Hiya



I picked up your game last week after watching a LP of it on YouTube. I was in the mood for a 4x and the streamlined interface attracted me. SMAC is one of my favorite games, and I've played Civ4/5, TW, and Crusader Kings over the years. I'm also a big fan of good industrial and UX design, so I was excited to find a strategy game with a good UI - as much as I like strategy games, they have awful UIs. I think there's room in the market for a 4x game with a reasonable and intuitive learning curve.



Four games (Formers, Horatio, Cravers, sciencers) and a week later, I don't feel a particular desire to play the game. It's still got a load of potential, but I think it could stand a lot of ironing out. I thought I'd offer my notes from my blind playthroughs. Green is praise. Red is low-hanging fruit or high-value suggestions - features that I believe would have an excellent ROI of effort. Grey is features that I've seen already suggested on the board.



If any of you other players feel that my experience is far out of line with your own, please feel free to contradict or correct me. This is just data, and it can only be enriched by your own input.



UI

-Why is there no random select for galaxy type?

-The tutorial is pretty wordy. The ideal interface is intuitive. Still, I suppose it's better to have than to not have.

-Reorder the race traits on the selection menu to feature the important ones first, rather than last. The Horatio aren't exactly defined by their starting techs, and had to save and quit the game to doublecheck what my faction bonuses were (I later realized I could do this from diplomacy).

-The game feels like it was designed for both PC and tablet (click and drag to scroll, unity engine), which I think is a brilliant idea. The best place for a strategy game is in bed and Lord knows we have enough artillery and farmville games on the iPad. I don't know if the business makes sense, but I trust you guys have that figured out.

-Right click to exit menus is pretty neat, but it feels like you're overloading the action. When a ship is selected on the galaxy screen, right click is also used to move the unit, a la the Civ and Starcraft conventions. It's probably fine as is, but inside of menus, I often found myself right clicking on items to try to drill down into them for more information, a la the windows convention. I think the mouse-over popups can display a little more agressively, as I sometimes feel like I'm waiting for the interface.

-I sometimes found myself trying to box around units to select them and failing. Most games that feature zoom and tiny units will also feature unit flags that you can click on.

-Hotkeys. f1-5 for the tabs, SpaceBar for open/dismiss next notification.

-On the galaxy map, the luxuries have no visual distinction for when you're able to harvest them or not. They should be red (like planets) when you can't.

-I got a unity NullPointer exception in some random part of the game, and it just gave me a pop-up instead of crashing me to desktop. This is AMAZING.



Fleet management

-I actually lost several turns without realizing that a Settler had been built before I noticed that one was hidden in the hangar. I don't see a particularly good reason for units to remain in the hangar unless you're under siege (which is a relatively rare case) - I think you should consider eliminating the hangar altogether, and deal with siege some other way.

-Why can't the fleet management window be bigger? If I've got 10 fleets, organizing them is hell.

-Rally points would also be nice. You can't see the ships within the fleets you have selected when trying to merge them.

-The execute all scheduled moves button is brilliant.

-However, if two fleets engage at the same time, it's not possible to manual battle both. I'll expand on this in the gameplay section.

-There's no visual queue that shows that a unit is healing. I honestly wasn't sure whether units could heal at all in the same, or if I had to repair them or if I had to disband them. This would all be resolved with a simple visual affordance.

-Why are there no "work work" audio reports when units are selected? I've seen this suggested before, but people underestimate how important those are. They're an audio affordance that let the user know that he's successfully selected something - the fact that they can help you establish an identity for the different races is just a bonus. You should have audio reports at a minimum. Differentiate by race as a mid-term goal. Differentiate by weapon load-out type as a stretch. If you record the reports in some random alien screeching, you won't have to internationalize them.





System Queue

-When reordering the queue, I tried to drag items between the two items where I wanted it to go, and it would snap to the end of the list. After a day, I realized you were supposed to drag it into the queue slot where you wanted it to go. Make the space between the tabs a valid area for dragging and reordering tabs, so that both mental models can be supported.

-Add to front of queue.

-Add to all cities. Add to front of queue for all cities. This can be more difficult for tablet - you should have a special selector on the F1 tab for "All Cities", where you can manipulate all the queues simultaneously. If there are 30 different improvements in the game, I don't want to click through 30 different systems to add it to their queues.

-Repeat add to end of queue, like in Civ4.

-Enhance the mouseover for system improvements to have them say how much they'll ACTUALLY improve the FIDS in your system. If an improvement will do NOTHING for my system, I don't want to have to scan through all my planet types again to make sure. Calculating the immediate and potential benefit of an improvement is rote, and should be automatic on the mouseover (immediate, potential on full population).

-Reorder the build menu to feature the most valuable FIDS system enhancements first.

-Add a configuration option to disallow you from (or warn you from) building a system improvement that generates *no* value for that system. It would mostly be used in conjunction w/ the Add to all cities functionality.

-The build completed notification should be split into two: builds completed and next build started, and builds completed and no build queued. The former is a strict report of information, where the later requires your input.

-Removing the last instance of a build from the queue eliminates all the production invested into it. This is profoundly irritating - no production should ever be lost on any build because of a tweak in the UI.





Ship builder

-Put a + button on the components already on the ship. The game rewards you for making delicate balances between components - adding one, removing another. It shouldn't force you to mouse across the screen several times whenever you want to lose one of A for one of B.

-The auto-upgrade button is fantastic.





Tech tree

-Why are system "improvements" things that you build, and empire "improvements" things that you get passively? You need to change the term on empire improvements to be something more informative.

-Why is the empire improvement icon a star? Systems orbit stars - the star implies a system improvement. It should be something else.

-Why are the icons for each of the ground assault technologies completely different? There's no way of intuitively knowing that they're ground assault techs.





Diplomacy

-Why is there no notification when you go from war to cold-war, or when you are pulled into peace by your alliance? There's also no visual indication of whether you're at war or not (or open boarders or not) on the galaxy map.

-Exactly how much dust/diplomacy is necessary for a victory? The % is nice I guess, but a turn counter to victory would be MUCH more useful.

Gameplay



-As is the case with most strategy games, Tech trading can be abusive. It's fortunately not essential, as the AIs don't seem eager to trade techs with each other, but it's still abusive (even at 3-1 or 4-1 rates, trading the tech costs you nothing and gets you a free benefit). The most frustrating thing about Civ4 was that optimal strategies at higher difficulties would research a tech that the AI never researched just to broker it. There's no way of knowing that the AI never researches that tech except through experience, and that's just bad design.

The problem of tech trading is a large one and is not easily solved. Civ4 has a stopgap where they stop trading with you after you get a certain number of techs in trade, but that's inelegant. It's worth thinking about.



-As far as I can tell, there's no particularly good reason to add weapons of different classes on a ship, except to hedge your matchups. In fact, all the weapons within each class feel a bit samey - Kinetic 1-7, Laser 1-7, Missle 1-7. There's some good design in the lower levels, where the 1st level of missle and laser require strategic resources, but after that, it doesn't seem like there's much difference. If there is, hidden somewhere in those weapon stats, I can't be bothered to read through them to find out.

It would be nice if different levels of weapons had different properties; high accuracy, high damage variance, EMP properties (disabling components), DOT properties, with bits of iconography on the icon to indicate that weapon level's specialty. It would give me a reason to go for laser 5 other than the fact that it's 1-more.



-The dust-discount hero abilties on tactics cards feels worthless. One of the starting tactics cards should cost dust, and be overpowered. It should also be countered by a relatively weak card and by retreat. This will get players used to the idea of spending dust in battles, and makes for interesting risk-reward scenarios.



-Hero assignments feel kind of rote. If you're at war, put them on your best fleet. If you're at peace, put them on your best city. It would be nice to have an inbetween choice - sending them on quests to race for artifacts or new faction traits for empire-wide boosts. Other people have suggested spying and diplomacy as well a la Crusader Kings, which I also like.



-I'm not sure I understand how production overflow works. If I leave the build queue blank, does the production get saved and spill over into the next build? If I build one ship every turn that costs less than the production I put out, can I build up production indefinately? Droping into the city every turn to enqueue one cheap ship is an incredible pain in the ass (like drafting in Civ4), but if it's optimal strategy for, say, 1-turning the win-condition structures when you get the tech, then it's the optimal strategy.

