I would love to see the dodge & weave, I hate having faster little frigates with torpedoes and other weapons stopping within range of an enemy cruiser and getting pounded. If they could continue to move it would be much better. Perhaps a command that tells them to stay within weapons range without moving too close or too far.
I also would like to see more engines make a ship faster in the way that more shields or armor increases their defensive strength. As far as I’ve noticed this isn’t currently the case.
I know you can see the stats but I’ve tried this and nothing changed. I’ll have to give it another look, since I thought that seemed a bit odd. Would be particularly nice in combination with the dodge & weave suggestion put forward earlier when making a fast frigate that could zip around hitting enemy ships.
Anyway, thanks for confirming, I’ll have to try it again.
I’ve just been having Fun With Fighters and watching my rocket bombers uselessly spiral around because I’d stupidly set their engage distance lower than the minimum rocket distance. Would it be possible to make it impossible to set engagement distance below your minimum weapon distance (for hulls with one weapons) and highlight those weapons who wouldn’t be able to fire at the current set distance (for hulls with more than one weapon).
Also, we can currently choose to set engagement distances to the maximum distance of a weapon. Would it be possible to also choose to set the distance to the optimum distance of a weapon?
Another suggestion I have regards fighters. When they’re all zooming about like pocket rockets, I have no idea how many are left or how the fight is going. I had two ideas about this, either clicking on a single fighter could bring up a squadron list or, more aesthetically pleasing, we could have coloured contrails which would provide a quick and easy method of getting a rough idea of how a fight is going.
Copy / Paste, or some form thereof, is the feature I want most!
Placing ships can be tedious, especially in larger battles. Being able to do this quickly would definitely make the game a lot more enjoyable.
I think the optimal way for speedy ship placement would be to select a ship, then simply ctrl + click (or right click, or whatever) in the battle area for each placement of that ship. The click and drag placement could still work, but dragging the ship would also select it as the ship to place upon a ctrl + click. Also, for increased placement accuracy, ctrl + click-dragging would allow for dragging the new ship around.
Design renaming. Not only is the text field sluggish right now, it has no hilighting and doesn’t support home/delete. Basically, it’s a massive pain in the ass to use - no offence Cliffski.
I have a few observations and some initial impressions from playing the solo game for the past few days and thought this thread as good as any to post in:
Order system is unnecessarily complicated and counter intuitive (Although you can get used to it). An alternate system would be to use drop down menus. Escort Example: Designate an escort by right clicking on the actual ship (or selected group), select escort from the drop down menu, click on the ship to be escorted.
Target selection menu seems unnecessarily detailed. I would prefer priorities as a 5 step slider than the precise numerical system. Range example: Minimum/Short/Optimum/Far/Maximum as opposed to micro-managing a precise number anywhere from 0 to 2000
Engines seem unnecessary with most battles relying on the enemy coming to me. I think by providing incentives to move out and around the battlefield, engines would be more useful. Incentives could include bonuses if ships are located in central areas, objectives to be completed (ie Destroy a protected asset), or flanking advantages to attacking ships from multiple directions (ie Shield power works better when defending from 1 direction only).
I would like an additional ‘Move to’ order that directs ships into a general area. The iPhone game Reign of Swords (Which has a similar battle mechanic) has very simple move orders that work effectively in directing units. This would be especially useful for features suggested in the previous point.
Eventually, I would love to see a meta-game implemented where the battles fought were only part of a more strategic level game where you actually construct the fleets and capture planets etc. (Perhaps for a sequal?)
More a personal preference, but the title of the game doesn’t really suit the style. Seems more games are doing the very descriptive title thing (Everyday Shooter, Massive Action Game) but I find it breaks immersion. On the same point, the default names of the ships seem comical compared to their actual style which is actually quite detailed and realistic (Tentacles = Testicle, ok I get it).
Looks like it’s been mentioned but there is a definite need to order components and ship types in a more logical order. An ability to make quick comparisons between these would also be great.
Overall, the game is amazing and can only get better.
Objectives other than “Go here, kill everyone” would be fun. An rescue mission for a bunch of shuttles, or a battle in an asteroid belt would be interesting.
Maybe I’m being uneconomical in my designs, but I continually find that I’m running up against severe crew limits with frigates. I’ve was tinkering with a fast frigate design to take advantage of the new ‘Keep Moving’ order and found it really hard to get a frigate with fast engines, shields and weapons. I don’t know, maybe frigates aren’t supposed to have all these things but currently I find frigates very limited. Currently their crew modules only go up to level 2, including a micro-crew cabin which I’ve never used; adding a third expensive (or zero-g, I can’t see the Enterprise in zero-g, but maybe it’s smaller brother?) level would fix this nicely.
They’re limited in choice of modules as well. For example, a cloaking device would be handy for them as would cut down versions of other cruiser modules, target painters for example: I’m loathe to drop a cruiser weapon for one, but a frigate weapon isn’t such a loss. In my mind, cruisers are all about going places and kicking butt; frigates are the support vessels which do everything else that allows them to do that. Currently they’re undergunned against everything other than fighters, and not able to do much else.
suggestion:
new order - ‘Follow the leader’
effect:
uses the formation leader, or ship you’re escorting’s target.
souped up version of co-op - as whole formations would use one ships target at a time. it may of course need the formation leader to upgrade their computers for full effectiveness.
Something I would appreciate is if the update install automatically detected the install folder. It keeps pointing at the C drive when I have it installed on a different drive.
The coordinate attack command should let you pick who you want to coordinate attacks with to prevent any ambiguity.
That way you can have a target painter squadron working with a long range missile frigate specifically.
Or a disruptor bomb frigate working with an armour cracking cruiser.
Ok-- I see there are many threads with ‘[SUGGESTION]’ in them and then also this massive list. I’ve read through this list and have on Deployment UI suggestion that I did not see elsewhere (yet).
Deployment UI Suggestion:
Can the ‘default’ behavior for launching into battle from a deployment screen be to ‘temp save’ your deployment? I realize we can save with the special name ‘deployed’ for each battle and it will revert to that but it is fairly easy to forget to save and I don’t want to save each tiny tweak I’m doing and testing. It would be more intuitive to me I feel that once I’m done with a battle test that when I return to the deployment screen I should see exactly whatever fleet and order state I had entered battle with. I find it very odd that it reverts back to an arbitrary save file. Anyway, that would make my play style way easier and less flow breaking.
Another suggestion for the deployment screen. The new mass deployment for ships is nice, but you still have to link ships together with orders one by one. I think the use of copy-paste could be very nice. Say you have a small battle group of cruisers, support ships, and fighters, all linked with escort, formation, and other things. Now say you want 8 battle groups like this on a large map. If you could just select all those units, ctr-c, ctr-v and have another group set up in the exact same way that would be awesome.
And I’d like to restate how important it is to add attack orders for priority and distance in the ship design. Pretty much if I build a ship with all frigate plasma launchers I’m always going to set it’s range for the optimum range of 800. And they don’t need to attack fighters.
These are the two improvements that could reduce setting up a large battle from 10-15 minutes to 2-3 minutes.
I’d like the ability when looking through the challenge list to see what map they are on. I would like to play specific maps some time, and there is no way to tell now until you open the challenge.
