Next time this happens try holding down CTRL and hit 1 several times rather than once. Does this resolve it? There seems to be something finicky here, but we can't isolate the problem. Is anyone else having issues with this as well? (Crumbs in the keyboard don't count!)

ooh, then i cant reproduce the problem

works fine here

Oh dear, looks like I won't be able to play it at uni then >_< Anyways, still a great game, and I look forward to beta testing it on a lower spec machine for you

same...

Beta 2 is impresive! I can only imagine what it will be like after an additional 222 days of developement... I don't want you guys taking any breaks on this one, better start stocking up on those caffeine pills! Great job so far!

I think that the current ballance of resources available to you is very good; there is no need to have more crystal like I have seen a few request. You need to spend your crystal wisely, balance it well between research, ships, etc. If there was as much crystal available as metal then people would be blazing through the tech tree and have 20 capital ships out at a time. Just like fuel in CoH, you need to weigh the options on where to spend it.

Some thing I think needs worked on...

1) I have only played one game on easy but one thing I saw off the bat was how you could easliy spam the light frigates (the first kind of frigate you can build w/o research) you can and mix in a few capital ships and you owned the star system. I haven't tried at higher difficulties yet so I don't know if it differs.

2) There does not seem to be much in effective planetary deffense, the gauss cannons (right spelling?) are good at destroying the random scout ship that comes your way but it would seems that if a large attack fleet would come they would not be of much help.

3) It seems to me that tech is researched rather too quickly, but I see how that would be usefull in online games to keep the games shorter, maybe an option to decrease/increase the rate that it takes to research tech like in GalCiv2?

4) In comparison again to GalCiv2 the diplomacy in Sins is laking. I know that GalCiv really excelled in this area, and I am not putting on expectations to be like them, but a few more options like being able to trade tech, demand tribute, etc. would be nice.


I have only played one game and this is my feedback from that game, also I am aware that more content will be coming out in future betas and the full game then is currently available.

By the way I am also having issues with adding ships to an already created fleet. I end up just selecting all the ships I want in the fleet and recreating it. This is too much micro though...

New capital ship abilities should not default to auto-cast.

There's nothing worse than seeing a lvl 6 Kol fire up finest hour the second you add the skill because it got scared by a local frigate.

mmm. the graphics are really great...the mouse movement isnt actually.

I play a lot of 4x games and I have to say upon playing the beta II of Sins I was reminded of two games first, that abortion Star Wars : Empire at War and second, homeworld which I liked but could never get fully into.

I have to say first impression the game does have that addictive quality that makes 4x games great, it hooks you in and keeps you going, there are though some significant issues with this game that I should like to point out that could easily keep it a bargain bin.

First, the research is awful. Just strait up dreadful. Players need to feel that something has happened when they upgrade and I just can't see how teching up is helping my little guys win the battles. I would also suggest that the whole tree also needs to be revised as in there needs to be a big benefit to players that research as opposed to players who just tank rush. A lot of other games like war3 and c&c use a two or three tier system for all tech. This might not be too bad an idea.

Second, All ships need to arrive in a system at the same time in order for good offensives and maneuvers to be planned and executed, basically what I am suggesting is that you make something like a jump node as seen in wing commander. What I want is a little red circle at the end of every space lane where ships placed within the circle will automatically jump together. The problem with the current system is a player basically ends up feeding their fleet to an enemy fleet on the other end. Now this would be fine if all ships had to go through the jump node one at a time and it was a game feature, but it isn't so jumps end up very messy disorganized affairs. There is also a big mess as to who comes out of a jump node where on the other end, right now its based on where the ship started off in relation to the fixed jump point and this also needs attention. Maybe players should have the option to create a fleet pattern battleships on the outside carriers within ect.

Third, the culture takeover system needs to be fixed, I mean what do these fleets put on planets a bunch of traitors? I mean what revolutionary is honestly going to rebel or culture flip with a planet killing battleship in orbit? I think if you put the colony there it needs to stay there for a while. Penalties on wealth and resourcing could be a better option. I'd really like to know though a historical example of a culture flip.

Fourth, I am having a lot of issues with the RTS battles, there need to be more options and it shouldn't just be a total slug fest every time. Maybe give a bonus for a rear and side attack? Look at company of heroes they got it right! I mean your dealing with battleships in space think of all the cool tactics that could be developed. Ramming, self destruction of the plasma reactor, crossing the t --- the list is endless.