Overflow needs to be standardized and made discoverable. Is there a maximum overflow? How much is being committed to what?



-Why can't your research backwards into the tech tree?



-The number one reason why I stopped playing was because of the lack of cards in auto-combat (particularly retreat in the early game). Combat is just way too time consuming, and most battles are actually won in their preparation (with fleet composition). I realize that simulating combat with cards could be a lot of development effort, but you must realize that this isn't really a game about combat. The only reason most expansionistic strategy games feature tactical combat is focus fire, which lets you unbalance the enemy's composition to improve your own matchups. This game just doesn't have that.



-The races feel a little samey. Their abilities are certainly different, but every game I find myself going down similar tech paths in the opening, and my game becomes defined much more by the geography I spawn in rather than my race abilities. I saw some suggestions for mirrored universe galaxy types,which makes sense to me. In general though, more of the benefits need to be early-game focused, so they can actually affect your expansion.

-Maybe add a unique combat card for each race? That seems like a relatively low investment, and can really bring some character to the battles. (The card for the scientists would be a super-retreat =D).



-The game feels like it has the same problem Civ5 has, in that it's too linear. You can't make specialized plans, because no matter what you do, the best option will improve everything at once. There's no reason to specialize a system for science, because the specialized FIDS multipliers don't come into play until much later in the game - you just build the best enhancement for each planet type. I've never even bothered to change any planet types in any of my games - there was no point.

-There is no way to stagger your goals. There are no landmarks. There are no wonders, or rewards on discovering a tech first - just military and a gradual slog of tech. The joy of these "one more turn" games is that you have many different things cooking at once. In 3 turns I get oracle for the slingshot, in 5 months the siege breaks and my 2nd heir comes of age, etc. In this game, it's just 5 turns to Missles 6, with nothing else cooking at the time (other than new lvl1 heros, which is pointless). This is one instance where adding quests for heros could create some nice goal staggering.

-There's no urgency in the tech tree. One of the best innovations of Civ Revolution was that it gave a reward to the first person to discover a tech, for every tech. This turned the game into a 3-pronged race, between expansion/happiness, military/production, and science. I've sometimes felt that urgency in the bottom and left trees, when I needed techs to maintain my empire's expansion with happiness, but never in the top and right trees.

-It'd be nice if there were more interaction between the tech trees. Maybe a circle between 4 mid-level techs in each of the trees so that you can make a sudden tangent if you reach one of the four. Make focusing on a single tech tree a trade-off/investment - otherwise, nobody will do it and nobody will actually encounter the penalties you levy against players who neglect some of the tech trees. Choice is important to strategy games.



-It doesn't feel like there's much you can do with dust. You can speed up production and lower tax rates, but that's about it. Heros are a kind of one-time cost. It seems almost worthless in trade, and you can't convert it to science or food in any way. For a resource that's supposed to be the most important thing, it feels like a watered down and focused version of production (and a victory condition, apparently).

-It would be nice if you could "invest" the dust for a deferred reward. Maybe a 10% return on 500 dust in 10 turns if you keep peace on a planet, or maybe a prototype ship, or a tech or an artifact/faction trait. Just something to look forward to.

I don't think any mod would really call me out for this triple-post, but just in case: At least it was productive! And there's no other way to fit 25,000 characters into a 10,000 character limit.

GenericKen wrote:
Why is there no random select for galaxy type?

I'm not sure if anyone's suggested this before - probably have - but it seems like a useful feature, even if I might never use it.

GenericKen wrote:
-The tutorial is pretty wordy. The ideal interface is intuitive. Still, I suppose it's better to have than to not have.

You're not the first to point this out. I think the devs have this as a low priority thing to fix, but there's been a bit of discussions about creating scenarios and stuff.

The reason there's no interactive campaign is because there's no trigger events in the game yet. Meaning, there's no way for the game to know whether or not you've done something, and it can't wait until you've done it to react - which is important for a tutorial.

GenericKen wrote:
-Reorder the race traits on the selection menu to feature the important ones first, rather than last. The Horatio aren't exactly defined by their starting techs, and had to save and quit the game to doublecheck what my faction bonuses were (I later realized I could do this from diplomacy).

I've never really noticed this as an issue before. I'll check next time I play. Although it sounds like a rather nitpicky issue - and plus, how would you judge what bonuses are more "important" than others? I think the easy fix would be to have a separate category that shows your starting techs, but that sounds like a complicated solution to a simple problem.

GenericKen wrote:
-The game feels like it was designed for both PC and tablet (click and drag to scroll, unity engine), which I think is a brilliant idea. The best place for a strategy game is in bed and Lord knows we have enough artillery and farmville games on the iPad. I don't know if the business makes sense, but I trust you guys have that figured out.

I'll agree that the click and drag to scroll is a bit weird, but quite frankly, by now I'm so used to it I try to do it in other games I play as well. It's quite handy in Gratuitous Space battles.

Still, I never really figured out why you can't scroll along the edges. Perhaps the devs themselves were used to click-and-drag (for whatever reason) and so nobody noticed the lack of sidescrolling?

Still, I don't think it's worth the harsh words you gave it. It's a pain if you're not used to it, but it's not like the devs had ported this from an iPad or anything.

GenericKen wrote:
-Right click to exit menus is pretty neat, but it feels like you're overloading the action. When a ship is selected on the galaxy screen, right click is also used to move the unit, a la the Civ and Starcraft conventions. It's probably fine as is, but inside of menus, I often found myself right clicking on items to try to drill down into them for more information, a la the windows convention. I think the mouse-over popups can display a little more agressively, as I sometimes feel like I'm waiting for the interface.

I think they're fast enough; I've never noticed any wait time for them to pop up. Maybe it's a computer issue? Still, I don't have any problems with wiring my brain for right-clicking out of menus, and I also played a lot of Civ 5.

GenericKen wrote:
-I sometimes found myself trying to box around units to select them and failing. Most games that feature zoom and tiny units will also feature unit flags that you can click on.

This also seems like a rather nitpicky issue. I'm not saying it's a bad idea, but it's not like zooming in and out takes more than five seconds. Maybe it's five seconds you would rather save, but at what point do you draw the line between convenience and impatience?

GenericKen wrote:
-Hotkeys. f1-5 for the tabs, SpaceBar for open/dismiss next notification.

Hotkeys are an issue that's been presented before. I would never use them myself, but I fully agree with their inclusion.

GenericKen wrote:
-On the galaxy map, the luxuries have no visual distinction for when you're able to harvest them or not. They should be red (like planets) when you can't.

Simply and extremely helpful. I like it.

GenericKen wrote:
-I got a unity NullPointer exception in some random part of the game, and it just gave me a pop-up instead of crashing me to desktop. This is AMAZING.

Check the Tech Support forums. There's an apparently massive thread going on about this.

GenericKen wrote:
-I actually lost several turns without realizing that a Settler had been built before I noticed that one was hidden in the hangar. I don't see a particularly good reason for units to remain in the hangar unless you're under siege (which is a relatively rare case) - I think you should consider eliminating the hangar altogether, and deal with siege some other way.

I think the hangar is useful for keeping fleets in a system without risking them being attacked, and also so your enemy won't know how well-defended your planets are, and you can surprise attack them.

The most important part of the hangar, however, is that it doesn't spawn your fleets. Why is that important? Because of the CP caps. How would you deal with unit creation without the hangar? Spawn each unit in its own fleet? That would be painful if your system is under attack and your one ship won't do it. Would you put all the ships into a fleet until it's full, then make another? The management issues of having to deal with this system would be phenomenal.

GenericKen wrote:
-Why can't the fleet management window be bigger? If I've got 10 fleets, organizing them is hell.

I agree that this can be an issue, but simply making them bigger doesn't sound like a good idea. It should be dealt with, but in a different way.

GenericKen wrote:
-Rally points would also be nice. You can't see the ships within the fleets you have selected when trying to merge them.

I'm not entirely sure what your point here is. I feel like you're talking about two completely different things, so am I misunderstanding or was it bad wording?

GenericKen wrote:
-The execute all scheduled moves button is brilliant.

It was a late addition after a lot of people complained about not having one. I do hope it will be phased out at some point for a better system, though, since the current ship movement system seems horribly inefficient.

