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[rrrob]

Hi all!

I read about this game from RPS and was sold immediately. I pre-ordered yesterday and spent many hours with the game already. These are my impressions after finishing all the missions except Dire Straits and Predator or Prey.

The parts I love:
- Deep tactical combat! Different weapons types, ship positioning, buildup and releasing of flux, turning shield on and off, etc, etc. So much to do during fighting. Taking down enemy ships is very satisfying
- Awesome ship art! Unique style with just the right SciFi feel
- Great AI! Both enemy and friendly ships fly and fight intelligently. Smaller frigates circle around and harass bigger ships.
- Very immersive mission descriptions. Can't wait to immerse myself all the lore in the campaign.

Some comments on other parts of the game
- In some missions I had to spend most of time in the Command screen to make sure my fleet does what I want them to do and stay up to date with what's going on. All the fighting becomes abstracted and I don't get a feel of what really happened. What friendly units kicked ass? Against which enemy ships? How did they win or loose? You only get a notification on the top of the screen when a wing gets destroyed or a ship gets disabled. I could move the camera to that spot but then I can't command the flagship. There is just so much going on and I want to take it all in! Unfortunately that is not possible right now, at least not for me. I want to command a ship AND know what's going on in the rest of the battlefield in more detail.
  Maybe instead of just pause and play add quarter and half game speeds? Ability to open PIP screens that follow other ships? Recording of a battle to replay afterwards? More detailed granular notifications? Ship is at 50% hull, fighter wing down to half its squad etc. More detailed debriefing where you see the kills of each wing/ship? There is so much going on, I almost wish this game was turn based .
- Assignments, command points and all that was totally confusing at first. Even after going through the tutorial. Especially since for some reason the counter for command points was outside of the visible screen area when I ran in full screen. I could see the number when I ran the game in windows mode. Before that I was completely confused why I couldn't give any more orders or create new assignments. To clarify this maybe add some icon or -1CP text to show assignments subtracts command points.
This system is definitely different from how I expected the command screen would work. In a way I like the limited number of orders forcing players to make choices. On the other hand it doesn't feel completely natural and for now I am trying to figure out what the AI will do and try to "game" into doing what I want it to do. For example when I want an interceptor wing to race to a waypoint but the AI chooses a frigate that is further away to go there instead. I don't want to assault it since that would make the AI send more ships/wings there. The current set of assignments don't seem to be enough. Yes I can give direct orders but I might need to use up several direct orders just to undo what the AI does before I can assign the ships I want.
- Capturing Nav buoys and comma relays adds strategic layer into the missions but sometimes I just want to a big slugfest  between two fleets without worrying about capturing these points. That doesn't work on any of the missions since capturing these locations are so important. Will the campaign battles also involve capturing victory locations? I hope not. They probably make sense in certain types of battles but not all.

All in all the game is already fantastic in this early state. I can't wait for the open campaign with crew, customizable weapon slots and all the other goodness. I just came from playing SPAZ and Captain Forever/Jameson but this game scratches the space fleet combat itch in a way that the itch hasn't been scratched before since Star Wars: Empires at War. Great work guys!

PS. I was greatly surprised this game is written in Java!! I do Java coding for work but never imagined you could create this types of games with Java. I was so curious that I took my Java decompiler to look at the code. Not to steal it of course XD but to see how to create a game in Java which has always been a dream of mine. You will probably be happy to hear that the obfuscator did its job. I could look at the code of all the classes but it was just not worth it to figure out the dependencies between all the clases. The engine and all the meaty internals of are hidden behind all the OOOOOOOO's the obfuscator generated . It would be awesome parts of the campaign and could be extended and new weapon types created through some sort of an API in the future. I am sure many would jump on the opportunity to create more advanced mods. I am thinking about some of the total conversion mods for Mount & Blade that creates entire new campaigns and enriches the game with mechanisms. Well that is for later, first we need a vanilla campaign .

[Ivaylo]

Hello there, welcome!


First of all, thanks for your support. I wanted to just throw some notes out there regarding your well thought out post (this is not a comprehensive answer to all your points).

- Too much going on: I hear you on this one. However, one very important thing is that your are still in the "new player" learning curve territory. This does not address the issue completely though. The missions are sometimes very unforgiving me personally, even after all this time. I do believe that a less sharp learning curve, especially with regards to your own fleet and its composition will go a long way to addressing this. This is the curve we have planned for the campaign.

- Command points, etc.: Can't say much more than what I have already, but currently the campaign fights are simpler than what is in the missions. Regarding gaming the AI: maybe Alex can weigh in here. The way I usually play it though is the reverse of an RTS approach. Basically get in battle, send the orders to the captains... then I am on my own. There are additional things that are in store here, like captain personalities and the like, which will give you finer control over behavior, but not while in combat.

-Java: Another Java dev, representin'! Wooohooo!!! OK, first of all props for using a decompiler. I am still surprised to see devs that do not regularly use them, boggles the mind. Regarding modding, that is something that is a big focus for us. You should be able to get weapons and ships modded easily (all data is in text format within the distribution, no need to de/re compile). For additional modding info, look at the modding forum, people have done amazing work.

[Alex]

Hi - thanks for sharing your impressions!

Especially since for some reason the counter for command points was outside of the visible screen area when I ran in full screen.

