After one week of playing the alpha, here is a massive list of observations, suggestions, and general statements. I’d put this in separate threads for reference but there’s a lot and I’d prefer not to spam the forums. Also, the list is too long for one post so it has to be split up into two threads.



[Suggestion] Improved ship version management: It would be nice to have a little more version control over ship designs. Being able to re-name or adjust the name of a new design would be nice. Additionally, being able to fork and merge ship designs would be nice as well since this would allow for a player to create variants of a single design without it being considered an upgrade and without breaking the lineage.



[Suggestion] Being able to organize saved games: At least for me, I tend to save religiously. Less to be able to rewind time and more simply for archival purposes – and in alpha/beta, for purposes of attempting to recreate bugs or what have you. However, this also means I tend to rack up huge amounts of save games across multiple playthroughs. It would be nice if any given playthrough was put into it’s own folder with its own saved games. So when you go to load and save games, you only saw the saved games from a particular playthrough and you would need to hit a Change Playthrough button to switch.



[Suggestion] Being able to name saved games: Similar to the previous suggestion, it would be nice to be able to name a saved game on the start of a new game so that one could differentiate between playthroughs. When every playthrough as a Sophon is named the same, it gets annoying to rename stuff every time one goes to save.



[Suggestion] Colorblind friendly empires: For me, the vast majority of the empire colors are similar to at least one or two other colors used. It would be nice if the colors were either customizable or empires were given some sort of adjective or other identifier to better aid identification.



[Balance] Even early on in the game, it’s fairly easy to encounter or create defenses that ships of the previous generation can’t even touch due to defenses. In addition, the ability of defenses to create invulnerability also means that weapons have to be balanced with more accuracy or damage to counter-balance. Allowing defenses to be non-absolute would allow older ships to remain competitive a little bit longer but also allow for weapons to be more readily balanced without resorting to massive damage/overkill.



[Suggestion] To help encourage combined armed fleets, perhaps fleets & ships get bonuses and abilities only in context of being with other ships. That is, take away a lot of the special abilities of weapons and ships and only return them when working with other ships. Other abilities could also be unlocked or gained with certain combos. For instance, when smaller ships are combined with larger ships, the smaller ships might get an accuracy bonus while the larger ships get a dodge bonus to simulate the larger ship providing aiming and ECM and thus allowing the smaller ship to get in closer while smaller ships screen for the larger ship. The overall idea is that ships, technology, and team work act not as significantly more effective but more like force multipliers – they make what you have better.



[Suggestion] Multi-fleet combat: A simple solution would be that for each fleet in a system, at each phase adds in a new fleet (or part there of) as reinforcements that replace any losses or act as a second fleet. The additional fleet would start at a distance one further than the current one. For instance, reinforcements that come in during the Medium Range phase would be considered to be at Long Range.



[Observation] The Cyberskilled Skill: This skill is pointless because there’s never a situation where you wouldn’t take it. Thus just assume everyone will take it and give this skill out for free with its perquisite skill or what have you.



[Observation/Suggestion] The idea of cold war and under the table dealings: The use of the idea of a cold war is fantastic. That is, indirect and non-binary diplomacy. It would be nice to see additional sorts of actions available. For instance, being able to gift resources or ships under the table to another or gift intelligence.

After one week of playing the alpha, here is a massive list of observations, suggestions, and general statements. I’d put this in separate threads for reference but there’s a lot and I’d prefer not to spam the forums. Also, the list is too long for one post so it has to be split up into two threads.





[Suggestion] Victory progress: Currently, no way to tell how far along you are other than scientific. This would be nice.



[Suggestion] Random events clarity: Random events need to say not just what happened but to what. If something got a vision upgrade, we should know where and what.



[Suggestion] Economic Victory: Currently, you just stockpile income. However, this is both unsatisfying and also doesn’t allow for opponents to really to counter and combat this form of victory. More importantly, the method of achieving this victory is automatic and something the player does not actively have to strive for like other forms of victory. One suggestion would be that to work towards economic victory, the player must invest or otherwise use that income actively. For instance, they must make payments towards the victory total or give up some of their positive income. To allow others to interfere, perhaps allow others to hinder progress with their own investments (which don’t count towards victory).



[Suggestion] Planetary defense: I like the slow pace of invasion and war. However, invasion itself is a little unsatisfying for both attacker and defender. Perhaps give planets some sort of inherent ability to actively defend themselves – making sorties, launching planet-to-space missiles, or simply shooting down invading troops. Meanwhile, allow attackers to actively ‘attack’ a planet at the cost of HP and such. This would conceptually similar to how Civ 5 treats cities. Other options would be the ability to use money or other means to delay or otherwise combat invasion. But likewise, for attacks, this would allow for things like orbital bombardments ie siege weapons. And for visual interest, some of these options can use the current system of combat – how neat would it be to see a planetary bombardment for instance.



