1)Do you think that the scenario spatial anomalies is actually useless right now?
The current spatial anomalies have very little effect on my tactics. My long range missile frigates are just as useful at staying out of range of enemy lasers when all weapon ranges are reduced by 25%. I suggest you have special anomalies nerf particular weapons or ship types to force us to try out new ship combinations when our favorite unit combo has been rendered impotent by the weather.
2)Do you think enemy ship damage is too hard to determine?
Yes, but I don’t care that much. I know eventually the enemy ship is going to blow and I just time how long that takes. It would be nice to see an indicator of how much shield, armor, and hull integrity is left on an enemy ship when I click it, but it is not a big issue for me.
3)Do you avoid playing same race vs same race battles?
No, those traitors must be punished and I will be the one to punish them.
I’d like to see the scenario features more pronounced and more critical in general than they are presently. Screwing with range or damage or shields is one thing, but changing armour penetration for beams, or ECM effectiveness, diffusing plasma shots over range, or other ‘rules’ would have a powerful effect on people’s fleets (moreso than ‘-10% hitpoints’).
I strongly resist the idea of allowing the player to see ‘health bars’ and if this is introduced, would like it to be purely optional. Improvements to visual feedback are very welcome, but turning the combat into floating damage numbers and the like does not appeal at all. I might suggest a) different damage decals to ‘armour hits’ and ‘hull hits’ (perhaps ‘scorch marks’ and the current ‘giant burning holes’) and b) allow ships to break up before death as they do after death (a little bit, anyway). This would give feedback and allow ships to ‘lose’ modules outside the reach of repair.
I haven’t played enough to be annoyed by the race stuff, but simple colour-replacers and trail colours would be fine for me.
Yes, but I also consider it to be very low priority as game play issues go. I’d much rather see your dev time go to making the ships move around with a little more intelligence. The movement controls or lack there of, are my biggest frustration with the game, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. Spacial anomalies don’t even make my top 10 issues. As for the design of spacial anomalies, I’d like to see them be more variable and interactive. For instance nebula clouds that fill some but not all map squares that reduce shield effectiveness but increase stealth effectiveness would be great. But honestly I think this area isn’t anywhere close to as important as tuning the core gameplay.
Yes, but not terribly. The visuals for module repair are very cool and will help a lot. Overall it doesn’t seem to make that big of a difference because right now it tends to work out that most ships only die one of two ways. Massive focused weapons fire finally overcomes the shields which cannot come back up after they fail regardless of repair and armor levels and nothing will stop the ships destruction OR their armor is reduced below the amount needed to protect them from fighters and they go down almost instantly with their shields still up and all their weapons firing. There doesn’t seem to be much more effect going on with module destruction on my own ships before their shields collapse so I’m assuming it’s not making a difference to the enemy ships either.
Avoid, no. I just go with whatever paradigm I’m working with. Overlays would work but I think having multiple team tint colors available would be better. The best thing to do would be to take the existing color textures for the 3d models you derive the sprites from into photoshop and adjust the hue/saturation sliders to change the color without changing the details then run new sets of renders for each tint set. Even giving the player a choice between just 4 different tint schemes would be nice and would make sure the player can tell the difference in same race battles without obscuring the gratuitous beauty with a garish overlay. With a little preparation you could batch both the photoshop work and rendering and save yourself a lot of tedium.
Actually Question 3 brings up a question of my own. In the final version of the game did you intend each race to have its own campaign? The Federation is never the opposing force in the default missions which made sense when I was playing as the federation. However since I unlocked the rebels it would make more sense if there were a unique set of missions for them and each of the other unlock able races. I know this is asking for a lot of work but it would add a lot to the reparability of the game.
I like the changes to the spacial anomalies. My only suggestion would be to remove reminders. I was playing one where shields would not work in a nebula and a pop up box reminded me to check the anomalies. (one of my frigates had shields) .
I could not tell if you changed the way shields are taking damage so that it is visible. I would imaging that is hard to show graphically. I imagine a shield nearing its usefulness (say ,40%?) to fast strobe a little bit once and a while like its having power issues.
In the fleet HQ area, when you click on any of the upgrades, there is a high pitched sound effect. Its the same one when your in game. For me, when I first started playing, I wanted to read all the different possible upgrades. The high pitched sound affect got on my nerves. (and wife in other room)beep beep beep… I would suggest changing it to a friendlier tone. Its the same sound as when you click a ship during battle. I have played the game for 2 weeks now and the sounds dont bother me anymore as I have all upgrades but I remember, when I was noob, they were pretty bad.