Fifth, The left side menu and the bottom "card" menus both need to be revamped. Right now the card thing isn't really understandable or useful and the side menu need to reflect more about attack and defense. Also I'd put in +/- values of resources like in supreme commander. Those helped a lot with deciding when and where to build.

Sixth, I'd like to have more defense options. Ship killer cannons on the planet Jump point shutdown devices to stop reinforcements all kinds of crazy stuff. I can't believe honestly though that in the sins universe there are no space mines

There are a lot more issues than just these, but a lot of them have been mentioned by other contributers. Please make this a great game.

improving armor and damage really does help... in a 3v3 or something like that, it doesnt really look like much of a difference, but in a 30v30 its really quite obvious



there is a button for that. bottom left hand corner, you can right click the arrows to make it separate or together. its in the tut



I think for now they are just testing overall game balance and whatnot, im sure theyll add more in there, but you have to remember that they are trying to make it very non micro intensive



its a beta, not complete. btw, how would the mines discriminate between friend and foe?

P.S. having slight trubble with the quote feature, its putting the quote /quote inside the original text box instead of in the reply box

I definitely think Beta 2 is MUCH better than Beta 1. However, my biggest gripe at the moment is the whole culture/colonizing thing.

Hey you! Yeah, you guys down on the planet. That's OUR colonizer we sent down. Don't touch it.

Hey! I said don't touch that!

What do you mean I can't tax you? You used OUR colonizer to set up your government.

Hey...STOP BUILDING SHIPS FOR THE OTHER GUY!

In all seriousness... I have a fleet of seige frigates and capital ships in orbit. I highly doubt that the colonists I JUST SENT DOWN are going to open their doors and immediately declare allegiance for another empire... Oh yeah, did I mention the SIEGE FRIGATES in orbit?

There needs to be some sort of martial law or occupation system. For now, I'm finding it almost impossible to set up footholds in other star systems.

Also, the AI needs to be smarter as well. I've found that the AI will always coloize empty systems it finds, even if the culture is so high that the planet colonizes for the other guy.

My thoughts on combat (before I begin I am totally aware this beta 2, not a demo or final release)

Combat

At the moment combat feels very similar to another 4x game, Sword of the Stars. What I mean by that is it serves no real stratgic purpose. Every time I play it devolves into who can spam as many frigates possible first. Theres no tactics involved, no sense of urgency or warfare.

My suggestions; up the scale or at least open the avenue for modders to-do this. The best example of scale used to great effect is the total war series. For a space exampe, Nexus / IG 3. Its space, its ment to be epic with huge lumbering battleships and nippy little fighters.

Tactics; rear, front armour - bonus for flanking around large crusiers. Modules - It'd be insanely awesome if you took a leaf from HW2/Nexus and had modules - engines, powerplants, weapon systems etc. This would make pirates a real threat...
eg. Oh my big shiney crusier will easy wipe out them pirates - oh shit they've used weapon X to wipe my shields, awww crap they've used bombers/frigates to take out my engines & powerplant (powerplant linked to main weapons) ahh crap they've captured it and now sending back at me! (guns blazing)

Probaly thinking that add alot of micro'ing but it'd force players to take into consideration fleet compostion, mixing the right units together for the best results.
On that note, fleets should be the most important element of the combat! I want to be able to set a formantion, tactics and anything else, I want to be able to name my fleet, have it gain experiance, pick a flagship (and name it) Carriers should be able to hold at least 2 wings of either fighters or bombers. Lets me build & plan ahead.

Limited 3d combat! Please space is not a 2d plane and I understand devs are not going for the full 3d (ala HW) but some 3d movement by both player & ai would really create alot of depth. Even if its fake 3d like Empires at war, it'd still look convincing.

Combat ship options; I'd like to have alot of ships for different roles or a streamlined amount of ships that have mutli roles. Eg 'Cobalt' Frigates would be more interesting if they had 3 weapon types (missiles,turrets & limited anti-shield weapons)

Finally after battle, debris is a climatic effect which can be produced quite cheaply, hunking hulls should become metal resource while smaller ships should leave a small amount of debris that fades away with time.

To sum up combat - Fleet options (custimaztion) , Tactical options (weapons/movement/modules)

If this is not part of the gameplan - Please for the love of Jesus / Allah/ Buddah - Please leave the option for modders to implent this.

