I just finished my first campaign. Resistance / Normal. I registered here to leave feedback. I will try to be brief. I omitted things in the roadmap.
The game is great fun. So firstly big kudos to the devs. This is a very unique and great game! Please do not take this as harsh critique, quite the opposite, if I didn't like the game I would not spent three hours writing detailed feedback.
Specs:
- Ryzen 5 5600X
- 32 GiB RAM
- RTX 3090
- Samsung 980 Evo Pro nVME SSD
Pacing / length of the game
I am your target group, I spent hundreds of hours in many games like this. No problem with long games, but this one has long stretches of time where the player has to wait without being able to do anything.
My first campaign took me 121 hours, at least 30 of those were waiting for things to happen.
In the early game, waiting for councilor turns to complete.
In the mid game, waiting for techs and for resources to build ships. Then waiting for the ships to finish. A ship takes 6 months to be build, that is multiple real time hours. Then, if you play for the first time, you have to iterate through many designs, costing a lot of time to try out.
For example, It took me a long time to destroy my first alien space station. I tried many times with many different approaches. This was great! It was like solving a puzzle and I enjoyed the process. However, due to a mixture of long transit and build times, it takes forever to iterate your designs. I distinctly remember designing an anti-station fleet during noon. It failed after midnight. That is too long. Here, cutting down build and research times would help.
In the late game, I never unlocked good drives, so I had to use Zeta Helion. This means 21 weeks transit times to Neptune and then again from Neptune to the final base. That is around 1-2 hours of real time in which one can do nothing. Cutting down transit times would help a lot with this.
Once I had a working fleet it took me 10 more real time hours just flying from station to station destroying them. This is too slow and very frustrating. Basically, I knew I won and had to spent the equivalent of a long work day realizing that win.
The game unnecessarily slows down often, more on this in:
UX / Quality of Life
Important / super annoying
These items made me literally yell out loud a couple times in frustration.
- Ledger camera movement: This one is in the roadmap but I wanted to highlight how important this change is. Clicking on something in the ledger should not focus the camera on that item. Just select it and make double click focus. Or add a column with a go to button. This also slows down the gameplay massively. If I had to guess, changing this would have saved me around 10 hours.
- Repetitive notifications: I calculated that during my game, I had to click away 4350 councilor notifications. Maybe implement for example HoI style notification options? The VO would be enough for me to know what happened after a while.
- Widget settings should be saved: Please store the value of every drop down and checkbox widget in the save or the user options. I hate reloading the game, clicking on habs and having to set up all the filters again, or having to check "hide obsolete parts" in the ship designer every time.
- Formation widget settings should be saved per fleet: Similarly, every fleet should store the value of the "formation" widget in the engagement window. If you set it up wrong once, you can die because of it, and it takes 2 minutes to load a save.
- Forced time compression changes: Real-time battle slows down the time compression to 1x afterwards. Time compression should be reset to the previous value every time. Time compression can only be 6x if focused on earth. Otherwise its 2x. Leading to the loop: click on fleet, give order, click on earth, zoom out, increase time compression, unpause.
- Tech tree load times: I get it, you have to calculate the techtree graph in the game because some techs, mods or whatever may add options during runtime. But please, prerender it during game start or save load once and store it in a adjacency list or whatever, and then fire an event when a research adds new options to the tree, instead of calculating it every time. This game requires going through the tech tree multiple times to figure out what you should do, it is very frustrating when it takes so long. I ended up using a web version: https://rookiv.github.io/terra-invicta/ hosting it locally and copying in the newest json. Without this I might have given up on the game. Btw: the browser version I linked has several other improvements that would be nice, like highlighting a subtree for a specific tech / project.
- UI responsiveness: Other menus, too, should not take multiple seconds to open, or to sort a list. I have to stress this, unresponsive UI is the #1 thing making users stop using a product.
- Transit browser is a mess: I have a fleet, I want to go to an alien base. How do I do that? Go to habs, find alien base, memorize name of the asteroid, go to fleet, click on transit, click through all the asteroid tabs and scroll through every list until I find the asteroid. Too awkward. First, there should be a search widget. Second, every asteroid etc. should at least get an icon if there is a base on it or in orbit, also this should move it to the top of the list. Third, the transit browser should have some way to show faction bases directly, like the hab browser. And it should also be much bigger.
