Oddly enough, my last post was.... this one: SOASE2?

I'm currently roaming through my second game, and thus far I have not run into any technical issues. I'm on an AMD Ryzn 7 3800X-8 Core and running a run-of-the-mill 3060 nvidia and Win10 running DX12 iirc.

Initially I was thrown off by the new GUI, but... its a new game. What's not to expect? Of course its new. From what I see its all but effectively a direct port of SOASE1 to a new engine, which isn't bad. It's so smooth by comparison.

Thoughts on the new GUI:

• Easy access to capital ship upgrades
  • Does not have a place where it tells you what group/fleet the ship is a part of. When you're marking CTRL+# groups, this should be reflected in the capital fleet upgrade menu. Otherwise you're blindly making upgrades---which by the way, the new secondary upgrades are fantastic, though I'm clueless on balance at this point. 
  • Not all secondary upgrades are visible in the gui from this screen; must go to ship  to select (like tac analyst).
• Easy access to planetary upgrades
• Easy access to research
  • The new research "tree" is not intuitive at all. I think bringing back the tree would be better than what this is. Could be argued that this could just be something that takes getting used to, but by the same token the tree was better as it was a visual clue as to how far along in the tech tree you were. Granted, from the modder's standpoint (others, not me), a simple list would be easier to throw mods into without having to deal with positioning. Perhaps a toggle from tree to list mode?
• Crisp.
• I thought excavation was missing on mainscreen and only accessible from the global colony menu. It was not obvious where it was. 
• Minor Factions alerts don't fit in the little button, and unless you are actively looking for the alerts they are easy to miss.
• The build ship/orbitals is intuitive once you've spent a few seconds playing around with it.

Overall, the game has run crisp and smooth with none of the chugga chugga lag that I was accustomed to on soase. Granted, it looks like maybe 20% of the game is here (or less), but so far so good.

OMG PLANETS / SYSTEMS MOVE/ORBIT. AMAZEBALLS. It'll be good to see what happens once custom map creation is done---particularly adding multiple stars. The "there's like 40 planets around this one star" was about the only thing that chapped my uh... buttons with the original. Makes no logical sense whatsoever so much that Neil DeGrasse Tyson eyeroll meme slams around in my skull like a tank squishing a rabid wombat inside of a ceramic crucible wrapped in the glowing hum of a fusion reactor. (colorful right?)

This says that functioning planetary systems are possible with this game, which means that its possible to flip this into a quasi real time moo2 type of game with the right manipulations. Assuming that the planetary orbit speed can be altered in multiple aspects, this opens the field for an enormous amount of tactical ambushes for when phase lanes open up at certain intervals. This system is amazeballs. 

Game-Technical issues spotted:

Fleets will not jump in formation if you have a capital ship getting stuck on another object due to #captainelevatedbeyondhisability. these same collisions happen with missiles as well. I'd like to suggest moving asteroids and bases below the plane, assuming that ships can still tilt and fire up/down like in the original. This'll keep the standard travel plane clear.

If you happen to hover over a tradeship the screen drags you with it. Trade ships should not have a screen yoinky ability. Actually this seems to happen with a lot of things, including fighters. It gets a little irking when you're trying to see whats going on and the screens doing this dancy mc flavorpants thing.

Nice additions to think of:

Once research is completed, some form of ongoing research would be good. Examples:

• 10000 credits 5000 min 5000 cry - 1% increased trade income gain, repeatable
• 10000 credits 5000 min 5000 cry - 1% increased damage, repeatable
• 10000 credits 5000 min 5000 cry - 1% increased armor, repeatable
• 10000 credits 5000 min 5000 cry - 1% increased shields, repeatable
• etc

similar to how most 4x games do high tech/advanced research.

Research itself could use a bit of an update. I'm confused at the need of so many research stations. To have that many and the only thing they do is increase a level, but don't have anything to do with number of active research operations in progress. Maybe allow multiple things to be researched at a time? When you have your economy going strong, having a line of 30 research items going but you have 20+ research stations seems kind of counter intuitive. My thought is that even if each single research takes longer, there's other perks/downfalls to taking that route. It means that if the research station research thing "x", gets destroyed, the player loses that research, which means it hurts somehow, whereas now its just "this researchy cloudy thingy" that just finishes automagically in the ether. 

So longer research time, more things researched simultaneously, more risk of losing research, perk of getting more techs in about the same rough time frame depending on how quickly you're expanding and teching up/out.

Going back to the planets moving----you guys realize that from how smooth this engine appears to be running, you could probably actually do a Moo2 type of game here, right? Expand the space out. Make the space between stars themselves a "they could go anywhere" type of thing, whereas within the gravity well of the star the phase lanes are required to move (which if memory serves is probably already how that works if this is almost a direct port to the new engine). That basically means that any invading force would have to jump to the star itself, which would allow each system to have its own "protective starbase" like Stellaris does it. Best part is that that could simply be a scenario type of situation, leaving that to modders. Point is, you folks have apparently created a game that makes that possible. It'd be up to modders to do the fun stuff from there I suppose, like throwing in rogue planets that randomly open back door phase lanes from system to system outside of the bastion systems next to the stars.

I realize this game is alpha, but flat out---I'm already super impressed with it. 

.....so long as you guys actually reveal wtf the vasari are running from.

Addons:

Beef:

Cobalt Light Frigate: Weapons: 1x Light Autocannon. Cobalt Light Frigate very visibly and clearly happens to have two cannons. o_.

Hold position does not work

Orbital "arrow" line is not intuitive. Brain immediately believes it to be more like an engine or comet trail. So red is clockwise, yellow/orange is counterclockwise. Brain thought it was the opposite. An actual arrowhead on these would remove questioning.

When clicking a minor faction reward, the window needs to minimize, be it pirate bounty point or put a leader on a planet etc. It's counter intuitive to hit escape or click outside the window for fear of losing the clicked option.

Pirate raids kicked off by you should allow pirates to pass through your territory freely---unless you deliberately point them at your own planet.