GenericKen wrote:
-However, if two fleets engage at the same time, it's not possible to manual battle both. I'll expand on this in the gameplay section.

This is a design decision to keep multiplayer games in motion, but a lot of people have been angsty about it and they're going to fix it. I think the inclusion of Battle Actions in Auto will solve the issue (and it's one of the next things to be included).

GenericKen wrote:
-There's no visual queue that shows that a unit is healing. I honestly wasn't sure whether units could heal at all in the same, or if I had to repair them or if I had to disband them. This would all be resolved with a simple visual affordance.

Ships are always repairing. That's why there's no visual cue.

GenericKen wrote:
-Why are there no "work work" audio reports when units are selected? I've seen this suggested before, but people underestimate how important those are. They're an audio affordance that let the user know that he's successfully selected something - the fact that they can help you establish an identity for the different races is just a bonus. You should have audio reports at a minimum. Differentiate by race as a mid-term goal. Differentiate by weapon load-out type as a stretch. If you record the reports in some random alien screeching, you won't have to internationalize them.

I agree that they should be added, but personally I disagree with your claims of their importance. There's already a ticking sound when you select units, which is good enough in my opinion.

GenericKen wrote:
-When reordering the queue, I tried to drag items between the two items where I wanted it to go, and it would snap to the end of the list. After a day, I realized you were supposed to drag it into the queue slot where you wanted it to go. Make the space between the tabs a valid area for dragging and reordering tabs, so that both mental models can be supported.

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here, as I've not had an issue with it, but I'll take your word for it.

GenericKen wrote:
-Add to front of queue.

Extremely minor grevience. Though I suppose you could right-click production options to move them to front (right clicking anywhere else will back out of the menu) and it should be a solid solution.

GenericKen wrote:
-Add to all cities. Add to front of queue for all cities. This can be more difficult for tablet - you should have a special selector on the F1 tab for "All Cities", where you can manipulate all the queues simultaneously. If there are 30 different improvements in the game, I don't want to click through 30 different systems to add it to their queues.

I'm not even sure the game is available on tablet, but this also seems like it could cause problems for any system. And besides, you'll still have to zoom in to systems to explore moons and construct exploitations.

GenericKen wrote:
-Repeat add to end of queue, like in Civ4.

It's been suggested before, and I fully agree. Although mashing the production option seems to do the trick for me.

GenericKen wrote:
-Enhance the mouseover for system improvements to have them say how much they'll ACTUALLY improve the FIDS in your system. If an improvement will do NOTHING for my system, I don't want to have to scan through all my planet types again to make sure. Calculating the immediate and potential benefit of an improvement is rote, and should be automatic on the mouseover (immediate, potential on full population).

There are a few issues for this. First of all, the tax system. As you lower taxes, the amount of Dust you get from improvements decreases, meaning the values you see could be irrelevant. The same goes for the other FIS with Population and Approval; Approval goes down, FIS return goes down. Population goes up, FIS return goes up. If you're already taking all of these factors into account, it shouldn't be difficult to calculate quickly what returns you'll get on improvements.

GenericKen wrote:
-Reorder the build menu to feature the most valuable FIDS system enhancements first.

Again, this could become a logistical nightmare. With the three variables I mentioned above that could be in constant fluctuation, this could almost cause more problems rather than creating them. Take this scenario:

Two system improvements in queue. Two planets: Desert and Jungle. A new Industry improvement (let's say N-Way Fusion Plants) and a Food improvement (let's say Epigenetic Crop Seeding). The Industry improvement will give 1 more Industry than the Food production will give Food, so it constructs that first. One turn before that completes, the Jungle's population goes up by one, and now the Food improvement gives 1 more Food than the Industry. So it stops constructing the fusion plants and starts a whole new project.

You can try to design all sorts of workarounds for all sorts of scenarios, but really, you'd just be creating an incredibly complex system. Plus, think of all the scenarios where you may want to construct a lesser return value improvement first - for example, it will be constructed faster. You're creating a logistical nightmare in response to a minor gripe.

GenericKen wrote:
-Add a configuration option to disallow you from (or warn you from) building a system improvement that generates *no* value for that system. It would mostly be used in conjunction w/ the Add to all cities functionality.

Again, going back to my three variables, this could be a curse instead of a blessing (when you try to build an improvement anticipating population growth).

GenericKen wrote:
-The build completed notification should be split into two: builds completed and next build started, and builds completed and no build queued. The former is a strict report of information, where the later requires your input.

I think instead, you should be able to zoom in on a planet by clicking on it in the window. The issue with splitting up the notifications is that you can minimize the notification, update the queues, and then the notification will update.

Plus, what if your system has a new construction, but you want to change it? Then you'll want the "report" window to be merged with the "input" window, so you may as well skip a step.

GenericKen wrote:
-Removing the last instance of a build from the queue eliminates all the production invested into it. This is profoundly irritating - no production should ever be lost on any build because of a tweak in the UI.

Agreed.

GenericKen wrote:
-Put a + button on the components already on the ship. The game rewards you for making delicate balances between components - adding one, removing another. It shouldn't force you to mouse across the screen several times whenever you want to lose one of A for one of B.

Minor but necessary improvement, hope they find a solution without breaking something in the process.

GenericKen wrote:
-Why are system "improvements" things that you build, and empire "improvements" things that you get passively? You need to change the term on empire improvements to be something more informative.

Give examples of where you have this issue?

GenericKen wrote:
-Why are the icons for each of the ground assault technologies completely different? There's no way of intuitively knowing that they're ground assault techs.

This is another minor issue, and quite frankly, the game rewards you for reading and also memorizing. By 'memorizing', I mean playing the game enough that you know what everything is - and if you forget something, read it!

GenericKen wrote:
Why is there no notification when you go from war to cold-war, or when you are pulled into peace by your alliance? There's also no visual indication of whether you're at war or not (or open boarders or not) on the galaxy map.

Totally agree with you.

GenericKen wrote:
-Exactly how much dust/diplomacy is necessary for a victory? The % is nice I guess, but a turn counter to victory would be MUCH more useful.

[/quote]



Another useful addition.

GenericKen wrote:
-As far as I can tell, there's no particularly good reason to add weapons of different classes on a ship, except to hedge your matchups. In fact, all the weapons within each class feel a bit samey - Kinetic 1-7, Laser 1-7, Missle 1-7. There's some good design in the lower levels, where the 1st level of missle and laser require strategic resources, but after that, it doesn't seem like there's much difference. If there is, hidden somewhere in those weapon stats, I can't be bothered to read through them to find out.

The lower-end weapons cost less Tonnage and less Industry to produce. It's not really a matter of combat efficiency, but rather production efficiency. The same reason you may not want to fill ships up to 100% Tonnage.

GenericKen wrote:
It would be nice if different levels of weapons had different properties; high accuracy, high damage variance, EMP properties (disabling components), DOT properties, with bits of iconography on the icon to indicate that weapon level's specialty. It would give me a reason to go for laser 5 other than the fact that it's 1-more.

The system does seem a bit broken, but this doesn't seem like the best solution; it would create a battle system that was almost IMPOSSIBLE to balance properly.

GenericKen wrote:
-The dust-discount hero abilties on tactics cards feels worthless. One of the starting tactics cards should cost dust, and be overpowered. It should also be countered by a relatively weak card and by retreat. This will get players used to the idea of spending dust in battles, and makes for interesting risk-reward scenarios.

I'm not sure if I agree with the second half here, but I do agree that the dust discount feels like it's just absolutely not worth the time. By the time you have free level up points to spend, you have so much Dust that it doesn't matter.

It might be better to just increase the cost of abilities dramatically, from 20 to 200, so there's actually a reason you'd want them to be cheaper.

GenericKen wrote:
-Hero assignments feel kind of rote. If you're at war, put them on your best fleet. If you're at peace, put them on your best city. It would be nice to have an inbetween choice - sending them on quests to race for artifacts or new faction traits for empire-wide boosts. Other people have suggested spying and diplomacy as well a la Crusader Kings, which I also like.

I generally find that it's better to have Heroes that specialize in System improvements and leave them in systems, and have Heroes that specialize in Fleet improvements and leave them in fleets. I never find myself swapping them between fleets and systems, especially since war/peacetime (or lack of either) does not make either of them useless.

