Suggestions (various)

Hi, bought (well, ‘preordered’ :stuck_out_tongue: ) the game yesterday, awesome game, I’m very impressed.

The game is in beta still… So I’d like to dive in with a bunch of suggestions. Hopefully some of these are new to you.

  1. Ability to hide victory message
    The victory message currently appears in the middle of the screen, and cannot be minimised or moved without exiting the battle. I often like to have a quick look around the battlefield to admire my handiwork before I move on to the next game (or watch the surviving 10% of the ships finish the battle,) so it’d be great if it were possible to move the message out of the middle of the screen.

  2. Game speed / skip ahead function
    On a similar note, it’d be nice if it were possible to accelerate the game beyond 4x. I’ve encountered a fair few challenge fleets with veeeeery slow engines. Unless I chose a fast fleet, that can make for a very long wait before anything interesting happens. Obviously this would chew up a lot of computers… So perhaps speeds beyond 4x could have sounds silenced and artificially low frame rate - perhaps even not drawing the game at all - like a ‘skip ahead 30 seconds’ option, where the game would just calculate the next 30 seconds of battle without showing it to you.

  3. Allow higher zoom levels
    It’d be nice to be able to zoom further out. Maybe this could be an option (‘unlock zoom’, with warning about potential effect on frame rate.)

  4. Zoom to cursor
    Refocusing on the cursor position when zooming is a very nice, intuitive, cinematic, way to move quickly around the map. It’d be awesome if this were possible here.

  5. Streamline GUI for setting orders (especially Escort / Formation)
    It takes a lot of mouse movement to set up escort / formation orders. It’d be nice to streamline this. Perhaps make it possible to drag the order onto the target. Simple keyboard/mouse shortcuts would work too (maybe these already exist and I haven’t discovered them yet.) Make it remember the last range you set for escort orders. Also make it so if you set the range before you set the target it remembers this (currently it snaps back to the original value.)

  6. Streamline GUI for setting up ships.
    It’d be very nice to be able to do things like shift+drag on a selected ship (or group of ships) to duplicate it (including it’s orders.)

  7. Show ship names on or near the ship selection buttons on the deployment window.
    If you use the same hull for several types of ship, it gets time consuming having to carefully check through the popup name text until you find the ship you want, since the icons are identical. Alternatively, make it possible to customise the ship icon somehow (perhaps something as simple as picking a colour for the hull silhouette.) Anything you can do to make it easier to differentiate between designs will make the game easier to play.

  8. Bug? Some destroyed modules don’t affect ship performance.
    I noticed a couple of times that my shields remained up even when my shield generator had been destroyed (i.e. by fighters.) This shouldn’t happen. Similarly, losing power or crew modules doesn’t seem to have any effect on the ship whatsoever. Repair modules do behave as expected, ceasing to work when destroyed.

That’s it for now… Spectacular game so far.

Oh, one more…

  1. Fire teams
    This one would be more work to code in, but rewarding when planning battles… The ‘cooperation’ order is a bit too general, in my opinion. It’d be nice to be able to assign groups of ships that will try to cooperate with each other (but won’t put any emphasis on trying to coordinate their fire with any other ships.) It’d essentially be the ‘cooperation’ order, but with a extra variable to set, say from a drop down list ‘everyone, group 1, group 2, group 3, …’ which filtered which ship’s targeting affected it’s own target selection.

EDIT: make that two more…

  1. No exhaust plumes on ships without engines.
    Just a simple tweak to improve immersion… Currently, ships without engines show engine plumes (and make noise) as if they were travelling at full speed. The reverse should be the case :slight_smile:

Personally, I think an engine should be an essential ship component, at least for any ship with a engine on the sprite. (But we should have a ‘hold position’ ship order, perhaps that automatically times out after x minutes to break deadlocks and get the battle going, in case both players used such orders.)

EDIT: on a roll… last one for now, I hope

  1. Allow including a message or ‘mission’ text with challenges. The short description you put on the challenge is good enough for the listing, but it’d be nice to be able to put down more text somewhere. This would help build community a little more.

For example, I saw a challenge placed by someone showing a fleet that had beaten another by 100%. I found I was able to make a fleet that could beat both by 100%, so I put that up as a challenge myself. I’d have liked to be able to put in a message saying ‘if you have a fleet that can beat this fleet by 100% and the other two fleets by 100%, please challenge me with it.’ But there’s no way I could fit all that in the listing text alone, including needing to describe which two other challenges I was referring to.