It is in the game for capital ships, and eventually will be in for all ships I hope... Eventually it will be able to recycle debris for credits I am guessing...

Well thus far I've played through one map to completion and put a good 5 hours into another one. I'd like to point out some things I liked and didn't like.

I appreciate the ability to make a map with 100 planets and 10 star systems as I am a fan of the large epic maps in any strategy game be it turn based or real time. However I've got a gripe with the generation of the map. I made the 100/10 map and placed 3 AI into the slots, my hope was that it would give us each our own system to start in and we'd be slugging it out over the various systems in the galaxy. What ended up happening was 2 of us in one system and two in the other. I understand wanting to promote some kind of conflict early on but an option for another way would be nice.

I also noticed in this game that the AI did not spread to any system besides the starting one, I've killed the one in mine and the other two AI are just duking it out in the middle system. So out of our 100 odd planets only 20-30 of them are even seeing any kind of use. Perhaps something in the AI isnt working correctly to get it spreading out more.

I like being able to get my fleet to jump as one, however the phase where they are aligning the formation to depart could probably use a bit of tweaking, ive noticed ships getting stuck in some kind of twitchy limbo really slowing down the war .

The economy setup I like quite a bit, I do think that there should be two types of marauders, there should be pirates attacking trading lanes, for example the sun is often a place of trade traffic outweighing anything else but almost all pirate activity is just large frigate fleets being thrown at walls of defenses in well guarded planets based entirely on bounty it seems. I'd like to see something like bounty hunter factions trying to collect on that and then the run of the mill pirates, using faster ships to raid trade vessels.

Capital ships, I love that they are these behemoths of the battlefield and are relatively rare compared to the other ship types, I like the special abilities they bring to the battlefield, However Id like to see some more variety in the ships available besides them. As it stands now I end up with a nice variety of capital ships and nothing but LRM frigates and kodiaks or cobalts with a few flaks thrown in for moral support.

I'd also like to see some type of supercapital ship class, maybe something you can only have one or two of, a true flagship of the empire. A system like Galciv 2 for ship design but not as complex would be cool, keeping the same base model for things and just choosing the type of weaponry the chasis has would be cool. I dont know if that's a possibility with the models already created for the ships. I know it's the beta and not everything is in and so on but I still want to throw that out there.

This is more of an aesthetic gripe, the research tree upgrades, would it be possible to have some kind of graphical indication that you've upgraded your weapons. Different models for missiles, different effects for projectiles and lasers as you advance your technology. I just find it slightly awkward that I keep piling improvements on everything, new armor, new shields, new weapons, and it all remains the same throughout. Also more pronounced shield effects would be fun, many times it seems like stuff is just pinging off this invisible wall. It would be cool if the frigate class ships not based on lrm did some bobbing and weaving in combat as well to liven up the action a little bit

One technical bug I noticed has to do with the noise the robotics cruisers make, for one it's kind of annoying on it's own but whenever i come in contact with one of these things, the sound effect it makes kind of overrides everything. Since the computer uses a TON of those things, I've had entire battles where all I could here were those blasted cruisers.

The AI itself could use some work on fleet composition, in the rare event i manage to find a fleet or get attacked it's usually composed of 90% light carriers and robotics ships. At first I thought they'd created it to counter my fleet which had little flak protection like galciv AI would do but ive seen that fleet trend in all my games thus far. I did see somone posting we should see some AI changes soon and I'm looking forward to it, but I figured I'd share my observations.

I also think you should release the other two races so we can help with the balance there <_< >_> yea that'd be nice

All in all I'm having fun, not really finding any bugs in my play, it runs smooth in all the matches ive played so far and I appreciate the chance to test and improve what's looking to be a great game.

I second this. With only a few Hoshikos it can really get on a person's nerves.

Especially when the enemy AI attacks you with like 12 of them

It's really an annoying voice. I always have to zoom out, or turn down the sound when the enemy uses them... and he uses them all the time...


-------------------------

Btw. the mining stations have quite a bad clipping error.



-------------------------

The resource overviews need a scrolling options. They get useless if you've more then ca. 50 planets.

I'd like to see a feature/option to have ships in a fleet wait for the rest of the fleet to clear the gravity well before jumping. It might actually work better if this applied to any multi-ship selection instead of just fleets. On a related note, the Akkan battlecruiser seems awfully slow compared to the rest of the capships.

