I don't know if this counts as a bug, but fighters and flak frigates both do not seem to prioritize strike craft as targets. Instead, they attack ships and modules like any other ship. This makes it very difficult to attack against massed fighters; the only practical method I found was to lead fleets with pairs of Kol battleships spamming Flak Burst.

Command cruisers are pretty nifty, but if you research designate target they ALL seem to designate the same target. Eew. Leading into:

You have to go through your cruisers (and presumably destroyers) individually if you want to turn off auto ability execution. This is a pain in the ass and results in me just letting the ai manage it even if it makes silly mistakes. Or am I missing a command?

A lot of research seems to become increasingly Not Worth It. I'm not sure you can make back your outlay in any sort of reasonable time frame on the mining and modular construction techs, for example.

I don't know if it was just bad luck, but i ran almost completely out of asteroid crystal in short order. The only planet with crystal left was my Ice, which didn't really make a lot of sense to me, because even though it had 3 crystals i didnt think they were any more full of crystal than other planets.

I've had some people ask me about this: An irc client is built into stardock central, but if you are using something like mirc the server is irc.stardock.net and you join a channel by typing /join #sins.

1. Known bug.
2. Known bug.
3. Known bug. Indirect result of having abilities not casted as a group which you don't want to avoid wasting antimatter.
4. We'll look into their balance over the course of the beta.
5. Ice should contain dramatically more crystal than anything else though resources are actually infinite because you have refineries to always grab more from your nodes and even depleted nodes have a minimum income. Not to mention you can always buy it off the market. Another thing worth pointing out is the galaxy generator is going to be reviewed to make sure the planet distribution is more balanced - this will also help.

Logistics of planets needs to be doubled, as it is now, in a small map you run out of place to build real quick...

Well, some abilities i would think you want group cast. Like the missile frigates aoe attack. Or maybe the Kol shield.


(Maybe shift-clicking or something should --> group cast?)


I suffered a crash but I cant seem to post it in the technical thread: it keeps eating my post. LOL. But not a big deal, since i didnt nab the smartexception for it anyway.

I think an easy way to 'fix' logistics would be to make it more top heavy and capital reliant, so that you can still fit a lot of ships even with limited planet control.

Ships in the solar area seem to help keep marauders under control, even when they escalate to truely ugly proportions.

As for the carrier cruiser being useless....Eh! Look at its cost! It's not much more than frigates are. And it looks cool. I do wish it had a gun tho.

I agree, make the capital have like a level 12 logistics, most of the time I am maxed out at 4

well i changed this little piece of code for the capital planet, and with only 10 minutes into the game it already seemed better, a little faster paced, and I wasn't searching for planets to expand to as fast as before...

In the PlanetTerranHome.entity file I changed this to increase the capital logistics numbers:

path:CivilianModules
stageCount 3

I changed the maxModuleSlotCount:Civilian 2,3, and 4 to 4,8, and 12.



I didn't change upgrade prices or anything , I just wanted to see how the game felt with less stress trying to find space to build the buildings you need.

Hot tip: desert planets can house 6 modules. Terran/Ice only go up to 4. (That's why the second death star got destroyed, they could only put in the capital shipyard.)

Also, I think i misinterpreted what you ere saying... I thought you were talking about Fleet Cap. My bad, tho.

yeah the changes I made allow you to build more structures at the home planet, if you want to you can now build all 8 research facilites at the home planet , and still have room for a trade dock, a capital ship yard, and 1 broadcast center!

I like the Beta 2 so far, the new additions are amazing. However the concerns I do have are as follows:

1. The Cruiser Carrier needs the addition of a weapon, or the ability to wield more then one squad. Through research or other means.

2. The Command Cruiser is nice, however extremely underpowered. Pop a few Auto Kinetic Turrets on it, or increase its laser damage. These are cruisers by the way.

3. The Kol Battleship, has its turrets been replaced? It seams that in the Beta 1 its Auto Kinetic Turrets looked better. Could be a bug.

