Feedback

[core2k]

Amazing game concept, and implementation. I've got about 90 hours in the game so far. Brilliant fun for the most part.

However, a few suggestions that I would love to see patched:

1. Turn processing and display of information:

Rather than the mandatory popup in the centre of the screen, ideally the same practice as the Paradox games should be considered. A box in the lower left of the screen, listing each item as it happens. The need to click continue or Okay for every ship movement of the aliens is beyond tedious and seriously breaks the immersion/fun of the game. It's not so much of a problem early game, but as soon as the Aliens appear, there's between 20-30 ship movement announcements, each of which need to be clicked on. Alternatively, spacebar can be pressed to continue the turn as the displays are there, but it removes all the interaction with items. The big problem though is that the repeated need to acknowledge every message, leads to frustration as other more important messages are often lost due to frenzied clicking.

Give the user the ability to stream information messages in a dedicated area. As with Hearts of Iron, the user should be able to choose what kind of messages pop up, or are minimized into the communication feed.

To be honest, I'm amazed anyone has made it to the endgame, because I've halted each of my games because of how annoying/tedious, it has become.

2. Add to the information panel to the right:

A list of your countries with their protection status. - As empires grow, and the user has many countries spread across the globe it's very easy to miss the notification that the protection has elapsed. Same with their current popularity, and possibly their cohesion.

3. Extra information to the event notices.

When the AI takes one of your nodes in a country, I'd love to see the percentage of their attempt, and the skill level of the operative. Sometimes, it doesn't make sense that they're able to take a node in China or the US, when the user would have needed extensive preparation (gathering surrounding countries) and popular support to do it.

4. Please alternate the music and sounds. The sound of constant warfare gets annoying in the background, and while the main track is really good, again, it gets annoying on it's own. There needs to be a little variety.

5. Game clock (computer time). Considering how much of a time sink this game is, it would be nice to see a display of the current computer time somewhere.

6. Per the first suggestion above, A list of all important happenings during the turn processing, so that the user can look back at what happened. It's too easy to click something like the Alien warnings, or the survey of an asteroid, and lose all that info entirely. It would be great to be able to see what's come up.

7. Galaxy map. A symbol beside planets, asteroids etc to show that they've been surveyed (without needing to click on the object first).

Possible Bugs?

Alien flora. The AI doesn't destroy it, even when it's in their own territory. Unless the User destroys them, the flora continues to grow everywhere. Also, there's no notification of the flora growing in your own territory, even though, the flora is listed in the actions menu for destruction.

Country nodes and protection status. Even when all the country nodes are protected together at the same time, sometimes the first node will lose protection before the others. There has been no hostile action. It simply becomes unprotected. This tends to happen with larger nations like a combined EU, China, etc.

Attacking country nodes. There is no point waiting for a country node to lose protection naturally, and then attack it. The AI always manages to protect it because their actions are performed before the users (although sometimes the AI doesn't bother to protect itself).. which means the only way is to brute force attack the protected node, using added influence. I don't know if this is as intended, but it's incredibly frustrating for the new user learning how to deal with other nations nodes. It's particularly difficult when approaching the EU or the US in the midgame, whereas the AI seems able to bypass this issue when attacking your own nodes.

Turn notification messages: Most of the time, an announcement will have the continue button, but not always. Ship movements, for example, usually do, but sometimes don't. which causes the turn to pause. It's odd.


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I haven't even touched ship combat yet. The above has been enough to prevent me from getting to that stage. Absolutely love the game, but it's incredibly frustrating after a while. The early/mid game are wonderful to play, but... the problems listed above just kill the enjoyment for me. Considering just how much depth the game has, it's too much of a struggle as it is. Which is a shame, because I'm totally addicted to it.

[johnnylump]

The spamming of fleet activity alerts was a mix of bad AI behavior and some code that wanted to make sure you new there was an enemy fleet doing things nearby. Both have been adjusted.

As for #7, try the "P" key.

[KinSeth2]

I agree with this. The game has been fantastic. The fact that it is as playable and usable as it is with how nuanced it is, demonstrates really excellent design even if it comes off a bit rough sometimes! There are so so so many things i hope other developers take from the success of this game. Thank you all for your work in making this!

[core2k]

@johnnylump Thanks for that.