I've been playing the game a while and thinking about what about it bothers me, so now that I've had time to think, here are my thoughts condensed:
1. Aesthetic: None of the units look especially epic or interesting. The model designs are all generic, boring RTS units we've seen over and over, decade after decade. The maps are generic and bland. There's very little interactivity with the map other than resource points.
2. Spammy, repetitive sounds: you hear a lot of the same sounds over and over again. There's very little variation in sounds. The sounds spam again and again if you move your camera away from the units then back onto them. Seems to be that the sounds play when the units get within your camera's field of view. Very weird.
3. Lack of hero units: The closest we come to any sort of capital ship are the dreadnoughts, and even they aren't that interesting. You can successfully play the game (and win) without building any dreadnoughts by just spamming the right composition of cruisers and managing resources well.
4. Lack of any sort of tech tree: The tech "tree", such that it is, is extremely limited. All you really have to "tech up" is increasing your supply limit, resource storage, and slight bonuses to your units' power that quickly gets prohibitively expensive.
5. Very weak defenses: The defensive buildings in the game are extremely weak and easily defeated. There's little point in building them because a bunch of artillery cruisers can instantly melt any defenses, and basic frigates can meatshield through them even without artillery cruisers. There's no way to upgrade the range or durability of these structures. Compare to games like SupCom or Total Annihilation, where anything short of an absolutely huge rush of units will easily get picked off at range by superior defensive buildings.
6. Air is binary: Air units are extremely fragile, and the lack of any higher tier air units means that your air units are "binary": either they're deadly effective (to the point that building a few of them can insta-kill the enemy's nexus), or they're totally impotent against a few ground based air defense towers, and nothing you do can fix that short of making a combined air/ground assault. There's very little room for a semi-successful air assault.
7. lolol gg: Most games are extremely short. The preferred tactic in multiplayer seems to be to bum rush the enemy with a neverending stream of frigates and cruisers. Either that, or build enough bombers that you can destroy their nexus in a single pass. Point is, the games are short and fairly shallow in strategy, aside from minor considerations about the ratios of different unit classes to put into your army, and how quickly you can APM through a couple resource points.
8. APM: Despite Brad and the devs claiming this is not an APM game, this is an APM game. Very much so. There's very little time to think with this game; you have to maximize the use of every second to expand as quickly as possible while monitoring enemy movement and building armies at breakneck pace. Units are extremely expendable, to the point that you want to just start throwing units *everywhere* on attack-move to maximize your chances of hitting something. It doesn't matter if they die because you can keep them on continuous build. If you are producing units faster than the enemy, you'll eventually win. Micro also plays a huge role in the game, which leads me to...
9. No automation tools: Although Brad and the devs claimed that "macro" strategy is more important, the game does very little to assist in automating the menial micro tasks that are often necessary. For example, there is no way to create a "template" of a series of buildings (basically a one-click drop of a bunch of buildings in a build queue in a consistent arrangement) -- this would save a lot of time by allowing you to set up the same defensive perimeter around each and every resource point you capture.
Unit AI is also fairly stupid, with units easily lured into a trap if you aren't microing them, and armies just make your units frustratingly turn around and move the opposite way that you're telling them to move for half the time.
There's no way to tell units to pop out of a factory on automatic attack-move.
There's no way to tell engineers to automatically replace destroyed resource extractors or base defenses. For that matter, they don't even seem to recognize basic orders like "repair the nexus" - they just go stand near it and might occasionally coincidentally toss a few repairs at it.
There's no way to tell the unit-producing buildings to automatically set your rally points intelligently so that units automatically assemble in armies at the borders of your base.
There's no way to give orders to an army to automatically seek out and capture uncontested resource nodes in a sort of branching exploration pattern (kill neutrals; capture node; roll on to the next one). This is a standard part of every single game that has to be carefully microed instead of being automated. Also, half the units don't even think to get within range of the power plant to attempt to capture it, so you end up waiting a lot longer than necessary to capture the node. Even right-clicking on the node doesn't seem to help your units realize that you want them to capture it.
