This is being run on a Windows XP 32-bit system, fully up-to-date, with 2GB RAM, quad-core Athlon and a pretty decent ATi card. The game's running flawlessly, in terms of speed, at 1600/1200 resolution.
BugsLet's start with the bugs / UI issues.
1. The UI doesn't support people who don't have mousewheels, and has some really irksome features:
A. I want to be able to slide menus, and there appears to be a slider bar, but it doesn't work by left-clicking and dragging. This is a major drag throughout the interface. I would like to respectfully request old-fashioned sliders that just work, please :-)
B. The buy menus for Items are seriously borked in terms of the way Sort works. Sort prioritizes Crew, Supplies and Fuel lower than weapons, and has no way to sort non-weapons. I figured out pretty early how to mod the stack sizes for those things to fix issue C, but then the first time I hit Sort, because of issue A, I can't see the stuff I primarily want to buy. Kind of makes the long game unplayable atm.
C. I don't want to buy 1000 troops when I have 150 max crew or accidentally over-fill my cargo space. I want the menu to prompt me about how many I'm buying, and auto-buy the correct amounts, no larger. I should only be able to go over those limits on purpose. The shift-click-to-buy-one-thing is not a feature; it means huge amounts of clicky-clicky to do something that a slider and a submenu would handle better, imo.
D. The buy system for ships suffers from the lack of slider support, but there's a deeper issue: although Medium turret slots can take Light weapons, the system priorities and lack of screen real-estate make it impossible to find the Light weapons unless the base is out of Mediums. It gets worse if one's dealing with Universal turrets. Would really like to be able to prune it down to the things I want to have.
E. Simulation mode desperately needs the ability to add friendly ships as well as hostiles. Ship behavior is so qualitatively different in 2 vs. 2 situations that it would make a major difference in terms of utility.
F. Bases need to both add and subtract goods when fleets arrive, not just keep adding ad finitum, so that things don't just stack up.
G. I would really like to see all of the ship classes show up and be buyable, same with weapons; this is an early WIP of the Campaign, so it's important to be able to playtest all of the designs to be able to offer more concrete feedback about how balance is evolving.
2. Because of issue 1(A) above, I can't switch the "follow the mouse pointer" key from the default (A/D + Shift) to Caps Lock, where it, in my opinion at least, belongs. The current system's very prone to suddenly coming unglued in battle, and holding down the Shift key all the time is going to give me carpal in a real hurry; please address this, for people who like to use mouse-follow a lot.
Suggestions / Feature RequestsI'm going to apologize in advance, Alex; if you read this, it's going to be longish, but I'll try to keep it reasonable. I really like that an Escape Velocity-like game like this is getting built, and I like the general tone of it; these are things that I feel could really improve gameplay.
1. Afterburners. Direct trade of Flux for speed and acceleration. The arguments for this feature are solid; it would make lighter ships much more fighter-like, give one more major factor to consider in terms of ship capability, and would give larger ships a way to get places during battles, instead of being effectively immobile. I don't think this should be a Hull Mod; it should be inherent and adjustable on a per-ship basis. It's too important that this kind of thing be very fluid and moddable.
[EDIT]I've tested Burn Drive in 0.53... and, eh... it's not very useful, compared to anything else. It lets the big ships close, but it's not useful at all for Frigates, where we need to be able to maneuver while applying thrust and the 50 we get for having no Flux is pretty marginal. Please replace it with Afterburners, let the values for thrust / max. velocity that they can add be a modifiable value in the ship, and it's useful.[/EDIT]
2. Fixed Guns vs. Turrets: I've read what the effects are, and I've read your(Alex's) commentary on the issue, and I'm afraid I don't agree with the current reasoning.
Fixed weapons have many serious disadvantages:
A. They are dependent on ship facing, which in the vast majority of cases cannot be changed as quickly as a turret.
B. Turreted weapons get both the swing rate of their turret plus the swing rate of a ship.
C. Turreted weapons on Autofire have vastly better rates of engagement and far more efficiency.
D. All of the above result in fixed weapons being largely only useful in forward orientations (or possibly in large "broadsides") but they still have enormous problems, in terms of their
effective rates of fire and hit ratios. Their stats are not the story.
In short, fixed guns are hugely disadvantaged, and need to have major buffs to compensate. My suggestion on this is simple: instead of looking for a procedural fix, such as increased durability, make them a separate category entirely.