I think more sound affects should be audible when zoomed out further then it takes to hear them now. To really get hear whats going on, you have to zoom all the way in. I think weapon and explosion sounds you hear when zoomed all the way in would be nicer when you are zoomed out a little more, say, when your almost halfway zoomed. Right now, to hear some of the weapons, you have to zoom in so far that your cant fit an entire cruiser (empire) on your screen. When your zoomed all the way out now, you hear some weapon fire, (like they are far away, its cool) but almost no explosions even with cruisers.
I dont know if you are still adding major components. I think it would be neat to have a weapon (frigate?) that sent a shuttle out to board nearby ship to destroy something important like power generator or shields. I think anti missile batteries should be able to fire on fighters to a small extent.
I think the game is awesome so far. I love the game and am only making suggestions. Its a great program.
1)Do you think that the scenario spatial anomalies is actually useless right now?
I agree that they need to be more drastic, and perhaps more interesting, but they are useful.
2)Do you think enemy ship damage is too hard to determine?
For shields, yes, for the rest, no. I think the shields should be a thicker blue when they’re full, but get thinner-looking as they’re damaged.
3)Do you avoid playing same race vs same race battles?
No, as they need to be destroyed, allthough I think a customizable flag would be awesome. For a flag, I think you would choose a colour, a secondary colour (optional), a patern for the flag, and a symbol on it. You would put it somewhere on the top of the ship (where would depend on the ship), and it would look cool, as well as help you know what ships are yours.
The only anomaly that’s actually forced me to make changes to my fleet is the no-shields one, and even then it was a matter of just swapping out a few systems for other ones. The ship designs I used remained essentially the same.
Part of the issue here I think is that you don’t actually have enough control over your ships to really be able to force different changes. For example, if you had pockets of dense asteroids or explosive nebula gases that caused damage when they were moved through, you’d have to be able to tell your ships to either not go there or move around it (such as “waypoints” or “fobidden zones” or something). Currently there is no possible way for anomalies to actually change how the ships behave in battle -just the designs.
I know GSB was designed to minimize direct player control over the battle itself… but you can barley set up any kind of battleplan right now. Even deployment positions is severely limited. Unless this is fixed (or the AI gets an incredible intelligence boost), I don’t think you’ll be able to add any kind of meaningful space terrain.
Personally, I don’t mind having no information on the strength of the enemy ships. I think it actually adds to the suspense of the game not knowing how much damage you’re inflicting.
I thought the anomalies did have a balance tipping effect but when playing challenges there is no reminder of what the anomalies will be! Just the change where the anomalies are easily accessible from the deployment area will help a lot.
I would prefer if the stats screen were modified to include enemy ships. The enemy ships pane would have a different focus, amount of damage inflicted & what is known about enemy ship modules (such as if it carried at least one EMP cannon, or had shields or didn’t have any armor). Naturally, things that you couldn’t determine directly by watching would not be revealed by the end-of-battle stats.
I often use the nifty button that puts a green/red tint on ships. The tint is a bit overwhelming, but I use it all the time when I fight as the same race as the enemy. With 4 races in the galaxy, I would think that would put a damper on civil war so I don’t mind the same race battles being more rare. Instead of a hotkey (or in addition to if I might be greedy), I would like the tint to be more subtle, or do what another poster suggested and make it put colored stat boxes around things instead.
[edit]Just noticed the original post date. Does this mean there is an “anomalies” button on the deployment screen I missed?![/edit]
Please consider a very light shield shimmer to distinguish between dropped shields or not getting hit. Also, some visual indication when they are <30% or something. And decoys hitting the shield should produce zero effect, just disappearing, so you know whether you really got hit or not.
And can you make the “Keep moving” command prefer the enemy’s side of the battlefield to move to ? Or generally prefer to move straight unless near the borders ? I hate it when my slowass cruisers start turning slowly the WRONG way, heh …
P.S.: I’d like to take this opportunity and say the gfx are excellent !!!
Yeah, it would be interesting if shields could change color based on their state, like blue->yellow->red. Or maybe just fading in color as they get weaker or some other visual cue.
Actually I get a lot of use out of this feature. A lot of times I use “Keep Moving” on ships I want to stay well away and lob missiles and it annoys me when they keep turning towards the enemy fleet. :-p
If you want your ships to really crash dive the enemy fleet while “Keep Moving” is on, adjust their attack range to be lower than their weapon range. e.g., if you have range 400 weapons, set their attack range to like 200. They still might wander off a little bit but they’ll tend to stay in the thick of it.