Thanks for your support, and for dropping by to share your thoughts.
How do I get my ships to listen and stop flying off to get singled out and killed? I set command orders to take over a couple points and to defend nearby them, yet some of my ships still wander off on their own. How do I prevent this behavior, and what should I be doing? I watched two online tutorials from a few months back and played the in-game tutorial and still don't seem to be doing this right.
"Defend" doesn't tie ships to the point very closely - they're free to engage in a rather large range, especially if there aren't any enemy ships near the point they're defending. I think the main issue is with interceptors, which aren't careful enough - but frigates and such don't run off to get killed, but rather run off and effectively engage the enemy.
How are you guys making use of your capital / flagships? Their weapons seem to have a very short range and their speed is atrocious, so trying to engage anything ends with me giving chase as they either outrun me or outflank me. Right now, I feel either like a sponge absorbing bullets with no other real purpose, or like a turtle always showing up after the action has come and gone. Shouldn't I be able to lock onto targets and fire missiles or long range beams or something? I actually enjoyed the smaller ship in Sinking the Bis'mar since I got to actually dodge and use some tactics. The big ships are a bore.
Well, it's a matter of feel and preference. Larger ships take a bit more care in their use (and thinking a bit further ahead, because you can't get out of a bad spot nearly as easily), and small ships are more arcade-like, which probably makes them easier to start with. Large ships do have a lot more firepower, though.
The latest addition to the dev build (damageable weapons and engines) adds more tactical considerations that are particularly important for large ships.
Also, Nav Buoys. If you're in a large ship, controlling those makes a big difference because of the speed bonus.
As far as missiles and long range beams, the Apogee (which I suspect is the first large ship you encounter - in "Hornet's Nest") has both. You can target off-screen enemies from the war room through an option off their context menu and fire missiles from rather far off that way.
Make it more obvious when firing a weapon that it is either on cooldown or out of ammo. I am normally looking at the action on the screen and not at the bottom of the screen where the ammo display/info is. Instead, I end up losing time/firing angle when I try to fire a gun that isn't ready or has no ammo left. I think either a subtle "Out of Ammo" or "Weapon not ready yet" overlay on or near the ship would help quite a bit.
Same as above but with Flex. An obvious indicator on/near your ship that you are nearing overload would be handy. Again, I don't find myself looking at the lower left corner of the screen when I'm taking damage/fighting someone.
Yep, both those need to be addressed.
Hotkey or option to keep the screen locked with your ship in the center. I understand the desire to look around while flying, but it can be disorienting when I'm trying to aim and end up moving my ship nearly off the screen in the process. I don't care for this and it detracts from the experience.
This is something that just takes a bit of getting used to. Given the effective weapon ranges, locking your screen on the center of the ship isn't as good as it sounds - it ends up being pretty close to useless.
Allow access to the controls list while in battle. As far I could tell, you can only access the controls list from the main menu settings.
Yeah, should probably do that
More in depth tutorials to explain game mechanics. This game does not seem to work well with the old "jump in and see how things go" philosophy. In fact, its downright frustrating. I have completely destroyed some of the scenarios while others left me without a clue how to proceed. I suspect I am missing some things.
Yeah, this is really something the game needs to handle better. The main problem is that you're thrown into the deep end of the pool right away. If the campaign was in place, you wouldn't have all these ships and options available to you at once, and the pacing would be much better - but now you get to very large battles shortly after starting to play the game.
Something I'd like to add for the next version is a series of stripped-down "training" level scenarios which introduce you to the basics. Something between "tutorial" and the "easy" level missions, where you're free to do as you like, but the tactical situation is very constrained to demonstrate a particular gameplay dynamic.
Ultimately, though, Starfarer is meant to offer a challenge - it's just the learning curve is too steep right now. This is something I'm very much aware of, and will be addressing as time goes on. In particular, once the campaign is added, I think it will get a lot more manageable.
