You get bored watching ships shooting at each other? So much so that a x4 speed button isnt enough?
And Cliff has already he said he’s worried about making the game too complex.
I cant help but think youre wanting too much from this game, Loki.
Yeah, I don’t have much of an attention span. I have actually requested a 10x or more speed ability.
Towards the rest, I am having a lot of fun playing this game. It has actually occupied more of my time than I thought it would already. If I stopped playing now, I would have gotten my moneys worth.
I realize that there is a limit on available complexity, but it would be so nice not to have a game that is dumbed down to the point of boredom. Maybe it is my age, maybe I have hidden elitist views, I don’t know, but I miss games that challenge me. Games used to be hard. Some to the point that no one has ever finished them. This one can be challenging. I plan to spend a lot more time in the challenge section in the near future. This game is already not a casual gamer game. I realize that there is hope that it could be, but really, think about what a casual game is
… … … Now that we have hit Super Mario, Halo, and pretty much every x-box title, lets move on… … …
Due to the simple fact that to build a fleet beyond what can take down the expert mode levels, you need to start taking into account weight, AP, SP, damage, rate of fire, tracking speed, # of people, power cost, etc., you have already taken it far beyond the reach of a casual gamer. It’s a bloody complicated game. A fact that I think really drew a lot of us in.
“These gratuitous space battles are not won by plucky heroes with perfect teeth, but by the geeky starship builders who know exactly what ratio of plasma-cannons to engines each ship in the fleet will need.” - Positech Games Site
This line is why I bought the game. Absolutely why I bought this game. I am still learning the intricacies of this game. The casual gamer can play the single player and do okay. No truly casual gamer will get further. It is too complicated. Complicated is not necessarily a bad thing. Games are too easy these days, and this is one that, for the ones who want it to be can be easy (as long as they stick to the SP) and for the ones who want it to be can be a very complex, in-depth experience.
I got close to what I wanted, and if it gets destroyed in the full release, then I am glad I played it in the beta.
btw: it is lokis222. a lot of people make that mistake tho, so no biggy. 
Its age mate, Im the same. Its why Ive got a hard drive full of old emulator stuff.
The complexity thing, please understand that most of my arguement are devils advocate point of view. Me personally, I’d love this game to be as complex as something like Master of Orion, but since Im not going to get it I’ll offer a different viewpoint on everything instead.
Btw, the abbreviation of your name was friendly familiarity. If youre really that bothered, I wont do it again.
I agree with you guys. One of my favorite games in the world is X-Com Terror from the deep. I can play that game over and over and over… because it’s a little different every time, and each mission has such an element of danger (where are they hiding?) that I just love it.
So I love complexity, dearly, but I also understand the need to tone it down, to have short cuts to get things up and running. I described some basic roles in another thread and I’d ask you guys to tell me what you think about it. I think, like James says, we can have both worlds with regards to orders and programming fleet behavior. I am just asking for a bit more user friendliness. I really think it would pay off by opening the game up a bit. Plus it would make it more fun for me to play… But like I said… I am hooked already and if it comes to the point where I just need to back off and deal with the order set as they are… that’s fine 
NP on the name thing. Lokis is just a misspelling of locus, not an exaggeration of loki. However, if you want to use loki , no problem. It didn’t bug me. Was just clarifying.
I will take a look at the other thread. I have glanced at it though, and it seems to offer some ways to clean up the interface and simplify things, and keep the game complex. Hope some version of it survives to make it into the game.
The problem is that just throwing a lot of big guns on a ship with little thought and watching it go isn’t fun for very long, and it’s arguably not much of a game. I don’t see anything wrong with the game being primarily about designing the best ship, but the ship design is too shallow right now to really support that. You’d need a lot more modules and more factors to take into account when choosing them, and that risks making the game even less friendly to casual players.
That said, I actually don’t think GSB is very casual friendly as-is anyway - I’d be surprised if there were many casual players out there interested in watching ships blow each other up with very little interaction. Most casual games are all about constant interaction and constant feedback, neither of which GSB provides or even could provide as it is currently designed. I think if the intent was for GSB to be casual, then cliff already missed the mark by a wide margin.
Ah well, Im a dedicated casual, me.
For what it’s worth, I get what you’re saying, Harathan. All I’m saying is that there’s no game in the blowing-up part - it’s more like you’re watching someone else play a game. That’s fine. I think it’s a really cool design decision, in fact, it’s just that if you take away the “tactical” part that comes from designing and planning you’re left with literally nothing except a screensaver.
This would be a great idea for Cliff to use as a spinoff from this game. Put together random fleets with some half-decent AI and just run sim after sim. I would happily pay a couple of dollars for that screensaver. It should be easy enough to do using the existing code base.
Personally, I’ve actually been enjoying running faster ships. They DO have their uses… I have a cruiser design with 5 engines and speed .3 that has been pretty successful against many challenges, especially plasma/missile heavy ones. They get under the enemies min range and whittle them down. And wading through the optimum range of the enemy to get to firing range is a lot more exciting than 2 speed .05 fleets sitting still 900 from each other and spamming plasma. 
Kinda like watching a D-Day landing movie in space.
I’d love something like this. I used to run Defcon as a screensaver all the time.