Since fixed guns are pretty much all direct-fire weapons, this would allow them to be buffed until they were efficient without deranging balance everywhere in the game design.
Yes, it adds more complexity, but it's a meaningful and useful tradeoff, and it allows for a lot more innovation in ship design. For example, the Brawler would go from being almost entirely useless for cost to being a ship that has some big disadvantages (slow speed and turn rate, lousy shield coverage, mediocre Flux) to being a really dangerous close-in fighter that could close with powerful weapons. Add in afterburners, and Frigates that were basically really heavy fighters and super-fun to play in an arcade way would emerge almost naturally :-)
3. Energy weapons vs. Everything else. Long story short, I think that energy weapons and Everything Else need to be
much more strongly differentiated so that there's a really meaningful tradeoff between the two types and corresponding advantages.
Ballistic weapons need to have a lot more range or hit a lot harder, and should use no Flux at all; they're already disadvantaged really severely by ammo limitations in most situations, because so much ammo is either wasted on misses or is absorbed by shields that are regenerating.
To test this theory, I simply doubled the range of all the non-energy weapons and got rid of their Flux costs, and it worked quite nicely, except for a few weapons that didn't have either enough ROF to generate sufficient hits or weren't hitting hard enough to justify ever mounting them, like the Mortar. I really don't like games full of newbie-traps, so I was in the middle of fixing all that last night and finding better niches for everything. I will start re-fixing it when I have time again.
Energy weapons, in a shorter range band, on the other hand, I made much more deadly but with much higher Flux costs. This gave them a lot better close-kill capability but it made watching out for Overload / shield tradeoffs and getting into range much more important.
These two major changes addressed a lot of the issues with the two weapon types feeling a bit same-ish and mushy; addressing a few specifics, such as making the Antimatter weapon have a range and fire rate large enough to actually see use as a long-range sniping weapon (I gave it 1200 range and 0.5 shots / second for a rough re-balance) really added a lot more depth to our available tactical choices. There are other issues in that area, but it's probably better to just build a mod and show it all, instead of wasting your time explaining it :-)
4. Frigates vs. Everything Else. Frigates, are, imho, the most fun to actually play right now. I've tried everything up to Battleships, and I've found Frigates were the most fun... but only after I'd given them some meaningful changes. With some modification, I made most of the Frigates moderately useful and competitive, and I honestly think that's how the game should work: Frigates should be the most powerful, in terms of raw damage for size, as well as being fast; everything else should be much more durable and be able to mount more of the larger, long-range weapons that are suitable for battering down each other's weapons, or be anti-Frigate builds that provide players with a strong challenge.
To address this issue, my suggested balance changes would be:
A. Frigates need significantly more OP for their size, so that Frigates can pack more Hull Mods and have more flex than any other ship size.
B. Frigates need to all be significantly faster and more maneuverable than anything larger. If Afterburners are put into the game design, their speed, maneuverability will be good enough to be really useful and fun as tactical units.
C. Frigates should get a really significant Flux tradeoff, in most cases: a high Flux capacity and rating, but a significantly larger (i.e. worse) Shield Flux Efficiency rating. IOW, make them able to dish it out, but not take it, and make flying them more about dodging, shooting accurately and spending Flux carefully and using Vent to shed Flux while keeping away from the enemy.
5. Boarding actions should happen a
lot more often, to keep combat monetarily sane. Right now, they happen so infrequently that fighting a major fleet action is practically always at a big loss, monetarily, even if I win against overwhelming odds.
if I trade 3 Cruisers and 3 Frigates for the defeat of a major Pirate fleet, I should get enough plunder to cover my casualties. Right now, I generally lose money every time, which means that I have to build up a fleet... again... or resort to a save game reload to have some more fun.
6. I want to have weapons that can kill engines, kill weapons and kill crew. IOW, special weapons specifically meant to make it possible to disable the enemy without destroying the hull.
7. I'd like enemy ships to surrender in combat when they know they're doomed, not always fight me to the death. It would really improve the feel of combat, in terms of the humanity involved, and if it worked both ways, that would be wonderful.
