Here's my feedback as I play
First up when I loaded the game after install I had no text appearing anywhere in game, dialogue boxes, menus, descriptions or options!
- It wasn't due to a hung fonts installer, I checked
- My ATI Radeon 6740M had the most up to date drivers as of yesterday the 27th (Australia here, in the future)
- Updating to the Beta drivers fixed this problem, yay in game and can see things!
In game I noticed that even with headphones plugged in the game continues to pipe audio through the speakers.
- I checked my audio settings, all correct
- The games audio settings said they were on use system settings, correct
- Tried turning it onto headphones mode in options, no change. It's still piping audio out of the laptop speakers, easy to live with
Attempted to load up a game (Terran, Tiny map, 1v1 single player) and it crashed.
- Attempted again same settings, crashed
- Changed to Small map, same settings, crashed
- Changed the video settings to disable bloom, game has loaded in, looks amazing!
On my home world I have one bonus tile, +2 to farming, sweet. Unfortunately the game spawned my starport on it. A way to avoid initial building placement on bonus tiles would be great!
Ships:
- Don't move automatically when given the survey command
- Once moved manually and are out of moves this turn, the games focus should snap automatically to the next ship still with movement points remaining
- They're rather pretty
- Being able to waypoint them with the shift button would be great, particularly useful when I'm exploring manually and want the ship to follow a specific route to be more efficient with the exploring
- For some reason colony ships and constructors require you to double click them to use them. Please remove that. Single click all the way!
- Ships should use up one movement point per attack, currently exploitable
Gameplay:
- Notifications for when I finish building an improvement, ship or complete research please!
- When artifacts are found by the survey ship that give a fleet wide bonus, bonus' aren't applied fleet wide, only to the survey ship
- A way to adjust the build order in the colony cue would be great
- I would like to see my treasury while I'm on a colonies overview screen so I can see what I can afford to buy at a glance
- In colony screen planet backgrounds occasionally failed to load
- The music is great, but the levels are a bit all over the place and transition from screen to screen can be a bit jarring at times
- Auto upgrage buildings please!!
- An indicator that a turn has passed would be great, it almost happens too quickly. Just a quick flash of "Turn X" in the top centre would be great
- After victory the dialog box says you have the option to keep playing if you would like, but then it just kicks you out anyway
AI:
- The AI wasn't very clever, I killed its survey vessel early on and it never replaced it
- Scouts sitting next to planet that produced it
- It's planets were producing scouts and colony ships even when my combat fleets and transports were in it's space and sensor range
- I left a transport in range of one of the Dregin ships unprotected by accident and on the Dregin turn it chose to leave it's ship exactly where it was rather than killing an undefended transport, resulting in it losing a world
After I actually managed to get into my first game without a crash it played great without hanging or looking like it was about to crash at all! Well done Stardock, this is as solid as alpha's get!! I'm supremely impressed that if the game in this state is fun to play and polished in areas that the finished product in a years time is going to be incredible!
Thank you so much for providing us all with the chance to get hands on with the game so early!
Fate, 