Thats not as wasteful as you might think -- defending dead asteroids or even dead-end phase lines pays out a lot when insurgency starts popping.

Good point.

Ships do not need subsystems to make them less effective with damage taken. A reduction of efficiency is just as good a simulation of damage. Like reduced accuracy and/or damage. Perhaps first third (or something) of HP should make no difference, than the damage could start taking it's toll. Exponentially? Or first half should make no difference than a linear reduction towards 1/4 of efficiency. Etc.

I think that we need "merely a counter that sits at the top corner of the screen?"
"so you could, in your mind, write your own little narrative?"

"Stardate 294.4.3 Captains log. Day 4 of the War at Blabla Nebula. We encountered the notorious Vasari and what seemed like an early scout fleet. It wasn't long thereafter before the space around our star Lalaland started crackling as ships exited warp space"

Have noticed that the AI controlled races seem to have a larger and faster build even at the easy setting. By this I mean I can send my fleet of 6 frigates and my battleship to explore, after 2 or 3 systems, I run into one of the AI players. They have at least 10 light frigites if not more, and seem to get them to the battle much faster than I can.
Quite honestly this is not fun, the farthest I have gotten into the game is about 2 hours by this time, the AI races completly wipe me off the map, no matter what defenses I build, and I cannot keep up with there production. The AI seems to have an unlimited access to resources while I cannot produce enough to counter the attacks. Again, this is NOT fun.
Bounty, I have tried a game where I only explored and colonized 3 sectors that had nothing but pirates in them, within 20 mins my bounty had become 1450. Why??? I have seen no documentation that explains how the bounty is calculated and on what actions does the AI base this on, that I am hiding.
Did not attack a single exploration ship that came through my systems, and your placment of the defense platforms leaves an area at the edge of your system you cannot see, nor protect, so unless you have ships posted there you will never see the ships enter and exit your sector. Is this part of the Game??? if so, WHY?

Glenn

The AI does not have unlimited access to resources (he plays by the sames rules as you do) however the pirate NPC group temporarily does until we complete that system. As of the July 12th patch they were severely limited so perhaps you need to update.

How bounty works is not currently in the tutorial as it is still under revision. We will include how it works in both the manual and tutorials once we decide on the final implementation. In your version of the beta, AI players will place bounty on you if they perceive you as a threat and if they want to encourage other players to attack you. The pirates base their decisions on how much bounty is on you, how many planets you have and how many trade ships you have.

The defense guns do not access to attack the edge of gravity well because in Beta 1 this became an exploit. Players would fortify the phase lane entrance points and as soon as an enemy sent ships in they would destroy everything without giving the player no time to react.

Thx for your feedback

I remember you could set ships/modules in Homeworld 2 to decrease ships abilities as they took damage. I hope Sins allows for that kind of modding as well. I would love to reduce ship speed/maneuvering/fire rate/accuracy as they take damage.

A) In beta 2, this actually runs on my work computer (2.4GHz P4, 512MB RAM, no freaking video card at all). Of course, I have to stay zoomed out a bit...

Maybe create an option for ship icon view (to either always display ship icons or never display them. Maybe even a slider so you can set the zoom out level they show at. This game is absolutely gorgeous, but it's hard to get a screen cap of a sexy space battle if there are little pink fighter and bomber icons flying around.

C) I like to play gigantic games for hours on end, but even if I capture all the planets within seven jumps of my capital, my ship cap doesn't get much over a thousand. I want five big one hundred ship fleets jumping system to system subjugating my foes! Maybe distance from capital penalties can scale down as map sizes scale up? Because of how large the maps can get, it just isn't worth it to colonize world more than ten jumps out from the capital, so why bother killing your enemy on the other side of the map?

D) Again with scalability: is the ten stars one hundred planets thing going to stay in place? If other scale issues are resolved, I'm going to want to run a perpetual two week game in multiplayer spanning dozens of stars... mmmmm...

E) I love you.

Uh, what? You always see the enemy if he's in your system (and if he's jumping in with the first Psidar tech... the second one doesn't seem to do anything past that). As far as not being able to engage ships that don't want to come in towards your cannons, just research and build hangars... and if you want, a phase jump blocker to keep them in-system!

Cool, that beats our expectations

You can turn of main view icons in the options menu. This will turn off all the icons. There are also other things you may want to turn off in there for screenshots. (Try pressing Cinematic Mode for an example). Finally, hit CTRL-SHIFT-Z to turn off the interface.

