Beta 2 feedback, bugs, suggestions

from Sins Forums

Hi, I just finished a several-hour-long game.  I enjoyed it very much, it is a great improvement over Beta 1 as well as the original title...

...mainly.

 

Sorry if I'm just repeating stuff that's already known, I don't read forums much.

1) Torpedoes (glowy ones, Advent, I think?) home on their targets forever.  A massive volley of them followed one of my capital ships through TWO short phase jumps. (this should be reproducible without difficulty)

2) The game ended in victory before I had actually defeated the final player.  The last AI had at least one planet remaining, and it hadn't even been bombed yet.  I was attacking its home system - mines everywhere, a dozen or more structures in orbit, and a highly upgraded starbase, all largely untouched.  I had wiped the floor with his fleet though.  (I have a savegame)

3) The AI turns completely dormant and just sort of sulks in the corner after a while.  In a game against 3 "medium" AIs, all three of them completely stopped making any attempt to attack me or each other.  I wasn't even overwhelmingly powerful.  I had 10 mid-level capital ships, a handful of turrets/bases, and a fully-upgraded starbase; that was the full extent of my military power.  I don't normally play this way, but I was having a very easy time of it.  I also had only three planets.  When I finally got tired of playing SimSins, I attacked with my capital ships figuring I wouldn't have a problem clearing them out - and I barely escaped with them.  I built a fleet consuming all of my level 4/5 fleet capacity and lost over half my fleet with each attack on the AI planets, and I had ALL the defensive technologies and many of the offensive technologies researched.  Before I built the big fleet, I could have been easily wiped out by any one of the three AIs...  Anyways, I have a savegame of this too.

4) Human torpedoes frequently don't do their huge explosion particle effects or make the explosion noise when impacting various ships and structures.  I don't know whether it's specific units it doesn't work against, or whether it's just random.  I don't know about the other races' torpedoes, I wasn't paying attention.  As an aside, the noise is obnoxiously loud, can the volume be reduced a bit?

5) Human AI still has a sick obsession with robotics cruisers, it needs counseling or an intervention or something.

6) You can't queue up fighter construction immediately after ordering the construction of starbase hangars.  It's sort of a Sins trademark that you can always ask for stuff to be built in advance if you're currently working on the prerequisite, right?

7) Starbase fighters appear to be offensive ships, not system defenses when zoomed out.

8) An "attack-move" command would be very nice,

9) PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE make group attacks ALA Homeworld possible.  You know, you select your ships, then you hold down alt and the right mouse button and drag a box around the group of targets you want attacked.  This is SO important in a game with such "unrivalled scale"!  I wasn't a really big fan of Homeworld, but I really have a hard time with Sins because I know it's missing.

10) I notice several infocards where "strikecraft" and "strike craft" are used.  You should decide on one and use it across the board.... just for polish...

11) Pirates are comically inadequate now with the introduction of more advanced defense structures.  And for some reason I tend to get a LOT of flak frigates sent at me.

12) Torpedo cruisers seem to be too good to be true.  Over double the range and damage of Kodiaks, 20% less supply usage, (currently) infinite homing distance... I admit I don't remember the cost difference, maybe that's what I'm missing.  I guess they're also slower?  I've never really paid attention.  Or maybe its an amour type thing, where they only do 50+ damage to certain targets?  I don't know, they just seem bloody terrifying.

13) Not necessarily directed at developers, but what is the purpose of cobalts?  Once you're out of the very beginning of the game, it seems like LRMs and tech rushing to kodiaks is the best bet.  Are they intended to only be an early-game unit?  Is there ever a time I would want to use them preferentially to Kodiaks?  It's always been my design philosophy that units should be usable - for one purpose or another - throughout all phases of a game.

14) I've always felt that Psidar (and its Advent equivalent) seems overpowered.  I can understand Vasari using it, they're supposed to be really advanced in phase tech, but being able to see ALL enemy fleet movement from 3 jumps away seems crazy.  On many maps, there are 3 jumps or less separating homeworlds!  If it was up to me, I would elminate Advanced Psidar, raise the tech level of Psidar by two levels (raise it 1 level for Advent) and make it effective for a distance of 2 jumps.  It's really hard to make an effective ambush or surprise attack when such a massive area can be seen.  YES, you can't spend the entire game zoomed out, YES this game has an uncommonly large scale, and YES micromanagement is a tool of the devil, but it still seems too powerful IMO.

15) This is *probably* just a cosmetic thing, but here it is.  When you build the cap ship that gives a targetting advantage, it shows a little crosshairs image above the ships that it is helping.  I don't seem to ever get these crosshairs above a marza dreadnought, but I do above all other ships.... I think.  Maybe the image is inside the model or out of place?  Or myabe the Marza for some reason isn't benefitting from the abiility.  Crap, I should've checked the infocard.

16) Dead asteroids, and possibly regular ones, can have starbases built too closely to them and they clip each other.  Then at some point (possibly when you build first starbase addon?) the starbase abruptly shifts into a more sensible position.  (hahaha, I guess TEC starbases CAN move after all!)

