Suggestions for the game!!

I've now played through Beta 2 twice, wanted to post my impressions.

First, I see several posts wanting to compare this to GalCiv II. Other than what I found to be a confusing tech tree, which would definitely benefit by being closer to the GalCiv II model, I found myself comparing this game more to the Homeworld, Starcraft, and Age of Empires RTSs. Overall, the game did keep me entertained for hours, but it lacked the immediacy of those other RTS games.

1) I need a way to grab the map and pan it with the mouse. Homeworld did this by pressing both the left and right mouse buttons. Using arrow keys or scrolling to the edge of the screen is cumbersome in an RTS environment. Also, on the subject of mouse control: using the mouse wheel to zoom was problematic. Sometimes the game would actually move in the opposite direction that I wanted to scroll! I also found it difficult to select objects quickly. To select an object, I had to click on the exact center of the object. Clicking on one end of an object did not select it.

2) Interface: I found the system/fleet display on the left of the screen to be almost useless, especially as the game progressed and more and more information cluttered the screen. It was easier to scroll out, click on a system, and either read the information in the colored bars or scroll into the system to see details.

3) Managing my empire in the middle and late part of the games took so much time that I rarely watched the battles. Over 95% of my time was spent zoomed out clicking and placing icons. Here, Homeworld had a far superior feel. In that game, I watched and participated in almost every battle. With Sins, I sent in my fleets and returned to managing, checking occasionally on the progress of the battle by clicking the system and looking at the colored unit bars. What's the point of creating good graphics if there's little time to enjoy the fight?

4) Please put most of the game controls on screen and mouse-clickable. In Starcraft and Age of Empires, I rarely had to go to my keyboard. Unlike a turned-based game like GalCiv II or the Civilization games, where I have plenty of time to play with keyboard shortcuts, in an RTS, I don't want to have to hunt my keyboard. Everything I need should be clickable on-screen.

5) Please don't try to make this RTS GalCiv II (I'm hoping GalCiv III will accomplish that). I think a better model is the Total War franchise which uses a turn-based strategy map for managing and RTS for combat. It's a balance that brings together the best of both worlds. True 3D like Homeworld would also be a lot of fun.

Sins DID keep my attention for many hours, so I look forward to the next beta. Thanks.

One small thing is that during the loading of games, selecting saved games, saving games, etc. you have to select the 'next' or 'select' button. It would be nice if you could just double click it and get to the next stage rather than having to specifically select the button.

well, ill start with the first post (not reply)

1) has been said it would be too much micro

2) hasnt really been discussed much, but they would be rather pointless IMO

3) The devs have really worked on the techtree for beta 3

4) good idea, they havent really talked about this (Blair?)

5) They have said they will be "balanceder" for the next beta 2 patch

6) it may be added as an off game thing, but during the game it isnt really feasible

7) hasnt been discussed

8) lol

ill try to reply to the first reply when I get back

Not really doable -- TEC and Advent are the same species, but Vasaari and the others aren't ever close to related.



People are ants, when viewed from orbit Fact is, those things you see in orbit need to be reduced in size, majorly. As it stands they're the size of small cities



Wait, you complaining about the tactical UI they're working on? I know that its not up to snuff (yet) but personally I like it quite a bit!

And I'm not sure about what you mean by not having time to manage fights -- you should have plenty of time "free" to manage fights if you really want to.



Just use yoru left hand on the keyboard -- thats all you really need. qwert and asdf are used as "constant" hotkeys, no hunting necessary. Also places your hand in good position to use the "shift" and number keys as needed, as well as zxcv if you want those zoom controls. That said... how do you avoid using the keyboard in starcraft?!



I'm hoping that was a very not-funny joke.



This game is what it is -- play imperium galactica II for a similar game (I've heard nexus floating around as another similar). As far as 3D goes, its already in game, its just that the Z axis doesn't get used much. You have to use the "move" button (no right clicking) and the tilde (~) key for it. (On american keyboards, ~ is the the left of the number row. On other keyboards, ~ is elsewhere but the key needed is still the one to the left of the number row).

as to the second reply:

1) you can use the "zoom to cursor" feature that was used in supcom by clicking... something...