10. Voiceovers: There are no voiceovers in the campaign. I know this is an indie game, but come on, guys - it's 2016. Get with the program. Even if you have to get the janitor to read voiceovers, some voiceovers are better than none. They really help with immersion.
11. Music: Just listen to the catchy music of Sins of a Solar Empire. Or any of the GalCiv games. There is nothing even close to that level of memorable and awesome music in AotS. I haven't played Sins since like, 2013-2014, and I can still hum one of the best TEC music tracks.
12. Customization: There are few to no parameters you can customize to distinguish yourself from other players. Sure, there's the general paintjob color of your units, but there are no persistent decals, no level-based buffs or unit unlocks, no pre-game "emphasis" or sub-factions (like the Rebels vs the Loyalists in Sins: Rebellion, or the points you can distribute among various attributes in GalCiv), no nothing. All the things I've come to love about Stardock games over the years just aren't there. Think of any random thing about GalCiv series or Sins that you loved. Is it in AotS? No. Of course it isn't, because AotS is an extremely simplistic APM strategy game, without even one of the four elements of "4x".
13. No economic, diplomatic, cultural or tech interaction with other players: The only interactions with other players are "shoot them" and "stop them from capturing all the Turindium nodes" (which boils down to shooting them so they can't). It's the simplest style of RTS, and simple is bad IMO, because the only real depth is acting faster than your opponent. So, basically an APM game.
14. No Stardock aesthetic: Despite the cute reference to "Drengi" in the last mission, this is not at all a Stardock title. There's very little about the game that harkens back to the design philosophy of Stardock's other seminal strategy games. Most of this boils down to a lack of tech tree depth, a lack of customization, and a lack of higher level unit and building orders (like the other stuff I've mentioned above).
15. Not friendly to casuals: The campaign is BRUTALLY hard. The AI may not cheat, true, but it does *technically* cheat, because it can give orders and determine what to do much faster than a human can. It's simply not possible for a human to click and think as fast as the computer. Even without getting resource gathering bonuses, the computer is always going to be way faster than a human. The difficulty is so amped up that most casual strategy game players will not be able to beat the campaign at all without using a trainer, even on the easiest difficulty.
16. No feeling of "commitment": In SoaSE, you often had to commit your main fleet to an attack, knowing full well that there's no way to back out once your ships start to jump. That feeling isn't here, because units aren't valuable and defenses are weak. You can always just turn around if you try to attack a force that's too hard for you, and 9 times out of 10 you won't lose the bulk of your units.
17. Campaign story: The story is just plain boring. Sorry, but it is. There's almost no personality, almost no intrigue, nothing relatable at all about the main "characters" (if you can call them that). A skirmish game of GalCiv 1 has a better story than the campaign of this game. The campaign just seems to be a way to slowly introduce you to the tech tree, like 90% of the strategy games out there. Except that strategy games from decades ago have infinitely better stories (see: original C&C).
18. End-game is pointless: There's little point in building stuff like the orbital strike or some of the more advanced orbital stuff. Most of it is so expensive, and the building housing it so fragile, that you're better off spending your resources on cruisers. Only in games where the players are extremely evenly matched do the end-game units ever come into play, and even then, it seems more like a tool to let the winning player win faster, instead of tipping the scales one way or the other. Army size, position, and composition is far more important than any of these higher tier orbital buildings.
Sorry to have to be critical of the game, but I'm really tired of these skin-deep strategy games, so to see Stardock build one is a little disappointing, especially in the wake of fantastic titles like SoaSE. I'm not happy with the game and will probably not give it another look.
Hero units, Voiceovers and no fiendly interface whatsoever. They have so much to improve in this game both sp and mp
The trick with Stardock games is to play them 3 years after release when they've got their shit together. I have no problem giving them money on release because I know they'll do their damndest to earn it.
This is great feedback.
We will be continuing to work on the game as long as people want us to work on the game.
Thanks for your reply, Brad! I'm a little surprised to hear such a positive response given how critical I was in my criticisms.
Instead, now I'll try to be constructive. Here are the things I would like to see improved about AotS -- and let me be perfectly clear that if some these things arrive in expansion packs that cost money, I will buy them with extreme prejudice.