Easily modded in gameplay.constants (open with notepad).

Easily modded in galaxysetup.galaxysetup (open with notepad).

We love you too! Enjoy the game!

i think this might be some kind of glitch cos sometimes when i press a button like building new bombers on my kol flag ship (one of the first things i do) it laggs for about 4 seconds and sometimes it clicks on the wrong 1 like when im choosing specail abilities for it. my system is intel d 2.8Gh 1gig of ddr2 (dont know speed) Geforce7600 gt 256mb ddr3.

not all, icons above planets are still there

what settings should i ave it on for best performance?

Those are your RACE icon silly...

I think I know what your talking about... there's about a half-second delay between when you click the mouse button, and when the computer takes the position of the mouse to actually click. Which means that if you move the mouse, all of a sudden your click isn't where you placed it.

Click on a button, then immediately move the mouse to another button. I usually run into this with fighters/bombers. Should be easy enough to reproduce.

true, but we should be able to remove them

nobody commented on my gameplay post

Because other than the fact that it was weirdly worded, it didn't really need a comment.

well, multi doesnt NEED a quad core, but he still has one

Hey, I'm new, so I apologize for any repeated observations.
Upon getting the beta up and running I decided to go ahead and dive head-first into the game and figure out things as I went.So, I went ahead and maxed out the number of planets and only had two stars, the ensuing chaos was amazing. I'm happy to say that this worked surprisingly well and that the game is quite easy to catch on to. (Assuming one has a decent RTS background)
After playing my first seven hours of Sins of a Solar Empire I have noticed a few things that are a bit off.

1)Planets/Asteroids with Odd logistic slots
After colonizing a few planets I noticed that a few had an odd number of logistic points (Typically 9). I found this quite odd, seeing as all of the current logistic structures take up 2 logistic points.
I have a feeling that I may just be missing something, or perhaps this was intentional due to an unreleased logistic structure, but as of right now it seems a bit out of place.

2)Late game slow down
My strategy in the game was to get cease-fires with anyone that could do me any harm and simply become on economic giant. This worked out really well and I was quite happy with my finishing the entire tech tree without even getting attacked by the AI. After finishing fully upgrading everything I owned and maxing out just about everything I could, I decided that it might be okay to attack at that point. So, I set out and built about four of each of the capital ships, creating an absolutely ungodly fleet in the process.
After my monstrosity of a fleet was complete I set out conquering anyone who dared to remove a treaty with me. The first two Empires were filled with fun and quite trilling to overthrow. (Even though the AI's intelligence was lacking a little) The third empire that I destroyed was still pretty fun, but things were slowing down significantly. Upon reaching number fours I realized that it wasn't as fun as it was and that even though my enemies had maxed out their defenses, they just didn't put up enough of a fight. I wasn't really surprised at this, but still a little disappointed that the huge universe that I was playing in really didn't have more to offer.

Adding more customization into the gameplay would probably make it a lot harder to get tired of playing. Such as, customizable ships/fighters/bombers (Possibly just the appearance, not necessarily the capabilities of the ship, being able to name capital ships, being able to name planets, seeing physical changes on the planets as more research is done (Cities on the surface, ext), random events, planets with quirks, and so on.

3) Odd AI
Throughout my "little" trail run I found that the AI was a little lacking in the intelligence department. They retreated when they had me outnumbered and outgunned, they continually attacked heavily fortified planets rather than the weaker ones, they didn't really team-up on me, didn't have any reaction when I sent a gigantic fleet to their homeworld (cease-fire was still in effect.), they were really odd about cease-fires and other treaties deciding to be allies and then revoking it thirty seconds later, and other strange and quite amusing behavior.

4) A bit slow paced
Upon conquering thirty planets (one third of one solar system) I started to find that the speed of my fleets and the distance that they had to go to reach their next targets left me with a lot of free time to admire the scenery and mess around with the camera.
I don't really know what to suggest, as anything that increases fleet speed would really mess with the balance of the game.

