Played through a couple of games, but unfortunately wasn't able to finish either due to victory conditions I had turned off deciding they were on and making me lose (I turtle up and steam roll, so things like economic victory tend to get in my way)



But that's not what this is about... as mentioned, I've played it for a bit today and there were a few things I noticed that could do with a slight usability improvement.



Consistent Camera Controls: The Tech Tree and Planets

Camera controls are great, I can navigate the universe fairly easily, using either the mouse, arrow keys or wasd, although it's a surprise the mouse is click and drag, but doesn't do anything if I move to the edge of the screen. I run in to two problems however, and I'll start with the small one.



Planets. The way the camera works with planets at the moment is VERY 'Civilization'. Everything is done with the left and right mouse buttons. This was actually somewhat of a surprise to me... I understood needing to click on a system to view my planets, but I expected to be able to use my mouse wheel to 'zoom' in or out on a particular planet, or to zoom out of the system and back to the galaxy map. This is a small issue, and probably more about personal preference... after I got used to the idea of left and right clicking to navigate, it worked brilliantly... but even 100 turns in I was still trying to use my mouse wheel to zoom out of a planet and back to the system screen.

The suggestion: Perhaps add the mouse wheel as a way to change view between planet and system view, and to go from system view to the galaxy map. The zoom based details on the galaxy map make it impractical to add zooming in to a system with the mouse wheel. That last bit made little sense, and I'll clarify if anyone wants.



Tech Tree: The tech tree navigation I feel was a problem... it was... clunky. Planet based stuff was great, just a personal preference thing, but the tech tree. My problem here is once again very simple, camera controls in the galaxy are available to the mouse, arrow keys and wasd... but the tech tree only allows you to use the mouse. All I ask here is the arrow keys and/or wasd be added for navigation on the tech tree, or for the arrow keys and wasd be removed for galaxy navigation. I feel consistency is important. If I had to click drag everywhere, I'd do that, but when given the option to use the arrow keys, I take it. If that option is only half available, I become frustrated with having to change how I control the camera.





Victory Viewability.

This is a short and simple thing... as it is, the victory progress is viewable in multiple screens. Great, I can find out how I'm going when looking at the relevant information... but if I want to know how the game is going, there's no Score Screen, or something similar. You have the galaxy icon up there, which will give me a standard abstract number about how awesome I am, but I feel like it would be helpful if I could click this icon and see all the active victory conditions, and how close I am to them (and my enemies, if I am able to view that). Throw in a score graph and you're golden.





Battle.... bionics?

Assonance was never my strong suit. This actually has nothing to do with bionics, it's the simple case of battles involving a good deal of waiting. If there was a button I could press, or an option on game creation (Multiplayer bonus) that lets me speed up the combat somewhat, or even just tell them what cards to use, and then leave it to have fun without me. The battles look great, I enjoyed seeing my ships get blown up, which is a rare thing... but there's only so much of the 5 phase combat one can take, and when you're looking at a 4x game, or indeed a space strategy, the number of battles you're likely to fight will end up with the best course of action being to let the battles resolve on their own. The card system is really nifty, and I feel it could lend itself well to a kind of "Standard Response" that you could set up in the military screen. "Long Range: Adaptive, Mid Range: Overclock, Short Range: Dust Missile" kind of thing. This would be good for multiplayer, particularly the larger games with more then just 2 players, since the players could set up some standard options, let the battles battle themselves and not hold up the game because they want to manage every single battle to stop the ai from killing their ships.





Leader Levelling!

Yes, back to the sensible assonance, although this still isn't entirely related. When I want to see the details of a leader, I'd like to be able to hire/assign/unassign/expel them, then and there. Instead, I have to go to the leader screen proper. Basically, if I have a bunch of leaders, I want to be able to look at their stats in detail, and decide what to do with them without having to go back. This is personal preference again, I just have a horrible memory for faces and can't quite remember what each guy does until I look at them... although on a more practical note, if I have a pilot type leader 'training' on a planet, I'd like to be able to reassign them while I'm levelling them up. By 'training' I mean putting leaders on a planet to gain experience without getting them involved in combat that could easily just cost me dust in healing, although it could easily work the other way, with ideal colony leaders sent to the front lines to boost them up a few levels before sending them back to the easy life on a planet. The info screen for the leaders looks like it would have the space for the buttons.