1. Deeper pre-game customization. Let players choose bonuses/weaknesses (spending "points") before the game. See: StarDrive, GalCiv, Endless Space.
2. Rich differences between races. In addition to, or as an alternative to the first suggestion, check out how deep race customizations vary in Age of Mythology http://ageofempires.wikia.com/wiki/Ra
3. Orbital layer. Introduce an orbital layer akin to (some of) the Civilization games, and have space-based units up there. The buildings you build on the ground right now that enable new orbital "services" seem a little odd, as I'd think those things would be launched into orbit - no? Anyway, having space-based fighters or platforms would be awesome.
4. More defensive units. Create mobile units that are not very fast but have superior range and hitpoints, something like a heavy tank for example. These would be great for defending bases against lighter units. Also create more costly defensive structures that cover a wider area.
5. Tech tree. There is something alluring about having a "tech tree" where you have to research stuff that just seems like it belongs in a serious strategy game. Either that, or make higher-tier production buildings beyond what we have now, that are much more costly to build.
6. Smarter unit AI. If your goal is to make a strategy game that encourages the player to macro rather than micro, units should be more autonomous and intelligent. For example, if units are within a certain range of a power generator you control, they should automatically defend if they detect enemies in the area.
7. Higher-level automation controls. There is a spectrum of how much "automation" (doing things for the player) that makes sense within an RTS. On one end is Starcraft 2, that does next to nothing for you, except for your SCVs auto-mining minerals at the start of the game. On the other end is Distant Worlds: Universe, which allows you to set up varying levels of automation as you prefer -- anything from no automation at all, to letting the AI run your whole empire and play the game for you. Right now it seems like AotS is pretty close to Starcraft 2. I'd like to see AotS offer players higher levels of automation, borrowing slightly (but not whole-hog) concepts from Distant Worlds: Universe, like automatically distributing the armies as they get created. Or perhaps creating a "policy" for how to intelligently distribute the units (one policy would be "position them around the power generators we control"; another might be "send everything we've got at the enemy Turindium nodes!").
To sketch out what I mean by automation controls, I basically mean that you should be able to set up a "standing order" for something you want to happen continuously, and then the AI will take care of it for you after that. Something like:
- Set up a series of waypoints from your base into enemy territory (through a few of their currently-held nodes).
- Designate the units produced from a certain set of factories to assemble an army until the army is X units in size (10, 20, 50, 100, whatever), then run through the waypoints in attack-move mode, capturing any nodes found along the way. If the army gets destroyed, reassemble a new army and repeat, or provide a notification when units reach the final waypoint and are done fighting.
Other possible automations:
- Auto-reinforce armies with supplies of units from nearby factories as units are destroyed.
- Unit composition recommendations: If one of your armies gets owned, have the AI suggest to you a unit composition adjustment (to change the ratios in your factory production queues) to counter the enemy threat based on the perceived weakness. For example if you only have 1 Apollo per every 10 cruisers you chunk out, and your army gets obliterated by bombers, you'd get a notification to increase anti-air production in your armories with a checkmark / red X to indicate whether to accept or decline.
8. Upgradable nexus. The later into the game it gets, the easier it becomes for someone to cheese your nexus and instantly win. This sort of backdooring strategy is not fun, in the same way that a one-turn kill is not fun in Hearthstone: a player can be winning strategically, and seconds later they are dead because of a very focused enemy attack. The nexus should be upgradable to increase its firing range, health, and damage.
9. Better dreadnought customization. I think this one speaks for itself. SoaSE level customization is a bare minimum, IMO.
10. More varied and more powerful air units. Carriers, gunships, etc. and more powerful ground-to-air AA units to match them.
11. Econ upgrades. There should be more buildings aside from just the Amplifier that enable you to harvest more and more resources from existing resource extractors. It's OK to make these expensive, but they should help escalate and accelerate resource mining while making turtling (to a certain extent) a viable strategy. Maybe allow upgrading Amplifiers, or higher tier units you can build within the radius of a Power Generator that simply provide more metal or radioactive units at great up-front cost (I'm thinking of Fusion Reactors in Total Annihilation).