17) Gauss turrets don't display their meson/missile weapon stats in their infocard once they have those abilities.  It would be nice to know how powerful those actually are, at a glance.

18) If you built multiple frigate factories, most of the time the ships come out unevenly and it looks weird.  All four appear to be working on something, but you just keep getting bunches of ships gushing out of one factory.

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Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top

Answering some of your points if you don't mind :)

1) Torpedoes (glowy ones, Advent, I think?) home on their targets forever. A massive volley of them followed one of my capital ships through TWO short phase jumps. (this should be reproducible without difficulty)
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This is true for a lot of particle effects, they generally have a set duration for display, so if they travel slower than a ship, for example, they just chase it until their display duration expires.

2) The game ended in victory before I had actually defeated the final player.  The last AI had at least one planet remaining, and it hadn't even been bombed yet.  I was attacking its home system - mines everywhere, a dozen or more structures in orbit, and a highly upgraded starbase, all largely untouched.  I had wiped the floor with his fleet though.  (I have a savegame)
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AI surrenders were put in in one of the earlier Sins patches, 1.03 or 1.04 or something. Sometimes they fight to the last planet, some I've had surrender when they still had 4 left. Depends on a lot of factors, which I don't know the exact details of.

4) Human torpedoes frequently don't do their huge explosion particle effects or make the explosion noise when impacting various ships and structures.  I don't know whether it's specific units it doesn't work against, or whether it's just random.  I don't know about the other races' torpedoes, I wasn't paying attention.  As an aside, the noise is obnoxiously loud, can the volume be reduced a bit?
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There's probably some safeguards against playing overlapping sounds, sounds like that's what it is. I've also had times in large battles where the explosion effects don't have time to play before the ship is debris, that's probably just the system getting bogged down with everything it has to do.

6) You can't queue up fighter construction immediately after ordering the construction of starbase hangars.  It's sort of a Sins trademark that you can always ask for stuff to be built in advance if you're currently working on the prerequisite, right?

7) Starbase fighters appear to be offensive ships, not system defenses when zoomed out.

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Well, they're different systems. Hangar buildings start with command points for fighters, and the Advent starbase can queue the first 2 strikecraft while it's being constructed. But the rest are gotten through upgrades, which are not that dissimilar from capital ship levels. If you buy an upgrade for your carrier capital, you can't queue the extra squadron until the upgrade is done. And since the starbase is not a planetary building per se (the pip bar below the planet shows actual logistics/tactical buildings), its craft aren't part of it. It makes sense too, if you're using an offensive starbase, would you want its squadrons showing up below? :)

9) PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE make group attacks ALA Homeworld possible.  You know, you select your ships, then you hold down alt and the right mouse button and drag a box around the group of targets you want attacked.  This is SO important in a game with such "unrivalled scale"!  I wasn't a really big fan of Homeworld, but I really have a hard time with Sins because I know it's missing.
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This has been discussed, but IC hasn't found a good way to put it in and keep memory usage in check. Sins is very tight for memory usage, and mass-selecting ships is a very big variable to throw into stability. From one player drag-queueing a few ships to 10 players drag-queueing whole fleets is a big difference. But if it makes you feel any better, I've been asking for it to be brought back in some way since release (it was actually in beta, you could right click on stacks in the empire tree to queue attack orders) and I'll keep bugging Blair about it periodically until he clubs me over the head with something really heavy.

12) Torpedo cruisers seem to be too good to be true.  Over double the range and damage of Kodiaks, 20% less supply usage, (currently) infinite homing distance... I admit I don't remember the cost difference, maybe that's what I'm missing.  I guess they're also slower?  I've never really paid attention.  Or maybe its an amour type thing, where they only do 50+ damage to certain targets?  I don't know, they just seem bloody terrifying.
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They do nothing to ships, which is misleading from the big boom. They are scary to buildings, but IC has said that they'll likely get a bit of a nerf.

13) Not necessarily directed at developers, but what is the purpose of cobalts?  Once you're out of the very beginning of the game, it seems like LRMs and tech rushing to kodiaks is the best bet.  Are they intended to only be an early-game unit?  Is there ever a time I would want to use them preferentially to Kodiaks?  It's always been my design philosophy that units should be usable - for one purpose or another - throughout all phases of a game.
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Besides being one of the best ships to take out carriers (take less damage from fighters and bombers and do extra to carrier armor), take a look at their unlocked abilities from research. Cobalts have an ability to mess with enemy ships' antimatter, and Advent light frigates take it one step further by actually using the antimatter they steal from the enemy and pumping it to your own fleet.

Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top

Thanks for the response.

The fact that it's a particle effect doesn't excuse the fact that it still exists several minutes after it is fired.  Ironclad should time the duration it takes for a torpedo to cross the largest gravwell reasonably possible, and limit the particle effect's duration to that.  Better yet, 30 seconds.  If a torpedo doesn't hit its target within 30 seconds, it's a damn lazy torpedo and when I'm king it'll be first against the wall.   ......where's my radiohead cd.....

