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1

Suggestions / Custom map notes?

« on: March 27, 2021, 08:32:04 PM »

It would be very nice to be able to add some pins with custom notes to the map, or maybe a new "custom" category to the Intel screen. There's often times when there's something at a specific location a player might want to tag for later attention and currently there's no way that I can see to do so in the UI. Examples I can think of where I'd personally want to add a note:

• While exploring, you come across one of those Legion XIV elite carriers, but don't have the supplies, fuel and/or time to bring it with you right now.
• Contacts, not marked on the Intel screen currently.
• Your favourite colonisation targets for later. Yes, you can find them later by using the filters and sorting on the planets list, but it'd be easier if I could just drop a "this system right here is where I'll lay down my home" note.
• A system where there's something very interesting but one can't currently access it due to too strong [REDACTED] presence.

I'm sure there's other use cases as well, those were the first ones off the top of my head. Having something beyond a text file open in another window to keep track of this stuff would be quite useful to the player and shouldn't be hard to implement. It might not even be visible on the map, it might be as simple as a Custom category on the Intel screen so long as the player could there attach the textual note to a specific system or location within a system.

2

Bug Reports & Support / Cursor bug

« on: May 06, 2017, 09:19:52 AM »

I noticed a bug with Starsector today. I'm unusual in that I use my Windows taskbar on the left side of the screen, not the bottom as is usual. (I find that vertical screenspace is more valuable than horizontal, and then widescreens have less of the former in the first place.) So, when I bring the mouse cursor to the left edge of the screen, it turns into the Windows cursor and if I click something there, it brings me to Windows and minimises the game. I have to take it pretty far to the left (like, within a few centimetres of the edge) of the screen before it happens and bringing the cursor back towards the centre of the screen will reset it, but afterwards it will happen several times further away from the edge until I change the view (say, by opening up the Intel view for instance) whereupon the cursor resets to the Starsector cursor and the range in which it turns back to the Windows cursor becomes just a few centimetres again.

I have a GeForce 970 with drivers only a few days old and am using Windows 10.

3

Suggestions / "Go here" command on the strategic map screen?

« on: September 12, 2012, 11:13:21 AM »

Would it be possible to get a command on the strategic map screen where you'd click/right-click/something on a place in empty space and your fleet would automatically head that way. I'm asking because while right now one can get your fleet to automatically fly towards an object in space, when trying to intercept supply fleets and the like with not-too-fast fleets it often becomes a matter of trying to figure out an approximate interception vector to get between it and its target, then fly manually a bit, then check the map screen again, then fly manually some more, etc. It's a kind of an awkward process if done in empty space with no convenient "landmarks" (planets and the like) nearby, and it'd be somewhat easier if you could just designate a waypoint and tell the fleet to go there.

4

Suggestions / What I think is needed: midrange carriers

« on: March 12, 2012, 12:43:06 AM »

Playing the new version, I've noticed something awkward: there seem to be no carriers holding the middle ground between Condor and Astral. So in effect, the only carriers currently in the game are a converted freighter that's... Well, it's cheapish and it holds a flight deck. That's about the limit of its virtues. Then there's Astral, which is a Tri-Tachyon-exclusive super-vessel. There are no dedicated carriers between these two extremes, and only a fairly small number of cruisers or capital ships have flight decks, either.

Now, granted, you don't want flight decks in everything, but would I be correct to assume that there will, at some point, be more carrier types in the game? It feels kind of odd for Hegemony, in particular, not having its own carrier design. Now, I'll be the first to admit that this is hardly an urgent issue, but it does seem a bit of a gap in the currently available ship type selection.

5

General Discussion / 0.5 feedback

« on: February 14, 2012, 01:46:09 PM »

Well, I've now spent a few hours playing around with the new, lovely 0.5 version of the game. That it's awesome goes without saying, of course, but I have noticed some things that could be improved. (Which, hey, is only natural at this point. Still, I'm imagining some of these you might actually not have noticed, so here goes.)

• The Wasp drones - the fighters without crew - do not seem to be repaired. I figure this is a bug related to them using zero crew, is this right?
• It would be really helpful if, in the refit screen, you could see some kind of overview of the weapons installed using a mouse-over, right-click or some other such function. It would be downright great if, selecting a weapon slot, you could see the stats of the currently equipped weapon as well as the weapon you mouse-over so you could easily compare them.
• There seems to be some sort of bug relating to the cargo capacity - I noticed that even offloading all supplies and having no weapons in the cargo, the game marked me as using a few points (2, I believe) of my fleet's cargo capacity.
• Based on the way the game goes in the system we can play around in, the Tri-Tachyon overpowers the Hegemony massively - they tend to easily wipe out any Hegemony fleets they come across and eventually control the system. Is this working as intended?
• Could empty slots on the refit screen be emphasised somehow and/or there be some kind of message when some of your weapons get destroyed? I was surprised to find a Lasher of mine to be minus one light assault gun - I only found this out by accident. (I assume you can only lose weapons if the ships get disabled.
• Could the text links that control how you're going to approach the battle (communicate, attack, leave and control yourself, let second in command do it etc.) be made into some kind of buttons rather than just floating text, along with some physical separation on the screen? It'd look a bit better and clearer.
• Really liking the new tooltips in combat and elsewhere!
• Component damage rules!
• Either I'm awesome or lucky, because I won the Forlorn Hope mission on the first try despite making a few minor blunders.
• I'd really like an option to set "targets" on the campaign map so I don't have to jump in and out between the astrogation ("flying around") view and the map to find my destinations, especially moving targets like fleets.