GenericKen wrote:
-Why can't your research backwards into the tech tree?

Because it would be a bad idea. A very, very bad idea.

For example, players who are ahead in tech are the ones who would make most use of this. If they're ahead in tech, allowing them to go backwards would basically let them "skip" tech, meaning they gain an even greater tech advantage. Forcing them to spend some time researching older techs will at least slow them down.

Also, if you could research tech backwards, it would make a lot of the lower-level tech even less useful.

GenericKen wrote:
-The number one reason why I stopped playing was because of the lack of cards in auto-combat (particularly retreat in the early game). Combat is just way too time consuming, and most battles are actually won in their preparation (with fleet composition).

I'll stop you here and remind you that battle actions in auto are an upcoming addition (the next addition if it wins the G2G vote, which I haven't checked in a while).

GenericKen wrote:
-The races feel a little samey. Their abilities are certainly different, but every game I find myself going down similar tech paths in the opening, and my game becomes defined much more by the geography I spawn in rather than my race abilities. I saw some suggestions for mirrored universe galaxy types,which makes sense to me. In general though, more of the benefits need to be early-game focused, so they can actually affect your expansion.

Again, I feel like you bundled three different discussions into one bulletpoint. There have been talks about the races being a bit samey, but I personally disagree. I also find that not all races follow the same trees; for example, a Sophon player will research more into the Diplomacy tree than a Craver player. Mirrored universe galaxy types were a response to unbalanced map generation, and I hate the idea of mirrored maps.

GenericKen wrote:
-Maybe add a unique combat card for each race? That seems like a relatively low investment, and can really bring some character to the battles. (The card for the scientists would be a super-retreat =D).

...I LOVE this idea.

GenericKen wrote:
-The game feels like it has the same problem Civ5 has, in that it's too linear. You can't make specialized plans, because no matter what you do, the best option will improve everything at once. There's no reason to specialize a system for science, because the specialized FIDS multipliers don't come into play until much later in the game - you just build the best enhancement for each planet type. I've never even bothered to change any planet types in any of my games - there was no point.

I have the same feeling as you, but a lot of the more experienced players seem to feel differently, so maybe it's just a newbie thing?

GenericKen wrote:
-There is no way to stagger your goals. There are no landmarks. There are no wonders, or rewards on discovering a tech first - just military and a gradual slog of tech. The joy of these "one more turn" games is that you have many different things cooking at once. In 3 turns I get oracle for the slingshot, in 5 months the siege breaks and my 2nd heir comes of age, etc. In this game, it's just 5 turns to Missles 6, with nothing else cooking at the time (other than new lvl1 heros, which is pointless). This is one instance where adding quests for heros could create some nice goal staggering.

I still don't fully agree with Hero quests, but I like the idea of advantages for discovering a tech first - maybe an extra Science boost for a few turns?

GenericKen wrote:
-There's no urgency in the tech tree. One of the best innovations of Civ Revolution was that it gave a reward to the first person to discover a tech, for every tech. This turned the game into a 3-pronged race, between expansion/happiness, military/production, and science. I've sometimes felt that urgency in the bottom and left trees, when I needed techs to maintain my empire's expansion with happiness, but never in the top and right trees.

I disagree here. I often struggle because you have to juggle between all four trees. The bottom tree is important for expansion, the left tree is important for happiness and combat (fleet cap upgrades), but if you ignore or fall behind in the top tree, your fleets are going to be massacred, and if you fall behind in the right tree, your Industry and Science values will fall behind, and once again your fleets will be massacred. Play a few difficult games against Cravers and try to pitch this idea again.

GenericKen wrote:
-It'd be nice if there were more interaction between the tech trees. Maybe a circle between 4 mid-level techs in each of the trees so that you can make a sudden tangent if you reach one of the four. Make focusing on a single tech tree a trade-off/investment - otherwise, nobody will do it and nobody will actually encounter the penalties you levy against players who neglect some of the tech trees. Choice is important to strategy games.

I see a lot of potential int his, but also a lot of issues. Mainly, it means that a Sophon player can research into the left tree, and then make a sudden swap to the top tree and be ahead of the Craver player. I like the idea, but quite frankly I think it would be a horrible decision and the current system should stay the same. And the penalties against players who fall behind in trees isn't a problem, it's just a game feature that newbies should get used to 0 if you're falling behind in one tree or the other, it's not the game that screwed you over, but yourself.

GenericKen wrote:
-It doesn't feel like there's much you can do with dust. You can speed up production and lower tax rates, but that's about it. Heros are a kind of one-time cost. It seems almost worthless in trade, and you can't convert it to science or food in any way. For a resource that's supposed to be the most important thing, it feels like a watered down and focused version of production (and a victory condition, apparently).

I don't agree that Dust is useless, but I do agree that there should be some methods of turning it into Science - other than improvements to systems that cost Dust (considering you can't build more than one per system, it's only a solution for so long).

Okay, this took me a while to read - GenericKen has done an good job in pointing out the issues with ES - Fenrakk101, well done with picking up GenericKen's points & adding your opinion!



I agree with almost all points listed above (not going into detail) but would like to point out, that there really should be more ways/methods to turn Dust into Science! The unique combat cards seems to be a nice idea too! (or an class-specific Hero maybe?)

Tredecim wrote:
The unique combat cards seems to be a nice idea too! (or an class-specific Hero maybe?)

Specific classes of Heroes already get unique battle cards, at a certain level. However, since any race of Hero can be hired by any race, it's not that interesting. It would be far more interesting if each race had their own unique card that they started the game with and that no other race will ever have access to.

Fenrakk> Perhaps I should have made somethings more clear in my into.



Things in green were praises. There was no criticism in those paragraphs- no sarcasm. I think it's wonderful that a game can have an NPE (which I incurred while adding more than 100 ships to my build queue - there should perhaps be a limit on that) and not crash to desktop.





Also, many of my criticisms are about discoverability. The ability to play the game the first time through without guidance or a manual. You only get to play through a game for the first time once, so I feel that these notes are particularly valuable. If a player's first experience with a game does not go smoothly, he or she is unlikely to have a second experience, and if public multiplayer, and indeed Amplitude's brand, is to flourish, it needs to nurture and grow its player base. This will mean catering to newbies, but it will not necessarily mean dumbing down the game. Most discoverability and adaptation problems can be solved in the UI (and particularly with intuitive iconography).





Re race trait order:

I've never really noticed this as an issue before. I'll check next time I play. Although it sounds like a rather nitpicky issue - and plus, how would you judge what bonuses are more "important" than others? I think the easy fix would be to have a separate category that shows your starting techs, but that sounds like a complicated solution to a simple problem.

It is a little nitpicky, but simply changing the order of the traits should be very easy from an implementation perspective. Judging the importance of the traits is indeed subjective, but it's the developers subject and can help guide how players should play their races. The order doesn't have to be perfect - just informative. If the cravers need to constantly expand, list the locust trait first.





Re unit flags

This also seems like a rather nitpicky issue. I'm not saying it's a bad idea, but it's not like zooming in and out takes more than five seconds. Maybe it's five seconds you would rather save, but at what point do you draw the line between convenience and impatience?

You also believe that you need to zoom in to click fleets? Zooming in to select and out to move the unit somewhere is a change in context, and you're doubling or tripling the number of actions that need to be done. Increasing the area you're allowed to click on to select a fleet is more forgiving to players.

They can also just make the clickable footprint larget when zoomed out, I suppose. Don't know how hard that is from an implementation perspective.





Re removing the hangar

I think the hangar is useful for keeping fleets in a system without risking them being attacked, and also so your enemy won't know how well-defended your planets are, and you can surprise attack them.

The most important part of the hangar, however, is that it doesn't spawn your fleets. Why is that important? Because of the CP caps. How would you deal with unit creation without the hangar? Spawn each unit in its own fleet? That would be painful if your system is under attack and your one ship won't do it. Would you put all the ships into a fleet until it's full, then make another? The management issues of having to deal with this system would be phenomenal.

I agree that you probably want a solution to building units in a sieged system, but the hangar affects EVERY built ship. For the majority of your systems and the majority of your built ships, the siege scenario is irrelevant. You're just increasing busywork for the most common scenarios. Spawning each unit in its own fleet seems reasonable to me.