- Im finding it difficult to manually target metal and crystal extractors. I seem to keep on clicking the asteroid , and can only manage it by zooming in and panning the camera down

- I still feel the Sova needs 3 fighter slots to start with.

I've played multiple games on medium and hard difficulties and I have a couple of suggestions:

1) Allow the player to modify the game speed (if I can, it isn't well documented and I haven't been able to find it) - Generally, IMO, the game plays too slow, and I find the end-game (moving from system to system with large cap ship fleets) to be somewhat tedious. As a general rule, I will typically walk away from the game for 10-20 minutes every few hours to do something and let the game play itself so that when I come back, I have enough resources to make purchases, or wait for the culture of a defeated faction to decay so that I can colonize their previously controlled planets.

2) Give the AI teeth - They rarely build capital ships, and it seems they are very passive aggressive; intent on funding the pirates, but not attacking openly. For example, I thought I would try 9 on 1 (set all the AI to team 2) for a challenge. I then had to walk away for over an hour, and nothing happened, except my cap ships leveled up like crazy as my choke point intercepted waves of massive pirate incursions (since I was the only faction collecting a bounty), and I had a ridiculous amount of resources at my disposal.

3) This is related to #2 (not sure if this is a bug or a gameplay thing, but I'm putting it here as it's probably a little of each); when a teammate is eliminated don't give the whole team a loss. In the above example, imagine my surprise after I climate just one of nine, and get the "win" screen.

4) Increase the rate of decay of culture, particularly for utterly defeated factions. I don't think this mechanic really serves a purpose, except to slow the game down (related to #1).

5) Allow (or require) fleets (ctrl-grouped units) to jump together.

6) This isn't a suggestion per se, but I find the game is generally too easy. I'm not sure if it's my tactics or that the AI doesn't really attack, or that defensive structures are over powered, it's probably a combination of all three. Basically, I quickly grab 3-5 systems, fortify them with 5-10 heavily packed Gauss Cannons, and 3-7 hangars with Bombers (and I place the hangars inside the radius of as many cannons as possible). For whatever reason, this configuration can repel any invasion I've ever encountered, allowing me to concentrate on building cap ships. Once I've built 1 Akkran (for colonizing purposes), I build 3-5 carriers, and 3 or so additional Kol's. This configuration allows me to lay waste to everything and I can methodically go through and take out faction after faction. It's rare that I loose a capital ship, even on hard. Hopefully this will change significantly once human players are involved.

Since you asked us:

Top three techs:

Any of the teraforming abilities (i.e., increasing population sizes on planets)
Any of the ship upgrades (e.g., shield/armor/antimatter/weapon damage) upgrades
Any of the infrastructure techs (e.g., refinery, trade port, increased cargo holds)

Bottom three techs:

Any of the frigates or cruisers (I find them utterly worthless in the face of a cap ship, even with numbers)

Thanks for listening. I think this has the potential to be a very good game, hopefully someone finds this feedback helpful.

As I mentioned in another thread, I tried to take two groups and redistribute them into three groups. I spent the rest of the game trying to convince one cap ship that it was only in group three....and no longer a part of group two as well.

Another question (forgive me if this has been addressed elsewhere): When scuttling logistics/tactical items, are you supposed to get those slots back. I had a system that I wanted to build something different in, so I scuttled several platforms to make room. It still said that I had no available slots.

If we aren't supposed to get those slots back, then scuttling would be pretty pointless. Unless you're that had up for resources and needed them back, it would hardly be worth exchanging them for permenently lowering the orbital capabilities of your planet.

Keep up the great work, guys!

[quote]



Select the group you want to remove the unit from and in the empire tree hold down shift left click on the unit then control + whatever number you used for the fleet.

Hope this helps.

I've found that you generally need to wait 30-60 seconds after the object has been scuttled before you're able to reclaim those logistics/tactical points. Also, make sure you're scuttling something that has the necessary points to allow you to build what you want (each structure has a different logistics/tactical point cost).

There's a few ways of doing this:

1) Shift-click to add more units to an already existing group
2) You can select all the units in a system (if that's what you wanted to do) by left clicking on them in the system list on the left hand side. The first set of boxes is the system strutures, the second set are the units in the system, and the third set (if there are any) are the hostile forces in the system.

Hope that helps.

I had two systems where I tried that, and waited the rest of the game and nothing happened. I had the same thought as you. I'm going to try it again in the game I have going now.





I had made that bone-headed mistake the first time, but then corrected this when I actually paid attention.