5)Fighter-Bomber "immunity"
I found it a bit outrageous that fighters and bombers can only be targeted by fighter squadrons. (With an exception to a few capital ships and their abilities)This odd protection that they have is quite frustrating when you have a fleet with an amazing firepower and you have tiny little fighters picking at them. (Even though you can just have your carrier ships carry fighters to fend them off)
I realize that making bomber and fighter squadrons vulnerable to fire from larger ships could really mess with the current balance of the game and make fighters/bombers pretty much obsolete, but I think that could be fairly easily worked around.

6)Auto-auto placement
I'm pretty sure that this is just an error that I caused, probably be turning on/off an option on accident, but for some reason whenever I go to click to build any strategic or logistic structure the game automatically auto places it for me. Now, this is kinda cool, as it saves me a little bit of time, however it does really aggravate me when I try to construct something in a way that works in a unique fashion, or just looks cool.
So, any response on that would be great. I'm pretty much assuming that this is my error.

7)AI apparently hates anything that can colonize
I found that, early in the game at least, that whenever I went to take a new planet/asteroid that the pirates defending the system all focused their attacked on the colony frigate. Now, I like that this makes it seem as if they are actually picking a target, but it is really quite easy to use to your advantage.
For example: Having the pirates follow that colony frigate around in circles as the rest of your fleet tear them apart. Or, only sending in a repair ship and a colony frigate and being able to take out a much more powerful force simply by taking advantage of this little "glitch".
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User Interface
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Nothing major here, I like the set-up over all, but to be honest I almost never looked at the bottom left news/events, as I started to recognize planet names and just get used to certain events happening there often.
-The darker section on the left side of the screen was irritation at times, but I quickly learned to ignore it.

-I found myself looking at the top of the UI far more often than the bottom, as much of the most important information appears at the top of the UI, rather than the bottom. I was always rather surprised when I looked down and I saw the planet counter and I said "Oh, cool, I didn't actually notice that before, huh, weird." and then quickly forgetting it existed. Point being, perhaps there should be something of more importance at the bottom of the UI, as to cause the player look at the whole screen.

- I don't know if this counts as part of the user interface, but I would really like to be able to change/customize my insignia. (I was a little disappointed by not being able to use the wings as my insignia. Nothing too major.
(Be nice to the newbie, please forgive any mistakes/things that I didn't notice.)

Be glad you said that



Its part of the upgrade process -- you can upgrade logistics and tactical, so that the number of slots increases. The final logistics slots (with the maximum number of upgrades) is always even ATM. (Edit: This was covered in the tutorials, I believe)



Its a beta Devs are focusing more on gameplay and engine stability (aka: bugs and *gross* balance issues) rather than AI ATM (though AI is still being worked on, from what I understand).



Flak frigates can hit fighters, and thats what they're there for



There's an auto-place button just to the right of the little photo thing of the unit you have selected. It controls whether auto-place is on or off for most buildings (in options, you can also choose auto-place always on for metal and crystal extractors, a must IMO). (Edit: And I think this was covered in the tutorial, too )



Those items are actually context-sensitive, carrying different information when you have different units selected. For example, if you choose a ship its HP, shields, and anti-matter are displayed. Also, the little "news-cards" to the left of the photo are immensely helpful. Not only do they sort incoming events into four logs, and then let you examine each event log separately, by clicking on them you can browse through the recent events (and go "back" with R click, forward with L click).



You can do that at the start of the game. IIRC, you control your icon on the same screen as you set your name. Colors are controled at the screen where you set-up your opposing players, however (wierd system, I know). Maybe the devs should make it a little easier, by making the color controls for the player be in the same place as the icon controls, then simply "locking" the chosen color out when changing the AI's color.

what post?

I think that we need "merely a counter that sits at the top corner of the screen?"
"so you could, in your mind, write your own little narrative?"

"Stardate 294.4.3 Captains log. Day 4 of the War at Blabla Nebula. We encountered the notorious Vasari and what seemed like an early scout fleet. It wasn't long thereafter before the space around our star Lalaland started crackling as ships exited warp space"

I hope this request gets to the developers...one thing I would like to see implemented is to be able to select all units of the same type that is currently on the screen by double left-clicking on a unit. For instance, if i double left-click on a a scout frigate, all the scout frigates that are currently on my screen will be selected. This feature has been implemented in some of the other RTS games, and I have found this feature to be extremely useful for quick selections.

everything posted here gets to the devs, thats the point of this thread

personally, i like double clicking on a unit and selecting all the units within a certain range. but i think there is a way to do that...

WOO! 400th REPLY!!!