see any lights on either the Repair Station or Broadcast Center. Now, for what I really wanted to post about: Can you make the messages clickable? I keep seeing things like "TDN Whatsit has reached level 4," but if I want to perform some action on/with TDN Whatsit I have to search high and low to find it.

Trade ships can get into a condition where they trade with their own tradeport, giving you functionally unlimited credit flow. I think this happens when you have a trade alliance with someone who has no trade ports.. or maybe after canceling a trade alliance. I haven't managed to narrow it down yet.

When canceling a structure order, it should always take the last one in the queue, or at least one that's not being built.
Rshift should work just as well as Lshift. Currently it doesnt.
A phase jump exit graphic would be nice and dramatic.
The Save dialog should present a list of existing save game names.
There should be a way to quickly sell greater increments of minerals on the black market, such as shift-click for 1000.

The Hard AI aggressively builds ships in the early game, but seems to hit a ship production lull in the midgame. In particular, I think it spends more money and resources on research than it should.

When you recieve a message like "Your fleet has reached [system]" or "[shipname] has reached level X" Maybe you could make the system in question blink on the empire tree or something,becuase in a bigger game, i can't keep track of which system is where, except for the few i fortified or have shipyards in.

also, the exclamation mark in "Pirates!" look really cheesy

Third point, the message box on the top doesn't always disappear gain after I scroll in it.

incidentally, here's a savegame where the tradeships are going bonkers with the credits.

I would just like to say i like this it's the best looking and most stable beta i've ever seen. But i would also like to suggest the ships moving while they fire and another vote for no phase jumping through gravity wells.

P.S. sorry if these things have been covered.

Thank you Aro325 Yes, the moving ship and phase jumping issues have been popular. We are exploring options for both.

All excellent suggestions DeadlyShoe. We are addressing most of these..thanks.

Hit the space bar to jump to any message but we are looking at ways to improve this access.

-The unlimited credit trade bug has been fixed.
-Shift selling/buying for larger quantities got removed by mistake
-good points all around

hmmm I've noticed this and it bothers me... my trade ships don't actually ever dock with the trade station... also, the trade station and the research station in the game seem REALLY bland... they need lights or moving parts or something...

Maybe somekind of conveyer system carrying crates away or something....

I must agree with jnewl that when you click on a news you will be taken to that point.
sometimes you get like 2-3 news at the same time, but I really wanted to go to the planet where the enemy fleet is

I think its too easy to research all the topics in the techtree. This is suppose to be a 4x game, and in those games you can research for a whole day and still wont get like 50% of all the techs, just look at Galciv 2 .

it would be great with a frigate class missile-boat. and minelayers would be great! or maybe have mines as a tactical building, which makes it impossible to just keep laying mines with the ship when the antimatter has charged.

a missile type of defence structure would be nice.

The "laser attack" with one of the capitol ships should only be able to shoot at the direction the ship is currently facing. it looks pretty silly when the laser beams goes 90* from the direction the ship is facing.

I must say I think the ships (especially the frigates) shouldnt just speed up as fast as they can to the enemy, then making a complete stop and then they all start to fire against each other until one side dies. more movement would be nice.

and is it possible for ships to dogde incoming fire by moving out of the way, or does all weapons have a homing ability ?

I noticed that when my colony ship entered "hyperspace" 100 of its antimatter was used, howabout if you dont have the right amount of AM you wont be able to phase jump. and there could also be a tech to lower the cost of the phase jump.

If you double click on a ship, I would rather have it select all of the same type of that ship in that system, then having it center on it. I think the mousewheel does that already.

Hi Blair, here are some more suggestions...as if my last post here wasn't long enough


#1. Construction Frigates:

The Construction Frigates should be removed from the game. As they are now, they spend most of the game sitting around doing nothing but getting mixed up with your fleet icons and slowing down older PCs. They can't even Phase Jump...not that there would be any reason to bring them anywhere.

Instead of using Construction Frigates, you could instead order all of your construction projects exclusively from your planet/asteroid menu. You could then have a whole bunch of those tiny little ships that fly over the surfaces of planets fly up and build your project. They could swarm all over your project until it is built. Once the project is completed, they would swarm over to the next one. Once done building all the projects, they would return to the planet and merge/disappear back into the traffic.

Exchanging the Construction Frigate for these little swarms would have the added bonus of getting rid of the magic construction beam concept as well (some people were really bothered by the repair/harvesting beams in Homeworld).

When there are hostile ships nearby, you could slow down (or stop) the construction rate of these little swarms until the threat is dealt with. Hmmm, you could even make it a research option to allow these swarms to construct at full speed while hostile ships are present.

If you don't want to waste the Construction Frigate model, you could use it instead as a repair frigate/tech. It looks like something more suited to repairs than the game's present repair facility.


#2. The threat of Multiplayer Phase Lane Fortification Stalemates

Something needs to be done to prevent a Phase Lane Fortification play style being the most powerful strategy. Multiplayer sucks on Space Empires V because the game always reaches a point where nobody can assault fortified enemy warp points anymore and the game becomes a stalemate. I hope this doesn't happen with SoaSE.

