Challenges Screen:
Please remember my settings for the next time the page is opened e.g. which checkboxes are checked and what sort order I have chosen.
Please add 3 columns to the table - My Attempts, My Victories, and Victory Achieved (yes/no).
Please add a checkbox for Victory Achieved, so I can filter for challenges I have not beaten yet.
Thanks,
Gareth.
Fleet Deployment:
Can I have some kind of triangular or hexagonal based grid instead of the square one? This would allow for better(tighter) V and wedge shaped formations.
I would like to be able to group selected ships into a single entity that automatically sets a formation order between those ships, and can be selected/moved/assigned orders as a single unit.
I would like to be able to set the range and priority sliders from the main window(perhaps some kind of zoom function on the slider)
I would like to be able to delete orders from the main window with a single click.
I would like to be able to click on the weapon in the engangement orders to have the range slider cycle through min range, optimum range and max range.
I would like double clicking on an order to add it, to not close the order windows, as I add Keep moving, Co-op and Vulture to every ship I deploy.
I would like to see the total cost and cost remaining for a battle at the top.
I would like to see the cost of one of my designs overlaid on the icon to deploy it.
Cheers,
Gareth.
Orders:
Please add a flag/checkbox to the engage order for “Move towards this type of ship”. I want to order my ships to shoot at fighters as they approach, but not deviate from the goal of advancing towards and concentrating on larger ships.
Cheers,
Gareth.
Battle screen:
I would like an option to view the shield / health / armour of each ship, similar to that when you click on an actual ship, displayed under it on it on the battle screen.
I would like to see the number of kills each ship as e.g. 15/3/1 - fighters/frigates/cruisers. Although the battles are non interactive and no XP is gained or anything, I would like to see my top killer have some kind of recognition.
I would like to see double clicking on speed up and speed down go straight to 4x and 1x respectively.
If I am fighting the same race as I am, can the enemy ships be a slightly different colour tone, or have different decals to tell them apart.
Cheers,
Gareth.
I’m left handed and I play on a laptop so clicking and dragging with the button held down requires a bit of uncomfortable hand twisting. Is it possible to at least have an option for click-hold-drags to be replaced with “sticky” clicks (example from shipbuilder screen: click to pick up module, L-click to drop on a slot or R-click to discard module).
I achieve this by setting the ‘attack fighters’ priority to 0% and setting the distance to 100 feet (lowest possible). Deleting the order makes the ships not shoot at the fighters and having any higher priority causes the ships to run in circles after the fighters.
This works for now, but I agree there needs to be a more obvious option.
Right now, ships flying in formation needs a lot of time to react to the formation leader. This is particularly obvious with slow Cruisers, as the formation leader most likely will fly 1 1/2 ship length in front of the others. I’m guessing that the formation command is implemented as a “car chase” (best example I could think of), where each ship sees where the leader is going and sets their speed/direction based on this.
I think it would be a bit more realistic (and useful) if all ships in the formation - with a small, variable delay and some directional deviations - would set the same speed and direction as the leader.
As it is, the formation leader will be in front getting killed while the rest of the fleet slowly crawls into their respective places, engines at 10% and slowing…
@ Okei
I often have my formation leader in the back. Having a cruiser hold on to a boquet of “fighter-filtering-fragates.” (say that five times fast!) It keeps the frigates from breaking away from the fleet and out of the range of the heavy ballista just to their rear.
Here’s one that I would definitely like. When in the deployment screen a confirmation box would be very nice for the delete option since I accidentally deleted a ship configuration when I meant to edit it. Woops.
Additionally, while formation is good at times, I’d like a “match speed” command so that I can have ships approach as a front and once they arrive those that need to continue forward more to bring weapons in to range may continue moving. With formation they all just stop and it makes it hard to organize the assault the way I want.
One that sicks out to me is number 22 in the deployment screen: Why bother dragging to deploy? Why not just make single click normally mass deploy mode?
That’s a good one. I added it to the list as a ‘speed control’ order so you could potentially set your ships to any speed below it’s maximum. Except to stop the whole no-engine thing, maybe the slowest speed is a certain percentage (20% or so) of the maximum.
That is a nice solution to the problem, but I still think ships flying in formation would be a bit more synchronized (e.g ships using radio communication instead of the captain looking out his window at the formation leader, going “Ok, a bit to the left…wait, increase throttle…”).
I second that, the button is even lurking between the edit and mass deploy buttons 
I agree with this topic completely, just one thing though.
I really hate mouse acceleration. Anything that isn’t ordinary Windows behavior for mouse movement is something I don’t want. But, it’s usually an option you can turn on or off in any game that has it, so long as this is true it’s fine to have it as an option.
Ah yeah, I’d been meaning to complain about this. I always feel like I’m mousing underwater or something when I’m playing GSB, like there’s a slight lag between my mousing and the cursor responding. Or maybe it’s just a different sensitivity from my Windows default, I don’t know. In any event, I’d love it if I could disable whatever it is that’s doing that.
