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« on: February 16, 2012, 06:38:53 PM »
First of, 0.5 suddenly made the game awesome. I would say that at the current state, it is already very much worth the price. One thing i particularly liked once i noticed it was how the objects in the system actually revolve around each other, instead of just being one static map.
However, here are the things i noticed which might need improvements.
There needs to be some way to get basic ships for each role in large quantities, that does not involve capturing them. Interceptors in particular are both very important in my usual fleet layouts, and also have a tendency to sometimes die, so the amount the station has is depleted pretty fast, and then i can just have as many as i can capture.
The start of the game is a bit rough. Although, if i had just used my initial found to buy some talons, it probably would have been much easier. I also have already played a lot of the former version of the game, and i think a newer player might have some problems being forced to fight fleets which are basically double your strength at the beginning of the game. A simple tutorial popup suggesting to buy something with your money might even be enough here.
Something seems a bit off in the way the AI uses their shields. I particularly noticed that when i was fighting a Paragon in my Onslaught, and did not really have a lot of kinetic damage. I would have never broken through its shields, and it could have just used it superior shield efficiency to slowly grind me down by just firing enough to not overload, while being completely safe behind its shields. But instead it chose to randomly lower its shield and allow me to hit it, while firing with all its guns all the time and then venting flux, which again allowed me to blow it up. Generally speaking, the AI lowers their shields far too often in dangerous situation just to immediately restart them, which often allows multiple heavy hits to go through until the shield covers a large enough area.
There needs to be a system to store your stuff on a station instead of having it all on your fleet all the time. I really like to have a large storage of all types of weaponry lying around just in case i want to use it, and if cargo capacity would be relevant, this would be very problematic at the moment, because either i have half of my fleet consisting of freighters, or i have to sell that stuff and buy it back for inflated prices when i want to use it.
I might just not have noticed it, but at the moment there appears to be no way to empty specific slots of a ship except completely strapping it and refitting the other slots.
Some way to speed up time during boring episodes might be useful. Like when i am waiting for 30 days for my onslaught to get repaired, or when flying across the whole system with a slow fleet, especially considering that you seem to want to make a far larger galaxy for the final release.
I find it a bit strange that the tachyon lance can fire far further then you can see. This means that you basically have to use autofire with it at any given time. Sure, autofire works just fine, and my tachyon lance blows up stuff across half the battlefield without me even seeing it, but i think it might be more fun to manually blow it up and actually see it explode.
I think someone already mentioned it, but showing the weapon that is in that turret at the moment when refitting would be very nice.
A functionality that automatically fills up crew, supplies, fuel and marines to some level point, either every time you enter a station, or by clicking a button when on it would be very nice.
I think the whole buying/selling interface in general is not very good. For example, i don't really see why marines, crew etc... need to be in large amounts of 500 stacks. In my case, there are now about 60 stacks of both supplies and fuel which clutter the interface a lot. Why not just have one large stack per item type? Some sort of filtering mechanic might be useful, and i find it highly irritating that i have to mouse over every icon (except for the very obvious ones) to find out what that weapon actually is, or to find the weapon i am looking for. This might be just me, but basically the only thing i can instantly identify are reaper torpedoes, because they are red.
At the moment, fleets just hang around until they are completely destroyed. At some point, they should really retreat, a Tri-Tachyon attack fleet consisting of one single wasp wing flying around the station forever because it is pretty hard to catch is just strange.
I think it is much easier to escape when defending when compared to escaping when escaping. That is a bit weird. When defending, you just need to run away to your edge of the map, while when escaping, you need to go across the whole map to the enemy edge.
When i attack the convoy to loot the Atlas, i don't feel like a get the amount of stuff a superfreighter carries. Also, usually some fightercraft escape and, now being far too fast to catch, continue onward to the station and a message that the convoy has delivered it's load appears. I am not 100% sure, but i also think that the station get additional stuff.
I think some way to set a behavior for ships would very useful, for example to keep your carriers out of trouble, or your fighters from engaging large ships all on their own far in enemy territory, but maybe that is something you already plan to do with the officers. Also, there should be some way to set some weapon groups to autofire by default. This is very minor, but a the moment i start every battle by setting PD-weapons on autofire right out of the gate. Or just keep the settings you had when finishing your last battle active for the next one.
Now, this is a lot of negative stuff, most of which is probably already known and/or planned to be changed anyways, so i just want to state that the game is actually very fun. The combat is very good, and especially the low-tech weapons feel just right and meaty. I just want to help make this game even more awesome by pointing out stuff that might be improved.
