Hello



I am a new user, pre-purchased and have around 30 hours in so far, I have a few comments to make about the game, which is very good overall but some things just seem to strange



A) Can the devs or mods make a starting location (homeplanet) that is not highly trashy and require a restart of the game, for ex, if you set max number of planets (6) and your solar system has 4, 3 of which are barren, then a restart is in order else you will be to far behind.

B) If you do not have an adminstrator as one of the first heroes you get, you are pretty much forced to restart, the +25 production bonus from director is too much to pass up, given that early your colony produces maybe 10 production with 3-4 people points in it.

C) Some races have a harder time starting up, for ex the humans get that weird anomaly on their home world, if you do not have any other good planets to colonize near your home system or in your home system you are at a high drawback and are somehat forced to "relocate" your capital to another system however you cant move the capital building (like the palace in Civ series). this makes you lose a few good turns until your new colony grows up to speed.

D) Some races have the starting planet an inferior quality, for ex Cravens, Horatio they start with an Arid planet, which provides less bonues then Sophons who start on a Terran planet. Horatios get a free pass due to their bonuses which makes you grow fast but you are still kinda limited



Regards

Ashdrake, welcome to the forum!

I really like the idea of trying to balance the starts for each race. This will probably be even more important in multiplayer later, where a dramatic difference in starting systems could accumulate to big starting advantages.



Civilization 5 seemed to go to great effort to do this, not only trying to balance each starting location but also trying to match start location features with civ preference. Even if it means the map isn't entirely "random", this kind of start balance would be really nice. Like Civilization, it could be tunable as an advanced map setting and turned off if you want something unforgiving and random, or boosted to high levels ("Legendary Start") if you want everyone to start with amazing systems.



Edit: I didn't mean to imply otherwise, but race-specific start penalties should be be applied on top of the otherwise-balanced starts even with this suggestion.

Ashdrake wrote:
you are pretty much forced to restart

You say this part alot. While this might become true if you are playing against humans, the AI isn't that good...



You can, even on the hardest difficulties, come back from openings with a single home-system planet and no administrators most of the time. I suppose you might not be interested in playing if there is even a 20% chance of loss, but the game needs some difficulty somewhere in it.





Maybe when AIs are improved this might become more important.

I get the impression that the point is to encourage you to consider exploration and expansion.



Yeah, it might take a bit longer to get things off the ground fully, but what are you going face later on when the other factions who have aggressively expanded unlock the other habitat types? Sure you may have a really nice beefy home system, but they're looking at multiple systems with planets giving various production bonuses, and each system is capable of simultaneously building ships to capitalise on the dust/productivity.



I'm thinking that it might be better to adapt play style to take those "less than ideal" start positions and work with them towards mid to late game goals instead of just rerolling in the hope that you get your ideal system.

Ashdrake wrote:
Hello



I am a new user, pre-purchased and have around 30 hours in so far, I have a few comments to make about the game, which is very good overall but some things just seem to strange



A) Can the devs or mods make a starting location (homeplanet) that is not highly trashy and require a restart of the game, for ex, if you set max number of planets (6) and your solar system has 4, 3 of which are barren, then a restart is in order else you will be to far behind.

B) If you do not have an adminstrator as one of the first heroes you get, you are pretty much forced to restart, the +25 production bonus from director is too much to pass up, given that early your colony produces maybe 10 production with 3-4 people points in it.

C) Some races have a harder time starting up, for ex the humans get that weird anomaly on their home world, if you do not have any other good planets to colonize near your home system or in your home system you are at a high drawback and are somehat forced to "relocate" your capital to another system however you cant move the capital building (like the palace in Civ series). this makes you lose a few good turns until your new colony grows up to speed.

D) Some races have the starting planet an inferior quality, for ex Cravens, Horatio they start with an Arid planet, which provides less bonues then Sophons who start on a Terran planet. Horatios get a free pass due to their bonuses which makes you grow fast but you are still kinda limited



Regards

Ashdrake,



You can remedy some of those issues right now to enhance your gameplay. C cannot really be avoided as it's a flaw that balances the UE for their amazing late game power with the dust boost, but you can take measures to make the planets in your system better. You can go to advance galactic settings and setting your planets to large and set the number of planets in a system to high, then when you're out in the normal game setup screen, set your galaxy to normal for its age. Doing all this should give you a play experience that shouldn't require you to restart.



Sadly I have no work around for not having a good hero for governing, but I personally just try to roll with what I am given. I find it as a challenge to see if I can scrape out a living. This can be very difficult at the higher levels, because like their real world counterparts, the people are very quick to get unhappy and require you to get those approval bonus traits from the hero quite fast.



As for D, well, I'm sure there will be some tweaking on the side of the devs to make at least their starting planet a little nicer. I normally play the Sophons and Humans, so I don't encounter this issue all too often, but I can surely see your point.