[Suggestion] Game speed: Personally, I think even on slow, the game is too fast. It would be nice if there were even slower speeds available as an option. This includes both research costs as well as overall game speed.



[Suggestion] Map size: Likewise, I think even on huge, the map is kind of small. It would be nice to have even larger map options.



[Observation] Clicking the Amplitude icon in the forums takes you to the website - I like this. This avoids the redundancy since you always drop down in form via the path. On the other hand, the forums don’t allow you to save your login information so I’m constantly having to relog in over the day.



[Suggestion] More starting options that allow random: I like randomization in my starting conditions. Having more options that allow for random would be nice.



[Suggestion] Cold war: Again, the idea of a cold war is really nice and innovative idea. It would be nice to be able to go back to cold war status to allow for a distinction between peace & war, friend and enemy.



[Suggestion] Listening posts: Given the large amounts of space between planets at times, it would be nice to be able to create listening posts in space. These would act as a stationary ring of visibility with some form of upkeep.

[Suggestion] Merging fleets: When merging fleets, named fleets should take priority over auto-named ones. After all, we probably named them for a reason. I’ve had instances where, forgetting that the first thing I pick is the parent, I’ve merged fleets and promptly lost my naming. Since I use naming extensively for organization, this is annoying.



[Suggestion] Fleet name length: It’s really really short. I can barely fit 1st Fleet. It would be nice if the length allowed for fleet names was longer.



[Suggestion] Ships in hanger as defenses: Other than buying improvements, there’s not a lot of ways to really improve defenses on a planet. One way would be to consider ships in a planet’s hanger as additional defenses (that took damage). This would be balanced out by the natural requirement of having to build or move ships to a planet for it to count. For a planet under siege, this would mean buying or building ships on the planet.



[Suggestion] Make greater use of the card system: Borrow ideas form TCGs. For instance, instead of giving races a flat constant bonus to ships and such, each race might get additional modifiers on cards or even get their own custom card they could use in combat. For instance, Cravers and Hissho might see a +10% attack bonus on any Offfensive card. Expanding on the idea of card options would also allow for special bonuses that aren’t directly related to FIDS and what have you – being able to find special cards via random events or as a reward for a super-monopoly on resources.



[Suggestion] Hybrid Heroes: Currently, hybrid heroes are far less valuable than pure administrator and pure combat heroes since skills don’t translate. Allowing attributes to affect both parts would help alleviate this – for instance, skilled administrators might reduce the upkeep of the fleet they’re attached too while skilled corporate managers might grant a small CP bonus for the fleet. Skilled pilots and admirals might provide a ship construction bonus or XP bonus when assigned to a syste.



[Observation] When loading a saved game, a lot of things don’t’ seem to be saved such as notifications. But also things like planets don’t seem to load up until after significant delay.



[Observation] Warp: It can be somewhat advantageous depending on situation. A means of balancing the benefit of it may be something like an increased movement cost for non-friendly systems, inaccuracy in the destination, or some such. However, a simple solution would be to treat it more like the idea of paratroopers rather than a mode of travel. You can warp into range of a friendly target and that’s about it.



[Observation] Techs: Some techs/ship upgrades are organized oddly. More advanced ones aren’t necessarily more powerful in some cases and certain benefits are actually lost with higher upgrades. In a large number of cases, you’re better off not actually upgrading because it’ll be worse. While this may be intended on a certain level, the high frequency of it means it’s highly counter-intuitive as much as it is a strategic choice. It also means that researching better stuff occasionally feels like a waste of time.



[Suggestion] On the fleet screen, it would be nice if you could double click on a fleet in order to jump to and select that fleet.



[Observation] Main menu music: I love it. It has a nice space opera feel.



[Observation] Guerilla tactics & invasion speed: I like the slow pace of war - invasions take a long time (at least how I'm playing) which is good since unlike a land based TBS, movement options and such are far more limited. It also allows for a continuation of a cold war and a fairly unique tactic in TBS/RTS - the ability to hit and run/guerilla tactics - you can jump in to a system, spend a turn invading, then run away. but this invasion time -very- quickly goes down and turns it into a slug fest. That is, at a certain point, it takes a fleet only a handful of turns to invade making it difficult to respond but also taking away a lot of the strategic consideration. You’re better off simply giving up a planet usually and attacking from another direction.



[Observation] The little dots next to planets to show colonization status: As someone who is partially color blind, the grey/blue/white dots all look basically the same to me. Changing the colors a bit would help with the intent of this part of the UI