That's all I can think of for now, but certainly there are some other improvements that I think the game would benefit from. I'll continue to follow the game's development and will be interested to see what changes.
OP, I think you pretty much nailed it with all your points.
The only other thing I would like to add is, there is no way to increase the UI size or move the windows around to where you need/want them.
Playing this game on a 4K screen is very difficult because everything is so small. Even my grandad can't play on a 1080p screen, since the interface is just too small for him to see clearly enough.
I would also like to see much more unit customization.
There was a really cool RTS game by the name of Warzone 2100, where you could design your own units, different bodies, weapons, propulsion and so on, and this game engine with that amount of customization would really be epic!
This game seems to be a rushers paradise, with very little strategy involved, besides who can pump out the most units.
It could have been so much better.
"There was a really cool RTS game by the name of Warzone 2100, where you could design your own units, different bodies, weapons, propulsion and so on, and this game engine with that amount of customization would really be epic!"
I think you are reeffering to Earth 2160 BadVoltage.
That game was wicked in what it was intended for users to customize their army. really powerfull game.but lets not get ahead of ourselves. they need to improve it little by little and maybe in the future they give us a more polished game. The game as is stands now seems like a beta, especially the sp campaign.
No, it is Warzone 2100, Earth 2160 was pretty horrible, and had god awful voice acting in it, and it never had any customizing of units, except for building "base towers" where each level could be a different thing. Doing some searching, it seems Warzone 2100 is still being worked on, and is free! http://forums.wz2100.net/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=12429
I also think AotS was pretty much unfinished for the campaign as well.
No, it is Warzone 2100, Earth 2160 was pretty horrible, and had god awful voice acting in it, and it never had any customizing of units, except for building "base towers" where each level could be a different thing. Doing some searching, it seems Warzone 2100 is still being worked on, and is free! http://forums.wz2100.net/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=12429I also think AotS was pretty much unfinished for the campaign as well.
Earth 2160 was a polish game, maybe thats the reason for the awful voice acting, lol. I actually had it in original polish version, it was pretty funny. I am actually slavic and my language is similar to polish one, but still there are some differences, and those could make me smile on occasion. I loved their word for bomber for example, "bombowiec"
Anyway, it was not that bad game, playing for the Alien faction was pretty awesome, once you got to the big flying spaceships and went on a roll, killing everything it your path.
On topic, very good thread this. Agreed with lot of what the OP said, especially the parts about the need for deeper customization, techtrees, etc. I just like those aspects of Sins, so naturally i would want this game to be more like Sins in this regard, pretty much its land-based version. So far it is not and perhaps this is not what the devs are shooting for... we shall see.
some good points there. I would also love to see sub factions, customization and hero units and more air units.
Now, I'm not actually 'into' Stardock's games... but know Frogboy well enough to know he'll always be receptive to criticism of Stardock's products....provided they're well thought and well voiced [as they are here].
"This sux" is just a gross waste of typing strokes...
Anyone who puts an actionable list of things we can actually improve on is a friend of mine!
Glad to see another WZ2100 fan!
I did post about it a while ago: https://forums.ashesofthesingularity.com/475296/page/1/#3623306
Frogboy, I humbly suggest you spend some of your valuable time (as the game is free there is no other entry barrier) taking a look at WZ2100.
While its interface is really outdated many of the mechanics there are still unsurpassed (a sad testament to how little the genre advanced) and could have uses in a future AOTS DLC.
Hi Frogboy,
So here comes my suggestion or questions.
I played with a friend of mine online a 2v2. After my base got destroyed the game was over for me and I basically got kicked out. I was really surprised not being able to stay connected and keep watching. I wanted to know how this match ended.
Are there any plans to implement that feature in the future?
Since I lost, I must have been terrible with my economy since I had the same amount of metal but got spammed to death. I wish there would be a replay so I can watch and learn. This feature has been announced for the distant future right?
Overall I think this game is very micro-intense, are there any plans to improve on the empire tree on the left top corner? It does not really do anything for me... or double click a unit and all units of the same kind are selected?
Double clicking cruiser or frigate factories, being able to add build queues or pause production for all of the selected factories?