2) This is supposed to have been changed to be much better in beta 3

3&4) OK, avoiding keyboard shortcuts is VERY bad. Using your keyboard allows you to complete actions much quicker, allowing you to to have more time to do other stuff, such as watching battles...

5a) Sins won't be.
5b) Galciv III wont be.
5c) Good model, but not what they are going for here.
5d) Not really the best of both worlds.
5e) Has been discussed and ruled out as too confusing.

I agree with the ship creation idea from Gal Civ. However you must keep in mind that it would slow the game down considerable if it had to continuesly load and add in the polly count of what ever god knows what creation the player created, wich in turn would mean fewer ships on screen aat one time. So i would have to agree with the DeV's chouce not to do this.


As for making this game similar to the total war series i disagree. One the idea of this revolutionary R4xts ( i forgot the exact abrv sorry=() is so you can have more ppl playing each other online. The reason i say this is look at Rome. Yes you could have multiple Human players playing but When a battle came up the other player not in the battle would get stuck waiting for 30 40 minutes. Another good comparison is lucas arts Empire at war. I say this cause they did manage to have a primative real time galactic map and have real time tactical battles. However, Only two ppl could play online at a time because if one player attacks you then the other player would be forced to wait untill your first battle is over before he could attack. That is the exact reason why EAW only allowed 2 players online in galactic conquest. So basicaly Sin's is getting not 100% but pretty blooody close to it in both worlds. You have all of the amusment of the ability to manage ur empire in a tbs, with NEARLY ( you dont have 100 persent control of ur units but u do have more control than u do in tbs's) 100 persent of the tactical complexity and menuvering of a RTS. So no its not the best of both oworlds but its close aand its bound to be revolutionary, and in my opinion industry changeing. If not its at least a brand new aprouch to things that i have been very pleased with.

There are so many responses to this but one that really caught my eye is eetmorsqrls

1.) This in particular to the response give about Hijacking ships; I wanted to make sure you understood theres a race called pirates. Pirates are best known for what? stinking for one killing etc etc but mostly hijacking ships gotta watch Pirates of the Caribbean.

As far as how hijacking would work it would be simple like killing the crew like "Nexus the jupiter incident" with a transport ship you have to be stronger then the security force aboard that ship or have more then one military transport hijacking the ship. After you have taken control of the ship you steal it or sell it depending on how gay the ship is.

Another ability that was nice in "Nexus the jupiter incident" was disabling engines and weapons you'd need this to have transport ships get close enough to a capital ship. You could even go as far as to haveing a capital ship meant just for hijacking ships that way you could over run a ship with ease i'd imagine there would be a couple different sizes of transport ships.


In addition since in the final release or the next beta there should be more then one race there going to have different technology so by capturing a capital ship you should be able to aquire ceartain technologies of that ship for example "cloaking" if it was able to be cloaked you now have the ability to research it.



2.) Giant Star Bases, for people that have captured that small asteroid in this game you all have to say what the hell logistics is always fully upgraded. Normally i'd say take that crap out the game but it's kind of realistic and then it's not. So the solution to that would be to make a Gigantic star base where you could add modules to it like trading ports refinery's etc etc plus they look really really cool. Another reason to have it is during commutes to distant galaxies you could have a pit stop on the way.


6.)It would be nice to have it in multiplayer as well when your playing with buddies on LAN not everyone wants to have the same design of ship floating through out the universe especially if they've picked the same faction.

8.) It's true lol it would be easier, just add these ideas along with it.

9.) Somthing i forgot to include last night, the gravatation around a star during the port to different galaxies needs to be thought on a little more because it's really slow trying to get around the sun maybe an enhancement in research would help. Or worm holes which i have yet to see in this game.

Again i appreciate all the post apparently great minds think alike.

The numbers are still going in order from my previous post.

how does "so many" equal six?



you are basing all your knowledge of pirates from that movie... *blows brains out*

The problem with your idea is that you would have to manually pick each ship to hijack and sell, since boarding and whatnot takes time, and you may be preparing to get your fleet out of there, when all of a sudden one of ur ships decides to hijack another one.


the problem with #2 is where would you put it? if you are going to make a gigantic star base, why make it right next to a planet? why not just put it ON the planet?