Is it even possible to order units back into a hangar? Being picked off piecemeal sounds like a problem for fleets in general, not just ones that are getting spawncamped. Maybe you don't actually need a solution to being unable to build up fleets on a planet.





Re enlarging the fleet management window

I agree that this can be an issue, but simply making them bigger doesn't sound like a good idea. It should be dealt with, but in a different way.

Why would it be a bad idea? It seems like it would be very easy to implement, and you can see (and merge) more than 4 fleets without scrolling.





Re execute all scheduled moves

It was a late addition after a lot of people complained about not having one. I do hope it will be phased out at some point for a better system, though, since the current ship movement system seems horribly inefficient.

I like that button. What don't you like about it?





Re repair icon

Ships are always repairing. That's why there's no visual cue.

They don't repair when they're at full health, and I don't think they repair when they're on the move or in enemy space (sieging their planets) without repair ships. Do they?





Re ordering by FIDS

Again, this could become a logistical nightmare. With the three variables I mentioned above that could be in constant fluctuation, this could almost cause more problems rather than creating them. Take this scenario:

Two system improvements in queue. Two planets: Desert and Jungle. A new Industry improvement (let's say N-Way Fusion Plants) and a Food improvement (let's say Epigenetic Crop Seeding). The Industry improvement will give 1 more Industry than the Food production will give Food, so it constructs that first. One turn before that completes, the Jungle's population goes up by one, and now the Food improvement gives 1 more Food than the Industry. So it stops constructing the fusion plants and starts a whole new project.

You can try to design all sorts of workarounds for all sorts of scenarios, but really, you'd just be creating an incredibly complex system. Plus, think of all the scenarios where you may want to construct a lesser return value improvement first - for example, it will be constructed faster. You're creating a logistical nightmare in response to a minor gripe.

It's fine that they're in constant fluctuation. I meant automatically ordering the improvements in the *build selector menu*, not in your queue. You can still make your own decisions wrt population growth and projected tax rate and techs and stuff, but in the build menu, it should be ordered so that the stuff you probably care about is closer to the top and not below the scroll.

You can still build stuff that doesn't benefit you at all. I can think of a couple scenarios where you'd want to do so. But it should take more clicks and user interactions to do something unusual like that, and it should take fewer clicks and less reading to do something more common (like "let me get production going here, or let me pump food/science").

Re splitting the construction complete notification

I think instead, you should be able to zoom in on a planet by clicking on it in the window. The issue with splitting up the notifications is that you can minimize the notification, update the queues, and then the notification will update.

Plus, what if your system has a new construction, but you want to change it? Then you'll want the "report" window to be merged with the "input" window, so you may as well skip a step.

That's a good point, but something similar happens with heros. You can leave the notification up and assign a hero's abilities, and the notification will update.

I wasn't proposing that the notification for "build completed and next build started" should change in any way - you should still be able to change the production. It's just that it's annoying to scroll through the long list of systems that you've already taken care of to find the system that actually needs your attention.



The actual ideal would be to be able to assign new builds to systems on the notification without diving into the system and closing the notification window. You have to re-open it each time, and I think the order changes.

I later realized that I can manage production from the F1 galaxy overview, but the game teaches us to operate through the notification. It might be best for that notification to just send you to the f1 screen (maybe; still thinking about it).





Re Empire improvements vs system improvements

Give examples of where you have this issue?

The primary example was on my first playthrough. I researched down to the first -22% unhappiness for empire size tech, and then I spent 15 minutes fumbling around in the game trying to figure out how to build it. I eventually googled it and found out it was a passive.

It really shouldn't take much development effort to rename "Empire improvements" into something more intuitive. Improvements are things you build.

It might take more effort to change the icon from a star, but seriously. It's an icon for the exact wrong thing.





Re ground assault icons

This is another minor issue, and quite frankly, the game rewards you for reading and also memorizing. By 'memorizing', I mean playing the game enough that you know what everything is - and if you forget something, read it!

It is minor, but it's unnecessarily frustrating and it's bad design. In theory, every weapon technology could have the same icon, and the game would be rewarding you for memorizing which ones were lasers, kinetic, and missle. Or, it could give every single weapon technology a different random icon, and again, it would be rewarding your for memorizing which techs did what.

But icons are supposed to make the game easier to understand, without forcing you to read the details in the mouseover.





Re weapon level specialties

The system does seem a bit broken, but this doesn't seem like the best solution; it would create a battle system that was almost IMPOSSIBLE to balance properly.

I don't think it'd be that hard to balance. Every additional level of weapon is 5% more effective, but has some extra property tacked onto it. Some weapons in the chain are more powerful than others, but that's okay. That'll drive the ebb and flow of which weapons type chains you've chosen to research down.





Re hero assignments

I generally find that it's better to have Heroes that specialize in System improvements and leave them in systems, and have Heroes that specialize in Fleet improvements and leave them in fleets. I never find myself swapping them between fleets and systems, especially since war/peacetime (or lack of either) does not make either of them useless.

This is my exact point. I almost never reassign my heros. I don't even know what the cooldown for reassigning a hero is. If we *can* move them around, we should get compelling reasons *to* move them around.





Re backwards research

Because it would be a bad idea. A very, very bad idea.

For example, players who are ahead in tech are the ones who would make most use of this. If they're ahead in tech, allowing them to go backwards would basically let them "skip" tech, meaning they gain an even greater tech advantage. Forcing them to spend some time researching older techs will at least slow them down.

Also, if you could research tech backwards, it would make a lot of the lower-level tech even less useful.

What's wrong with skipping tech? Almost all of the 1-4th tiers of tech seem useful.

Most things in these kinds of games are exponential - some food in the beginning results in even more food later, and so on. Having the tech advantage accelerate your tech pace isn't a problem imo - it's a feature. It's not super-important to me though, and you may know better from experience, so I'll defer.





Re tech tree urgency

I disagree here. I often struggle because you have to juggle between all four trees. The bottom tree is important for expansion, the left tree is important for happiness and combat (fleet cap upgrades), but if you ignore or fall behind in the top tree, your fleets are going to be massacred, and if you fall behind in the right tree, your Industry and Science values will fall behind, and once again your fleets will be massacred. Play a few difficult games against Cravers and try to pitch this idea again.

My first game was normal sowers vs cravers. I never researched past the 4rd level in the top tree or the 6th level in the right tree. I had two allies buffering between me and him, and I coasted to victory while they picked at each other.

You mentioned earlier that the higher tech weapons don't improve combat efficiency, but production cost efficiency. Having massive industry seems to override that (especially when you expand out to get monopolies). On a higher difficulty, my two AI buddies would've still wailed on him.



Maybe I just don't have enough experience with being behind on tech?

Fenrakk101 wrote:
Specific classes of Heroes already get unique battle cards, at a certain level. However, since any race of Hero can be hired by any race, it's not that interesting. It would be far more interesting if each race had their own unique card that they started the game with and that no other race will ever have access to.

I agree, this would be far more interesting!

GenericKen wrote:
Fenrakk> Perhaps I should have made somethings more clear in my into.



Things in green were praises. There was no criticism in those paragraphs- no sarcasm. I think it's wonderful that a game can have an NPE (which I incurred while adding more than 100 ships to my build queue - there should perhaps be a limit on that) and not crash to desktop.

You made it clear - it's entirely my fault if I criticized your non-criticisms. With such a long post I eventually just lost the mental will to check whether your words were one color or the other, and just responded to them all as I sort of, well, did. I apologize if I sounded like a jerk for it at some points.

GenericKen wrote:
Also, many of my criticisms are about discoverability. The ability to play the game the first time through without guidance or a manual. You only get to play through a game for the first time once, so I feel that these notes are particularly valuable. If a player's first experience with a game does not go smoothly, he or she is unlikely to have a second experience, and if public multiplayer, and indeed Amplitude's brand, is to flourish, it needs to nurture and grow its player base. This will mean catering to newbies, but it will not necessarily mean dumbing down the game. Most discoverability and adaptation problems can be solved in the UI (and particularly with intuitive iconography).

I see your point, but in fairness, you're not supposed to figure out a 4X game on your first time through, either. It was only a recent discovery of mine that you can increase your CP cap in the left tree - and I've played quite a few games in my time so far.



