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[NeutroniumFurnace]

To be frank, this post was not meant to be constructive. I even described it as a rant from the beginning. The post was to present all the major complaints to Alex for him to do something about. It was not to give him advice or direction, it was merely present that something needs to be done about this ***.

About 90% of all the posts made the 'it's early access' argument, which I ain't buyin'. Many, MANY other early access game have come out in the last 3 years that have added more to their respective games than Alex has in his entire time on SS. Darkest Dungeon has been out for less than a 6th of the time SS has been out, and it has provided it's consumers with FAR more content in updates. Saying this game is early access is akin to saying the 'don't complain, be happy with what you have!', and I call BS on that.

I'm not meaning to be hurtful. I liked StarSector for a time. It has a good combat system, and it showed a lot of promise. But that was 3 years ago, and the game now shows dust where it used to show promise.

[Xanderzoo]

You do realize that people pledged over three hundred thousand dollars to Darkest Dungeon on Kickstarter? To put it lightly, that might have helped speed their development process.

[Euqocelbbog]

Cool *** thread OP, keep up the good work.

[Pushover]

If this post wasn't meant to be constructive, why post it at all? Just simply post it as 'these are the things I don't like about SS and why.' You somewhat did this, but didn't really provide more details. Which ships in particular don't you find balanced? Saying 'this balance sucks, fix it' is much less useful compared to 'the Hammerhead sucks and the Paragon is OP, fix it.' Just be more specific in your rant, or in replies to your rant.

The points I gathered from your post:

• You feel some ships are too strong/too weak (which ones?)
• The campaign tutorial system is lacking.
• You would like the features listed on the front page now.
• You want more different goods.
• You feel tariffs make trading practically impossible
• You feel trade campaigns are impossible (I'd like to hear your definition of what a trade campaign is, to see if I can make you eat your keyboard)
• You feel there is no flow to the economy
• You feel the economy/trading is RNG dependent
• You feel mods are required to have fun with the game
• You feel mission balance is off in many cases (again, which ones?)

I can agree the tutorial is lacking, but again, that's part of a full game. How much of a tutorial was there in Alpha Minecraft? IIRC you had to just open the wiki and such.

Can't really make a comment about how fast development is, I think everyone agrees that more features now would be better, but there's only so much that can be done...

More economic goods can easily be added, but again, why add them when the economy system is likely not set in stone.

Regarding the tariffs, Alex feels that normal 'buy low, sell high' trading should not exist. You can probably make arguments for or against (I personally am okay with limited buy-low sell-high styles of economy)

There is a flow to the economy, it's just very difficult to see. Goods are updated every 30 days, based on the various tags that the planet has, and based on how the planet's demand was met. I felt like the lack of visibility of this was a problem, which is why I posted my thread.

Effective trading is somewhat based around exploiting food shortages and trade disruptions, which is what Alex feels is the better way to allow trading. There's a little RNG involved, but only for it occurring.

I think the modders in this community have sunk a lot of time and effort into pushing the boundaries of what SS can do. I would not be surprised to find that the players collectively have spent more man-hours creating mods than Alex has developing the game.

Mission balance, as I've said, doesn't make a lot of sense to make a pass on it when the rest of the game still needs balancing. If the mission is still possible to beat then the mission is probably fine. Who cares about the listed difficulty?

[Zaphide]

Hmmm I think the thing a lot of people underestimate is the sheer lack of problems in each StarSector build. Every update is stable enough that it can be played quite happily.

Combine this with the fact that each update also includes a full suite of modding API's to access pretty much the entire game engine as it stands and, well, I think that is a fairly amazing achievement  

So much so, that other people take this and can work with it to produce some spectacular mods, that probably take the game in directions that Alex and Co. would not have imagined.

(A possible side effect of this is that if you are a modder you (may potentially) gain more out of each release of StarSector than non-modders...)

I'm with Xeno; even in it's current form (with no mods) StarSector is still the best EV Override/Nova-like currently available With mods, well then I think it easily surpasses EV Nova

[Jonlissla]

There is a flow to the economy, it's just very difficult to see. Goods are updated every 30 days, based on the various tags that the planet has, and based on how the planet's demand was met. I felt like the lack of visibility of this was a problem, which is why I posted my thread.

So that's how it works. It's never really explained in the game, and the UI to be honest doesn't really explain it either.

Effective trading is somewhat based around exploiting food shortages and trade disruptions, which is what Alex feels is the better way to allow trading. There's a little RNG involved, but only for it occurring.

I think this is what many new players find difficult, not the concept, but just getting used to.

I would definately like to see proper trade info in the map screen without having to be in that system or hijack some array. Maybe add a sort of "sensor" area around your fleet, like, 2 map tiles wide. Every system within your sensors would then update automatically without relying on arrays or broadcasts.

[Dark.Revenant]

To be frank, this post was not meant to be constructive. I even described it as a rant from the beginning. The post was to present all the major complaints to Alex for him to do something about. It was not to give him advice or direction, it was merely present that something needs to be done about this ***.

About 90% of all the posts made the 'it's early access' argument, which I ain't buyin'. Many, MANY other early access game have come out in the last 3 years that have added more to their respective games than Alex has in his entire time on SS. Darkest Dungeon has been out for less than a 6th of the time SS has been out, and it has provided it's consumers with FAR more content in updates. Saying this game is early access is akin to saying the 'don't complain, be happy with what you have!', and I call BS on that.

