Hi,
I'm about 20 hours in and finishing my first full game, and would like to list issues I have discovered thus far. I've jotted these down on a notepad over the last month, so please disregard anything you have already fixed. I've also only listened to a few of the developer reports, so may be missing some things already covered.
GENERAL:
- Master production list: The list of planets and their projects is useful -- a master list of ships in production is needed too. Two games that do empire-wide production management well (and allow you to edit production from the overview screen) are Civ V and Endless Space.
- Decommission starbase option: When my empire is bleeding cash I think I need an option to shut down or dismantle unneeded starbases. I also need more detailed financial information to see how much each starbase costs per turn, etc. when making these decisions.
- I accidentally had to many ship yards. I couldn't de-link them from planets and destroy them.
- Gameplay would move along faster if the game autorotated to the next available unit.
WARFARE:
- Zoom to battle: As has been mentioned by others -- the popup/notification about battle is not very useful if it doesn't take me to the battle. I LOST MY CAPITOL, and didn't even realize it for like 2 turns.
- Invasion points are listed nowhere on the summary screens. When I get many fleets going, I would like the invasion points to show up when hovering, along with the combat points. Similarly, movement points could be more clearly listed, particularly when a large fleet has ships of various ranges flying within it. I want to be able to pull the fast ships out quickly when needed somewhere.
- I've been getting some crashes when attacking directly out of a starbase to a fleet or planet.
- When enemy fleets are stacked, they often all disappear after I destroy one. This happens repeatedly and is very confusing.
- I think that military starbases and/or planets should exert a "range of control" -- so that an enemy ship passing within one or two spaces is automatically engaged in combat. Building upon that idea -- Its silly that I can have a starbase full of ships sitting over a planet, and have the planet invaded out from under me. The concept of one fleet/army joining another in nearby combat is well executed in Total War Rome II, for example.
SHIP DESIGNER:
- Ship designer could use an "undo" button. I've accidentally ruined some awesome builds by changing things that I then couldn't get back to where I started.
- Angles - The snap-to points/angles are really helpful when building a classic front to back ship. They are much less helpful when trying to build, say, a round ship. Just try to build a completely symmetrical round ship and you will see what I mean -- it's very hard to get the same part to attach at the exact same angle on all four or six sides of the 3D ship. Not sure how to fix, but it gets frustrating. Perhaps the rotation number should be degrees different from the snap point, rather than degrees on the XYZ axis.
- Angles 2.0: I would like to be able to type in an angles and offsets in addition to using the slider buttons. This would make it much easier to replicate the same angle on multiple parts quickly.
- Automatic upgrades and version renaming for custom ships. I don't really understand how model upgrades work now, but I'm not sure that all of my custom ships are upgrading along with the base models?
- Will ship designer have Steam Workshop support? I could imagine an unlimited number of parts in all shapes and colors... that would make this tons of fun.
- One thing that would add a lot of variety is a powerful texture editor for existing parts. -- if i could take any existing part and, for instance, make it 30% translucent and 15% green tinted -- it would really add to the variety that we have to work with.
Thanks! I welcome any clarifying questions/disagreements. Overall a great start. I probably won't play that much more until a lot more is done though -- It's just not that much fun without diplomacy and real combat.