Beta 2 cleared up the performance issues, so I can actually play now. Played 220 turns or so.
Major Points
UI is awful - After playing some other 4X games recently (CiV, AOW, Endless Space, Pandora, Endless Legend, and others), coming to this was a rude shock. Finding information is difficult, the UI is ugly, and whatever information I can find is often uninformative. A tech benefit may read that it reduces building costs by 10%, but I have to read the text to find this only applies to research buildings. Information on how systems work / effects is also non existent. Why does one race have more UP clout than I do? How do 'influence' and 'diplomacy' differ? My approval modifiers may state -10%, but I still have 97% approval? What benefits do adjacency give? How does population pressure work? Tourism? Trade? Why only 1 tourism building per planet? I feel like I am stumbling through this with no explanations.
Hyper-specializtion and instant population refocusing - it seems wrong that I can instantly decide to make every scientist into a manufacturer. It also promotes hyper-specialization of planets (which may be intended), but makes planet building feel very monotonous - just spam the one improvement that benefits science or industry or wealth, and have all the adjacency bonuses. Sure you may need an initial factory or farm, but besides this there seems to be little meaningful choice in colony building.
Colonial / Shipyard industry slider - I can understand the tradeoff between money/production/science, but why does this slider exist? What situation possibly exists where you would want to split production instead of either getting out a ship a few turns earlier or getting the benefits from an improvement a few turns earlier? Why not just have 'idle' colonies automatically provide full production to their shipyard instead of making me manually switch.
Excel Syndrome - Hopefully this is because it is still early beta, but I feel like I am managing a spreadsheet. Research a tech that gives a 10% bonus. This leads to a new tech, which unlocks a building that gives a 20% bonus. Then another 10% bonus tech, then an upgrade that improves my building another 20%. It feels very lifeless. We do have the anomaly tiles which add spice to planet development, but they are very rare (3 anomalies out of 60+ planet tiles). Why not have natural wonders? Planets that have moons or rings that provide an effect? More anomalies, possibly with unique building for them? Different types of planets (desert vs ocean vs molten) with different effects or available buildings?
Basic ship designer - the ship designer seems incredibly powerful. I may at some point want to build some awesome looking ships or templates. For the majority of the times when this is not true, please consider implementing a simple system where I choose a template (visual style), and can then easily click to add components. See endless space or sots ship design for ideas.
Random Feedback
About a 50% chance to crash on startup - didn't happen in Beta 1.
Please give us shift-move (move queue) for ship movement
Ship movement - The turns left to move to the target shouldn't update during flight, but only on new turns. This leads to a ton of misleading situations, where I think I can move somewhere because it tells me 1 turn, but then I realize I have already used half my moves
Ideology tree should be draggable
UI notifications - a pop up list (see Endless Space / Legends, Warlock, Civ, AOW, etc) would be better than a single button for all items.
Planetary spending approval bonus seems to go down as spending goes up. Could be intentional - I have no idea what it should do.
Diplomatic autobalance or 'what will you give me for this' would be nice
Ship buyout costs need to go down as ship construction procedes
Allow starbases to be sponsored - by about turn 100, half of my turn was managing constructors
Text boxes cut off text constantly. Misaligned, split into two lines when only space for 1, cut off...
Planetary projects (eg birthing subsidies) don't work if you have no colony industry...but do if you have 1%
I seem to be able to go in enemy territory without open borders, and can't do anything about it when they enter mine. Please add a option to destroy intruders, possibly with a diplomatic penalty, if no open borders.
Sidebar queue needs to show turns to completion
Costs need to update immediately after changing sliders
In govern, I would like an overview of civ bonuses (traits, from research / ideology, etc), and time remaining on temporary bonuses
Do diplomacy background have lower framereate? Somehow getting impression of low quality when viewing them
bonuses unclear - in research text, may say one thing but bonus implies another
Trade improvements, but can't see value in planet - only in total?
Tourism seems huge - doubled my income
Adjacency bonuses don't update in UI after research
Ship logistics cost doesn't seem to be listed anywhere
When there multiple types of a building (eg 2 factory types) hard to know upgrade chains. Iridium store isn't an upgrade to free market?
Show current ideology levels during events
Very good in your "random feedback". Many are probably "in the pipe", but it is good to list them out.
Now some comments on your major points. It is just my thoughts, so take them with a grain of salt.
UI/text -I agree that there could be better notifications. That is probably still in discussion. Everyone agrees the text needs cleaned up. That said, it is fruitless for the poor person doing it when the values will probably change multiple times during the beta. That would tie up a resource indefinitely for the next few months double-checking that all of the text was still correct because someone may have changed it and not mentioned it to the documentation person. However, they should fix the ones that say one thing and do something else entirely.
Specialization - It appears that is exactly the intent. Why wouldn't it be? Otherwise every planet would be the same build queue with only the size of the planet making a difference. The wealth, manufacture, research circle dynamic is foggy. I don't understand why lowering wealth makes approval go down. So if I generate 100% wealth, which equates to me taxing them and keeping the money makes them happy? Eh?
