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SBeare

Join Date 07/2007

first impressions playing the beta

I generally think the game is going well, of course there are some things that I believe are a must to be changed.
Here's my list so far:
- I highly doubt players are going to want to play a 3-15 hour multiplayer matchup (I just played a 9 hour single player game in a large universe setting)
- The AI, I believe, is incredibly stupid on hard difficulty and I beat them my first try without problem.
EX1: I've seen large enemy fleets hopping planets/stars to get to a destination, but when they see my fleet thats maybe half the size as theirs... or 5 times as large... they keep floatin' on past and they all get obliterated without a fight.
EX2: an AI offered an alliance so I grabbed it... then they asked for my assistance on saving one of their planets from pirates... so I went to help and when my fleet arrived my "ally" turned on me and I ended up killing its planet AND the pirate invaders, I wasnt able to run because of his hyper drive disabler thing.
- everything goes so incredibly slow... which is probably why my game took 9 hours... my resources ran out half way through so I was living off the black market.
- the AI are limited to about 4 different phrases... 2 of which are when somebody puts bounty on their heads and the other ones when you're jumping to their planet. I'd say take out their responses to different situations or add a load more, or it just gets incredibly dull
- the auto save gets veerrrryy annoying... it takes forever to save the game (with my really nice computer, about 5-10 seconds) and it occurs like every 5 minutes. Now I like autosave because I always forget to save my game then it freezes.... but every 5 minutes is just too much for the length of time a save takes.
- in all honesty the cruisers arent much different than the frigates... not much stronger or much larger or anything else for that matter to differencient between the two
- when I first started scouting the first solar system, I found it funny how an ice planet was twice as close to the star than a dessert planet
- there arent nearly enough kinds of planets in a solar system, and they arent where they should be placed.
- even with todays technology, our telescopes can see distant planets in our own solar system... let alone detect some planets in other solar systems... I dont understand why you cant detect all the planets in your solar system at the start, or even with some sort of research... completely unrealistic. Well I guess it makes the game a bit more unpredictable and keeps you on your feet... but I'd rather see a big cloud enveloping your planet and surrounding area (through technology/research) to shroud your planet and larger units/structures. Or maybe have every player start in a different solar system...

but even with my first glance at the game, I still find it pretty fun

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- the auto save gets veerrrryy annoying... it takes forever to save the game (with my really nice computer, about 5-10 seconds) and it occurs like every 5 minutes. Now I like autosave because I always forget to save my game then it freezes.... but every 5 minutes is just too much for the length of time a save takes.

It's been covered a bit -- long story short, you can disable it, change the interval (see the stickies), and it's currently unoptimized for simplicity.

- when I first started scouting the first solar system, I found it funny how an ice planet was twice as close to the star than a dessert planet
- there arent nearly enough kinds of planets in a solar system, and they arent where they should be placed.
- even with todays technology, our telescopes can see distant planets in our own solar system... let alone detect some planets in other solar systems... I dont understand why you cant detect all the planets in your solar system at the start, or even with some sort of research... completely unrealistic. Well I guess it makes the game a bit more unpredictable and keeps you on your feet... but I'd rather see a big cloud enveloping your planet and surrounding area (through technology/research) to shroud your planet and larger units/structures. Or maybe have every player start in a different solar system...

With regards to these 3... it's not a sim, and isn't trying to be... that doesn't mean there might be a legitimate complaint to be had, but if you're only issue is that it's unrealistic, well... there a lot of unrealistic stuff in the game beyond that. :/

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There's a lot of "unrealistic stuff" in the universe, as well.

I'm not talking _habitable_ planets (since we've yet to find another of those) but you very easily can find cold planets closer (no atmosphere = heat leak into space) as well as hot planets further away (global warming gasses plus intense gravity from nearby gas giants). Even so, that's just window dressings, if we want a more realistic spread of planets there will be one usable planet every couple hundred stars. Not as much fun then.

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Yes, I'm well aware it's possible to find a cold planet closer to the star than a hot planet. But if that were the case they should add a visible atmosphere to certain planets.

I'm not saying they would have to decrease the amount of habitable planets/asteroids...
and you shouldn't back up the game saying it's good the way it is, that isn't the point of a beta test. Don't defend the flaws... instead think of ways to improve upon them. Give them an idea, it doesn't necessarily have to be do-able but it could spark another idea in one of the designers heads.

