First off I've bought and played a lot of early access games and have been disappointed with more of them than I've enjoyed. Not the case with this game you've created a unique game that's really enjoyable. I'm looking forward to seeing what you clean and polish. I know this is early access and I'm sure many things are going to change and rebalance but I've played full release games that weren't as good. So haveing said that here's my thoughts added to the mix, I hope something in this ramble is helpful.
The great stuff:
1. I love the campaign mode that allows you to grow and specialize over multiple missions, great idea and I hope you expand on it and make it cover more missions. I'd love to see it stretch over 20-30 missions with some story, maybe even some single player (no ai) where you're racing against the clock to produce enough resource to avert a disaster or something.
2. The supply and demand mechanics you got in feel right, I actually feel like I have some control over the price of goods and that I can react to shortages.
3. Another thing I really enjoyed once I figured it out was that in campaign mode you can lose if the colony shrinks too much because of overly high prices of food or water. I think that a feature that should be added to multiplayer skirmishes. Something where everyone loses if they are fighting each other so much that they don't supply the colony properly. Although I'd say that that really needs to be documented better.
Polish I hope you add:
Tooltips and an encyclopedia - there is a lot going on in this game and not all of the information is readily apparent, more hover over information and a resource to go to in game to learn about the mechanics would really help. I watched you're let's plays and tutorials and that helped alot, if I hadn't watched those I'm not sure that even the tutorials would have been enough to teach me how to play
A list of hot key's and key bindings - From watching you're youtube videos it's obvious that you know all of the hotkeys, however I haven't seen any of them in in mousing over and I've seen you auto sell everything with a hot key, and for the life of me I can't figure out what that hot key is. I figured out spacebar pauses the game just because that a normal game convention, but I'd love to see a rebind-able list of the other hotkeys.
Sounds - love the music and most of the rest of the sounds but... are the voiceovers what you expect to have at release or just placeholders? I hope they are just placeholders as I find them to be kind of jarring.
Some UI function to cycle through buildings I already own. Many times I want to go build another mine next to one that I already have built and I end up having to scroll all around the map looking for the silly thing, if that function is already in then some documentation on how to find it or add in instructions on how to use that feature in the tutorial.
Documentation that going last gives you an extra claim spot - that's huge!
A tooltip on what your stock price is headed to as you go into debt or pay down debt, it's really unclear to me just how my debt affects my stock price. Yes the tooltip shows the x3 or x4 penalty for your debt. But in one game I ran up my debt to about 80k and then paid it all off very quickly and I couldn't really determine that it had a huge impact on my stock price.
Game balance or mechanics I'd like to see:
Debt doesn't hurt enough or the AI doesn't use it enough - I've seen this mentioned in alot of other post with a lot of other recommendations on how to resolve it. Personally when I turned on the stricter debt option in the quick start game it was a lot more fun for me. But here are possible solutions that I thought of to makeing debt feel right:
1. have the interest rate on debt work on a supply and demand just like every other resource in the game (basically like a simplified bond market) if other people are in debt then you can buy that debt and be paid their interest, and the more debt they have as a ratio to their stock price the higher the interest rate they have to pay.
2. Instead of haveing the interest on the debt add to the balance of the debt instead have the interest on your debt subtract from your cash balance. Basically you have to make an interest only debt service payment (which is pretty realistic in the real world on revolving debt) if there isn't a large enough cash balance to amke the debt service payment then have the interest rate increase (1%-5% for each defaulted payment)
3. Some way of limiting buying out someone else's stock while your deeply in debt
4. a softcap maximum amount of debt you can have based on a multiple of your stock price. Again this is a common thing for real companies that their bond prices are based off of a debt to book rate value, and when you exceed that soft cap no more expenditures are allowed until you pay down under that cap. This would solve the buying out opponents while your deeply in debt.
When shipping offworld the ability to auto buy and ship even if the reserves aren't in your stocks. It doesn't make since to require the extra mouse clicks to have to buy the resource first then click to ship it.
Science faction just feels too weak, the tutorial was by far the hardest and I've tried to play both skirmish maps and the campaign as science and they are way harder to play than any of the other races. The only thing I can think of (and this might be overpowered) is if you put a steel mill on an iron mine it generates the steal like normal and half of the amount of iron a normal iron mine would.
I said it before but I'm going to mention it again having a non player colony that drives supply and demand just like whats in the campaign mode so that demand for life support goods goes up over time (and maybe having the income from pleasure domes go up as well)
Lastly it feals like there needs to be more uses for carbon and aluminum. After the initial build up phase the prices seem to tank with not much to do with them.
And I know there are a few other thoughts but now I want to go play another game
Thanks for the feedback, sresk2! Good stuff!
What tooltips do you think the game is missing? We're considering an encyclopedia, but we may not do it and it is pretty far off.
List of hotkeys, yes! Here's an informal group of them: https://forums.offworldgame.com/461430/page/1/ As for rebinding, that's something we'd like to do but no promises. We have a lot of work ahead of us.
You don't like them? I went to the best free text-to-speech places on the internet and typed in my text there and you don't like it??
We'll get real voice actors. Don't worry. I want to keep how stupid/silly I wrote some of the lines though. Don't expect this for some time though.