Nice to have
- Ship combat: add important actions next to ship list: full stop, nose lock and target should be added as icons next to every ship icon in the ship list on the left, this would make it much faster to assign these orders to ships. Currently, one has to select the ship on the left, traverse the entire screen with the mouse to the bottom to click a button, then back to the ship list.
- Pre-engagement needs an overhaul: Give the user a visual preview of what the formation options actually mean. Move the "start battle" and "autoresolve" options to the same window as the formations, or have a "go back" button. It happened to me multiple times that I clicked engage, realized I had the wrong formation in the previous step and had to reload a save. Even more ideally, maybe there can be a pre-engagement phase to combat, in which you can position your ships yourself.
- Change ship type after class has been designed: If you select the wrong ship type for your colony ship for example, it will always be deployed at the front during combat, and you can only change it by creating a new design.
- Ship merge improvements: Ship merge and ship split should use the same kind of window widget. Makes it easier merging many ships.
- Set home base changes: Reuse transit browser for "set home base". If not, at least order the list by distance or at least alphanumerically.
- Shipyard UI simplification: Instead of every shipyard having its own queue, maybe have one queue per station and then just n ships building at the same time? Makes queuing up ships easier. See stellaris.
- Colony and base building folders: consider adding "folders" on the right to make it easier to look through. Took me longer than I care to admit that it is ordered by tier, then alphanumerically. Maybe have at least one "folder" or tab per tier. All lists like this should have a search widget.
- Strategic solar system map: Solar system map that allows WASD navigation without being locked to a body. Could be locked to the normal plane. Show the trajectory of all fleets of a given faction by clicking a button. I think the transit orbits are probably both newtonian-accurate and very pretty, but you never get to see them. Also I completely lose track of what is flying where and having a visual overview would give players a lot of good info about whats going on, how many alien fleets are heading where, etc.
- Fleet arrival warning: It is nice to tell the player that a fleet will arrive in a year, but maybe there should be a reminder a week before as well.
- Add ship designer to skirmish.
- Allow fighting space stations in skirmish.
Balancing
- I think LDA and Battlestations have been nerfed a bit too hard. I have to put them on every base and station. If I put them on lets say 20 stations that is 15 battleship equivalents of resources, and around 500 in upkeep. It does not feel like they behave accordingly. Especially during autoresolve they do a bit worse than one would expect.
- Alien ships should get a bit more non-missile weapons. I can routinely defeat 10-12 alien ships with 3 BBs. If you defeat the alpha strike, you won the fight.
- Nukes are too powerful. Since the cold war, every military vehicle has ABC protection. A single nuke should not be able to wipe out 7 armies. In my campaign, the aliens had nukes and would use them to nuke their capital to prevent it from being taken. Then, servants stacked 6 councilors into the capital doing reduce unrest missions, so my game was softlocked since resitance win requires the aliens to have no presence on earth. I had to edit my save, or my 110 hours would have been for nothing. Maybe add techs that reduce the damage armies take from nukes.
I want to end on a positive note.
The game is great, one of the best of the year. I have been playing video games for almost 30 years and this is one of the handful of games I could stand to play for so long. The idea behind the game is something completely unique and I loved it. Currently, it reminds me a lot of factorio before all the QoL got added. A diamond in the rough. I am sure you will iron out the issues and realize your vision, and cannot wait to play it again once that is accomplished.
I love the fact that all the factions are so different. I only played resistance so far but looking at everyones goals and their faction-specific tech etc. the playstyles seems surprisingly unique. That impressed me.
The game has this "always something to do" / "one more turn" feeling. I love that and it is the result of good game design.
I do enjoy that the Aliens are extremely frustrating at first. You can barely destroy their ships, cannot catch them, they do what they want and you lose stations and mining complexes all the time. This makes it so much sweeter when you finally manage to turn things around, and it feels like it would in reality, an uphill battle.
You really have one 3d artist doing everything? Give that man a raise.
I hope this feedback is helpful. Have a nice weekend.
I agree that most of the mentioned issues are a problem and some of QoL changes I've already formally feature-requested, eg. preview of formations.