Could you grab a screenshot of that? Sounds like a nasty bug. It'd help to know what OS you're running on, too.

For example when I want an interceptor wing to race to a waypoint but the AI chooses a frigate that is further away to go there instead. I don't want to assault it since that would make the AI send more ships/wings there.

This particular issue is fixed in the next version - the AI wasn't weighing the distance to the objective correctly.

Capturing Nav buoys and comma relays adds strategic layer into the missions but sometimes I just want to a big slugfest  between two fleets without worrying about capturing these points. That doesn't work on any of the missions since capturing these locations are so important. Will the campaign battles also involve capturing victory locations? I hope not. They probably make sense in certain types of battles but not all.

I can't say too much about this now, save that I'm thinking about it, along somewhat similar lines. Sometimes it is fun to just jump right into a firefight.



As far as the modding, I think you'll be happy to know that the "scripting" language of choice is Java. At this point in the dev version, the entire star system is created using the API - so it's all code you could tweak and play around with. Btw, you might want to check out JGO if you're interested in writing games in Java, it's a great resource. Also, Starfarer is using LWJGL for its graphics/sound/input, and I can't say enough good things about it.

[Zarcon]

I can't say too much about this now, save that I'm thinking about it, along somewhat similar lines. Sometimes it is fun to just jump right into a firefight.

Oh nice, it sounds like that train of thought may lead to some very good things and battle/map type variants somewhere down the road.    Exciting stuff.

[rrrob]

Another thing I love about this game that I forgot to mention is how responsive the devs are . Great job acknowledging and keeping your community up to speed with what's going on.

- Too much going on: I hear you on this one. However, one very important thing is that your are still in the "new player" learning curve territory. This does not address the issue completely though. The missions are sometimes very unforgiving me personally, even after all this time. I do believe that a less sharp learning curve, especially with regards to your own fleet and its composition will go a long way to addressing this. This is the curve we have planned for the campaign.

My problem isn't that there is too much going on. I love all the detail. Yes I was confused in the first few missions but everything made sense once I read the manual and the battles became even more fun once I understood most of the game mechanics.

The issue is that there is so much going on that I don't get to experience. I want to know which friendly ship took down what enemies ships, and how! How did my frigates and bomber wings take down the enemy battleship while I was busy defending a victory location. Maybe the frigates distracted the battleship forcing it to went its flux allowing the bombers to fire off torpedos right when the shield were down. It is not like other games were the units are abstracted into attack and defense ratings and outcome resolved by dice rolls. In this game, each small battle is played out. I just feel I am missing out on all these potentially awesome battles when I am focused on controlling my ship or just looking at map. Yes, I can follow any ship but there I want to know whats going on with every ship.

I think this becomes more important when we are able to assign crews and customize setup of ships. You will want to know how different loadouts and crews fares in combat. With different types of crews there is potential for even richer narrative in each battle. I am guessing different crews/commanders will have different AI personalities that will alter the behavior or affect outcome of battles in different ways. I can imagine players  being emotionally invested in their crews/commanders and want to closely follow each one of them.

The current battles are like being a coach of a sports team and you only get to watch your team play 1/4 of a game and see the final score. The other 3/4 you hear whats going in through radio commentary. I wish there was some way to experience the entire game in full fidelity and have full sets of stats to immerse myself in .

[Apophis]

Capturing Nav buoys and comma relays adds strategic layer into the missions but sometimes I just want to a big slugfest  between two fleets without worrying about capturing these points. That doesn't work on any of the missions since capturing these locations are so important. Will the campaign battles also involve capturing victory locations? I hope not. They probably make sense in certain types of battles but not all.

I can't say too much about this now, save that I'm thinking about it, along somewhat similar lines. Sometimes it is fun to just jump right into a firefight.

I dont' like sensor array and nav buoy, they modify too much the game mechanics. Maybe they works for mission but i hope there isn't any in the campaign. i like battles with only the two fleets and nothing else. Only exceptions are when there is a thing like a capturable planets where something to capture over the planet make sense.
And i like big battles, there should be an option for the campaign to increase battleSize

[ollobrains]

Hold put until 0.5 is out and then we can give our collective updated viewpoints

Side note dwarf fortress ( its freeware btw) so no competition with aurora and its a sim rpg thing is due an upgrade soon to ( maybe some of the rpg adventure mode might give alex some food for thought for this game to)

[Belhoriann]

The current battles are like being a coach of a sports team and you only get to watch your team play 1/4 of a game and see the final score. The other 3/4 you hear whats going in through radio commentary. I wish there was some way to experience the entire game in full fidelity and have full sets of stats to immerse myself in .

I have to agree with rrrob, and I have a little idea to avoid this problem : allow the player to zoom out more, a lot more. In fact, I think that it would be über awesome to access the tactical view by zooming out rather than pressing a button, like in Supreme Commander

[Alex]

I think we might have to agree to disagree I actually really dislike Supreme Commander's zoom model from a functional perspective. It's great for conveying a sense of scale (oh, wow, the units are so tiny!), and I think that's what they were going for. But having to spin the mousewheel so much to get from one zoom extreme to the other is a chore.

If you search for "zoom" on this forum, you might find the first couple of results relevant. Not to say there aren't other ways of doing things, but there are reasons why the zooming is somewhat limited - some technical, some gameplay-related.