I'm not meaning to be hurtful. I liked StarSector for a time. It has a good combat system, and it showed a lot of promise. But that was 3 years ago, and the game now shows dust where it used to show promise.

You speak fallacy.  If Starsector were kept behind closed doors this entire time and then finally unveiled today in its current state, you wouldn't complain about it taking too much time to develop.  You have false expectations colored by your perception of how long a game should take to finish after the alpha is made available to purchase.  Alex did not promise a time-frame, only that he would continue to work on Starsector full-time until it is done.  So far, he has done exactly this.  And if you seriously believe that the game hasn't changed much in three years, go see what the original alpha version is like.  It's practically a whole different game.

There is also fallacy in comparing Starsector to Darkest Dungeon.  One is a one-and-a-half-man-show making an open-world game.  The other is a well-funded development team making a (well-polished, but) fairly simple game with a limited scope and a fixed set of possible interactions.  As for the natural counterargument "why doesn't Alex hire more developers?", the answer is: he can't afford that.  We're talking $60k minimum to hire someone on full-time, most likely more.  While the most optimistic estimates of Starsector sales to date (~100k) would leave Alex with perhaps $300k of capital to work with, the reality is probably more like 30k sales, which leaves Alex with enough for his own living expenses, paying David and Stian, and little more besides.

[Tartiflette]

And this is exactly why Alex want to keep his game low profile until it's closer to be finished. Dealing with hundreds of malcontent steam users that got a distorted vision of early access due to some games having different production models won't do any good to speed up the development.

[Sproginator]

id have to agree with Dark's comments here. And also add that making a "rant" thread NEVER leads to constructive opinions, just to childish bickering. On that note, I suggest this thread be deleted but that the original poster be allowed to create it with a more sensible and less gun-ho attitude.

[Schwartz]

Ranting is fine. We have other threads on here where people are expressly invited to rant, like the annoy/frustrate thread that has turned out to be a goldmine of what needs fixed in the current iteration of the game.

Just as well, some of the things the OP said just cannot stand. Early access is literally you paying for an alpha product with a promise of all future updates, no when, no if. You have hereby bowed to the developer's schedule. Any and all comparisons are pointless, because that is what you've paid for. If you disliked the game so much back when you bought it, IMO, you shouldn't have. Simple as that. Don't ever put money on "Well, some day, it could be..." with early access games. And since Alex never promised X updates per arbitrary unit of time, only you are to blame for your own expectations.

The only thing I personally expect is that those Upcoming Features will turn into Current Features. That's all. Anything else is icing on the cake.

[Histidine]

Couple more things:

Now that 98% of the starsector community has left

How was this figure determined?
What percentage of any three-year-old video game community is still around at that time? I don't know, and more to the point, I see no indication that you do either.

Less than 20 overall marketable goods (not counting crew, weapons, or ships)

I don't know about other space games, but the highly esteemed Space Rangers 2 has eight.

20 different goods, or even the 14 SS currently has (not counting fuel and supplies), is pretty damn good for a game by any absolute standard. It's not like more commodity types (beyond what is required to create a reasonably diverse, believable universe) is actually better as any sort of general rule.

[Schwartz]

Less than 20 overall marketable goods (not counting crew, weapons, or ships)

I don't know about other space games, but the highly esteemed Space Rangers 2 has eight.

20 different goods, or even the 14 SS currently has (not counting fuel and supplies), is pretty damn good for a game by any absolute standard. It's not like more commodity types (beyond what is required to create a reasonably diverse, believable universe) is actually better as any sort of general rule.

True. Quite the opposite; there's plenty of goods and not really much reason to get involved with any of them. Right now, they're all basically the same. You go with what you know will give you a good profit margin, the icons and details are interchangeable. So a lack of variety is not the problem, the problem is infusing what we have right now with a meaningful purpose and meaningful differences in gameplay.

[DatonKallandor]

To be frank, this post was not meant to be constructive. I even described it as a rant from the beginning. The post was to present all the major complaints to Alex for him to do something about. It was not to give him advice or direction, it was merely present that something needs to be done about this ***.

About 90% of all the posts made the 'it's early access' argument, which I ain't buyin'. Many, MANY other early access game have come out in the last 3 years that have added more to their respective games than Alex has in his entire time on SS. Darkest Dungeon has been out for less than a 6th of the time SS has been out, and it has provided it's consumers with FAR more content in updates. Saying this game is early access is akin to saying the 'don't complain, be happy with what you have!', and I call BS on that.

I'm not meaning to be hurtful. I liked StarSector for a time. It has a good combat system, and it showed a lot of promise. But that was 3 years ago, and the game now shows dust where it used to show promise.

Again you're making claims of knowing about game development when you clearly do not.

You have made the claim you are a game designer - please prove it. What game have you designed, when did the project start, when did it release.

[Xanderzoo]

I'm not meaning to be hurtful. I liked StarSector for a time. It has a good combat system, and it showed a lot of promise. But that was 3 years ago, and the game now shows dust where it used to show promise.

First of all, yes, you are trying to be hurtful. You've specifically said that this is not even meant to be constructive. If you weren't trying to be hurtful, why post this thread? Second, a game shows dust if it hasn't been developed in a long period of time. As far as I can tell, Starsector has always been developed steadily. While the OP made a few reasonable points, I don't think anything constructive will come out of this thread at this stage.

[Alex]

Locking - can't really see this ending up anywhere good. Appreciate both the airing of concerns and your support.