4X games are definitely the type where you could spend 80 hours and have played 40 games and you can still learn some pretty important game mechanics, and while it is important that the game cater to new players, it's not supposed to teach you everything in one go - that would be simply mind boggling and rather impossible to comprehend. And as it is, Endless Space is far more open to new players than many other 4X games.

GenericKen wrote:
It is a little nitpicky, but simply changing the order of the traits should be very easy from an implementation perspective. Judging the importance of the traits is indeed subjective, but it's the developers subject and can help guide how players should play their races. The order doesn't have to be perfect - just informative. If the cravers need to constantly expand, list the locust trait first.

You have a point there, I'll give you that.

GenericKen wrote:
You also believe that you need to zoom in to click fleets? Zooming in to select and out to move the unit somewhere is a change in context, and you're doubling or tripling the number of actions that need to be done. Increasing the area you're allowed to click on to select a fleet is more forgiving to players.

They can also just make the clickable footprint larget when zoomed out, I suppose. Don't know how hard that is from an implementation perspective.

The problem I foresee is when you have a fleet only one "space" away from reaching a planet (or one space from moving away) and another fleet orbiting the system. (I just noticed I keep switching between "system" and "planet"; too much Sins I think?) the ships could potentially overlap so much that having unit flags when zooming out wouldn't help that much anyway. I suppose a solution to this is just putting flags over fleets orbiting systems, but... well, I guess that does work.

GenericKen wrote:
I agree that you probably want a solution to building units in a sieged system, but the hangar affects EVERY built ship. For the majority of your systems and the majority of your built ships, the siege scenario is irrelevant. You're just increasing busywork for the most common scenarios. Spawning each unit in its own fleet seems reasonable to me.

Is it even possible to order units back into a hangar? Being picked off piecemeal sounds like a problem for fleets in general, not just ones that are getting spawncamped. Maybe you don't actually need a solution to being unable to build up fleets on a planet.

Yes, it is possible to send units back to the hangar.

And spawning each unit in its own fleet seems fine and dandy until an enemy fleet moves into the system and wipes at least one of them out.

Plus, it would be FAR more of a pain to sort fleets out from having twenty one-unit fleets than to just sort out fleets from the hangar.

GenericKen wrote:
Why would it be a bad idea? It seems like it would be very easy to implement, and you can see (and merge) more than 4 fleets without scrolling.

My main fear is that it would block a lot of the remaining gameplay screen. Maybe set the expanded window as a sort of button/toggle, so if you plan on spending a few minutes in the fleet management, you can do so easily, but otherwise it doesn't inadvertently become an impediment.

GenericKen wrote:
I like that button. What don't you like about it?

It's the game system in general that I have a problem with. The button is amazingly useful, but it's like putting a bandaid on a broken bone, so to speak. I find it strange that a turn-based game can still involve a "who can press the button first" when you're trying to chase down an opponent, or are getting chased by them.

I've suggested in other threads that another system could be, ships don't move until all players' turns are over, and the ships will all move at the start of the turn or during the loading of the new turn. This would remove the need for the button, like I said before, and replace it with a more intuitive system for a turn-based game.

GenericKen wrote:
They don't repair when they're at full health, and I don't think they repair when they're on the move or in enemy space (sieging their planets) without repair ships. Do they?

They do repair in enemy space, unless I've been horrendously misinformed. It also seems like common sense to me that ships wouldn't repair at full health or while moving (especially the former). Maybe I just have a different perspective on things, but a repair icon seems more or less useless.

GenericKen wrote:
It's fine that they're in constant fluctuation. I meant automatically ordering the improvements in the *build selector menu*, not in your queue. You can still make your own decisions wrt population growth and projected tax rate and techs and stuff, but in the build menu, it should be ordered so that the stuff you probably care about is closer to the top and not below the scroll.

You can still build stuff that doesn't benefit you at all. I can think of a couple scenarios where you'd want to do so. But it should take more clicks and user interactions to do something unusual like that, and it should take fewer clicks and less reading to do something more common (like "let me get production going here, or let me pump food/science").

Well that sounds like less of a nightmare. But to me (personally), I would find it more of a pain if the build options were in different orders for every system. Maybe I'm just weird, but I'd probably spend a LOT more time looking for things if they were ordered by helpfulness rather than having a standard order.

Although it could be the best of both worlds if they had a checkbox or something in the build menu that would order it for you.

GenericKen wrote:
That's a good point, but something similar happens with heros. You can leave the notification up and assign a hero's abilities, and the notification will update.

I wasn't proposing that the notification for "build completed and next build started" should change in any way - you should still be able to change the production. It's just that it's annoying to scroll through the long list of systems that you've already taken care of to find the system that actually needs your attention.



The actual ideal would be to be able to assign new builds to systems on the notification without diving into the system and closing the notification window. You have to re-open it each time, and I think the order changes.

I later realized that I can manage production from the F1 galaxy overview, but the game teaches us to operate through the notification. It might be best for that notification to just send you to the f1 screen (maybe; still thinking about it).

What about planetary exploitations? Say you're colonizing a new planet in a system. You might have a few productions in the queue that you know you're going to need, and when the planet is colonized you could find it in the list and go to that system to change the production.

Then you could argue that systems that just colonized a new planet could end up in the queue that requires the action, but once again it starts to sound like a complicated solution to a simple problem. Maybe order the production notification so that planets with no production show at the top?

I think they should also add a notification for when systems have no production that stops you from ending the turn, just like the research notification. It seems silly that they don't have a notification for that; especially since there's Ind-Sci and Ind-Dust conversions that mean no matter what the situation is, you should ALWAYS have SOME production.

GenericKen wrote:
The primary example was on my first playthrough. I researched down to the first -22% unhappiness for empire size tech, and then I spent 15 minutes fumbling around in the game trying to figure out how to build it. I eventually googled it and found out it was a passive.

It really shouldn't take much development effort to rename "Empire improvements" into something more intuitive. Improvements are things you build.

It might take more effort to change the icon from a star, but seriously. It's an icon for the exact wrong thing.

I found what you were talking about, and personally, (no offense) but I would cite this as user error. The tech clearly says "-22% Expansion Disapproval on Empire." Techs that give you new system improvements would be labels "System" or say "per opulation:" Plus, if you mouse over the tech itself (within the research) it will say "System improvement" on the top for things you actually need to build. When you were searching around for the solution, you could have just moused over the tech and read the giant letters at the top. Empire Improvement and System Improvement are exactly as descriptive as they need to be.

You could argue that it should be more obvious - putting the title in shiny golden letters or something - but at that point it's a different complaint. I'll agree that having a star/sun as the icon is a bit weird, but not necessarily gamebreaking.

GenericKen wrote:
It is minor, but it's unnecessarily frustrating and it's bad design. In theory, every weapon technology could have the same icon, and the game would be rewarding you for memorizing which ones were lasers, kinetic, and missle. Or, it could give every single weapon technology a different random icon, and again, it would be rewarding your for memorizing which techs did what.

But icons are supposed to make the game easier to understand, without forcing you to read the details in the mouseover.

You have a point here, but another counter-point is that not all of the technologies do the same thing. For example, when looking at system improvements; some just give a base addition to invasion resistance, but some will give extra resistance per opulation:. Some invasion modules for ships give a base improvement to Invasion Power and some increase it by a percentage.

Plus, they all have the little red tab in the top-right corner, which is what you probably should be memorizing, instead of the icons themselves.

GenericKen wrote:
I don't think it'd be that hard to balance. Every additional level of weapon is 5% more effective, but has some extra property tacked onto it. Some weapons in the chain are more powerful than others, but that's okay. That'll drive the ebb and flow of which weapons type chains you've chosen to research down.

I think you're underestimating how difficult this would be to balance. You could say that if you take two of the exact same weapons, give one of them 5% extra damage and give the other 5% extra accuracy, they're balanced, but this is seriously shortsighted. The current system says "Do you want to use this new laser weapon to start rolling out new up-to-date fleets, or are you going to wait ten turns for the next set of laser power and then roll them out? Or will you roll them out and then pay to upgrade them later?"

