Wow and suggestions!

[surjl0827]

First of all, I would like to congratulate Zarksoft for the release of the game.
ITS GREAT! (Especially the art work)

Anyways, I've noticed a few things after a few hours of gameplay.
The game is amazing, but I already have some suggestions for future reference.

1. Gameplay speed/time
I feel that the game is TOO slow. Half a day or a full day to build a structure makes me really frustrated. I want to see my empire grow at a steady pace. This feels a little too slow for me. So here's a suggestion: Make time based servers.

Example:
Server name- Psilos Arcturus. Nubia. Kol

speed- slow 1/2X Normal 1X. Fast 2X. Very Fast 4X
This way players can join servers that best match their time availabilty.

2. Ship Design and details:
Ship design facinated me right from the start. Here's something better:
Ship designer. Gives us the parts to work with, then allow the player to put the ships together for additional customization. This way we have a diverse array of ships to work with. Also, It becomes confusing when I click ships that are transiting. I get confused ( I think they aren't doing anything) so I keep on making them move to a new location over and over until I realize I repeated it 5 times. When a ship is selected, show current action clearly.


3. Planet details:
Again, make the experience rewarding for the player. If we click the planets we own, allow the players to see the details. Show the actual strucutures that have been built on the planet. Show lively cities or quiet colonies functioning depending on thr colony size.
Show the empire's citizens and ships flying and walking past the cities.
Almost like Sins of a solar empire planet details.

With the art work I've been seeing thus far, I would explode in my pants if this happened.

Other than this, a little annoyed by the constant "Connection to Server Lost" msg which pops up occasionally.

Keep up the good work!

[Leedot]

Thank you for all the kind words!

1 - This is something we've talked about doing and should be workable. We'll have to talk more about when / where it falls on the priority list but it's something that has a good chance of getting added.

2 - It's funny you should mention that but the game originally was designed with a blue print system in mind. We took it out for various reasons (worried that it would overwhelm people considering it's already a complex game and we didn't want to try and do too much right off the bat since we're already doing a lot.) That said a lot of those systems are still in the background so that could be a cool thing to bring back down the road.

3 - Also something that would be cool and could be do able, certainly the most art heavy of the three so it'll take longer to get it done but it's not beyond consideration.


As for the 'connection to server lost' msgs we'll work on improving that. I think there are a number of places but that's more Tsagoth / Zark's area of expertise so I can't go into too much detail.

[DickDastardly]

Echo the sentiments. Worth waiting for, worth not sleeping very much and worth the years subscription, and that's all without the first game kicking off yet!!

I like the slow pace. It fits perfectly with work timescales for me, and i can keep playing without neglecting the family too much!!

[Kiminoth]

Yeah, very happy so far. Mine main suggestion would have to be a "remember your password" option. Due to the d/c when leaving the app and having to sign back in so frequently, that'd be very helpful. Although like it was brought up somewhere else, an auto-reconnect would really bypass the need for that :)

Another thing(perhaps I just haven't seen it yet) though but perhaps upon selecting a unit, would be to show a trail between where it is and what it's going to. And then, for example a harvester, show a different colour to where it's leaving from.
e.g source and destination in different colours, and with other units just destination.

Edit: Is there a queue system for orders given, or are they unable to be changed once given? Because i've tried, for example, sending a unit to sector A, but midway I decided to send it to sector B, yet the direction doesn't change, and continues to sector A.

[Kentar_lux]

So worth the wait for! Thank you for the game!

May I suggest a 'Music off' option thought, that would be welcome.

Plus, I find it a bit hard, if more than one ship are in orbit of a planet, to distinguish which of these is following orders, and which just popped out of the factory. Some visual sepration between 'busy' and 'idle' state would be helpful.

More maybe later, still in awe of the amazement ;)

[zarkwizard]

Yeah, very happy so far. Mine main suggestion would have to be a "remember your password" option. Due to the d/c when leaving the app and having to sign back in so frequently, that'd be very helpful. Although like it was brought up somewhere else, an auto-reconnect would really bypass the need for that :)


There is a little lock icon to the left of the password. If you lock that it will keep the password saved. We have talked about the auto-connect feature and we are looking at implementing it for the next release.


Another thing(perhaps I just haven't seen it yet) though but perhaps upon selecting a unit, would be to show a trail between where it is and what it's going to. And then, for example a harvester, show a different colour to where it's leaving from.
e.g source and destination in different colours, and with other units just destination.

God my bain... lol... We have tried MANY things, but we have been trying to figure out the best way to show this information. We have been discussing a new way to manage the ships and their pathing, and hopefully we will have something put together in the near future. Currently you can look at the AI (ships in motion) tab on the ships screen. If you click on a ship you can jump to the destination, or source (in the case of harvester) planet. Not exactly what yu are looking for, but it might help.


