Assorted and mostly-disorganized bits and bobs of feedback after way too many hours in way too few days, and having ran through the story twice. I'm not necessarily very in touch with balance, but this is more of a commentary on the feels-good/feels-bad of the game now:
- Enemies getting to harass you when you use the disengage SP has a bit of a potential strange feel to it. As an RP thing it makes total sense to me, if for no other reason than your fancy maneuvers could also put some stress on your ships (and is obviously still way preferable to just getting caught and wrecked). I do lean heavily towards "RP and verisimilitude" as high priorities, perhaps more than most, but I could also see new players finding it a bit of a wth-moment about the mechanics to spend one of those relatively-scarce points and still having to pay the supply-price. No right answer, I think, but a thought that dawned on me.
- In my last game I got a pirate station spawned in Duzhak, and I think it was trying to orbit around Aka Mainyu, causing pirate fleets to keep bouncing against the star next to it as the station got squished in between the gas giant and the star. A very minor issue, all things considered, but looks kinda funky and maybe it's worth failsafing by not letting pirate bases spawn that close to stars?
- I'm a bit on the fence about raiding; on the one hand it's kind of trivial to just run around raiding pirate planets and stations, but on the other it does come with the cost of maintaining and keeping a marine squad so it's not really just "free stuff", even if it feels like it is in the moment. Right now it feels too easy but it may be a perception thing rather than a real issue. I ended up feeling like something like the vengeance fleet mechanic from I think it's Nexerelin could fit in there. Say, if you don't hide your tracks with the SP option, repeatedly preying on a faction makes it end up sending bounty hunting fleets after you eventually? That brings some more of the core combat into the raiding loop, too, which at present it tends to miss, particularly in the core worlds. Otherwise, it's pretty slick and elegant to divide forces between what you want to steal.
- Ships on personal contact elite bounties not salvaging with their built-ins is a bit of a FeelsBad. I can see the reasons, and it's not inexplicable but one of the charms I've felt of the game is that whenever you encounter something you think is BS you can generally salvage, turn around and use it yourself in some capacity; this is perhaps now a (not necessarily THE biggest, but a) contributing factor to the enemy officer spam kinda feeling bad as well. Minor story thing:
Spoiler
Especially given you can salvage the Ziggurat.
Maybe allow elite ships to be salvaged with their built-ins, but force difficult recoveries for such ships when they're taken from NPC fleets, so you have to pay something of the appropriate resource, but get a discount for it being on a ship you might not necessarily want and/or be hullmods you're not ordinarily interested in? At least they do pay pretty well, which leads me to...
- Most Contact Bounties feel underpaid for the risk/reward, plus all the travel costs involved when they're placed far out. Maybe they could reward other stuff next time you visit, like some supplies/fuel, repairs, introduce you to possible (mercenary?) officer candidates... Say after you build some rep and you do a bounty for someone, come back, accept another bounty and then they go "hey I got something for ya before you go...", maybe some extra credits if you lost ship(s) in a previous bounty you did for them? There's something to be said for the simplicity of getting paid only in credits, but it's not necessarily how a world works?
- It's still somewhat unclear to me what the Importance of contacts actually does. That might be a me thing though, and it being a little vague might just be a good thing.
- The Fury is really fun to play and has enough punch to really play to high-tech's hit-and-run nature even against big and nasty stuff. This is probably to be expected from someone who already likes the Shrike (but finds it a bit under-armed) and Odyssey as well as the sort of "light destroyer/cruiser/capital" 'subclass' of ships.
Feedback that touch on story elements and other minor spoiler things:
Spoiler
- Generally I found the story quite fun, especially the current finale part(?) (at least I've not found anywhere it'd continue after Scylla and Elissa bugger off). "Baird always gets her way", right?
- I really did enjoy the little glimpses into the workings of the world. The little headbutting between Laicaille/Kazeron, the seeming-anarchists at Fikenhild, the little events with PL/TT/Heg agents coming to say hi at the bars/in fleets... The Interfactional Dispute Council line came a bit out of nowhere and opens up a lot of questions, but maybe that's one of those "explaining the mystery takes the fun out of it" things in the end. What is it, what does it actually do, who's on it, is it anything more than a token formality entity, etc etc etc.
- The Gates ending up being used as a fast travel system is neat. I keep messing it up and underestimating the fuel use, but that's a me problem.
- The Ziggurat's threat assessment may be a little undertuned? Then again, it might make sense given it's supposed to be something completely new and unfamiliar. I *think* I could've beaten it the first time I encountered it and it assessed as two-star (it wrecked me and my whole fleet, after I'd already lost most of my previous fleet and all its story point investments to the Tri-Tach phase squad) if I'd treated it more aggressively and didn't let it do the phase ship dodgyness, but that might be overclownfidence. When I came back later and it assessed as a one star and I fought it much more aggressively it still disabled two cruisers which isn't what I'd expect from such an assessment.