9) can you phrase that differently? im not quite getting it.

Just a note, but its a huge readability enhancement when you guys quote whoever your responding to... that way not only do I not have to bounce back and forth between two posts to figure out which number goes to which idea (and reply) but later on in the thread I have a clue which number goes to which post!

Not gonna happen because of balance issues, but the Advent will be able to take over enemy ships for a short amount of time, but not capital ships.


There will be more ways to customize your capital ships, but not there appearances.


Im not quite sure on this one, but id guess technology wont happen between 2 different races.


personally i prefer sins to have its on grapfics

You know I kind of know what you mean and I have thought about this. During combat, and combat is really very entertaining, alot of bells are ringing, technology is completed, things get built, some place else is getting attacked and I know its silly but I think I should be doing something else in the empire instead of watching or participating in the combat. I suspect this feeling will go away when I have a much better handle on things.

Another option would be for combat to continue when the game is paused.

If you think about, combat is the only thing really happening in real time (maybe). I'm guessing planets are not being fully colonized in a minute and ships are not flying from planet to planet or being constructed in a matter of seconds. Real time means real time for us human players but that is it. Seconds may equal years in the game, except for combat which is unique from a time aspect. Combat time may be occuring in real time. The best way to fully enjoy every combat then might be to allow it to happen when all other aspects of the game are on pause, at the player's discretion. This might be much more realistic as it could take years to build a ship or colonize a world, but minutes to fight a space battle.

Any thoughts? It would appear if doable this would showcase and take advantage of one of the game's best features-combat.

Can't happen. Ships are still moving, ergo everything is still moving. Sure, you could "pause" construction, research, building... but trade ships are still moving. Interestellar actions are still moving. That fleet over near Alpha Centauri is still forming up, so the defenses there still need to be building.

eetmorsqrls:



There were many people responding to this article in a short period of time stop being an ass it could of just been one person.

But any who im not baseing anything off that movie in fact I hated that movie. I figured this day in time people have seen the black pearl and could relate. In real life that's basically what they did was hijack ships steal gold and kill the crew.

In response to the Starbase, they are suppose to be an extention from the planet there not suppose to be built on the planet but then again i guess in the asteroids case that could be an exception. But then i stated before that you could be able to place these Star Ports on the way to distant galaxies i didn't want to limit where you'd be able to place them. The only thing is for a starport starbase whatever it would cost a pretty penny.


http://www.trekfrontier.com/Public/Card/immagini/starbase.jpg


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EBITAD:
I finally found someone that has reasoning if im going to spend money on a game I want what i pay for. If i'm going to send a faction back to there stone age I want to have a reason behind it for one. You shouldn't all start off pissed at each other wanting to rip each other a new one. At the earliest part of your game you should be worrying about developing your planets.

Maybe developers can come to an agreement and give everyone the simple things they want by makeing different type of gameplays. Example real time which is what we have now. Or turn base and incase the developers do take this into consideration don't mess up and pull what Sega did in Rome Total war and take multiplayer out of the turn base portion.

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Multianna:
Can you give me what your smokeing on I know it's got some power behind it. Can you explain how hijacking ships would become a balance issue? Are preist a balance issue in Age of Empires or Empire Earth? It's the same process except it's with military transport ships everyone would have this feature.

With one exception after your done converting or capturing a window will say you have aquired technology or it will say no new technology has been aquired if you already have this technolgy and then it will ask you if you would like to sell or add to existing fleet.

Just the simple things can improve a game.


Getting typers cramp lol!! It's worth it though i guess if my ideas are used.

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Ron Lugge:
Almost forgot you...

Ship design can be sort of like GalCiv except you can build your ship before you begin the game.

But you can still design and modify the ship in game as well but it won't take up much time as it would if you built it from scratch in game.

Hope that makes sense.

Im smoking some home made stuff, recipe is a secret

Since the search function is broken i cant find the posts where the devs has explained the reason why 1. isent in, also 6 has been replyed to some time ago.

