my 2 cents after 60 hours

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red1927
Posts: 1
Joined: Sat Oct 01, 2022 1:31 pm

my 2 cents after 60 hours

Post by red1927 »

hi i have spent more than 60 hours to this game since its launch, i missed class thanks to this game lol.
anyway i am gonna list out the problems i noticed only relating to gameplay (since lots of people already comment on the UI)

the biggest problems for me are the 3) late game ones

1) early-mid game. the phrase that player expand onto Mars.
1a) some nations has hugh advantage over the others, naming EU, which doesn't need those crazy great nation tech and already able to unify.
1b) boost priority being a cumulative modifier, which bottle neck the current phrase a lot, and quite lame in later phrase, by 2030 i have 1k boost and always build from space, there are just no need to use them later on. for the sake of design i think boost should still be a valuable resource late game, perhaps spending a lot of them to speed ship building up? need more ways to get boost in early-mid game, and ways to spend them in late game.
1c) when i send drones to asteroids and it takes 200 days to get there, i just wouldnt remember which asteroids i did send drones to. i think we need a list interface, a button to mark them e.g. gold star on valuable ones, red for trash, grey for non-droned.

2) mid game. the phrase when there should be a golden age. but alien starts showing up with unbeatable ships. (for me it is always around 2028)
2a) too many of those fleets, it sometimes go down to rng whether they do stupid stuff first or go right into destroying your mars base. if they destroy your mars base, you are done. because you wont have the resource to build from space again and it will take another year for the rocket to launch from earth to establish another mars base again, and building your first fleet will be even more useless by then.
2b) alien techs just outright beat you, insane speed, thick armor, while i think most of average player only have first tier of weaponry and shitty power and drive. i think we missed out the chance to space battle with other human factions.
2c) the resources comes by too easily if you are the first one to get there, makes reasearching inner planets less tempting.
2d) feedback with different type of weaponry against different alien ship setup are not clear enough, by the time i can build my first ship, i already have 5 different type of tier one missile and 5 type of armor. but my convette still got one-shot by aliens ship.
2e) the missile weapons need some work on it. i think increasing its speed while decrease its homing capability worth a try, so that it can shoot down slow target but not the fast one in the wrong angle, makes missile firing timing more important, right not i can just build cheap ships with missiles to cheese the early alien ships. and no other tactics can be used with close range weapon because my ships are too slow and aliens shoot long range missile first.

3) late game. late game for me is when i got those tier 2/3 tech and actually tries to fight some epic battle with aliens.
3a) the councilor thing is starting to get in the way, while you cannot wait to get those ship built and go into star battles, every two weeks you have to assign your councilors to do mundane stuff, which actually waste a lot of real-time.
3b) some councilors abilities should be remove, naming turn space assets and stations. it cannot be prevented and even stoped because by the time your councilor go to the turned station, the enemy agent has already left for one of your 100 other space station, plus trying to find a station from a small list is inhumane. the damage these abilities can do is tremendous, yet hard to prevent and hinder the game's rythm in a bad way.
3c) the councilor thing becomes very boring in the late game. it is whack a mole non-stop. every turn enemy tries to steal your technology, sabotage your boost or mission control, turn your space ship or even worse to assassinate your scientist. and you have 5 agents stopping 25 enemies with no way to finish the orgainization for good. honestly i just want the councilor thing gone late game so that i can focus on the space battle or tech or expansion or buildings. once you go to war with the organization, there are no going back, and you cannot hurt the ai because they are already weaker than you. maybe a world senate to vote for disabling certain actions? i dont know but it is really a nuisance, perhaps councilors should be purposed to geographical gains only.
3d) hard to understand the difference between aliens ships except their size. which allow few opportunity to build ships to counter certain alien ships.

4) combat bug, maybe its just me, but i dont know
4a) CTD upon exit battle, happened fewer time after reinstall, but still occur around 20% of battle exit.
4b) i had 7 escort all having viper missiles, and focusing fire on one alien vessel, the missile hit and detonate but did no damage to the ship while it is moving backward (away from my ships). my guess is that the ship is so fast that by the time the missile detonate, it has moved out of the blast area, don't know if its intended, but it feels awkward. i am quite sure if it is working normally, the alien ship will be destoryed because its more than 20 missiles hit in the same place in one seconds.
4c) in the same battle as 4b, when the alien vessel circle back, there were mysterious explosion following it, without the visual of a rocket hitting it. my guess is that there are phantom rocket that is not visually showing still follows the alien vessel.

overall i think this is a very addictive game. but the late game issue needs to be addressed.
thank you for making this wonderful game, havent been a game that attracts me so much for a while.
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Alitari
Posts: 24
Joined: Tue Sep 27, 2022 8:54 pm

Re: my 2 cents after 60 hours

Post by Alitari »

red1927 wrote: Sun Oct 02, 2022 12:02 am3c) the councilor thing becomes very boring in the late game. it is whack a mole non-stop. every turn enemy tries to steal your technology, sabotage your boost or mission control, turn your space ship or even worse to assassinate your scientist. and you have 5 agents stopping 25 enemies with no way to finish the orgainization for good. honestly i just want the councilor thing gone late game so that i can focus on the space battle or tech or expansion or buildings. once you go to war with the organization, there are no going back, and you cannot hurt the ai because they are already weaker than you. maybe a world senate to vote for disabling certain actions? i dont know but it is really a nuisance, perhaps councilors should be purposed to geographical gains only.
I agree with this point in particular.

While it may not be possible at this point in the development cycle, having focused, staged sections of the game (where the other stages are either beyond your reach or going on behind the scenes but not impacting that stage) might be a better way of going about the game.

What I'm thinking about is something along the lines of Spore:
* The first stage is the councilor and nation grabbing stage. This is all intrigue all the time. You're trying to get your people into positions of power around the world, with the goal of controlling nations that align with your goals / strategies.
* The second stage would be once control of those nations has been established, it moves into the colonization and exploitation of space. The nations under your control essentially form a block or coalition (with those nations you have interests in but not control over contributing a portion of their expertise to your block), and under that banner they go out to control the stars.
* The third stage is once a mature control of space has been established and instead of just building outposts that mine, you're engaging in interplanetary warfare, sending troops and vessels all over the inner solar system and scouting the aliens in the outer solar system.
* The fourth stage would be the final one, where your main opponent is no longer the other factions but the aliens themselves, for whatever that means for your faction.

Once you get past a particular stage, the mechanisms of the previous stage are either relegated to complete computer control (so there are sometimes random events that require your focus or might upset your plans) or abolished entirely (councilors go away as states become the focus). For instance Boost would be important in Stage 2, but not in Stage 3, perhaps merely being a bonus to some other stat.

The challenge is ... Terra Invicta is a simulation from the top to the bottom and in that it kinda forces us to find the game in there.
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