Another huge issues that I just thought of is, you're basically nullifying the point of researching upwards. If the lower-level technologies were not that less useful than the higher-tier technologies, you would be giving massive advantages to Cravers and Hissho - other races that rely on having advanced military tech. If they could get by with low-level tech, it would mean they could begin researching sideways or downwards into the other trees, making them enormously overpowered. Right now, the key balancing act is purely that Cravers and Hissho will spend more time researching up and have little to no freedom to research the other trees, or risk falling behind in their own personal arms race. So again, it seems like you're giving a huge disadvantage to Sophons and Amoeba players who rely on researching tech.

I do agree that it does seem a bit shallow to be more or less scrapping older weapons when you unlock more powerful ones, but changing that would break more things than it fixes.

GenericKen wrote:
This is my exact point. I almost never reassign my heros. I don't even know what the cooldown for reassigning a hero is. If we *can* move them around, we should get compelling reasons *to* move them around.

There are already compelling reasons, unless you either play in such a way that they never show up or you just never notice them.

You can get a System hero right off the bat, even if your home system is pretty bad, but they'll get experience for when you find a new system good for them to go to. You can move Heroes between fleets to move them to more helpful positions, or to get them out of harm's way (if they're in enemy territory with nor einforcements).

And no, there's no reason to switch them between fleets and systems. The Heroes' levels cap out at 20, and at that point you're not going to get to spend NEARLY all of their level-up points. You have to specialize them in one field or the other, and swapping them between fleets and systems is pointless unless you can only afford a single Hero. But at that point you should probably find a Hero that gives you more Dust and put him/her in a system to fix your horrible economy.

GenericKen wrote:
What's wrong with skipping tech? Almost all of the 1-4th tiers of tech seem useful.

Most things in these kinds of games are exponential - some food in the beginning results in even more food later, and so on. Having the tech advantage accelerate your tech pace isn't a problem imo - it's a feature. It's not super-important to me though, and you may know better from experience, so I'll defer.

Like I said, skipping tech is just fanning the flames, really. But if you don't want to press this point then I'll let it go as well.

GenericKen wrote:
My first game was normal sowers vs cravers. I never researched past the 4rd level in the top tree or the 6th level in the right tree. I had two allies buffering between me and him, and I coasted to victory while they picked at each other.

You mentioned earlier that the higher tech weapons don't improve combat efficiency, but production cost efficiency. Having massive industry seems to override that (especially when you expand out to get monopolies). On a higher difficulty, my two AI buddies would've still wailed on him.



Maybe I just don't have enough experience with being behind on tech?

On higher difficulties, alliances are harder to maintain, so keep that in mind.

I don't remember mentioning higher tech weapons improve production efficiency, so either I'm really tired now or I was really tired before.

In any case, I think your final sentence answered your own confusion. On higher difficulties, and especially in multiplayer, neglecting a tree is going to become a major problem, especially if you fall too far behind for too long.

-If you don't keep researching down, you're missing out on more planets - planets that tend to have high Industry, Dust, and Science outputs. Farther down the tech tree is terraforming options, which I'll admit I've never dabbled into, but apparently I'm going to need to learn it at some point. The bottom tech tree also includes things like new ship design, fleet movement speed, moon scanning, and removing negative anomalies, all of which are important for expansion.

-If you don't keep researching left, you fall behind on the happiness modifiers necessary to make use of those more difficult planet types from the bottom tree, as well as the Food improvements you need to make them useful (one population on a Lava planet is still a lot worse than five population on an Ocean planet). I also mentioned before that this tree includes fleet cap upgrades as well as diplomacy upgrades. While the diplomacy options can be ignored, if you completely neglect this tree your systems are going to be unhappy and your fleets will fall behind in battles. You could improve happiness by lowering taxes, but Dust is also important in other areas (such as buying out the happiness improvements) so you can't coast the game on +1 Dust per turn.

-If you ignore the top tree, you fall behind on the combat front. I agree with you when you said you might not have enough experience being behind in this tree. It's going to be very easy to notice when a single Destroyer of the enemy's has twice as much Military Power as three of your most powerful ships. Even a Sophon player can't leave this tree alone, otherwise he's going to have Scout ships plowing through his enterprises.

-If you fall behind on the right tree, you miss out on many of the resources you need to make use of the top tree. You also miss out on many helpful battle cards, such as EMP Blast, and on planet exploitations that can end up making a huge difference for you. You'd also be missing out on Tonnage upgrades - Support modules that increase the Tonnage of your ships; these are not as game-changing as advanced weaponry, but if you fail to acquire these your fleets will not be as powerful as comparable enemy fleets.

Juggling the four trees is one of the most crucial aspects of the gameplay, because none of them can be ignored unless you're rushing against easy AIs or dumb AIs.

Tredecim wrote:
I agree, this would be far more interesting!

To the G2G Suggestions forum?

I see your point, but in fairness, you're not supposed to figure out a 4X game on your first time through, either. It was only a recent discovery of mine that you can increase your CP cap in the left tree - and I've played quite a few games in my time so far.



4X games are definitely the type where you could spend 80 hours and have played 40 games and you can still learn some pretty important game mechanics, and while it is important that the game cater to new players, it's not supposed to teach you everything in one go - that would be simply mind boggling and rather impossible to comprehend. And as it is, Endless Space is far more open to new players than many other 4X games.

Why shouldn't a 4x game be playable on the first time through? You don't need to learn all the game mechanics - just the ones that apply to your current game.



You're right that Endless Space is one of the most accessible 4X games I've seen. That's its differentiating strength. The devs should work to build on its strength.

Yes, it is possible to send units back to the hangar.

Really? Wow. How?

What about planetary exploitations? Say you're colonizing a new planet in a system. You might have a few productions in the queue that you know you're going to need, and when the planet is colonized you could find it in the list and go to that system to change the production.

Then you could argue that systems that just colonized a new planet could end up in the queue that requires the action, but once again it starts to sound like a complicated solution to a simple problem. Maybe order the production notification so that planets with no production show at the top?

I think they should also add a notification for when systems have no production that stops you from ending the turn, just like the research notification. It seems silly that they don't have a notification for that; especially since there's Ind-Sci and Ind-Dust conversions that mean no matter what the situation is, you should ALWAYS have SOME production.

Planetary exploitations are not unlocked with new techs - they're only improved (and autoupgraded) with tech. They're about the same as colonizing new planets in the system or exploring moons - you'll queue up about 3 of each for the average system, vs 20 something system improvements towards the end of the game. Planet-specific improvements don't need to be supported by a comprehensive system-specific UI.

Fixing the order on the build completed notification would be a sufficient compromise, but from a strict UI design perspective, build completed and build completed and you need to do something are different notifications.



I was going to suggest that there should be an end-turn warning when no build is queued, but I honestly don't understand how production overflow works. If a system sits without anything in its build queue, does its production overflow build up?

I found what you were talking about, and personally, (no offense) but I would cite this as user error. The tech clearly says "-22% Expansion Disapproval on Empire." Techs that give you new system improvements would be labels "System" or say "per " Plus, if you mouse over the tech itself (within the research) it will say "System improvement" on the top for things you actually need to build. When you were searching around for the solution, you could have just moused over the tech and read the giant letters at the top. Empire Improvement and System Improvement are exactly as descriptive as they need to be.

You could argue that it should be more obvious - putting the title in shiny golden letters or something - but at that point it's a different complaint. I'll agree that having a star/sun as the icon is a bit weird, but not necessarily gamebreaking.

My misunderstanding wasn't that I thought the empire improvement was a system improvement, but in that I thought you needed to build an empire improvement in one of your systems to take advantage of it (like a wonder). Iirc, the tech itself doesn't say "-22%"; the Empire Improvement says "-22%", without saying what an empire improvement is.

You have a point here, but another counter-point is that not all of the technologies do the same thing. For example, when looking at system improvements; some just give a base addition to invasion resistance, but some will give extra resistance per . Some invasion modules for ships give a base improvement to Invasion Power and some increase it by a percentage.

Plus, they all have the little red tab in the top-right corner, which is what you probably should be memorizing, instead of the icons themselves.

The invasion resistance icons are fine. The complaint was about the invasion icons, which are for techs that grant linearly better invasion modules, and are (iirc), a bullet, a rifle, a helmet, and a skull? The second one grants a percentage boost in addition to a base boost, but it's really not that different from the other three.

