I feel you are right Dannyboy1121, I would also like the game´s speed to be alot slower. This IS suppose to be an Epic game

a few things that came to mind, that id like to see

-Slower fire, the bullets/plasma is way to fast.
-All ships should be able to miss there targets.
-Ships shouldnt be able to fire through friendly ships.

I'm not playing the beta (I have no tpreordered the game, but I can agree with Paradoxnt about the loosing a whole fleet.
It has no epic feeling if you can build the whole fleet in the matter of minutes and when loosing it matters little. My personal wish is that you can usually retreat with like a half (1/3...) of the fleet and repair it. And that the AI would do the same, naturally. Lately we hear a lot about the ease of jumping in/out of the system, space popcorn etc.. That kinda worries me.
The other thing is the space highway system as was described. If you have space lanes it is a setback for modders trying to recreate certain universes like Star Wars etc..

My proposal is that the travel should use antimatter and this would effectively set the limits for the length in two ways
1) The AM quantity limit. The level of travel research could make engines more effective so longer and longer jumps are possible.
2) If you can't escape without any AM you would NEVER want to jump so far as to be left without it. Since a fleet without any AM is more or less a sitting duck, right? Or at least it shouldn't be able to cope with even basic defences of a planet - that would and should be neccessary at every planet. A fleet jumping as far as spending all it's AM would have to sit back and wait to recharge enough to be battle-worthy. This would also give the time a defender needs to gather his forces in the case of such deep attack.

Also, i noticed that the guardia (or whatever it is called) flak frigate will attack normal ships, but only if they have shields, and they only do around 3 pts of damage per attack. then if shields ever fall, they stop firing on that target. so that shows that anti-fighter weapons, even though they read as having an attack of 19 have a 80% (verified in game files) reduction in power.

Also, was told in another thread that flaks only firing when ship had shield and then stopping at hull was a bug.

knowing that guardia's couldn't hurt my ships made fighting pirates a lot easier, as i now know how to prioritize my attacks.

KOL beam weapons firing at crazy angles is irritating. Perhaps the KOL spinal mounted beam weapons should have a tiny firing arc pointing directly ahead of the ship. To compensate for the lack of arc, these beam weapons should be increased in power. Spinal mounted weapons SHOULD have more power anyway.

My ships weapon fire tends to pass through other ships that I own to reach enemy targets (especially KOL beam weapons). I would prefer they didn't do that as it takes away from the enjoyment of the game.

I hope modders will be able to tweak the game's shields so that they can be made to hug the hull of ships tightly.

If I'm correctly aware of what this means, it still seems to be an issue. In my current game under the Mar 31 patch, the first faction to build a trading post (one of the AIs) appears to have gotten ridiculous income from it (before anyone else had any, or I'd suspect, he'd even built a second one)--far, far more than any of the other factions who built trading posts later on.

I find this not the least irritating but think that this is how beam weapons actually should work. You shouldn't use a moving turret when you can direct the beam with a small mirror - or a reflective field, to stay in the SF environment. Think e.g. of sky beams and laser projectors. Or the airborne lasers for missile defense: its definitely not the Boeing 747 that is precisely following a missile but the beam is pointetd by steering mirrors in its nose. Or Star Trek's phasers that fire also omnidirectional without any moving parts. Placing the beam 'outlets' at the tip of long spinal mounts is only to give the Kol an even larger firing arc without damaging itself.

I agree with the above post, beam weapons can fire at crazy angles as long as the beams are coming from outside the ship. If the whole ship is a giant beam cannon than I would understand that. What does kinda bug me is that the turrets on the ships don't track, they just point straight ahead yet fire opposite directions. Also there is a ship that has a spinal mounted cannon on it, the ship looks awesome, but it fires where its not pointing which can bug me.

These are all minor details that will get mopped up towards the end of development though, right now, just need to make sure the foundation is solid.

I personally think that the 'beam' should be a straight firing weapon, yes, i do have to agree that the 'redirection' system in the tips would be a good idea, but you have to think about heat and wear on such a small part of the ship, if you wanted to cripple the cannon, one good hit to a 'mirror' would take it out, or at least put a huge dent in its accuracy. Plus we know that warfare is not the Trade feds forte. So, i think that just developing a beam cannon to begin with was a feat of engineering for them.

Gameplay: I'd like to see a formations button to help order the ships after grouping ie line, triagle, square, pentagon, hex, circle ... the ships then fly into that shape which could be sized to be larger or smaller by the player. Allow the player to draw this grouping in whatever plane angle he/she chooses. How about abilites that would involve groups of ships like a version of Cantabrian circle or focused firepower without player intervention.

Tactics: Why buy fighters? If bombers take out the frigates and capital ships, fighters are purely a defensive buy and not likely to win against them if the attacker uses flak frigates/battleship flak batteries. Fighters should have a capable anti-frigate role (perhaps researchable). Make Hangers expandable with experience like a ship. Gun batteries should be smaller or more powerful

Graphics: I cannot discern the frigates or fighters/bombers during battles. More ship engines glow would help (not just trails).

So then maybe fighters could get a speed boost or an increase in anti strike craft power to compensate for their shortcomings.

I also have an issue with planetary shield generators in space (easily destroyed). These things should be part of the planet itself. Planets should get an automatic shield generator that increases in power/resistance for each level the planet is advanced (ie: 1, 2, and 3). Or maybe it could be a separate and costly upgrade for planets.