It'd really help if you'd quoted the original, I don't think I said anything like "it can't be done" here. Not in regards to ship design. In fact, I've been "pushing" the idea of pre-game aesthetics design. What I do not see happening is designing ships in terms of weapons / shields, they have to balance the game out somehow. And letting people customize the stats on ships would make that infinitely more difficult. (at the very least, exponentionally)

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It's a strategy game it's suppose to be difficult, the more difficult the more fun. But as far as ship designing they have already figured that out in there previous game just apply that technology to this game.


P.S. I hate quoteing because others quote your quoteing and it gets confusing!!.



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lol classfied recipes are the best.

I saw sometime a while back about war on planets where it would become like command and conquer mind you that would be the best game on the planet but. That type of micro management would be rather complicated and I understood where the developers were coming from.

As far as ship design they are being lazy i saw that somewhere to; the components are going to be there even if it's minimal let users customize how there ships are. Someone will make a mod to fix where they left off just establish it into the game.

Also war isn't meant to be fair a little enbalance never hurt anyone ok maybe it did but we will leave Iraq out of this.

Different genre. There they had an identical tech tree for all races, so they just had to balance out the techs (which included weapons). Here, they have non-identical units to balance. Including into this mix a unit which doesn't have standard statistics is problematic. The powers are probably headache enough to balance, they don't need more.



And as you just saw its even MORE confusing not to quote, because you attributed something I didn't say to me

An imbalance in the game will almost inevitably become exploited, and from there ruin the game.

i agree



Do you mean that you saw something about war on planets for sins?
if thats the case, id like to know where, since it has never been considered.


It has nothing to do with them being lazy, but that it would be hard to use in a game like this, where so much is going to happen.
This is beta 2 and there is ALOT more to come at a later stage, maybe some things might only come when its released.

Just for your information those who made GalCiv is a different company then those who is making sins. Galciv was made by Stardock and Sins is being made by Ironclad. Stardock is there publisher and helping with various things

Ironclad is an assistant developer for stardock, as far as what there website states.

Ironclad's team members have worked successfully with a number of entertainment based companies such as Sierra Studios, Take2 Interactive / Rockstar Games, Disney Interactive, TNT Television, The Cartoon Network and Mattel.

http://www.ironcladgames.com/about.html

I wonder what they did for TNT...

Crap lol i messed that up not sure how Multianna did replys between quotes. O well i guess you guys can tell where i'm replying lol.

Good question lol maybe the logo's for the NBA.

I see, well i dunno and sorta dont care but it has been asked alot, a dev might reply to it monday


ooh my bad


True, but saying they are lazy aint true



assistant developer for stardock? i dont read that anywhere
The fact is that Stardock is Ironclads publisher, as ive been following sins for around 2 years and its just within the last year Stardock got involved.
None the less, its a great combination thats for sure


lol yeah it takes some using of a few quotes

The game could have been so much better with a turn based strategic game,sadly a lot of gameplay is restricted so it could be a trendy real time game.

I realized I forgot to mention a very important point. The games I played were on very large maps. By the middle to late part of the game, I had multiple fleets in motion (6-7), and so did the other powers and the pirates. As soon as I took a planet or asteroid, I had to immediately set its development and defenses so it would be protected from attack and improve my stats. That took time. Meanwhile, other fleets are reaching their targets, or I have to zoom out to give a fleet new orders, or I'm cycling through fleets to find ships that have gained experience and need to be upgraded, or I'm checking research and artifacts, or I'm getting constant messages about incoming hostiles that I have to check out.

On that last point, it would help if there was more information in the warning. The same warning goes out for a scout as for a whole fleet. Just mentioning "small" or "large" or maybe giving numbers would tell me which warnings I could ignore and which ones I have to respond to.

As to pausing the game, I'm not sure that would work. What about reinforcements approaching the combat area? Does that mean they wouldn't get there? I think a better solution is through controls. If a fleet is designated as group 1, pressing "1" twice (or selecting a group 1 icon on screen) would immediately zoom to that group at the tactical level. Right now, the game zooms to the group but at the current zoom level of the map. Zooming in at a tactical level would allow me to quickly switch between multiple fights. The same would be true of messages. I click the message about incoming hostiles and I get a properly zoomed view of the target planet or asteroid: zoomed out if the message is "incoming" or tactical view if the message is "arrived". That would allow fast jumping between fleets and objects without have to scroll out, pan the map, and scroll back in.

Hope this helps.