Hi,



First of all let me congratulate and thank you for the great thing you are doing: a great game, the kind of game I have been long waiting for, a great community of enthusiasts, and the chance to communicate you our ideas. And I must also say that the pricing is really nice, it's nice of you to try to make the game accessible to most people. Thanks !



I have otherwise a couple of first remarks, which I hope you will appreciate. I played the game more or less 6-8 hours, so there is probably more to say and many more things I don't know. But anyway, since you released an alpha version I figured there is few time left to change things…



I would say that my main "problem" is all about information. When you do large-scale strategy, the key is information; you need it immediately and contextually. The game is a tool that helps you thinking and deciding, and you must know everything in one eye shot. Or almost From that perspective:



- The amount of dust is displayed in the upper-left corner. Why not in parenthesis the number of dust that is earnt or lost per turn ? If I want that information, I have to open the empire management window. it is important to be able to evaluate permanently how fast you go down when you live on the edge. On the other hand displaying what is being searched in a scroll text next to the dust total is not very useful, how often do you need to remember the technologie(s) that you just decided to research ?



- Science: the presentation of the tech tree is definitively a nice idea. However, you do not see the big picture. You have to zoom almost max to be able to read the text, which is generally a long general explanation but the real information that you need is what is the benefit of researching something. In other words, what can I build if I research something. You have to hover with the mouse to see a tooltip, and the tooltip enumerates names of things, the problem is you have no details about these things so you have no clue what these things are most of the time. And even if it was "missile-something", it still would not give me the specs of the missile in question, so I have a hard time evaluating the benefit compared to what I have already. That also means that you can't focus on an overall path you want to follow, instead you spend a lot of time trying to figure what does what. I am aware that strategy games take a lot of time to master and there is a lot of research and study But the game should help you I think, Civilization is an excellent example because it really assists you and you know what you decide.



- Having an option or not to display the time would be a plus. When you play such game, time flies ;-) It helps you keeping control over how long you play in a convenient way ;-)



- The window to manage ship designs… when I enter this screen it is generally to upgrade a ship design. If I want to do so, I have only one question and I want an answer immediately: is there something that can be upgraded ? So I want the interface to at least tell me what I am using, what is available, and I need to be able to compare that easily. I have a 30'' monitor with a resolution of 2560*1600. This is huge. It means that I see in a tiny little corner lower-left what is available, then look at two other places (tips around the ship and different way to present it at the bottom) to see what I am using exactly. I spend a lot of time looking in all corners of the screen trying to figure what ? If I developed a new shield, the lower-left corner tells me the weight and strength of the various versions I have at my disposal. Then I have to look on the right to see how many of these things I have on the ship, then look at the ship to see the total weight and strength. Then I have fun dividing these totals with the number I saw below to try to figure what version I am using and if, yes or not, I am using the latest version. This is really not fun to use as a screen



- Systems: I enter a planet and I see I different types of planets, like Arctic for example. You can pick one of 4 orientations/exploitation types. How do you know which one is best for Arctic, desert/arid, jungle, … ? Or it doesn't play a role ? The constructions are weird by the way, it feels strange to have one production queue for all planets. So that means that if you colonize 6 planets, you cannot "build" an exploitation in parallel on all planets; instead, you have to wait that the 6 planets have their exploitation made before you can actually do something with these planets, or new planets have to wait to be developed if a planet is building things that you need and can't pause. It's just a strange feeling, but I like to know that I can produce more things in parallel when I have lots of planets. Here I do not really feel the benefit of expanding except for having access to more varied resources of course.



I will post other things later probably regarding usability / information display.



Then I have a few other remarks:



- There is in Civilization an option to turn on or off barbarians. Some like barbarians, but I can tell you that some others don't like it These pirates coming constantly out of nowhere, not using conventional traveling through the lanes are extremely annoying. I can understand a pirate sometimes you know, but fleets of 3-5 ships from early on in the game, popping up more and more often without notice, at places you cannot predict neither control, is extremely annoying ! That means that I have to spend half of my production time to build battle ships to to put ships everywhere and replace the destroyed ones, and being fighting all the time, dealing again and again with the same issues and constantly go back is not necessarily what you would like to be doing when you are elaborating large-scale strategies to win against AI aliens. Truthfully this should be an option for those who like to be bothered all the time



- Sometimes you have an emergency, like for example again a pirates fleet popping up. You want to build a battle ship immediately… but you can't without destroying one of your production queues. Civilization has a couple of nice shortcuts: CTRL-Click enqueues in first position, so current construction is paused and this gets done first; SHIFT-Click enqueues; Click replaces, ALT-Click instructs to build the same thing indefinitely. You can combine, so if I CTRL-ALT-Click it will enqueue in first position but actually build indefinitely and never switch to the second item in the queue until I click it so it goes away from the queue. This is useful If a war starts, I can tell all my systems at once to build battle ships starting from immediately and till further notice. In real strategy, you re-prioritize things permanently. If you have to destroy all your queues all the time, it's not very fun



- Sometimes I select a fleet and right-click a system to go there and the fleet just doesn't go. I can send it somewhere else, but not there. I have no clue why It happened with an system and with an alien-occupied system. I can't go in this alien system and discover further systems, but he comes in my system



- When you have multiple fleets in different systems, most of the time you want to know who is where at a given time. Then you want to see who goes where, or where are the fleets that you are waiting for. You can't know that easily if you have a lot of ships, you have to click the ship to see the list of fleets appear in the tiny lower-left corner, then you have to click again the fleet to see the ships it contains. This should be visible at once, using a tooltip for example. For actually selecting the fleet, I can understand. But information is always the key, you should never have to look at different and distant regions of the screen and click multiple times to have information, it should be contextual.