One more vote against mouse acceleration, while I’m here.
A few things I didn’t see in the top of the thread:
Battle view:
ability to zoom out further
more contrasting colours on the minimap
better hotspot control for clicking -vs- tooltips; the tooltip with the name of a ship comes up easily, but I don’t often care about that, whereas clicking to get ship info seems much harder.
different coloured name tooltips for me -vs- enemy ships
Deployment view:
if I float over ships in the list, a tooltip with cost + number-of-pilots would help (already sort of in the suggestions list)
Tutorial:
I know this is something already known, but I really have no idea what’s going on and I’ve beaten the first set of federation missions (on easy). I just drag ships onto the deployment grid; usually tutorial fighters until I’m about 3/4 of the way through pilots or halfway through money, then tutorial cruisers, and that beat everything with no thought on my part.
Now I’m on ‘normal’ difficulty things look like they’ll be harder, but it’s not obvious what I’m going to do to beat missions. IMHO, the tutorial battles should start off with far fewer ships in there; first battle = the very basics, then introduce the different types of shields / weapons, which ones beat what, and so on, so that by the time I start to lose battles I’ll have an idea of what’s what and where to go to start winning.
As it is, every single battle seems to involve every single bit of game mechanic, so I don’t know which ones which ones I should be paying attention to amidst all the action. Possibly this is just because the tutorial ships are too well-designed, but even if they were much worse, the enemy fleets are always fairly varied; this means it’s not clear how I can work out which sorts of ship beat what sorts of ship other than trial and error, and, critically, looking closely at the middle of a battle to track things. If I had to battle a fleet where (say) only missiles would work, that would force me to understand about missiles, say.
It would be a big improvement if, for ‘select race’, the races had federation first, then rebels – after finishing the first round of battles, I didn’t realise there was a fourth race I could select until I happened to notice there was a scroll bar there. (and I didn’t really realise there was a “rebel” race until I tried designing ships and saw those options in there). Putting these two first would guarantee I’d have noticed the second race was unlocked.
Oh, and a bug in the tutorial; one of the popup windows got stuck in the top left (the ‘cancel orders’ one or something); it was there and I couldn’t get rid of it even after going back to the main menu. Quitting entirely and restarting seemed to solve this.
Here’s an idea, now that having extra generators carry the ever present threat of blowing up your own fleet why not have surplus energy boost the effectiveness of certain modules? i.e. if you have 100 spare energy you can pump that into engines to make your ship move faster. Clearly you can then mount lots of generators to make your ship go faster but also means that it’ll explode more violently. You could then split the power boost between different systems like shields or weapons, making them charge faster or shoot harder.
I know what you’re thinking, kamikaze frigates, but that’s a valid tactic I think…
Add standard hotkeys to text string edition:
I’m very accustomed to, for example, change the text “Big Frigate” to “Frigate, Big” by doing (with the cursor on far right): Ctrl+Left, Ctrl+Shift+Left, Ctrl+X, Ctrl+Right, Comma, Space, Ctrl+V.
It seems a bit convoluted, but there’s a lot of people who manipulate text in such way, and it’s quite unconfortable to delete by pressing backspace twenty times and then rewrite all.
When creating a new “Escort” order, if the player links to a ship without setting an escort distance, let the distance change to the current distance to the linked ship.
(I might be remembering the current behaviour wrongly; please accept my excuses if so)
I posted this in another thread (http://positech.co.uk/forums/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=3084), not realizing this thread was already present.
I want to see more detailed statistics. Be able to determine things like hit % and total damage on a per weapon, per enemy basis, so that you can tell what weapon works on what enemy. Likewise, see per enemy, per weapon statistics on what hit you. I’d also like to know what targets my weapons spent their time locked on to – again, per weapon, per enemy, total and % time locked.
Of course, I don’t always want this level of granularity. I’ll also want some higher summary, like how much total damage (and DPS) did I do against this enemy (across all weapons). Some sort of system for being able to specify the specificity of the statistics will be needed – maybe a drop-down filtering list or clicking on stats to see a breakdown of that stat, or having a hardpoint/enemy selection available.
I’ll second that notion of kamikazee. After all, in a battle about trying to make the other guy lose more than you, the last thing you want to do is sacrifice your own ships…unless you can make it worth it sometimes. Keep in mind, it would heavily change the balance of the game, since it would make ECM and quick destruction that much more important. It would also probably require some orders to counter it, such as attacking the nearest enemy, or enemies that are on a collision course.
Minor UI consistency: the scrollbar for race selection should behave like normal scroll bars; I should be able to click on the bar itself and drag to move between races, or in the empty spot next to it to move it in a jump. As it is, I have to click on the arrows at the ends.