caveat: I've only played one 200-turn scientific victory (after conquering 2/3 of the map) Sophon game on entirely default settings which went more or less according to plan, so maybe my impressions don't apply to games where you get pressured a lot early on. I kept nearly all systems ecstatic for the vast majority of the game, too.



food:

If excess food actually does something significant prior to the "convert excess food into industry" tech/improvement and I just didn't notice I'd argue that it needs to be documented better and/or isn't significant enough.

It seemed like it doesn't, as I had in the hundreds of excess food even in systems nearly entirely terraformed to specialize in industry via lava planets before building the food->industry conversion improvement, which didn't show any difference in their stats AFTER building it (and having 0 excess food).



I'd make this more interesting by generally raising food consumption especially in the late game, so that for example a 1 population planet still only uses 2 food units, but a 10 population planet uses 100 (which is probably still too low come very late game). And/or you could tie it to happiness, so that getting your population to ecstatic would require a large excess of food. Additionally I'd say have an existing improvement (space elevator seems a likely candidate, or just implement a new one) be used to explicitly export/import excess food to the galaxy, so you can further specialize your systems and actually have that "+50% food on blockaded system" hero skill mean something because not every single even heavily non-food specialized system would be self-sufficient.



enemy fleets bypassing your borders:

There should be an improvement or default behavior that makes enemy fleets in your SoI (or only in colony systems, not outposts) not able to cross systems in a single turn - rather make them end their turn upon reaching it, so you can intercept properly. As it is it really cheapens the defensive improvements, as you really have to build them everywhere to be of any great use, and then investing in more fleet would probably make more sense than that (especially once it comes to multiplayer and intelligent enemies).

Also make it possible to force the use of warpdrives (if it isn't already, I tried shift ctrl alt only) so you still have the possibly to mount deep strikes into enemy territory - which would still be interceptable, as ships in warp are slower than on lanes, while also making good sensor coverage more important.



a minor UI niggle:

Please enlarge the "build improvement/ship" selection window, as late game it becomes pretty cluttered if you don't build every improvement on every planet, which you obviously shouldn't. There's plenty of room to expand it to the left while leaving everything else as is.



combat:

Not too sure about that yet but it being a little more involved wouldn't hurt. See other threads for suggestions, like being able to target specific ships, formations so you could leave your missile boats in the back protected by specifically built-for-defense dreadnoughts, for example, etc.



Also please make beams actually be beams, visually :P

That should be it for now. Really great game so far by the way, especially for its development stage. Awesome UI and polish in general.

affront wrote:
caveat: I've only played one 200-turn scientific victory (after conquering 2/3 of the map) Sophon game on entirely default settings which went more or less according to plan, so maybe my impressions don't apply to games where you get pressured a lot early on. I kept nearly all systems ecstatic for the vast majority of the game, too.



food:

If excess food actually does something significant prior to the "convert excess food into industry" tech/improvement and I just didn't notice I'd argue that it needs to be documented better and/or isn't significant enough.

It seemed like it doesn't, as I had in the hundreds of excess food even in systems nearly entirely terraformed to specialize in industry via lava planets before building the food->industry conversion improvement, which didn't show any difference in their stats AFTER building it (and having 0 excess food).

Doesn't excess food speed up population growth? That's what I understood from the stickied economy thread at least which explains the game system and design rationale in a lot of detail.

Hmm, apparently it should. I somehow missed that thread, sorry.

But after reading it it's not like it felt especially worth it to prioritize or if I noticed at all, in game, as I had SO MUCH excess food in any case, with usually only building a single improvement for it. I had over a thousand excess food in a system specialized for industry that just sat there doing nothing until I hit the tech to convert it, since the system was maxed in population for a while already. Doesn't seem desirable for a resource to do exactly nothing for maybe half of the game - I never had to even think about not having enough food.



See attachment for a system with 4 lava planets, 1 desert, 1 jungle (10 under pop limit because +2 pop per planet improvement finished shortly before). Also "The more population the player has, the more Food they will need, exponentially." doesn't seem to be working, as you can see.





How does it work with the excess food->industry conversion, then, anyway? Would be suboptimal, probably, if having 0 excess food via that completely shafted your growth (since you do need a little bit of growth once you expand population limits via improvements), since you can't toggle that improvement on/off short of scrapping it, apparently.

I'm still reading around here, but the idea of excess food affecting planet/system happiness is a good one, imo. People like to eat. haha