Edit: Is there a queue system for orders given, or are they unable to be changed once given? Because i've tried, for example, sending a unit to sector A, but midway I decided to send it to sector B, yet the direction doesn't change, and continues to sector A.

Cancelling the AI should stop the ship. I'll look in to this one and get back to you.

[zarkwizard]

May I suggest a 'Music off' option thought, that would be welcome.

Opps.. I totally missed that one in the client. It use to be on the title screen. I moved the buttons around, and I forgot to put it back. I'll make sure it's back in the next version.


Plus, I find it a bit hard, if more than one ship are in orbit of a planet, to distinguish which of these is following orders, and which just popped out of the factory. Some visual sepration between 'busy' and 'idle' state would be helpful.

Ok, I guess maybe this was not explained very well anywhere. In the very early days of the game we would list each ship individually in the ship listing when you clicked on a ships location in the system. Lee decided to make 5000 probes (no joke, it was before we had decided on the object capping). Well when you opened up that listing it took a bit to display, and it took even longer to scroll. We thought long and hard about what could we do to make it easier for the player to manage.

What we decided is there are 31 ship types. All the ships in each type are the same. So we should you what we refer to as the ship roll up. If you select a probe from the listing the AI will automatically choose the 1st available probe and give it your orders. In reality it doesn't matter which probe does what you tell it to, you just want a probe to do action <x>.

If in the event you have 3 harvesters at a planet, and they are all harvesting, and you try to give a harvester an order, the order will fail because there are no harvesters available to give orders to. We really should see about removing the harvesters from the roll-up listing if they are under AI control. Usually you will have an arrow with a square on the left side of the planet and you can see how many harvs are at a the planet doing things.

The only place the original listing holds true is for fleets. Each fleet is it's own listing, and will list separately. If you click on a fleet you will see the ships in the fleet in the details of the ship. They show up just under the little detail window.


More maybe later, still in awe of the amazement ;)

Glad you like it. :)

[ravenzachary]

Yeah, very happy so far. Mine main suggestion would have to be a "remember your password" option. Due to the d/c when leaving the app and having to sign back in so frequently, that'd be very helpful. Although like it was brought up somewhere else, an auto-reconnect would really bypass the need for that :)

On login screen, type in your username and password, then tap the lock button so it goes into lock position, then tap the login button. It'll remember your password from that point on.

[surjl0827]

Yes, the game was a bit of a hassle to learn. But having played many 4x games (complicated) like X3 Reunion, Moo2 ,Gal Civ2 and the video tutorials helped me greatly.
Additional suggestions:


For ship designs: Still leave the core designs in place so that (default) players can jump in right away and ignore it if they want.

Additional planet types:
Asteroids- Mostly mining or outpost(should be rich in resources)
Dwarf Planets- Similar idea, maybe a small military base
Moons- Can build defense platforms on here to help defend planet.

Ships/Structures:
Corvettes
Starbases/ Orbital Commerce (Trade ports) or space docks.

[zarkwizard]

For ship designs: Still leave the core designs in place so that (default) players can jump in right away and ignore it if they want.

This presents some other issues that we need to look at. Basically what we would end up doing is allow people to change the ship design for a specific type of ship. Like for instance if you changed the spec of your Destroyer, all destroyers would have the same functionality. We decided not to implement single ship spawns for blueprints because it just became too much for anyone to manage.

Implementing something in the future that would allow you to customize a type, and design your own Destroyer class ship could be a possibility, and something we are actively looking at.



Additional planet types:
Asteroids- Mostly mining or outpost(should be rich in resources)
Dwarf Planets- Similar idea, maybe a small military base
Moons- Can build defense platforms on here to help defend planet.

Ships/Structures:
Corvettes
Starbases/ Orbital Commerce (Trade ports) or space docks.

There are a ton of things, and items that are not in the game yet. We plan on adding them. We have a very long future planned and designed for this game. We needed to cut it off some where so you could all start playing. :) Keep the feed back coming, we look forward to all the suggestions.

[mastergameaok]

Have you ever considered giving probes an auto-explore?

[Kentar_lux]

Maybe that would be too much of an auto-play feature.

What would help, imho, though is a button, when clicking on an unexplored sector, that would send an idle probe (empty being a probe sitting in an empty sector) to that sector to explore.

[Leedot]

Yeah, 'auto explore' has come up - it's one of the points that's been highly debated as we don't want to make the game so automated that you don't really do anything. There are probably some ways we could streamline that interaction a bit further though.

[zarkwizard]

In beta we had an iWin button. We just found there was too much conflict because the game couldn't figure out who was really supposed to win...

:) As Lee pointed out the auto explore was brought up on more than one occasion. We decided against it, since it made the game much too easy.

As for the unexplored sector and sending a probe the question would be an idle probe from where? maybe I can add a navigate command to the ship listing screen. Maybe add another tab to sort ships by type, so you can see all your idle ships, then command them. Although I would have no idea which one you really pulled...