Rally Points.

This is an RTS standard, and a sad rarity for TBS... I can't think of any that have done it since Master of Orion. In the early game, you have star lanes... and if you're an efficient turtler, you'll find the best available bottle neck as far away from your home as you can feasibly go. Later on, you're still using star lanes, but you have the option of skipping past and engaging warp engines or some such (the ai kept economy victorying me, so I'm not sure what it's called). In both situations, you're going to have frontier systems that are taking the majority of your enemies forces, and need constant reinforcements to avoid being obliterated. Having the option to move ships as soon as they're built, straight to the frontier would be a godsend. This ties in to the next two suggestions I have. I know this because my post got eated and only recovered to this point.



Repeat-Build

Another RTS standard, and not entirely rare in TBS land. The option to tell a system to keep building ships indefinitely. Sure, I could tell it to build a million ships... but what do I do when I suddenly want to change that? The best way I could think of doing this would be similar to how Supreme Commander does it, where you simply have a "Repeat Build" button, which causes the entire production queue to repeat on itself, allowing you to build multiple unit types together. This also allows you to put in a system construction when the research allows, without interrupting the repeat build, as it would just build that building, and since it can't be built twice, it would no longer be available for construction.



Auto Reinforce

This is part of a much larger problem I had with the game, but after my post died I decided to move it here. If you're able to tell a system to build ships and move them to a system, and to do that indefinitely... there is but one more feature needed to allow a streamlined endgame. Auto Reinforce... to allow a fleet to automatically replenish its numbers from the available ships. There are a few levels to this... first is the fleets themselves. If you're not careful, people will just end up with fleets of a single design, because otherwise auto-reinforce will make a fleet of support ships. To counter this, you can use 'fleet templates', a way to make a fleet automatically fill up to a template, say with 1 ship from the Protector design, and 3 of a custom cruiser design. That way, if you upgrade a design, you don't have to upgrade the template... it'll just grab any ship of that design that's available. The next is fleet saturation, and has to do with rally points and repeat build. The option for a ship to automatically go in to the reserve once it reaches its destination, that way it won't sit there as a fleet of 1, and it will automatically join a fleet if its design is needed. The final is kind of not important anymore, as it had to do with leaders in fleets, and preventing those fleets from joining together automatically. That's not a concern if the fleets only grab reinforcements from their reserves... although it would be a problem if fleets could automatically merge with other fleets.

The Beef

This was where auto reinforce originally showed up. This game is great... but one major problem I have is trying to manage my fleets. Yes, it makes sense, and pretty much anyone could work it out... but having to go to two separate screens to reinforce a fleet is just... annoying. Two 'easy' solutions to this would be adding orbiting fleets to the system view, so that you can move reserve ships directly in to a fleet; and showing the reserve ships from the galaxy view when you have a fleet selected, allowing you to move reserves in without going in to the system view. This, I feel, is just a simple usability oversight... you've done a great job of minimising the amount of stuff we have to click and fiddle with... this alone, I think, would improve the game a great deal.





Now, as I've mentioned, I lost my post at the Rally Points thing. I know there was another suggestion I made, but I don't know what it was. I also presented the last 4 points differently, so they may not be as coherent as I'd like...



Anyway, concluding this block of text, I think the game is great. I feel like I'm playing Starlord or Master of Orion, with a dash of Galactic Civilizations and a sprinkling of Civilization III. After 15 years of waiting, I feel like someone finally made Master of Orion III. If I could work out why the game won't listen when I say to disable other victory conditions, I'd be a very happy gamer.