Hello! First off, thank you to the developers of this game. It's got that old SSI "Warp Factor"/"Cosmic Balance" feel to it that I loved as a little kid on the Apple ][+. Throw in some Pirates! style gameplay, and I've been having a lot of fun!
Anyhow, here is a list of things that I've kept track of over my first week or so of play. To give you an idea of what I've experienced so far, I still haven't founded a colony, and the largest ship I own is a cruiser. I haven't done a lot of the story missions so far, but I do like them. Some added direction in a sandbox game is good!
Campaign mode:
- In campaign mode, slow down should be a toggle. Sometimes I want to use my left hand for something else while I'm going slowly through a large patch of storms.
- Cargo capacity should be displayed in campaign mode. A simple x/xx would be sufficient.
- In campaign mode, you should be able to right-click (shift-click? etc) on a jump point/star/etc to bring up that system's info page, just like from map view. When manually piloting, sometimes I get to a system and I'm not sure which jump point to use to get closest to my target. Or, just how far out is that fringe jump point, etc.
Combat mode:
- Combat mode needs time adjustment. Speeding up would be nice for pursuits, but what would be really useful is to be able to slow time down to 50% and 25% of normal. This would let the player watch and understand what's going on during complex battles. I'd be fine with the Paradox standard of the + - keys incrementing and decrementing speed, as the default. Yes, I downloaded the SpeedUp mod, but it'd be nice to have it built into the game.
- There should be some easy to understand visual aid to quickly, at a glance, be able to dertermine if that small thing moving through space is friendly or not, and whether or not it's a missile/fighter/etc.
- When you mouse over an object in combat mode, there should be a small tooltip that indicates what it is. For example, that ship is a Mule CBT Freighter, and that is a Talon interceptor, a Sabot missile, etc.
- In combat mode, targeting your own friendly ships and looking at their info doesn't show their loadout, just their mounts. However, you can see enemies' loadouts. I'm at that age where memory isn't as good as it used to be, so I often can't remember what that awesome blue beam is coming from one of my ships, and I have no way to find out during combat. Then I forget to look after combat, or I do look and then forget what I saw! lol
General UI:
- Ship refitting screen should display cargo capacity, burn level, etc. Basically any visible stat that can be modified by an action in the refit window. I know you can look at the more info window, but it'd be nice to have it all right there.
- When inspecting ships with More Info, there should be a key that toggles all bonuses off so that you can see the base hull stats. It should default to the current behavior. Alternatively, just show the base stats: 300/450(+150) Actually, this might be the better idea.
- When you mouse over a stack of items, add the value of the entire stack to the tooltip.
- For the "owned" count on weapon tooltips, add in a count of weapons in storage everywhere. Include free storage. Perhaps, x/y/z => mounted or cargo/stored in the thing I'm docked at/stored somewhere else.
- There needs to be a way to see what you have in free storage, remotely. Or, even that you have stuff in free storage somewhere.
- More ship names. A lot more ship names! It's very immersion breaking to see the same names over and over.
- Consider a list view for inventories. In particular, I have to mouse-over every type of weapon to see what it is.
--Or-- add a toggle to display below the icon however many letters of the item's name string that can fit.
- Anywhere that there is an accept button for a mission, there should be a map view of the location(s) involved. On mouse-over, this location should display known info about that location.
- For procurement missions, add a stack size * default unit value for the item being requested. Then the player can make an informed decision without having to back out of the entire conversation tree to check the unit value.
- For missions that have you go to a planet/station somewhere, indicate the faction that it belongs to.
- It took me about 40 hours of play before I realized that holding down the left mouse button would make my fleet follow the cursor. Maybe I missed the info in the tutorial? If not, please add it.
- I know that zoom is tied to balancing combat... with that said: Set the max zoom to be one unit higher in both combat and campaign mode. Especially in combat mode. If you're really worried about losing the "fog of war" effect, then consider lowering the tether distance for the camera from the active ship as the zoom moves further out.
