Had a spell at the game today, very impressive, especially for so early in the development.
Things I love
- Custom ship building is nice – love the naming and description that was kept in from GalCiv2
- Border showing a ship’s range away from base, very useful
- Graphics are awe-striking
- Tech tree is absolutely fantastic. It looks amazing already, incredibly in-depth and allowing for lots of customisation!
- Lots of tooltips/mouseovertext/information everywhere. I wouldn’t mind a little more here and there, more is more, but great so far.
- Renaming of units post-creation is good (Especially for nicknames/name changes/roles/etc. Would be awesome if we could also rename planets.
As for problems, there are a few things I’ve noticed so far:
1. Some of the techs repeat the bonuses you get out of it, and it’s unclear what it actually effects. For example, the tech Projectile Exceleration has 2 unlocks. Kinetic range +25% and…well…Kinetic range +25%. Does that mean it’s a 50% range buff, or a 100%+25%+25% buff, or a 25% buff that applies to two different types of kinetic weapons, or should it only be one unlock, Kinetic range +25%. Also on a minor note, Exceleration isn’t a word…was it meant to be acceleration?
2. With the ship designer, there are a huge amount of red “slots” to put parts on but it seems extremely difficult and tedious to select the right slot. For example, when I was trying to attack an engine to the underside of my ship, there were 5 red dots on the same X Axis, but I couldn’t place in on 3 of those dots, and the only ones I could place on were placed at an awkward angle. It would be easier if the blue dot highlighted was the same dot as the one which the mouse is currently over, because at the moment it seems a bit random in which red dot it highlights blue.
3. The way that ships with large move speeds animate looks like a snake with ADHD. The moves are so…absurd in the swaying from side by side caused by the hex grid. I think it would be much better/smoother if units moved similar to how ships move in Civilization 5, where it’s a single line from starting move to final move, with one curve in the entire movement. It looks way better than whatever the current movement in this game is. Watching the AI move their survey ship makes me dizzy.
4. In the planet build menu, there is no icon for my custom ships. The in-game ship model in the galactic map is working perfectly, but having an icon in the build menu would be much better too.
5. It would be really helpful if we could shift-click waypoints in order to easier manage the pathfinding when setting up subsequent turns. At the moment any right-click move order (shift held down or not) given to a ship will cancel previous orders and beeline straight for that tile.
6. Ships are pretty much invisible in asteroid fields unless you hover over the tile with the mouse. Perhaps astroid field tiles could become semi-transparent when units are in the same space (a la Age of Empires 2 buildings or the Red Alert build menu)
7. I would love it if I could scroll around the map without having to hold down the mouse. Age of Empires/Civilization was so easy to keep an eye around the map because of this simple mechanic.
8. So far, when you mouse-over a planet it tells you what you’re building and shows a progress bar. That’s fine, but it would be more useful if it had a number in that process bar showing the amount of turns remaining on that project. For example Colony Ship (4).
9. The mouse-over text in the tech tree is sometimes for the wrong tech. In the screenshot below my mouse is over Kinetic Specialization but I am getting the Shield Defences mouse-over text.
10. Not sure if it’s a bug, but you can mouse over the AI planets and know what they are building, even through fog of war.
11. While I like the flavoursome and somewhat comedic tooltips of some of the techs, it really doesn’t help me understand what it does. For example, Kinetic Augmentation “So what if our mass drivers already outclass our opponents’ defenses? I fail to see the problem. Perhaps you’d like to explain it to me. Over dinner.” For starters, ‘defenses’ is incorrect spelling (defences) and second, if we had a second paragraph of real information to tell me why I’d research the tech, it would be so much better. I'm not saying get rid of the humorous text, I just also want a paragraph of practical information to follow it to tell me whether I actually need this or not.
12. When saving a game, the word “Done” makes it sound like the save won’t be cancelled…but clicking “Done” does in fact cancel the game. Replacing it with the word “Cancel” or “Back” would remove this confusion and prevent some people thinking they have saved their games when in fact they haven’t. Also a control-s shortcut to saving would be very helpful (A la Civ)
Overall good so far. Hopefully the points I’ve raised are useful to you guys to keep doing a good job. Will be doing more of these logs as I play through the Alpha!
EDIT: Screenshot link not working. URL for the image is http://postimg.org/image/oipiomnlb/