- As a help, renaming the fleets could have been a workaround. Yes but, again you have to open another screen to be able to do that while you actually see better what you are looking at in the main screen. And then when you try to give a name you get confronted with the 8-characters limit. I wanted to call a fleet "Investigators" and I couldn't. A fleet called INST001 is not very useful you know



- Same remark for the ship design: I wanted to call a design "Battle Cruiser" and I couldn't. You will agree I hope that it is a bit restrictive





Okay sorry for the long post, and I hope you appreciate the feedback ;-)

dio@dioland.com wrote:


- Science: the presentation of the tech tree is definitively a nice idea. However, you do not see the big picture. You have to zoom almost max to be able to read the text, which is generally a long general explanation but the real information that you need is what is the benefit of researching something. In other words, what can I build if I research something. You have to hover with the mouse to see a tooltip, and the tooltip enumerates names of things, the problem is you have no details about these things so you have no clue what these things are most of the time. And even if it was "missile-something", it still would not give me the specs of the missile in question, so I have a hard time evaluating the benefit compared to what I have already. That also means that you can't focus on an overall path you want to follow, instead you spend a lot of time trying to figure what does what. I am aware that strategy games take a lot of time to master and there is a lot of research and study. But the game should help you I think, Civilization is an excellent example because it really assists you and you know what you decide.

Regarding the tech tree: if you mouse over the unlocks associated with a given tech, the tooltip contains all the numerical information associated with that item (damage, costs, bonuses, etc.), as well as what type of thing it is (module, system improvement, etc.)...

dio@dioland.com wrote:


- There is in Civilization an option to turn on or off barbarians. Some like barbarians, but I can tell you that some others don't like it. These pirates coming constantly out of nowhere, not using conventional traveling through the lanes are extremely annoying. I can understand a pirate sometimes you know, but fleets of 3-5 ships from early on in the game, popping up more and more often without notice, at places you cannot predict neither control, is extremely annoying! That means that I have to spend half of my production time to build battle ships to to put ships everywhere and replace the destroyed ones, and being fighting all the time, dealing again and again with the same issues and constantly go back is not necessarily what you would like to be doing when you are elaborating large-scale strategies to win against AI aliens. Truthfully this should be an option for those who like to be bothered all the time

There's an option (under advanced options on the right half of the starting screen) to disable barbarians.

dio@dioland.com wrote:


- Sometimes you have an emergency, like for example again a pirates fleet popping up. You want to build a battle ship immediately… but you can't without destroying one of your production queues. Civilization has a couple of nice shortcuts: CTRL-Click enqueues in first position, so current construction is paused and this gets done first; SHIFT-Click enqueues; Click replaces, ALT-Click instructs to build the same thing indefinitely. You can combine, so if I CTRL-ALT-Click it will enqueue in first position but actually build indefinitely and never switch to the second item in the queue until I click it so it goes away from the queue. This is useful. If a war starts, I can tell all my systems at once to build battle ships starting from immediately and till further notice. In real strategy, you re-prioritize things permanently. If you have to destroy all your queues all the time, it's not very fun.

Completely agree. I also appreciated (in Civ) the ability to select all of your cities at once and order them to build something else.

dio@dioland.com wrote:


- Sometimes I select a fleet and right-click a system to go there and the fleet just doesn't go. I can send it somewhere else, but not there. I have no clue why It happened with an system and with an alien-occupied system. I can't go in this alien system and discover further systems, but he comes in my system

Likely due to not having wormhole or warp tech. A popup message or something would be useful.

dio@dioland.com wrote:


- When you have multiple fleets in different systems, most of the time you want to know who is where at a given time. Then you want to see who goes where, or where are the fleets that you are waiting for. You can't know that easily if you have a lot of ships, you have to click the ship to see the list of fleets appear in the tiny lower-left corner, then you have to click again the fleet to see the ships it contains. This should be visible at once, using a tooltip for example. For actually selecting the fleet, I can understand. But information is always the key, you should never have to look at different and distant regions of the screen and click multiple times to have information, it should be contextual.

If you just want to know where all your fleets are at a glance, that's what the military overview screen is for. Could stand a bit of improvements, perhaps.

Hi,



Thanks for the reply, which was strangely the only answer for the numerous points I came with ;-) Okay for the tech tree my bad indeed you can see the benefits of a research; thanks too for the Pirates option, I did not see that when I was configuring the game before starting. Jeez that's 2 bad points !



On the other hand, for the problem of not being able to travel to a star system I am not sure I understand what you mean. It happened with 2 star systems that I already colonized. For some strange reason I could not go back there and that was really annoying because I needed to chase pirates. What's a warp tech ? A technology that aliens or pirates can use to block a lane ? The wormhole, is this something that can popup suddenly ?



For the military screen overview I completely disagree ;-) When I do strategy I look at a map, a list of fleets in a grid shows me nothing. Besides, this tells you about the mission of a fleet or is attributes, but not its position. Also, the point was about information So not only knowing where are your fleets, but seeing easily what they are actually composed of... on the map. I see enemies on the map, so obviously this is where I want to see mine too to see what I can do.



Cheers