And I know the game isn't a sim. That doesn't necessarily mean they have to make it look like something completely out of a kids imagination with no logic attached. I'm not trying to burn the game, I like it so far. It's just some constructive criticism.
I tend to enjoy games more if there is a bit more logic and realism put into it. It doesn't HAVE to be a sim to look realistic... at least the slightest bit.

Ohhh and there should be solar systems with 2-3 stars in them too. That'd be cool.

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Don't defend the flaws... instead think of ways to improve upon them. Give them an idea, it doesn't necessarily have to be do-able but it could spark another idea in one of the designers heads.

Well, that's just it -- I don't consider it a flaw, as it's fun atm

Ohhh and there should be solar systems with 2-3 stars in them too. That'd be cool.

Now *that* I agree with, but then, most of my time is dedicated to binary star research, so...

(but fun-wise, I think it'd add a nice variety to the 'geography', so to speak).

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I have some suggestions too.

1. The economy is real slow (like stated above)
2. Everything is very expensive if you think of how slow the ec. is
3. How can one star host 50 planets... the star must be huge... or the planets must atleast be close
4. Having a large empire is quite hard unless you have the buildings that makes the loyalty lvls rise. Since its quite hard to get and expensive (hard in the means of researching cost and since you get everything slow...).

Thats all for now

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Gauntlet03

Join Date 01/2004

+139

Well,

1. I try not to think about one star having so many planets, frankly its silly, they call this galactic warfare, but its not, its interstellar certainly, but nowhere near galactic in scale... but regardless thats not very important, you can think of the star as the center piece of a galaxy instead, and the planets are simply the only planets in the galaxy worth visiting lol.

2. Hot and Cold planets, meh doesn't matter where they are to me, but they need more visual types of planets, especially more terran planets, also they need moons, gas giants, nebula's, multi-planet systems and asteroid variance... why does every ice planet have the same 3 crystal asteroids! Why does every asteroid always have 3 usable ones?

Moons and extra asteroid planets in the same system could change the shape of the gravity well and add extra depth. (Comets could be done too with the tail end being impassable lol thus cutting a line in half the gravity well) Considering Stardock has the space RTS O.R.B available for download its interesting that they didn't employ some of that games very useful features... though the game wasn't too wonderful itself.

3. The Auto-save and the AI I feel are place holders, really not fully developed and I wouldn't worry about it...

4. The economy is slower paced, as is transit and combat, to allow the time for the player to manage the empire/epic features, some of which I don't believe are employed yet. Thus there is down time when in the future I think we will have more to do. I could be wrong about that... but the economic wind down from asteroids and such is pretty drastic I find it makes my game allot harder but not any more fun, it just means I wait 2-3 hours while building up my solar system or two to the max and getting all the techs.

5. I've only ever seen one Ring planet it was great... but rare... why is it rare, considering our solar system has what 3-4 planets with rings? Seems popular to me!

Oh yeah, and I wish asteroid colonies had big pods and constructions sticking out, and that trade centers had small traffic streams leading back to the planet.

The game is fantastic, I'm really looking forward to their next update because I believe these suggestions are mostly old hat to the developers, I would be money that a good bunch of these and other people's are already in the game, just not the beta 2.

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RonLugge

Join Date 05/2004

+50

I highly doubt players are going to want to play a 3-15 hour multiplayer matchup (I just played a 9 hour single player game in a large universe setting)

So play a smaller map.

The AI, I believe, is incredibly stupid on hard difficulty and I beat them my first try without problem.

Known "issue": the devs are still working on the AI. Examples are useful, bashing them for having an AI the match of most games that are coming out isn't.

everything goes so incredibly slow... which is probably why my game took 9 hours... my resources ran out half way through so I was living off the black market.

... Did you remember to research and build refineries? I'm (reasonably) certain the AI doesn't do so, which is (part) of the problem with late-game bounty-spam.

but even with my first glance at the game, I still find it pretty fun

Which is pretty impressive, what with this being a beta thats around 6 months from release!

