2. The player ship's "speed" indicator in combat makes no sense, it only shows the overall speed without showing the direction. It would be very useful to replace this with (or add) a 4-directional speed indicator showing speed forward, backward, left, and right. That way it's apparent at a glance whether you're advancing or retreating relative to your other ships.
1. It takes too long to understand the concept of avoiding larger fleets in the beginning of the game. A big part of this is that the UI doesn't give you much feedback as to another fleet's relative strength. Later on, when you learn the various hulls and can understand a fleet just by looking at the ships, it all becomes clear. But in the beginning it can be frustrating. I would suggest having some indicator for new players when mousing over another fleet that indicates whether you can reasonably engage it or whether you should run away.You can always notice that they have bigger ships and more of them. Mousing over a fleet already tells you its composition.
4. After I bought my first cargo freighter I noticed that my daily supply usage also went way up. But storing more supplies takes up cargo space, which require more freighters, etc. etc. This becomes a real irritant for long-haul trips, where I always feel like I'm either about to run out of supplies or going to lose critical salvage. It seems like it would be better if supplies had a separate inventory cap and 0 weight, the same as how fuel and crew works. Maybe there could be some dedicated supply ships also, so that all 3 fleet resources work the same way and there's more thought to be put into how to balance your combat and non-combat ships within the 30-ship limit.Freighters bring in massively more cargo space than their maintenance. If you are annoyed by maintenance, take the skill "Fleet Logistics" to level 2 or use dedicated freighters instead of combat freighters. At the moment I would rather have supplies share the same space, as it means sometimes you have to leave them to make space for more valuable items, and so that just filling the bays with them isn't an auto-pick.
6. "Shift" key aligns the front of the ship to the cursor, but some ships need to fire broadside (Conquest, Odyssesy, etc.) There should be an option in the "Weapon Groups" dialog for each ship to align to left, front, or right.I suspect that it's more important for Alex to have consistent control scheme. You must remember that turning to the side changes your mobility a bit, since acceleration forward and in other directions are different. Odyssey also has a ship system that propels it forward, to it's important to remember where is forward.
7. There should be a way to spend resources to entrench nav buoys/comm relays/sensor arrays points so that some 1-ship enemy fleet can't reclaim them. The problem is that the fastest ships in an enemy fleet will always escape and cannot be eliminated by the player fleet (Tooltip when trying to pursue: "The enemy fleet is too fast for your forces to catch up to"), and then that fleet will make a beeline to reclaim these structures and claim them for the enemy. For now there is no defense against this and so no reason to claim these points.In enemy systems, it's better to hack them to get the same benefits. You claim them only if you want to lure enemy fleets from their planet/station. In a system with your colony, your fleets sooner or later will take space infrastructure sooner or later.
1) The size of the circle of a fleet corresponds to the amount of deployment points total in the fleet. Fleets that are much larger than yours on the map will be significantly tougher, sporting larger and more ships. This should give you a good idea of whether or not you can take something at a glance
2. The player ship's "speed" indicator in combat makes no sense, it only shows the overall speed without showing the direction. It would be very useful to replace this with (or add) a 4-directional speed indicator showing speed forward, backward, left, and right. That way it's apparent at a glance whether you're advancing or retreating relative to your other ships.
You mostly need speeds (both your and enemy's) for targeting projectiles - leading pip mod helps with that.
I also had a mini mod that visualizes both own and target speed vectors (among other things), but I haven't updated it to 0.81 yet (and probably won't anytime soon).
6. "Shift" key aligns the front of the ship to the cursor, but some ships need to fire broadside (Conquest, Odyssesy, etc.) There should be an option in the "Weapon Groups" dialog for each ship to align to left, front, or right.I suspect that it's more important for Alex to have consistent control scheme. You must remember that turning to the side changes your mobility a bit, since acceleration forward and in other directions are different. Odyssey also has a ship system that propels it forward, to it's important to remember where is forward.
I wouldn't mind some sort of toggleable "this fleet is estimated to be considerably stronger than yours, you should stay away" GUI indicator of some kind on the campaign map, as a learning aid for newbies. (I also thought of displaying the fleet point sum or even a string like "very strong", but I'm not sure if that would be particularly meaningful for the newbies we're trying to cater for here)
Although at some level, this is kind of a thing best learned by getting bitten at least once.
1. It takes too long to understand the concept of avoiding larger fleets in the beginning of the game. A big part of this is that the UI doesn't give you much feedback as to another fleet's relative strength. Later on, when you learn the various hulls and can understand a fleet just by looking at the ships, it all becomes clear. But in the beginning it can be frustrating. I would suggest having some indicator for new players when mousing over another fleet that indicates whether you can reasonably engage it or whether you should run away.
Just wanted to say I appreciate this bit of insight - definitely not something I'd think of on my own. Made a note; could maybe pull off some sort of "danger" indicator on the tooltip.
Edit: gave it a go, pretty happy with it I think.
While nifty, any chance of also unifying the sector map 'fleet triangle' setup which deals reasonably well to show 'sizes', into the minimap shown in the campaign map?
You know, now that's that there: why not use the danger level to reward going after superior fleets? It could, for example, get you additional reputation to collect bounty for a fleet that's much stronger than you. It would make sense for a faction to be more impressed by that.
You know, now that's that there: why not use the danger level to reward going after superior fleets? It could, for example, get you additional reputation to collect bounty for a fleet that's much stronger than you. It would make sense for a faction to be more impressed by that.I love this idea. It would also make sense to scale experience based on relative fleet strength. Using overwhelming force is basically just a way to trade supplies for experience. But beating a force twice your strength? That's an experience you and your officers would learn from.