8. I'm really looking forward to having character traits to buff with over time. I know you probably have lots of ideas about this, but here are my suggestions about a simple, intuitive system of stats:
A. Heroism. Buffs all fleet damage by a small percentage; non-cumulative, highest Heroism is max fleet buff.
B. Defensive Tactics. Buffs all fleet defenses by a small percentage.
C. Engineering. Effects repairs, both in and out of combat, and is required to install certain weapons / hull mods. Out of combat, it should be a fleet-wide buff; in-combat, it's a personal buff.
D. Navigation. Gives percentage bonus to fleet movement speeds, so that eventually your armadas are able to catch smaller groups (but not Scouts, of course).
E. Trade. Gives bonus to trading, both ordinary equipment sales and commodities when that's in place.
F. Leadership. Improves fleet efficiency (i.e., fewer accidents) and morale in combat (fewer surrenders, ships obey instructions more readily, including self-sacrifice).
G. Management. Improves wage costs and Supply usage over time, once crew aren't just numbers you attach to hulls. Also should buff the XP gain rate of your fellow captains.
H. Gunnery. Personal bonus to damage. Should be a power stat when combined with Heroism.
I. Piloting. Personal bonus to ship maneuverability. I'd make this a curve upgrade, so that if you use this as your dump stat, you get pretty manueverable if you stack with hull mods.
J. Defensive Systems. Personal bonus to defenses. Stacks with Defensive Tactics.
All captains should have the above; part of game strategy should be putting together a group of captains and dumping their stat points into various areas to gradually increase your total fleet buffs, as well as putting points into the last three to buff some of them into combat heavies so that you can put them into the front lines. Experience needs to have both a personal (i.e., per-damage / per-kill) component and fleet-wide, so that you can have non-combat personnel who fly ships with a strictly supportive role (carrier captains, for example) who don't fall way behind on the stats curve. Part of having an end-game fleet should be having a solid crew in terms of support stats to give players a solid advantage vs. AI numbers.
9. I'd like ships to be able to mount weapons on the "underside" as well as "on top". This would be a big improvement for certain turrets and for having things like missiles on "wing mounts". I know that's a non-trivial issue in terms of drawing order, but I thought I'd request it anyhow.
10. Further in the non-trivial category; since planets appear to be 3D spheres with textures wrapped, I am wondering if animated space stations could be implemented that were 3D objects. Would greatly improve the look of stations and allow for a lot of neat tricks in terms of their visuals. Since they aren't currently things we can destroy or engage in combat, I figured this might be practical.
11. I'd like to see space installations that the factions install in various static locations semi-randomly, ala the missions in Freelancer where you'd have to destroy enemy stations. Stations would be really big, immobile ships, for all practical purposes (although that's just the tip of the iceberg; imagine a 'floating city' of procedurally-placed smaller elements we can destroy and dodge through as we engage ships, for example), so it would provide a fun change sometimes.
12. Big, difficult feature request: I'd like to see ships actually break up occasionally. It's probably possible to algorithmically clip up both the dead-ship bitmap and the collision zones and spawn the two-or-more new objects that would result, instead of having to waste artist time on specific gibs. Haven't the foggiest how much of a pain in the rear it would be, but it would add enormously to the feel of combat to occasionally fly through a drifting cloud of debris where that giant battleship once was, especially if some of the pieces were still recognizable.
13. Critical hits. Really needs to be in the game; freak stuff happens in real-world combat all the time, and while players will complain, they'll complain about anything that occasionally feels like real combat, and a lot of people will enjoy it. Critical hits should rarely be anything like an instant kill; more like, "the magazine of X exploded from internal shrapnel, and you just took 300 Hull damage, bypassing armor". Sometimes they'd matter a lot, most of the time they'd be part of the statistical noise but would add a little randomness that would be pleasant.
14. Chain failures. When weapons are taken out, sometimes they should have a chance to chain-detonate and sometimes they should be blown off and ruined for the rest of the battle. IRL, weapons damage to a warship is one of the more terrifying things that can happen; there's a reason those giant turrets have so much armor to protect the ammo stores
15. Resupply in combat. Would give a realistic and useful role to those totally-useless fuel tankers or a whole new class of vessel. I'd love to see shuttles flying around, delivering precious crates of Mark 9 rounds to my beleaguered Cruisers, saving the day through the power of Logistics. It's a part of real-world combat that would add a lot of flavor to the game but be largely optional for non-powergamers. It'd give us something to do while our giant battleships slowly crept into gun ranges, too, after the initial battles were over.