These are the things I discovered today. Don't take this list of complaints to mean that I'm not happy with what I got. I would have gladly went on playing. Still, I figured first impression feedback is useful.

6

Suggestions / Popcorn mode?

« on: December 30, 2011, 11:46:36 AM »

Would it be possible for you to add a mode to the game where it's just the AI against the AI so the player would be free to move the camera around the battlefield and watch the fireworks? I just had this notion that it might be very entertaining to watch every now and then. (And possibly make for a useful tool in evaluating different weapons/ships/variants.)

7

Bug Reports & Support / Issues with strafing

« on: December 15, 2011, 11:40:14 PM »

At first I thought I'd put this in General Discussion, but on second thought I think it fits better here.

Often - and when I just tested it out in the tutorial, it seems to be about random - when I try to strafe with my ships (Shift plus A or D) it takes a while, maybe half a second to a second, for the game to notice that the Shift is pressed down and until then, the ship turns rather than strafes. This, as you can imagine, makes strafing something I don't tend to do much because I can't count on it to make things better rather than worse in tight spots - which are the exact times when it'd be useful in the first place.

Not sure if it's an issue I have alone. And now that I think about it, I haven't tested it on the laptop due to the above considerations - since it's not reliable, I never got into the habit of using it in the first place.

8

Suggestions / Alert priorities?

« on: October 11, 2011, 04:22:50 AM »

I got to thinking... It's not uncommon for me to miss some important events in a battle when I'm engaged in a close fight with enemy forces. There's the event list scrolling in the upper left corner, but in larger battles much of the information in it (wing X is returning to carrier and the like) is of minor importance and it's easy to miss the important messages if you're busy with something else.

So would it be possible to highlight the more important messages somehow? Something like a visual emphasis on those items as well as a more conspicuous alert tone when it happens? Ideally, what counts as significant might even change depending on battle size - in a battle with 25 fleet points the destruction of a single interceptor wing can be important, in a battle with cruisers everywhere it's distinctly less so. Likewise, losing or gaining objectives on the map tends to be more important than a fighter wing launch from a carrier. So I think it might be a good idea for the game to emphasise the bigger stuff somehow.

What do you think?

9

Bug Reports & Support / Weapon description inconsistency

« on: September 07, 2011, 12:31:43 AM »

Okay, so this isn't so much a bug as it is a descriptive inconsistency, but I figure this subforum is the best place for this anyway.

The description test of the graviton beam describes it as having a massive effect on armour but being relatively easily blocked by energy fields. However, its damage type is listed as kinetic, which does 200% damage to shields and 50% damage to armour, which is the opposite of what the description would imply.

10

Suggestions / Wider maximum zoom out?

« on: September 01, 2011, 06:33:38 AM »

I pre-ordered the game two days ago on the strength of the videos of gameplay available online and frankly I'm astonished that an alpha build feels this polished. Yeah, I know there's going to be a spiffy strategic mode eventually (which is why I'm not fretting the single missions only condition overmuch - like I said, alpha!) but the balance, the visuals, the gameplay, it all feels pretty mature already. I'm having a lot of fun with the game as is, so I'm really anxious to see how great it will be when finished. I also like the direction the tactical map screen has taken - I saw videos of the more RTS style in the previous versions and read the devs' rationale for the new system and not having tried the old one, I do believe this one fits better for the game.

Edit: Also, the combat model is surprisingly deep for what's essentially action-based interaction, what with the flux mechanics, how they interact with shields, the multitude of weapon types and the rest. I like it! Are there plans to introduce critical damage (components of the ship like weapons, engines, etc. breaking down due to combat damage) at some point? I can understand if there aren't - it might be too much - just curious.

There's only really one significant issue I have with the game currently (that doesn't have to do with the alpha state) - the maximum zoom-out distance is significantly too low for my taste. It's hard to get a good tactical feel of what's going on around me without jumping into the map screen, which interrupts the flow of combat and isn't really useful for actual combat encounters. I have a feeling it may be a resolution related issue since the game seems to be sprite based - my screen's maximum resolution is 1440*900, which means that at times, I can barely see enemies before they enter my weapons range. Perhaps on larger resolutions the maximum zoom-out range is larger, but it's a problem for me at the moment. I mean, I'm not looking for a Supreme Commander level zooms obviously, but even twice as far out on maximum would be a huge help.