I think you're underestimating how difficult this would be to balance. You could say that if you take two of the exact same weapons, give one of them 5% extra damage and give the other 5% extra accuracy, they're balanced, but this is seriously shortsighted. The current system says "Do you want to use this new laser weapon to start rolling out new up-to-date fleets, or are you going to wait ten turns for the next set of laser power and then roll them out? Or will you roll them out and then pay to upgrade them later?"

Every tech would be more powerful than the tech above it, but not every tech would be the same amount of more powerful. So the chains could peak early, mid, and late, and you would always be given an incentive to change your fleet style, based on what your most powerful (or second most powerful) tech's bonus is.

There are already compelling reasons, unless you either play in such a way that they never show up or you just never notice them.

You can get a System hero right off the bat, even if your home system is pretty bad, but they'll get experience for when you find a new system good for them to go to. You can move Heroes between fleets to move them to more helpful positions, or to get them out of harm's way (if they're in enemy territory with nor einforcements).

Do people often reassign heros from one system to another? In my experience, the best homes for admin heros tend to stay the best homes for them.

I did once pull a hero from a system to a fleet to finish off a push, but I never reassign them between systems. I sometimes forget they're there. It feels like they should sometimes be *doing* something, doesn't it?

GenericKen wrote:
Why shouldn't a 4x game be playable on the first time through? You don't need to learn all the game mechanics - just the ones that apply to your current game.



You're right that Endless Space is one of the most accessible 4X games I've seen. That's its differentiating strength. The devs should work to build on its strength.

I agree, but I think the first step towards that would be making a better tutorial. Information is easily lost if you just bombard the reader with waves of text.

GenericKen wrote:
Really? Wow. How?

I don't recall exactly, as I don't do it often, but I believe it's one of the buttons available on the bottom when you have a fleet selected. If my memory serves me right, it's "Disband."

GenericKen wrote:
lanetary exploitations are not unlocked with new techs - they're only improved (and autoupgraded) with tech. They're about the same as colonizing new planets in the system or exploring moons - you'll queue up about 3 of each for the average system, vs 20 something system improvements towards the end of the game. Planet-specific improvements don't need to be supported by a comprehensive system-specific UI.

Fixing the order on the build completed notification would be a sufficient compromise, but from a strict UI design perspective, build completed and build completed and you need to do something are different notifications.

I'm not sure if you're confused or I am. If you colonize a new planet, there's no way to queue an exploitation for it before it's colonized; you have to enter the colonized system. The point I was making here had absolutely nothing to do with unlocking new techs.

GenericKen wrote:
I was going to suggest that there should be an end-turn warning when no build is queued, but I honestly don't understand how production overflow works. If a system sits without anything in its build queue, does its production overflow build up?

I honestly don't know. If I had to guess, I would say it doesn't build up unless you're actually constructing something.

GenericKen wrote:
My misunderstanding wasn't that I thought the empire improvement was a system improvement, but in that I thought you needed to build an empire improvement in one of your systems to take advantage of it (like a wonder). Iirc, the tech itself doesn't say "-22%"; the Empire Improvement says "-22%", without saying what an empire improvement is.

It reads "-22% Expansion Disapproval on Empire." I'll agree that it can be confusing at first, but I still say it's just as accurate as it needs to be.

GenericKen wrote:
The invasion resistance icons are fine. The complaint was about the invasion icons, which are for techs that grant linearly better invasion modules, and are (iirc), a bullet, a rifle, a helmet, and a skull? The second one grants a percentage boost in addition to a base boost, but it's really not that different from the other three.

Hm, I'll need to check that myself. I know what you're talking about, though. And now that you mention it, it does seem weird that the Invasion modules don't follow the trend of having the same (slightly altered) icon for each tech, when every single other ship module does it. I would forward this to the devs.

GenericKen wrote:
Every tech would be more powerful than the tech above it, but not every tech would be the same amount of more powerful. So the chains could peak early, mid, and late, and you would always be given an incentive to change your fleet style, based on what your most powerful (or second most powerful) tech's bonus is.

I still think you're underestimating the balancing complications involved here. You have to balance the number of shots, critical multiplier, critical chance, tonnage, military power, damage, accuracy, production cost... there are a lot of variables being taken for granted here.

GenericKen wrote:
Do people often reassign heros from one system to another? In my experience, the best homes for admin heros tend to stay the best homes for them.

I did once pull a hero from a system to a fleet to finish off a push, but I never reassign them between systems. I sometimes forget they're there. It feels like they should sometimes be *doing* something, doesn't it?

I tend to move the early ones around. Like (I think) I said, I often hire Heroes for my home system, but obviously your home system isn't always the best, so I swap them out whenever I find a better system. And I keep swapping them as I find better forge worlds.

Another strategy that I've thought of but never put into practice, is putting Heroes on planets you've just conquered. Heroes of a high enough level will grant Approval bonuses as well as the normal FIDS upgrades, so it would be a way to speed up the assimilation of new systems to your empire (and when razing gets implemented, this could become more of a viable strategy, as a campaign won't have to always involve dozens of new planets)

I agree, but I think the first step towards that would be making a better tutorial. Information is easily lost if you just bombard the reader with waves of text.

Which is why tutorials are bad. You should get the gist of how to play just from the iconography and the layout of the controls. The text is there for deep-diving, but it shouldn't be essential to know.



Most of the icons on the tech tree are brilliant. They have a nice consistent vocabulary or colors and shapes - as a veteran player of 4x games, I was able to figure most of it out smoothly without reading. These notes were from when I wasn't able to do so.

I don't recall exactly, as I don't do it often, but I believe it's one of the buttons available on the bottom when you have a fleet selected. If my memory serves me right, it's "Disband."

That's absurd. In every other game, in every other context, "disband" means delete, or disintegrate, not "return to hangar".

I'm not sure if you're confused or I am. If you colonize a new planet, there's no way to queue an exploitation for it before it's colonized; you have to enter the colonized system. The point I was making here had absolutely nothing to do with unlocking new techs.

I was just saying that you don't generally have to worry about queueing up new planetary developments or planetary colonies from the build notification. You usually build those either as soon as you can, or when you hit a population threshold.

It reads "-22% Expansion Disapproval on Empire." I'll agree that it can be confusing at first, but I still say it's just as accurate as it needs to be.

The tech doesn't say that. The tag says that, under benefits.

The tag is titled "Empire Improvement - Colonization Program". The only hint that it's not a thing that you build is the fact that no production cost is listed.





Do the devs read this forum, or should I submit individual suggestions for "race specific cards" and "unify invasion icons" someplace else?

GenericKen wrote:
Which is why tutorials are bad. You should get the gist of how to play just from the iconography and the layout of the controls. The text is there for deep-diving, but it shouldn't be essential to know.



Most of the icons on the tech tree are brilliant. They have a nice consistent vocabulary or colors and shapes - as a veteran player of 4x games, I was able to figure most of it out smoothly without reading. These notes were from when I wasn't able to do so.

To be fair, I never read tutorials anyway, so it's not good for me to have strong opinions on the matter.

GenericKen wrote:
That's absurd. In every other game, in every other context, "disband" means delete, or disintegrate, not "return to hangar".

Technically, no. Disband means "To break up or dissolve (an organization)" (taken from Google). If you disband your fleet, you basically take it apart from being a fleet - and if it's no longer a fleet, it follows that it would go to the hangar. Unless it's in enemy territory, in which case, Disband will make your fleets vanish.

GenericKen wrote:
I was just saying that you don't generally have to worry about queueing up new planetary developments or planetary colonies from the build notification. You usually build those either as soon as you can, or when you hit a population threshold.

I try to get them out of the way ASAP. Especially later on in the game, exploitations can make an enormous difference on a per-pop basis, and I would rather get those bonuses early and make them an advantage instead of waiting until I'm at a disadvantage.

GenericKen wrote:
The tech doesn't say that. The tag says that, under benefits.

The tag is titled "Empire Improvement - Colonization Program". The only hint that it's not a thing that you build is the fact that no production cost is listed.

True, but then again without a production cost you can infer that it doesn't need to be produced.

GenericKen wrote:
Do the devs read this forum, or should I submit individual suggestions for "race specific cards" and "unify invasion icons" someplace else?

I'm pretty sure the devs/mods read everything, but it's definitely a much better idea to put suggestions in their own threads (especially looking at how intimidating this thread has become).