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What bothered me a lot was the cultural influence making it impossible to conquer certain planets. I was playing on a large map and had conquered about 60% of the map. In spite of building a lot of broadcast towers my cultural influence ended at the star that was next in line to be conquered. The planets around that star were held by 2 NPC's and even though I killed all of their fleets and continuously bombarded and tried to colonize there worlds, the "rebels" kept taken the worlds back due to cultural influence... What culture? I had killed them all. Only fleets moving about were roving pirates. It gets even crazier. Some of the worlds had turned neutral, when I tried to colonize them, the "rebels" took over again!! And every time the rebels took over the infrastructure on that planet materialised as new out of nothing. After I had just bombarded the world for the tenth time into oblivion...

I agree the autosave is irritating. It takes too long.

The AI is worthless. No challenge at all there. I would walk away from the game, take a break, watch TV, eat dinner and things were all dandy when I came back.

The research model is too simple too little. You can max it out after only a few hours of play.

But having said all that, the game looks great, I love the epic space battles. If Stardock manages to combine the graphics and UI of this game with the depth of Galactic Empire, they have a winner.

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RonLugge

Join Date 05/2004

+50

What bothered me a lot was the cultural influence making it impossible to conquer certain planets.

Tweaking that featuer is one of the things the devs are working on -- they know its waaaay overpowered ATM. Is basically meant to slow down your progress into an enemy empire. If you kill the entire enemy empire, they're culture will dissapear, though. If it hasn't, you must have missed a patch.

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To Ron Lugge:

I noticed you made 4 very defensive quotes... and I just wanted to put them into perspective a bit.
1: not everybody wants to play on small maps and at the same time they wouldn't want the game to last a good 10 hours
2: I'm not "bashing" them for their AI. I KNOW it's a beta and I KNOW it's in developement and not completely finished yet.
3: yes, I built every economic advantage as soon as I had the resources for them. Building refineries isnt the problem
4: yes, it is impressive (not sure if you're being sarcastic or not). A first glance is exactly that... a first glance. If you can get that much into a game (enough to play for 9 hours) the first time you play it then it is pretty impressive, especially for a beta.

To Darth:

I agree, the cultural influence is kinda a pain but it makes sense. It bugged me for the first solar system (away from my own system) I tried to conquer, so after that I just sent 3 fleets in different directions to irradicate a faction so their cultural influence would disapear... THEN I took it over. It's just meant to slow your progress, basically. Adds more of a challenge.

...but I never did manage to get my cultural influence to spread INTO another solar system and take it over culturally. My cultural influence was much stronger than the AI yet my influence stops at their star rather than going into their system.

to Tsed:

lol yeah I guess it is kinda fun... but I still like to think of ways to make it funner (in my opinion)

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kryo

Join Date 05/2003

+458

when I first started scouting the first solar system, I found it funny how an ice planet was twice as close to the star than a dessert planet
- there arent nearly enough kinds of planets in a solar system, and they arent where they should be placed.

Planet positioning within systems was initially based on 'realistic' factors, but this had to be discarded for gameplay reasons--it was too predictable as to where certain types of planets would be found, so players went straight for the best ones without needing to explore first.

That aside, a desert planet is simply dry, not necessarily hot; Mars is one, for example. Dry planets can be anywhere.

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Thanks for the reply, that does make sense.

ohhh but I have a suggestion to fix the planet predictability. Would you guys be able to create different sized planets? So just because people would go for the most suitable terran planets, they wont necessarily know if it's better than an ice planet because of different factors like the water level or planet size/mass and gravity could be a factor on the larger planets where you'd need to research some anti gravity technology.

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If you added in all of those features the differences could only boost logistics capacity up slightly making it pretty much irrelevant or frankly too much work. I think they should add unique characteristics in each gravity well like "increased speed in this secter due to chemicals in planets atmosphere" or "frequent meteor showers cause reduced shield generation". That would make defending or attacking a little more choosy than just "I see a planet, lets blow it up!" Or "dead asteroid?!? f*** this game!!"

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I agree that adding things like meteor showers would be a nice idea... there should also be nebulas. But as to my suggestions, I don't believe it to be irrelevant whatsoever. What did you mean they could only boost logistics? Adding a certain uniqueness to each planet would be nice.

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Yeah, they did individual characteristics of each planet in Star Wars: Empire at War.

The problem with all those ideas for shaping a planet is what could it affect, really? I mean, there are no ground buildings like galciv 2, there is just space construction, and deciding wether it rains or has rocky terrain can get a little too complicated. But, planet size could be neat. The larger the planet, the larger the gravitational ring or even more logistics and tactical slots. I just think gas giants would be great. Easy to decide on it's pluses and it would be amazing to see a planet with dust rings like Saturn.