4. Again Cruisers, are cruisers. And they can hardly take on 2 or 4 Cobalt light frigates. In general their firepower should be increased as well as shields. It just doesn't make sense that the first 3 cruisers can't top the firepower of a Cobalt Frigate. In exception of the Carrier Cruiser, which needs the ability to field 2 squadrons or added weaponry. Also the Kodiak Cruiser is pretty nice, but could use a little bump in firepower. Maybe one or three points more of laser firepower.

5. Battleships are good. However the Marza dreadnought should have a boost in its Kinetic firepower. It is a dreadnought, as in usually the most powerful ship in the fleet.

6. The missile frigates could also use a little boost in firepower, or higher shielding.

IMO beta 2 is a 100% improvement over beta 1 (it should be because beta 1 was a system compatibility beta). Ive only played beta 2 for a few hrs on easy so far, and this time easy is much more of a challenge than hard was in beta 1. Im playing a 40 planet single star 3 AI FFA, flags, bounty's, and Pirates! (Yarr!) I haven't got to building major cap ships yet, and ill go into that later.

A few good things i noticed right from the get go.

You can toggle on/off the skybox environment in the options now If you dont like the ultra bright nebula's just toggle them off for a classic black with stars background!

The phase lanes IMO have improved slightly. I am still in favor of fully connected maps, but the new system generator is much better than beta 1 from the few maps ive seen generated.

The AI is much more aggressive this time around. Especially the Pirate AI. For the 1st time my capitol was attacked by an enemy fleet in the very early game, and i damn near lost it! (4 corsairs, 3 pillagers, and a group of rogues) I had to rush my flagship fleet back home to fight them.

The new system of population/tactical/logistics/squad cap upgrades makes things a little interesting. I was used to the upkeep system from beta 1 with no hard unit, or structure caps. This system forces you to think about what structures you want to build on each planet because real estate is finite now with 4 max logistics slots at a terran world you have to chose if you want that world to be a trade world or a production world, because you cant have both anymore. The good point is no more broadcast center spammage.

3 hours into the game i described above, and the only capitol ship i have managed to build was an Akain cruiser. I am having a major Crystal crisis even tho i colonized an ice world, and am in tier 4 of crystal harvesting with a refinery built. The majority of my crystal has been going into research. I have been using the black market quite a bit more to acquire crystal since metal comes in excess now. I do have a nice defense fleet built, but it only has 2 cap ships. The lack of cap ships makes rely heavily on planetary defenses now especially with the aggressive corsair flying wandering pirates ("booty off the port bow!" that line cracked me up). It is much harder to set up your economy, and maintain it now. Nicely done.

The bad things i saw. 1 graphical error in the tutorial where a highlight was in space, and not around the action bar where it should have been.

New frigs are nicely done. I havnt built any of the new cruisers yet. Speaking of which there is research for the cruiser/carrier which i researched, but there no icon to build it anywhere in ether the frig, or cap ship factory. Where do you build it. or is it build able?

While psycho wandering pirates is a good thing, it can also be bad especially in the very early game (1st 5-10 minutes). Like i said earlier the pir8's almost wiped me out at my home planet before i had any means of defending other than my flagship, and 4 cobalts. If it was a no flagship game i would have been dead. There should be a time delay before they start rampaging.

i agree we need higher caps i like big fleets or just make it so the cap ships dont use up 40 points!

i've modded the logistics to allow for easier placement of structures , i think the logistics numbers need to be bumped up by default...

The camera controls seem difficult to me. Zooming in and out is a pain, and often when I use caps lock to toggle the zoom, I'm just looking at empty space. Double-clicking on a planet should zoom in to that planet, instead of just centering on it.

I can also see things getting very difficult to manage when your empire gets a lot of planets. One thing that would make this easier would be to show icons next to planets when zoomed out that indicate available slots of each type, that way planets that can be improved can be identified at a glance. Another thing that would help is to not be required to zoom in to each planet to place structures. Here is how to avoid it. When a structure is selected to be built, and the camera is zoomed far enough out, a top-down view of the planet appears, showing the entire gravity well area. The player clicks to place the structure, then the view disappears and they are back to being zoomed out and looking at their whole empire.

I like being able to hover on those arcs around a planet to see what friendly and enemy ships are there, but I want to be able to see both at the same time so I can easily compare and see how a battle is going.