Planetary shield generators on the planet would also help in modded open connection games. It would help alleviate the whack-a-mole concept because tiny spoiler forces would be unable to wipe out a colony on their own (or would take nearly forever).

Also, upkeep doesn't go beyond 75%. I guess this is done for balancing purposes to give smaller forces a chance. Still, I hope that 75% can be modded to another number for mods.

I really like the idea of having the shieldgenerator on the planet instead of the present thing.

Also I think that lvl 3 is a bit too low to have as max lvl for a planet. make it to lvl 10, and maybe lower the boost the planet gets for each upgrade.

Latest thoughts.

-Bomb damage is dealt when bombs leave ships, not when they hit.. This seems to be the case for a lot of combat, but it feels especially wrong with bombs. It also results in a behavior where the last 1 or 2 salvos fired at the planet just vanish into it without exploding since the planet is already dead.

-Screenshots should be numbered 01, 02, etc. instead of 1, 2, etc.

-One nice touch I found in supreme commander was a shortcut to the savegames/screens/etc. directory placed in the games home directory.

-Feature request: Can teams be lockable on a per player basis? This would be nice if - for example - you wanted to set up a 'nemesis team' of 3 AIs, and then have yourself and 2-3 AIs who are free to engage in diplomacy.

-Intelligence pacts do not require cease fires. Is this intended?

The probem with straight firing beam weapons is that you can't use them on targets that are faster and/or have better maneuverability than the weapon platform. They are appropriate on fighters against other fighters and ships or on Death Stars against planets. But the Kol could never use it against frigates or other battle ships that are not already in its line of fire. Seeing how slowly it steams and rolls the lasers would most of the time be useless and leave the Kol with its meager autocannons. I'd concur that a 'ship killer' beam weapon needs to be restricted to straight line or a very narrow arc. But in my eyes the Kol's lasers simply don't have enough punch to rectify this. And, to be honest, I find the look of the firing Kol very elegant and gratifying.

The 'mirrors' or whatever technobabble gimmick is used for pointing the beams must of course be adequate for the weapon's energy and should not overheat by simply firing it. And one cripple every weapon by damaging its barrel/projector/visible parts.

You are right that TEC aren't the warfare experts in this game. Lets see what the other factions can produce WRT beam weapons.

Well so far so good. I see lots of potential for this title. I cant add any real useful comments at the moment because I have only had about an hour with it. With that said I must say it is fluid and crisp on all visual levels at 2560x1600 resolution. Moreover it barely makes a spike on my CPU meter - so far.

Regarding any suggestions at the moment I feel the speed should be slowed down (I love to fly around with the camera to check things out and often it is over before I can find a good view point. I would also like for the bars and GUI stuff to be user movable. I have lots of desktop real estate and I would love to use it all.

I'm also not hot the idea of "lanes" being that space is so vast and what not. I would like to see something like range jump ability depending on your antimatter level and tech skill. I would use the lanes for something like trade and but not the combat ships.

My rig has QX6700 OC+ running Vista64bit with dual G8800 OC+ in SLI with 4GBs of 8888 OC+ RAM.

People are using the Airbourne Missile Defense Laser as an example of redirecting a beam using a optical refraction turret. Those beams are so weak, they have a hard time damaging flimsy missiles...or pop cans. In fact, I think they do pulse damage instead of heat damage. They wouldn't be able to do squat to anything with a bit of armor on it.

But this is the future, so maybe laser efficiency has gotten infinitely better and the ability to optically redirect the beam is more advanced as well. Or maybe they've figured out how to create, focus and redirect X Ray lasers using solid state Arrays. These Arrays would be the jutting points on the front of the KOL ship. If this is the case, maybe the jutting points on the KOL ship should look a little more like Arrays/Turrets.

Still, a KOL Spinal mount weapon that does massive damage in a narrow forward arc would be cool. It would certainly bring some additional tactics to the game.

Also, the speed of the game is fine. I can handle a couple of battles simultaneously and do empire building stuff. Any faster and I would be pressured/rushed. Any slower and I would fall asleep. So I think Ironclad presently has the perfect speed setting for this game.

Huh, I'm only getting maximun res of 1280x1024 in the options.

what does your monitor support? my max is 1680x1050, which is the max my monitor supports, it would be stupid to show a higher resolution that what the hardware is capable.

@Ash & Lord - I have two 30" and two 20" Dell FPD.

Since I am using SLI mode for the game I can only use one monitor. I chose to use one of the 30" ones. Its max res is 2560x1600 and sadly the refresh rate is a mere 60Htz.

Mr Moneybags

Crap,must only support res of 1280 or lower.  

thats sounds about right for screens 19 inches and smaller...

LOL! The entire rig is brand new with all top of the line extreme components and cost over....


[wait for it]



$15K (that was with discounts on the parts if you can believe it)

I opted to make a new godbox instead of getting a new Harley this year because it was much cheaper and my wife likes those kind of purchases (the lessor of two evils in her eyes however).

Well, the godbox is less likely to kill you. Unless it goes HAL on your butt.

Latest notes:

-If you issue a formation jump order and then shift-click an attack order on a planet, the units which can bomb seem consider themselves a different formation than the units that cant bomb for purposes of when to jump.

I miss the option to destroy own buildings/ships.
Gauscanons and other defend stuff costs a lot of upkeep and once the front line shifted I should be able to destroy them.
That would help a bit with the always at 75% upkeep problem