I made a post about different planet variations and other problems I found with this game that I saw in previous space games. They never learn, do they?

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RonLugge

Join Date 05/2004

+50

not everybody wants to play on small maps and at the same time they wouldn't want the game to last a good 10 hours

Well, larger maps are stuck with being longer games.

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Well the shape and size of a planet could dictate the maximum population and pop growth rate. Same with a water planet that's say... 90% water. Or maybe they can add some extra economic factors onto planets besides the artifacts.

lol Ron... smart !@#... the thing is a lot of people enjoy playing on big maps with more players and I'm sure most would prefer the game lasting maybe an hour or two rather than 10. Yeah, naturally games would take longer on larger maps... but not hours longer...

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I agree with sbeare. I have had the game for a couple of weeks, and played on and off and I have found the same annoying things : slowness and confusion. Everything seems to be taking forever. The game has a lot of potential, but it seems to be very slow, tzhe controls for fleets and individual spaceships are hard, it should be easily clicking ona group of sheips and selecting just one instead it becomes an issue everytime I do it. As a single player, I finished a game after 7-8 hours with 10 stars and 100 planets, but it is very diffcult to control the navigazion from one point to another. There should a list of planets/stars where you want to go by just clicking. Instead a part having to identify and expand a star in order to pick up a planet thern is question of having to trace (using the cursor) until when one finds the star and then click the star several times ,because it seems that the response is very slow again. Another thing is zooming in/out, it does not work. I have used the wheel forward and backwards and the result is the same, it zooms in all the time. I am using Vista, 4gb proc 3.2ghz and I have a Nvidia 8800. None of which seems to give me much pleasure,... still as I have said, there is a lot of potential. It is a slight improvement in certain things on Ascendancy, but in others it is inferior. there should be more planet types and stars and more speed.

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sorry it zooms out, apologies

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actually im pretty pleased with the controls. Keep in mind that they have to have 3 easy to use axis that you can focus in on sectors while making everything 2d. I just zoom out to find a planet i want to look at then double click on it OR go to my planet list (i usually ignore my conquered systems cuz well, ther boring) and double click on one.

The thing im ticked off about is exactly what your saying about fleet management. They need to make a feature so that in your ship list on the planet interface can be used to highlight more than one ship at a time (im thinking of shift and clicking on begining and end of line). But im pleased with capitols. Some people are having theirs runing stright into gauss fields and sitting ther but im ok i leave that to light frigates (nobody likes you, 10 laser damage!).

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Oh, and to sbaer's last comment.

That's what im having trouble with. The 90% water. It can't just stop there. Hundreds of possibilities could spring up like, percipitaion, elevation, atmosphere, gravity, denisty, mass (well we already got that one), precious metals, methane lakes (i dunno, like on titan), jungle (Oooh, a jungle planet!!! thats even better than my swamp one... sry i was in a post talking about new types of planets), wind speeds, etc. If you have just percentage of water (which 90% water seems accurate rigt now with the terran planets) you can't just stop there. Its like, ordering a sandwich at subway and saying, "well, i know i want letuce..."

"and?"

"slow down there, sandwich man i'm a simple man with simple problems!"

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lmao shibfilet, thats a good one. But yeah I do agree that it shouldn't stop there. I was just putting a few examples on the table to spark somebodies imagination.

oh and litant, I do agree about the ship management... they DO have every single ship displayed on the upper left side of your screen... but that was really a bother for me so I just minimized it an hour in. Hopefully they modify it or incorporate something new.

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Yeah, that scroll bar on the side that looks like its stright out of windows 2000 does not help. They should add a tab opening and closing unexplored galaxies because in the begining in one of my games i had about 6 planets but 4 unexplored galaxies and i had to use the damn scroll bar each time i ordered my fleets into squads.

Also, just a question i forgot the answer to... what kind of special ability does the ice planet have? because i can't find the difference between a lava planet and an ice planet (in terms of logistics, tactical, population, etc.). Sorry about the delayed response i was gone for a week on vacation.

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Yarlen

Join Date 01/2005

+369

ATM, ice planets have more crystal than other planet types.

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laaame. I hate crystal extracters. They feel so... unreliable. Im trying to put 1 trade center and 1 refinery in all my sectors and maybe stack em on a desert.

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