Greetings Developers,
Great job so far. I was a fan of GC and GCII and I like what I see. Various bugs/UX comments below:
Bugs:
- The black hole vortex can be seen sparkling through the grey unexplored mist (at least on my hardware). This makes it possible to determine which systems are black holes without scouting them.
- Resources are often placed within the influence of a black hole vortex and when they do, you can't send a constructor to mine them. Not sure if this is intentional or not.
- In the "available projects" pane (right side of the planet surface dialog), some of the text for the special tile descriptions (e.g. ancient ruins, geothermal springs) do not fit in the label.
- In the govern planet dialog, the turn values in the "available projects" queue update when you adjust the allocation but the ones in the "manufacturing" queue do not.
- I know you'll probably performance optimize towards the end of the beta, but I was a bit alarmed at the sluggishness of the UI, relative to what I saw in the GCII beta. I have an ATI Radeon HD 5970...it is by no means a new card but has performed well with other new games I've played recently. Just thought you'd want to know.
UI/UX:
- In the "Govern Planet" dialog, there is a slider below the wheel used to allocate production to shipbuilding or planetary improvements. The slider has values from 0 to 100 but it's not clear which side is for planetary production and which is for shipbuilding. Perhaps some icons on the side of the slider would help with this?
- In several spots, the word "Influence" is misspelled as "Influance".
- I suspect that something is funky with population growth, but I can't be certain because unlike research, manufacturing, etc. there are no tooltips that explain population metrics (e.g. max population for a planet, growth per turn, factors contributing to growth.) I think adding a tooltip would help.
- I accidentally built two shipyards in a system with a single planet and the result was very distracting. The game would not let me proceed to the next turn until I had selected a sponsor and it would not let me choose the closest planet as a sponsor (maybe because that planet was sponsoring the first shipyard), so I had to choose a faraway planet to sponsor the shipyard which effectively prevented the faraway sponsor planet from building its own shipyard. I might not have mentioned this had I been able to demolish the 2nd shipyard, but I don't think that the game lets you. I don't have any specific suggestions to fix this, but it's bound to happen and when it does, it's a pretty serious playability problem.
- Alteria has (or had in my game) two planets named 'Po'.
- The description for the special tile 'Rare Earth Minerals' has a misspelling: 'These Rear Earth Metals' instead of 'Rare Earth'.
- I know this is probably one of the last things you put in, but hotkeys would be nice. Without them, the current interface is clunky during the end-of-turn phase when you are forced to give orders to your ships with moves left.
Hope that helps. Keep up the good work!