Use Z, X and C for better zooming - I personally never use caps or the mouse wheel. I like the idea of the slot icons. You can already build around planets without zooming by using the autoplace function (which for beta 1 users is much smarter now). If you meant for placing and you knew about autoplacing, your idea isn't too bad at all

As for the last comment, we usually use the empire tree to view how the battle is going from way back but I can see how it would be useful on the bars as well. Any ideas crew?

Well, playing about 7 hours so far, my take:


1 - For my reference the scaling proportion is kinda off: for immersion reason watching a trader or a freighter docking at a trade station or at a refinery is a painful sight. The station looks like it has some docking bays, but the ship is about 3 times the size of the entrance. I think most station needs to be a little bigger. With one exception ... for just 2 Gauss Cannon, I think the gun platform is wayyyyyy too big for its actual function (comparing to a shipyard or research station for example).


2 - I think the ships are moving way too fast, this is immersion reason too. Frigate is as fast as fighter, fighter is faster then even missile, and capital ship moves like corvette. This, so far make the only battles worth watching and enjoy the eye candy is when battleship dukes it out together because in frigate battles they move around like nut, too hard to keep track of anything. If it's not feasible to re-balance the speed of the unit, I hope it's moddable or the game will have a speed adjuster (that most RTS games have). Which lead to ...


3 - Capital ship combat orientation: I'm quite glad that the capital ship in Sins has some soft of combat orientation. Like some ship is strong as frontal attack, some use broadside formation ...etc... this can add a tactical level to the engagement of these ships. But as right now they're turning and moving too fast for this orientation to means anything. And the fire angle I think need to be adjusted too. For example right now the four frontal lasers of the flag ship can fire at almost a 90 decree angle which doesnt look right. Magic bullet anyone?


4 - This one about the AI, I'm playing on medium and I notice this: most of the time they jump in my system with a fleet, don't attack anything and then try to out run my defense to jump to the next planet. I thought it was a smart move to attack my back line. But no, as soon as their fleet exist the phase lane, they turns around and jump back to the first system. And you can guess, as soon as they exist they turns around and jump back to the other system again right away. It keeps jumping back and forth constantly like that until I eventually wipe them out. It seems they can not decide which system to attack. Happen the most to pirate fleet


5 - Love the planet animation, it took me a while to recognize what was all those line was about, but once I do, wow! Very neat.


6 - About the limited Logistic points: at first I thought it too little as well. But after playing a while I think it's about right. The purpose here I think is to encourage expansion, and more importantly, to have specialize planets (which seems to fix to what Kyro explained about planet type ealier). I had to sort out this planet will have research, that other one (say like one surrounded by asteroid) will be a resource planet, and the other one will be a production planet ...etc... I had about 12 system by the time I quited, and 4 of them have trading station, 2 have Refinery station, 3 are research centers and the rest are factories, I think it worked out quite nice and balance without getting too over the top. Think about the situation in which you have enough logistic to have a trading station in every single system ... I think that'll break the economy.



Edit: oh and Blair, I hope you don't have to work this morning

Blair,

Unit stacking sounds like the kind of thing I want, to control my point no. 2. My stack of unit X should attack the enemy stack of unit Y. If it can be performed in an abstracted view, all the better. CTRL-ALT-SHIFT-ETC-clicking several fast-moving hostile units are not everyone's idea of fun.



Point 4, I will have to experiment with the weapon range / hold position function. Hopefully it will do what I want it to, but I would still appreciate if the support capitals somehow had a more restrictive automated behavior that lets them survive engagements where the player is not currently present in local tactical view.


More suggestions coming up.

/ Per

An odd thing I experienced going from Beta 1 to Beta 2 was this:

All through beta 1 I constantly tried to mouse-wheel-zoom into the position of the mouse cursor, like you do in Supreme Commander. Eventually I got used to the fact that Sins zooms in on the selected unit / planet / sun, and I played well like that.

But then after playing Beta 2 for two hours, I suddenly got my wish - the game started zooming towards the mouse cursor when I rolled the mouse wheel, JUST like I had wanted from the start. Problem being, now I had already gotten used to the Sins way of zooming on selected units.