Hmmm.. At any rate.. I digress.. You could select a probe, go to the sector level then choose a sector and click the check mark with out entering the system. No idea if you discovered that. It will navigate to that sector, and orbit the sun.

[Corinthian]

Hey all. Probes... Here is my issue. As I mentioned in another post: It isn't so much that there is no auto explore, but that the information attained is very difficult to manage. When I send a probe currently, I must tell it to go to a planet to actually see that planets info. Then if I leave, that info is not retained. Why? It forces me to make a note (not functioning yet) or write myself an in game mail message to keep track of those planets... Why??

Ideally, once a probe enters a solar system it would see the planet info there withou having to go to each one individually and then actually RETAIN that info.
Thoughts??

[zarkwizard]

Makes sense. I have made a note of it, and we'll see what we can come up with. There are a few things we need to keep in mind. Since it has to do with multiple devices we need to make sure the data transfers to the other devices. We also need to keep it in the last state you saw it, not it's current state.

I have some ideas, I'll have to run some tests and see what the best solution might be.

[Corinthian]

Zark, love that you are here running with some of the ideas that might work and open to change.
Shows a lot about you guys and how much you care about the game and the community, and most importantly, about growing it!

Here is a thank you for all the work you do!
We are enjoying the effort... which reminds me...
I should go check out my probes quest for a new home!

[Kentar_lux]

By idle probe I was thinking along the lines of whichever gets there first (the closest one e.g., if speeds of probes never change).

[mastergameaok]

Anyway of lowering build time for shipyard orbital? One really cannot accomplish much in 1st 24 hours without it. Unless this is the point and I'm missing the reason.

[zarkwizard]

Anyway of lowering build time for shipyard orbital? One really cannot accomplish much in 1st 24 hours without it. Unless this is the point and I'm missing the reason.

It was done to slow down the initial grunt rush. We decided on 24 hrs for the ship yard because in beta people would pump out a ship yard in a couple of hours, then push out a bunch of attack ships and kill their neighbors. 24hrs game people a chance to log in and start working on their empire, rather than get the beat down.

We have talked about making some games that run on faster timers, so those that want to play a much faster game could. That would be in the future though.

[mastergameaok]

It was done to slow down the initial grunt rush. We decided on 24 hrs for the ship yard because in beta people would pump out a ship yard in a couple of hours, then push out a bunch of attack ships and kill their neighbors. 24hrs game people a chance to log in and start working on their empire, rather than get the beat down.

We have talked about making some games that run on faster timers, so those that want to play a much faster game could. That would be in the future though.

Thank you, the reasoning behind this makes much more sense now.

[Parsons]

Are there any plans for AI controlled spacial life forms? Maybe something along the line of giant floating space whales or what not. There could be different incentives for each specialisation to deal with them in a certain way. The war monger could fight it out with them, if he wins he gains some sort of hybrid living ship type. The researcher could gain understanding of space/time/movement and gains a bonus to speed if say they can keep a probe alive in the same sector for a number of days. The trader could possibly follow its movement around a sector and find its hidden home with vast stores of ro. Just throwing that one out there.

[zarkwizard]

Are there any plans for AI controlled spacial life forms? Maybe something along the line of giant floating space whales or what not. There could be different incentives for each specialisation to deal with them in a certain way. The war monger could fight it out with them, if he wins he gains some sort of hybrid living ship type. The researcher could gain understanding of space/time/movement and gains a bonus to speed if say they can keep a probe alive in the same sector for a number of days. The trader could possibly follow its movement around a sector and find its hidden home with vast stores of ro. Just throwing that one out there.

Actually there are aliens. They will pretty much instakill you if you are too low of a tech. We have AI for them, but currently they will not hunt you down if you encounter them. We have plans in the future to enable the aliens to chase you, and seek you out if you get on their bad side, but for the moment that is disabled. We wanted to make sure everything else in the game is stable before we introduce other things in to the mix.

[Wrath]

Not sure if I'm missing something here, but here's my experience: Going through the list of items to research shows you how long each item will take to complete. If you add two or three to your queue, then you no longer have the ability to tell how long the research time requires until that item in your queue starts researching? It removes the time requirement listing both in the research tab, and in your queue tab. Is that on purpose - we're supposed to write it down on paper before adding to our queue?

[ChickenHawk07]

^ Yeah, kinda hard to estimate when stuff will complete this way. Definitely would like to see the total time per tech skill remain while in the queue.

[zarkwizard]

Are your referring to when you see it in the queue, and you see the queuing information, you also want to see the time it will take to train the skill?

I added this:

http://www.scenites.com/eoteimages/skillsque.PNG

Does that work? The same is shown on the normal listings as well. Will new display the Time, and the Que position.

[Wrath]

That is exactly right - thank you! (For some reason, I thought it used to show it like that)
Thank you - this will be very helpful with planning. Appreciate it!

[ChickenHawk07]

Awesome! This is great! I love being able to help this amazing game grow.