No mods, 0.91a-RC8
Great job on this. I originally bought it when it was Starfarer, played it for an hour or two in 2016 (0.7.2!), but now it's much more playable in a campaigny sense.
I just did a playthrough and have some niggles/annoyances. I.e. things that were detrimental to enjoying the game.
* UI Consistency - Some maps left click is set destination. On others it's right. This is really confusing and even after 10+hrs playing it still gets me. A core tenet of any good UI is consistency. Free-look should be a keyboard thing, not a mouse-interface-changing thing. This was still getting me occasionally after 20+hrs of play.
I always forget to mention this when changes are discussed but YES. Especially given that I personally always want free look on, I really dislike that it's on right click.
* Two Galaxy maps. I find it confusing flitting between them. One good map would be so much better. Merge them.
I've been mostly ok with this, but it is odd that there's differences between how you interact with an use the bounty map (E) and the normal map (tab). Could probably use some cleanup/standardization.
* I'm playing on "easy" and I've been playing spacey games for decades (and am not too shabby at them as a general rule), but I still keep losing whatever ship I'm piloting with great ease, even if it's a cruiser and the rest of my ships are destroyers (against destroyers/frigates). I transfer into another ship in the fleet and shortly thereafter I'm dead again while the rest of my fleet goes on with no loses. I'm not that aggressive either. Now, for one thing this is a testament to the great AI, and obviously I'm doing lots of things wrong, but apart from this balance issue, I *have* to participate in the battles otherwise I'm just spending 10 minutes watching a (admittedly pretty) space combat happen. I can't micro my fleet (which I'd be more than happy to do) because I have a piddly amount of command points. So what am I /meant/ to do during the combat? I can't micro my shields/weapons like the AI does, I'm more of a strategist than a tactician but the game design decisions means that the space combat portion can be quite not-fun against anything except an inferior force.
I grew up on things like EV and this game beat the hell out of me. You're meant to pilot your ship and shoot stuff down because you're generally better than the AI, but at the same time you really need to understand the combat to not be dead weight. Feels like there should be a dedicated combat tutorial, and that easy should start you in a better ship (maybe just give the head start ship options) because flying something smaller while learning the game is punishing.
Heck thinking about it this strikes me as a great game for one of "customized start" systems, where you can pick from some presets or just toggle individual factors (starting cash/income/rep/ship). Would need to be done carefully to not get too finicky, but could help with roleplay aspects (start out with a specfic kind of fleet or with a certain faction) and difficulty.
* Further to this, in big fleet battles there simply aren't enough command points in the first place, even without microing. Reinforcements eat them all up alone, if I were to bother retreating that'd eat a bunch more. Didn't get the command-point upgrades because spent my levels on non-combat stuff (not that +3 points would have done much).
I believe a stated goal of the creator is that this is NOT an RTS game and by extension that's intentional. I could be wrong, and I know you can spend skill points to buff that playstyle, but it's been awhile since i tried it. That said I suspect there's already a mod to fix this, and if not it shouldn't be too hard to make/do so that those who want that kind of playstyle can get it. Again though, a better tutorial for these systems (seperate of the main game) would help a lot. They're deep and complicated so it's never going to be easy to teach them in some scripted main campaign thing.
* I "resisted" an AI inspection and took a -50 hit to rep! Ok, I get that they *really* don't like that, but it should have told me that the consequences would be so bad then I would have simply bribed instead. That's a *huge* rep hit with no warning; no way I'm going to bother grinding that back. If I click on the event after the fact it actually says "relationship reduced by 59". :-/
Yeah stuff related to colonies in general is in a very "alpha" state only having been recently added, and it's missing some core interactions. I think this sort of thing is known but it never hurts to have another data point. As it stands the end game colony management is fun, but a little flat.
* Forced manual combat against tiny fleets when I'm orders of magnitude more powerful.
Another one I always forget to bring up. More pre combat options in general would help. Being able to "let my second in command handle it" just like any cleanup op when you're vastly stronger should be a thing, but i'm also hoping we get things like "ambush" or "flank" one day that allow different engagements depending on the conditions when you bumped into them (thus giving more reason to go dark and the like).
* Chasing the last frigate or two down (and it's not decided I've "won" yet). Gah! Especially when they have that jumping ability.
Yeah i forgot how annoying this was when i was learning. Putting your fleet on eliminate helps a lot, but I absolutely build fleets now with this sort of thing in mind. Carriers in general are great at this but i tend to always have some fast attackers. Not sure what the goal should be here because there's absolutely a state, especially early game, where the AI shouldn't just give up, but also has 0 reason to rush you down, so you wind up playing tag all day.
* Given that (again) I can't micro my fleet, it would be nice if there was a "keep away from all other ships" option for my carriers. I've tried various things (assigning escorts, placing them "behind" where I think the combat will be, assigning them as escorts, etc) but they're glass cannons. I don't have enough command points to keep repositioning them away from the combat (which is always moving fluidly).
They should mostly do this by default and I believe there's a dedicated option for it. I generally just group my carriers into one blob and let them have at it.
* I managed to miss a delivery mission for independents. It was the only mission I failed. I got -5 rep. Fine, I deserve that. Several cycles later I'm hit by a ginourmous fleet (battlecruiser, 6*superfreighters, 4*assault carriers, 15+ cruisers...) which the comms is telling me is in retribution for failing the delivery. Can you say: Disproportionate. (That was about 6* more powerful than my fleet. Lvl 46)
Yeah....Disproportionate might be one off the key words to summarize areas where star sector still needs polish.
* Some listed missile ammo's cover the multiples they split into, others do not. This can be confusing when trying to work out what to equip. I get that this is because of the different types (some missles launch as one and split, some launch as many), but maybe it should say "limited volleys" with the number being how many times you can fire? (With the damage still showing the multiples as applicable).
Yeah # of volleys is probably a needed metric.
* If you use the starmap to set a destination by clicking on a star, it should navigate to a jump point for the star if there is one, not the star itself. I ended up in a blackhole that way! :-/
I'm still torn on this. I like that, in theory, jumping right next to the star is possible. In practice there's basically never any reason to do it, although I think several could be added.
* One of my colonies in particular keeps getting raided (by various factions). Eventually they took down the starbase, and now all the raids succeed because there is no starbase and they raid while it's still "disrupted". This has happened at least 5 times in a row now! Starfortress, heavy batteries, patrol, size 7, 270% fleet, me administrating with all 3 colony perks.
Basically a known issue. Again colony related stuff just got added last patch and is still very much a work in progress. There's some ways to mitigate this but it can absolutely get annoying.
* The pirates keep setting up next to one of my colonies in particular. Then I go there and destroy them, then a few months later they're at it again... :-/ Happened at least 4 times. Colony has patrol, surely they should, you know, patrol known pirate places. (Another colony has High Command).
Yeeeup. Same as the previous one. Very annoying, known issue, some ways to mitigate.
This was added?
So, this is by definition not a situation that can be "balanced" around.