I suppose that was a key binding I accidentally pressed. I'll have to look through the list to find which one it was.

/ Per

It makes alot more sense about the logistics caps now that you mention the specialized planets. To a new player that concept might slip by them. Perhaps a mention, and emphasis in the final games tutorial might help with that.

Can someone confirm for me if the "Psycho rampaging pirates" strength is equally proportionate to the bounty's against you? or is it determined by how well your infrastructure is set up, or how big your empire is? I'm having a harder time dealing with the pirates than with my true enemy's lol. They keep hitting me with consistently bigger fleets after each attack. Is there a way to wipe them out to stop, or at least slow down these relentless assaults?

New stuff:

5. List of selected units.

I miss the Homeworld list of currently selected units. That allowed me to bandbox a large team of units and then sub-select out of those ones by clicking the simple text list. For Sins, I appreciate the use of consistent icons for units, but the empire tree is already quite branched, so I would like to see the contents of my current selection somewhere else.

6. Double-click event text.

Sometimes the chat box lights up with event messages like "Ship has reached level 5". This is basically a message from the event queue, but if I haven't gone through my events in a while and I want to skip forward all the way to the current event related to that message, I would like to just click that event text and go directly to the ship that's leveled. Finding the white plus in the empire tree I already know about. It's nice, but I want more ways of doing things.


7. I dreamed there was a problem with movement.

...but when I woke up and tried to tell my wife, she just looked at me as if I were crazy. I still can't remember what it was I wanted to say about movement, but it'll come back to me. Unless I just dreamed all of it.

They are proportional to your empire size, trade and bounty against you. By all reports it seems a bit too powerful especially in easy and medium. They will be toned down in the next patch. I typically counter pirates by counter-bountying against other players or by picking key nodes from the star and fortifying them heavily. I also leave a few capital ships there to level up against the pirates which then makes it that much easier to beat them.

Also, it is quite possible the pirates are just passing through so you don't always have to worry - they may need to travel through your planets to get to an enemy.

( Thrawn,

Try SURL.se - their only limit is a 5MB file size, and you can upload most types of images and media files.

/ Per )

First off, what can I say but awesome. Now a few comments:

1. This really should be in the technical side, but it's a small thing. Here are my computer specs: Pentium 4 2.4 ghz processor, 512 mb ram, nvidia 5700 video card. During beta 1 I had to play at low graphics settings. Now, I can play at high, which for a computer that is four years old is amazing. If you can get my computer to play this game at the highest settings, then I will be even more impressed .

2. Load times are much better for the game, but for some reason it takes a while to load the menu screen, for me.

3. I'm playing a medium galaxy game with medium resources and on every planet I come to that has four resource asteroids around it there are 3 metal asteroids and only one crystal asteroid. As such I'm producing quite a bit more metal. This isn't a big problem at the moment since I can sell of my metal, but I could see problems further on in my game with not having enough crystals. Isn't there supposed to be two of each asteroid?

4. This is something that I'm sure some people won't agree with me on, but since this is beta 2 and it's about gameplay I feel I should post it. Certain parts of the tech trees, in my opinion, aren't very useful. For example, in the combat side you can research tech that allows you to build ships faster and on the empire side I believe that there is tech that you can research to build structures faster. I have really not had any moments where I had to build structures much faster. Usually, the default speeds were fine since my income couldn't keep up with my spending. Their are other techs such as weapon upgrade tech's that only affect a few ships, or the increase in population of desert planets tech, which is definitely helpful, but not as helpful as the tech that increases the population on your terran planets since terran planets have a higher population. There aren't that many of these techs, but there are a few and I believe that a cost-benefit analysis of these techs and some adjustments would help because when I play a game there are simply certain techs that I just don't use, which lessens the amount of decision making that I have to do, which I believe is at the core of the game .

Anyway, thats all for now.
Hopefully that helps,
Namnug

Gah! It posted 5 times!
Sorry, hopefully someone will delete em.

NP, I cleaned the posts up. Glad you liked the game and it ran your machine (wow!). Thanks for the feedback