16. Armor penetration. I'd really like weapons to have a value, separate from damage, about how much armor they're allowed to bypass instead of whittling away. It's one of the fundamental differences between directed-energy weapons and kinetic-kill munitions; one tears great chunks off the surface pretty inefficiently but it makes use of all the energy, the other makes teeny little holes in surface armor and leaves gaping wounds on the interior but isn't terribly efficient in terms of total energy transfer.
On the converse, I'd like to see heavy ships that are almost like tanks, that totally ignore lighter weapons, not just get whittled more slowly. It's not realistic for lighter ballistic weapons to ever cause significant damage to a battleship's armor belts, and it'd be nice if it worked that way in the game, giving us more differentiation and more opportunities to construct balance.
17. Missiles and their role. Basically, missiles are one of the big banes of balance in games like these, but I feel they currently aren't working well, and I consistently dropped missles from every ship I bought, because I found the OPs were better-spent elsewhere. One-shot missiles like the Reaper need to have enough speed or guidance to be serious threats, and kill things when they hit, otherwise they shouldn't be in at all. Lighter guided stuff mainly feels like anti-swarm, but is no real threat to even a Frigate with shields up.
This is very problematic, because if the Frigate's shields are down, practically anything in the game will kill it swiftly. I think all missile damage needs to go way, way, way up; the only exception that I can think of on this may be the engine-seekers like the Pilum, but even they feel pretty inadequate most of the time unless you're lobbing a whole heck of a lot of them. Missile boats should be perfectly practical and lethal, but specialized, due to their severe ammo and ROF issues. Fighters with missiles should be a credible threat.
18. Buyable / Pilotable fighters. Because it would be Fun and cheap, shieldless but maneuverable ships would be challenging to fly :-) Fairly easy to mod in, just making a request that it's put in as part of the main game.
19. Ships need moddable stats for Strafe. I'd love to see ships that can Strafe almost as fast as they can move forwards and backwards, so that some ships can have an "attack heli" kind of behavior, as well, as "snake" behaviors when using Afterburners to close to assault ranges, drop off a bunch of DPS and get the heck out.
20. Deployable obstacles. I.E., spray water into space, creating a barrier to directed-energy weapons; minefields, deliberate tank-trap type barriers to slow down fast-movers, etc. Would be very useful for the almost-immobile ships as a defensive tool and would give being on the defense a meaningful advantage if these were deployed early and the fleet was halted behind the resulting barriers.
21. Marines in combat shuttles who can take over enemy vessels. Probably been asked for a lot already :-)
22. Nukes / Superweapons that only a capital ship can hope to survive, but with enough warning that smaller ships can probably flee the area.
23. Ships built around a particular gun that cannot be replaced with anything else. Stuff like the A-10 Warthog, for example, where they built the jet around the rotary cannon. Would give more special-ness to designs and reflect real-world engineering issues better.
24. More interesting missiles and counters. I want to see anti-missiles and missiles that fire a single shot or half-second laser burst for range damage, so that we can have Hamiltonian types of space warfare.
25. Make it possible to swap the graphics of a ship on the fly via modded Java. Would be cool for transforming stuff (Robotech, anybody) and things like ships with animated parts. I know that actually changing hitboxes and the like is probably prohibitive but graphics changes would allow for some neato things.
26. More graphical doodads that can be modded in. It'd be nice to have dynamic "lights" that could be given cycles of color and translucency so that ships could sparkle a bit, and the same basic idea, if the graphics generated were rotated with the hull, could be used for all sorts of cool overlay effects without being too expensive, especially as this kind of thing doesn't need to happen off-screen.
27. I think it would be cool if your artist(s) could make up more parts sheets deliberately built for kit-bashing ships from. Since the game's not limited in terms of palette or translucency, it'd be cool to throw together bits and parts and create a new design, or at least block it out, then do the editing steps necessary to have a good working .ship file. And it would match, style-wise. Yes, I'm that lazy, sorry
28. Repair ships that can perform meaningful healing on the battlefield. Medics would complete the tank/wizard dynamics that are already in place for the heavies.
Whew! I think that's... it? At least for now :-) I really look forward to the future of this game, and I feel my $10 was well-spent, good luck and hopefully some of this was worth thinking about :-)