Production Slider - This is a function of the shipyard being its own entity. Essentially you can give production from multiple planets to the shipyard. Perhaps you want to build a planet improvement that takes a few turns, but need to get a colony ship out in 20. This lets you balance that out. I agree the production slider is a PIA, it should automatically transfer production from the shipyard to the planet if nothing is being build. That said, you can choose to make a shipyard idle now.
Spreadsheet - well, most research in real life boils down to an improvement of something existing. I agree it is a bit dull, because there isn't a new toy or something, but they are important. Would you rather have +2 beakers? More thinks to build?
Shipyard - You could build your own templates and save them at the start. Then use those as a basis for your upgrades as you research them. I agree that it is fairly worthless to have it not show up in a future game until you research all the techs for it. I don't remember every tech of every ship I built! Of course, it is up to me to remove them.
Good job, keep them coming!
Seems like you are new, in that case it should be 1# on the list of devs to make sure the game remains learnable*(not a word lol) to new players and doesn't mess with there heads to bad. Work in progress I say.
Thanks for your views.
I understand exact UI values may change, but a general overview of what effects something has (eg is trade dependent on route length? Planet size? Diplomatic standing? Length of time route has existed?) would be nice.
My biggest concern is specializtion / spreadsheet. As specialization is intended, it seems the best strategy is then to build a factory or two on each planet, and then everything else as your chosen specialty building. Since every building has an adjacency bonus to its own type, this essentially eliminates choice in constructing buildings on the planet, which seems to get boring. Hence my suggestions of more anomalies / base terrain (eg desert vs arctic may give different benefits to buildings constructed on them), moons or rings, or other things to spice up building.
Thanks for your views. I understand exact UI values may change, but a general overview of what effects something has (eg is trade dependent on route length? Planet size? Diplomatic standing? Length of time route has existed?) would be nice. My biggest concern is specializtion / spreadsheet. As specialization is intended, it seems the best strategy is then to build a factory or two on each planet, and then everything else as your chosen specialty building. Since every building has an adjacency bonus to its own type, this essentially eliminates choice in constructing buildings on the planet, which seems to get boring. Hence my suggestions of more anomalies / base terrain (eg desert vs arctic may give different benefits to buildings constructed on them), moons or rings, or other things to spice up building.
Thanks for the thanks
We could definitely benefit from a "conceptually, this is what we are shooting for", but unfortunately we do not have it yet.
If any game was spreadsheet, even under the hood, it is Paradox/Stardock games. I think Stardock disguises it better and adds more humor/fun.
As to starting with a factory or two, then... There was a large (well, several) discussions on farms and growth. Everything is based on population. Factories only give a boost, as well as research, etc. It is better to build a farm (increases limit for approval malus) and hospital (because it increases growth), than a factory. I checked out after a while, but it should be easy to look up.
Population is the driver of production, wealth and research. The tile bonuses, building bonuses and settlement bonuses/decisions fill out the rest.
HOWEVER, you are right in that an 8 tile planet with a snake build is not nearly as good as one with a "block" where the adjacency bonus will really help.
Why not just have 'idle' colonies automatically provide full production to their shipyard instead of making me manually switch.
This would really help reduce the micromanagement.
Diplomatic autobalance or 'what will you give me for this' would be nice.
Absolutely agree. Another tool to reduce micromanagement.
Interesting. This can be done with rally points, but when building a lot of starbases on huge maps, this might help with "now which rally point was that?"
Yes, my largest gripe in micromanagement is colony industry sliders and star bases. Anything that could automate those would be wonderful.
As for immersion - perhaps a better way to say it would be that I feel eXploration and eXploitation are lacking.
eXploration - finding one class 8 planet is much the same as another class 8 planet. There may (but probably not) be a single anomaly on one of them. Of course, location is important and there are strategic resources / artifacts / goodie huts, but exploration feels very barren.
eXploitation - half the fun (for me) in 4X is deciding how to best build up my resources on my cities / planets. Here, once I decide to make a planet a industry/wealth/science focus, I feel like my choices are done. There is some optimal combination (not found yet, but eventually someone will do the math) of factories/hospitals (for initial growth) and farms/booster buildings (for final output).
I don't really agree that the UI looks bad, however I do agree that one of the failings of GC games generally has been to give a clear and accessible explainations of what all the numbers actually mean and how things work and GC3 certainly has the same issue. This makes the game less approachable for turn based stratergy novices and means you really have to commit time to working out what's going on under the hood to learn to play really well.
I don't suggest dumbing anything down here just giving some clear information maybe in a tutorial and making sure that descriptions of what something does are clear.
I also suspect a lot of tech flavour tech is still WIP which is why most techs just read like a spreadsheet entry at the moment.
So I agree with many of the OP's points, except I don't find the UI ugly.
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