Perhaps by reimplementing planetary orbits like the developers initially wanted to do, trench warfare in space can be avoided. As planets orbit, the Phase Lanes could be made to randomly shift around making new routes. So what was once a fortified planet in a key junction suddenly becomes a backwater base far from the action.

The only other way to prevent stalemates would be to allow expensive high end research for Phase Space travel that doesn't require Phase Lanes (maybe with a serious range or speed restriction to keep some level of balance). I know modders would especially love this option the most.

Hmmm, or you could make an expensive tech research option for making brand new new Phase Space Lanes.


#3. Tactical Sensors

I think most of the die hard Homeworld gamers would be sold on this game if it offered an option for tactical level fog of war. Ships would have tactical level sensor ranges. It would introduce a lot of tactical cat and mouse battles complete with surprises and ambushes.


#4. Gravity Well size needs to be increased

I know I mentioned Gravity Wells in my last post. But I've been trying to figure out just how much they need to be increased. I figure they need to be increased somewhere between 4X - 10X. Closer to 4X and you get reasonably quick battles for gravity wells. Closer to 10X and you get a lot of fleet maneuvering and increase the chances of multiple players fighting it out in the same gravity well at the same time. Still, unless you implement sensors and fog of war, a 10X increase in size would delay games too much to be worthwhile.

Hope this stuff helps.

That was some really great ides Paradoxnt! especially that idea with orbiting planets etc.!

and also I think you should be able to force your fleet to move at the same speed as the slowest one if you want, instead of having your smaller ships rush ahead, taking a beating until your bigger ships comes into range.

imo planets shouldnt orbit. Id rather like bigger ships introduced to overcome planet defence. As it is the planet defence arent even that great. Orbiting planets will be confusing i think.

I like the idea about the tactical sensors. But for this to work in a proper way the gravity wells should be bigger, so you have room to manouver. Also the player made phaselines sounds like a awesome idea. But it should be some kind of super power, either costing alot of resources or/and a timer. Maybe also make it a tempoary phaseline, so it last a few minuts. That way if the attacker fails he is vaulnarble to a counter attack into his empiere. Which in turn can end up having the defender who counter attacked, traped in enemy territory if the phaseline closes. It should give alot of fun scenarios and options for the player.

On another note. Is it possible we will see a new economic overview then the current. Its hard to see how much income you get from trade ships, refinary ships, and how much is from tax and extractors etc.
Maybe make it like in SupCom where you can see your different resoucre/second for different types of sources(trade/refinary ships, extractors/tax)

I would just like to say that i agree with Paradoxnts suggestions in both his long posts 100% . My dream would be for the gravity wells to be huge, spherical, with fog of war (making every planet a major battlefield with potentially multiple battles taking place if several players are hungry for it). I don't know how much of those suggestions are going to be followed (with beta 1 it feels like the game is taking a different, more classic RTS-like route to me), but I hope at least some size and pacing paramaters can be modded in the final game

I'm also not entirely sure about phase space lanes. Perhaps a tech could allow you to not use them, but with limited range and longer travel times, thus giving the enemy some time to set up a welcome party for your fleet?

For a 1st beta i must admit this is a fine piece of work Ive only had 1 crash so far but was able to play though many sandbox games error free.

Only thing i can offer so far are suggestions on improving some things.

1) Better build animations... right now it just looks like a thermometer rising (i really dislike this). Is it possible to get some scaffolding around the objects that disappears when the building is finished?

2) Better pathfinding if possible. Some ships get stuck on objects, and i have to manually get them unstuck.

3) Capitol ship combat IMO needs a little improvement. Ships should not sit still, and slug it out. They should always try to maneuver, and outflank the enemy ships to bring heavy weapons to bare while trying to avoid the enemy's heavy weapons. Fighter combat seems ok from what ive seen.

4) The whole point of jump inhibitors is to keep the enemy from leaving the system. So far it is not working that well, because ships jump in right at the edge of the gravity wells, and if they have quick jump researched they can insta-jump right back out. AI managed to completely bypass a choke point i made like that. (i know you can train anti jump inhibitor, but i dont think the ai got that far yet).

5) Slightly better visual confirmation of control groups (like little numbers besides ships in empire view). Right now you can hardly tell what group you have selected unless you go to where they are at and focus on them. Sometimes you need to keep your attention elsewhere.

There is more, but i think others here have already mentioned them. So far i think with a little more work, and those things mentioned above added/fixed the gameplay will be spot on. The eye candy can always come later as long as it plays well.

IIRC the 3 races in the game will use different methods to jump from planet to planet (correct me if i am wrong). So the fortified phase jump lanes would only work vs TEC/Pirate ships, and not against the Advent, or Vasari. While i am all for the idea of orbiting planets, and resources im sure there is a reason why it was not implemented. Ether it didnt work well, or just not enough funding for the devs to include it. I think the current space lane setup is fine as it is as long as what you mentioned about the impenetrable jump lane doesnt happen.

That was an excellent suggestion about the construction frigates. Have them become the repair ships, and do away with the repair facility altogether. Have a research where the frigates will become tougher and repair faster to take the repair facility's place.

Yes, make those minions orbiting the planets do the construction work. That also was an excellent suggestion.