To minimize micro especially for economy, I would love to be able to use area commands, so that you drag a build order over every metal extractor in the area instead of clicking one by one? The system being used like in Planetary Annihilation?
Thank you.
hello my friend ^^
http://steamcommunity.com/app/228880/discussions/1/371918937279939419/
Some good stuff here.
Let me respond to a few of these. Mind you, this is just my own 2 cents:
1. Re Auto-Reinforce: I kind of worry about auto-reinforce because the UI requirements to support that would be quite a bit. I'm not against it in principle but you could easily end up in frustration situations where your resources are being eaten without understanding why.
2. Re Troop Transports. We have struggled with various ideas on how to make this both fun AND useful. In TA, I rarely used an Atlas for anything more than com napping (yea, sorry TA guys, I they made the patch because of me, I'm a jerk, I was young) and while SUpCom could automate this sort of thing, it was rarely used.
That said, OVER TIME, as the game gets more sophisticated in terms of supply lines and economy, it is something we want to eventually add.
3. Re Pausing several factories at once. Would selecting multiple factories and selecting pause be ok?
4, Re clearing teh queue. Yes. On the list.
5. Auto-level up for Dreadnoughts. Yes. On the list.
6. Formation handling. This is something we have to think more about. Right now, the AI tries to come up with the ideal formation for self protection without becoming a blob. This is jsut something that will have to be iterated on.
7. Re air unit behavior. Ashes and SupCom air units don't move as well as they did in TA. It's something on our list to make better especially as we add more air units.
8. Re Tech tree. We actually intended to have a tech tree screen ala Sins of a Solar Empire. We still want a tech tree. However, we are concerned that teching will take the player out of the action too long. It's a UI issue rather than a game play one as we totally agree with you.
9. Re turtling. The repair bays and drone bays along with smarties and sentinels woudl seem to do everything you'd want for turtling. What functionality do you feel is missing here? I.e. is it a balance issue or is it just not using the full assortment of tools?
10. Re track units. I don't think either the PHC or Substrate will be going back to tracked units any time soon. That isn't to say there won't be tracked units in the future...
11. Re super weapons. How is a nuke different than orbital strike?
12. Experimentals. We are considering what form a future T4 would be. In Sins of a Solar Empire, we didn't introduce Titans until Rebellion. They're ont something we want to casually add.
13. re Audio. What sounds would you prefer and what do you mean by low quality? As in the recording fidelitiy or soemthing else?
14. Re Eye candy. Indeed. Eye candy is an art budget thing. Given that we're an independent studio, our ability to do eye candy will have to depend on sales.
Cheers!
Now for responses for the OP.
1. Re units are bland and the map isn't interactive.
This is true. It was a design (budget) decision. We felt it was more important to have sophisticated units (in what they do) than to have pretty (but limited) units. Similarly, we wanted to have a lot of strategically variable maps rather than a handful of very pretty maps.
It's just one of those trade-offs you have to make when you have a finite (as in, think 1/7th of what SupCom 1.0 had to work with).
2. Sound. This is good feedback and I tend to agree.
3. Re "No hero units". We don't want hero units. The T3s are the closest we were looking for. On a small map, you won't build T3s usually. On big maps, you'll get annihilated by any decent player if you don't.
4. Re "no tech tree". We actually had a tech tree at one point and others have posted some amazing ideas. So why not? We ran into the issue where how much time can you take your view off the battlefield to deal with a tech tree and ultimately settled on tech levels. However, we do, badly, want a tech tree as it's a huge strategic gap that needs to be filled. However, we had to scrap the original concept of a near full-screen window with a Sins of a Solar Empire style tech tree.
5. Re Defenses. I so disagree with this. Build a repair bay and your buildings are nearly unkillable.
6. Re Air. I do think the game needs more tools for air. Part of it is a balance thing and part of it is that we will need to provide players with additional tools.
More specifically, the issue you bring up is a very important and complex one:
We need to be able to pick air units based on what they'll be facing. Thus, we need to have an air unit that can attack soft targets and an air unit good at taking hard targets (just to name 2 examples).