OK, I can understand AI surrenders, in fact I figured that is what must've happened.  Certainly chasing down every last enemy would be boring...  Maybe there could be a message explaining that the AI has surrendered?

"There's probably some safeguards against playing overlapping sounds . . ." No, not in this case.  The explosion itself didn't take place, and the structures/ships in question weren't close to dying.

It seems to me that a starbase is stuck in one gravity well and is intended to defend it, so the fighters and the starbase itself really belong in the defensive category.  Even in the case of the Vasari "offensive" starbase, if you're building a starbase in an enemy system, you're probably not doing it willy-nilly, so it won't remain an enemy system for very long at all... so it will inevitably, within a few minutes become a defensive structure regardless of its initial purpose.

I'm not a programmer so I can't claim to understand why group selection should be a memory or stability issue...  I just know that attempting to select a dozen enemies as priority targets is a b*tch.  You always *slightly* miss one of them and then you have to cancel all the orders and try again.  It reeks of something someone might eventually throw a computer out the window over.

When you say torpedoes do "no" damage to ships, do you mean that literally?  Or is it just a 75% reduction or something?  Regardless, as you say, it's misleading.  I can understand how a giant explosion is really a tiny explosion, but it's not at all intuitive.

I'll keep that in mind about the Cobalt.  I'd really hoped you wouldn't say something like that ("use its special ability or use it in one particular situation"), but I guess I'll have to live with it.

 

I swear if I ever decide to mod this game (there are about eleventyfive others I've promised to mod before this one), unit-specific damage is either going to be eliminated entirely (impossible?  just watch me) or made totally transparent to the end-user.  Seriously... unit-specific damage, especially of the hidden and/or difficult-to-notice variety is a cancer of RTS.  The hallmarks of outdated design philosophy are micromanagement (which Ironclad has managed to dodge brilliantly.... mostly....) and unit-specific damage.

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Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top

I've only two questions I can respond to here:

 

Gauss Cannons don't get their abilities added to their infocard because they're not secondary attacks, they're actually *abilities* a-la CapShips.  Similarly, you don't get a full rundown on what Gauss Rail Gun does every time you look at the Kol's infocard.

PSIDAR is only one jump, then two.  For Vasari, it's one-two-all.  There's no way TO nerf it besides making it come later for Advent/TEC.  ^^

Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top

Unit specific damage probably isn't going to go away for a lot of reasons. It's not intrinsically bad either. Otherwise you get tank-rush syndrome where you just spam the most efficient unit overall.

Lets take the Carrier-Heavy Cruiser-Frigate triangle, which is a classic example of Archer-Spearman-Cavalry. It's based on unit specific damage for the most part, but it's rather easy to justify in terms of 'realism' if you want to.  The Bomber's strong missiles are not accurate and tend to miss the Frigate; the Cruiser's autocannons are armor piercing but lack the destructive capability to quickly destroy the enormous Carrier; the Frigate's lasers wreak havoc on the lightly armored carrier but cannot penetrate the Cruiser's tough hull.

It would be possible to create all those effects through armor and armor-piercing weapons and so on and so forth but shields complicate that and really it's easier and less failure prone to do unit specific damage.

Bandboxing would be lovely, but the game isn't all focus fire.  There is logic in the game to cause units to spread their fire a bit. Thus utility cruisers don't spam all their abilities on the same target.  Also, units have preferred targets. Light Frigates will tend to shoot at flak frigates/carriers/supports, bombers like heavies and flaks, and so on. 

Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top

I agree when you say the game isn't all about focus fire and... hell I'll even give in.  I guess as long as units target sensibly (and they do, usually), it's not SUCH a big deal.

However I completely disagree with you regarding unit-specific damage.  A well-designed game doesn't need them at all.  A few years ago I might've agreed with you, but I know better now.  Eliminating unit-specific damage (except in rare exceptional cases) was one of the best things I ever did for my game.  Either make damage values clear and accurate or don't display them at all, I say.  R-P-S gameplay you're talking about is also another hallmark of outdated design.  It's boring, predictable, and noxiously simplistic.

The right thing to do is to make weapons and the units that carry them by their intrinsic nature effective or ineffective for various targets and roles.  Low fire rate, high damage for anti-cap weapons.  High fire rate, short range for swarming ships, etc.  Damn, it makes me so frustrated to not have enough time to mod this game so I could show you what I mean.  The game I made is played by tens of thousands of people, and at any given time there are reliably 150+ people in a game or lobby, trust me when I say I know what I'm talking about.  The game is a completely free and unadvertised RTS running on a great open-source engine... it was in PC Gamer.  Gas Powered Games employees (Supreme Commander) said they "love" my game and play it all the time.  So I say again, unit-specific damage, R-P-S, and micromanagement are game cancer.  SoaSE would benefit immensely by them being removed and replaced with modern balancing techniques.