Yep. This is a big feature that we're going to have to solve. We have some nebulous plans, but we need to start moving forward on them. This won't be fixed in the near-term, but it will certainly be fixed.
Yeah, that was an oversight. We'll try to add that information in an upcoming update.
We've had a number of requests to show how your price has changed over time. We don't want to add too much stuff to the interface, but this may be necessary.
I'm actually pretty happy with the cash/debt split at this point. Again, adding more complexity may fix this problem, but I'm very concerned about adding it to the game as a whole. There is a lot going on.
I understand there's a bit of busywork when shipping offworld, but I'm hesitant to automate more things. Players can lose money just by clicking and queuing things up.
Some people think the scientists are great, but they are probably the hardest to play.
We have that in the campaign game. It's disabled in the skirmish and multiplayer games because it's just so much stuff.
I think carbon is pretty useful, but I often play scavengers. Carbon goes into chemicals (which, imo, are vital), wind turbines (which Soren nerfed to unplayability), and electronics. Aluminum, yeah, I'm with ya there. But we have 13 resources! One of them isn't going to be used as much as the others.
Thanks for all the feedback!
Maybe make aluminum a component of launching offworld rockets, along with fuel? Those rockets don't look reusable
Woah you guys are active on the forums.
1. Tooltips - I played and watched a couple of more games and I think the problem isn't so much information that isn't available (which was my first impression) but it's not available fast enough, it just needs to be a shorter tooltip delay (I'd make a slider in the options UI to adjust the speed). And I found that when hovering over building the tooltips are there for the hot keys. I'd consider adding the same hotkey tooltip when you mouse over a plot.
2. Even if you don't make the UI rebindable to different hot keys even just adding a UI windows with a list of hot keys (minus the cheets of course) would be huge IMO
3. LOL that's so funny because my first thought was man these sound like text to voice... I bet their placeholders, I mean all and all they honestly aren't bad but they don't match the quality of the rest of the game, and if it was a $5-$10 title I probably wouldn't have noticed but yeah... hell just go crowd source some voice actors for $5 a line and your probably good to go
4. UI to cycle through buildings, glad to hear that's on the todo list, although I watched some more of your public games and a 5 second warning on when the black market is popping up or a progress bar or fading in from the bottom or whatever should be a bigger priority.
5. Debt - I've put more thought to this (I'm in the mortgage industry and I read a lot of financial bond news so debt is something I think a lot about ) On the one hand consumer debt and company debt are two very different things and I do like that you've made debt a tool an not something to be avoided at all costs, but on the other hand how it currently stands just doesn't quite "feel" right and I'm having a hard time telling why. I really think that if you guys are trying to keep debt as a strong strategic tool then I'd perhaps lower the interest rate (making debt even stronger than it already is) and then build in a soft cap to the maximum amount of debt you can have based on you stock price (and of course add in a tool tip to what you current debt limit is)
6. Automating shipping offworld - hmm you make a good point
7. scientists - it looks like you guys are are gathering a lot of in game player metrics I would just tell you to watch it really closely and I'll make a wager with you that the player bases is going to have way more losses than wins as science, there's a couple of things going on, one it's way harder to stack adjacency bonuses (unless you get slant drilling) and two it feels like they need to get the same volume of resources as expansive but have fewer claims to do it with but they still have to worry about life support unlike the robots. As science I consistently last to upgrade and usually the AI science players are also behind the power curve on upgrading. Maybe something as simple as decreasing their upgrade costs by 10%-20% would fix the problem.
8. can you add a toggle to turn on the campaign colony in a skirmish match, please? Please, please? It really is that great of a feature, and mostly becuase it forces the players to actually pay attention to keeping the life support costs down or suffer a scenario where everyone loses, not only are we fighting each other to be dominant we're also fighting a really harsh environment just trying to survive thats a great feeling that isn't highlighted enough in the skirmish.
9. Oh and this one's really harebrained but I'm going to throw it out there anyways, and this is totally feature creep that I don't expect you guys to get around too but... Again I think you're campaign mode is way more fun than just the straight skirmish mode and it's interesting to go into a match with the inability to build some buildings makes each of the races more distinct. I'd love to see skirmish start the same way but everyone has a budget of $200 to $500 that they can then spend on their starting set up as they see fit (so remove the limited 10 choices at the top of the screen and just allow players to click on the buildings that they want to put engineers into)
10. performance and crashes - performance goes down over time (and I have a pretty high end PC) as I'm sure you guys are aware and I had a lot of crashes last night, I was trying to watch what caused most of the crashes and I was having a hard time coming up with any common thread I wouldnt mind helping with more testing but I'm not sure what information you guys or looking for or how your generating crash loggs etc.
add another 10-15 wins which were denied by leaving hosts
so i disagree
Scientific is amazing. I play on VP handicap and win most of the games I play scientific. They were a challenge to learn, however.
Hmm I've been playing more scientific and the juries still out in my mind but i thought of another thing,
Really need the ability to save mid mission, especially with how prone to crash the game is right now. Many times I'm half way through a game when it dies and I'd love to be able to reload from a save.
Its funny, I've had some errors, but not crashes. I run Windows 8.1 with an i3 3210M laptop, which uses an integrated Intel HD4000 GPU.
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