7. Re the current fast expand being OP. This is a definite problem. HOpefully this week's update will address it some.
8. Re APM. I don't agree it's a heavy APM. Play some compedtitive StarCraft for heavy APM. It is, however higher APM than Sins. We are looking to change that.
9. Re base templates. Totally disagree with this direction. There's a fine line between Macro and sim.
9a. There does need to be more automation.
10. This is something we will be addressing. TBH, we didn't really think much of the campaign as being much more than a device to give people some custom missions and show them how to play. Now, since people WANT more sophisticated story-driven content, it's not a big deal for us to do that. We just didn't expect the demographic that played this game to desire effort in that area.
11. Re Music. The music in Ashes is fantastic. It's just a matter of taste. It was composed by Richard Gibbs (Battlestar Galactica) and Geoff Knorr (Civilization V). I'm comfortable that we hit the quality bar on the music.
12. Re Cusotmization. I like this idea.
13. Re Culture/diplomacy. Neither did Sins until Sins of a Solar Empire: Diplomacy. And obviously SupCom and TA don't have this. You can't be all things to all people or you end up with "The Homer".
14. Re Not Stardockian. While it's not a 4X, we make other types of games too.
15. Re campaign being too hard: That does seem to be the consensus.
16. Too easy to retreat. We see a lot more complaints that it's too hard to retreat than the other way around.
17. RE campaign story. We had to be very careful in what we had in the story because we knew it was going to be read on-screen during the action.
18. Re Orbitals. More of a blance issue which we are in the prodcess of addressing.
Thanks for the feedback!
Just to make it burn a bit more.
Im also very disappointed ,was hope be here only few days but i cant stop have fun with all this game have ,i blame AOTS for not play other games so often!!!
Engineers must have a pause or stop option.
Its not so important, but We need a queue option builds .
regards to tech tree and the fear of taking the player out of the gameplay too long, take a look at the style and UI formats of upgrades in Creeper Wars 3.
Glad to see your responses to a few of these issues!
Personally this is a non-issue for me I don't really use the army auto reinforce ATM but I could see it being a neat addition if it works well.
2. Re Troop Transports. We have struggled with various ideas on how to make this both fun AND useful. In TA, I rarely used an Atlas for anything more than com napping (yea, sorry TA guys, I they made the patch because of me, I'm a jerk, I was young) and while SUpCom could automate this sort of thing, it was rarely used. That said, OVER TIME, as the game gets more sophisticated in terms of supply lines and economy, it is something we want to eventually add.
I play a ton of TA/SupCom to this day and I agree the Atlas was fairly useless. The naval transport (the name eludes me right now) in TA however was very useful. I disagree with the automated troop transports in SupCom as I use them quite often. This is one of my favorite aspects of SupCom, the whole transport/shooting from transports (this isn't really necessary but it was cool and in some instances very useful) /ferry mechanic and I think it would really add alot to Ashes.
I think this would be perfect. If you have multiple factories of the same type selected I think any commands should be issued to all selected factories.4, Re clearing teh queue. Yes. On the list.
Awesome, this is good to hear as my r-mouse button is getting worn out 5. Auto-level up for Dreadnoughts. Yes. On the list.
Neutral on this but cool addition
6. Formation handling. This is something we have to think more about. Right now, the AI tries to come up with the ideal formation for self protection without becoming a blob. This is just something that will have to be iterated on.
I believe we need more control over formation sizing as right now when you get a large army the formation tends to be much longer than it is wide and this leads to situations where the units sort of stream in one row at a time while getting destroyed. This is a hard one but I think that we should have an option to let the AI do what it thinks is best or choose our formation ourselves (think an extension of the SupCom formation mechanic.) I haven't played too much total war but from what I've seen they have a pretty easy to use formation tool as well that could be looked at for inspiration.
Love this, TA was probably my favorite game with air units (Metal Fatigue is up there due to the multiple strategic layers) because they handled so beautifully. SupCom wasn't too great but is still a step ahead of Ashes at this point. Air units that handle well/fly fairly realistically really improves the feel of the game IMO. This is a pretty big issue for me and I'm glad you are looking at it.
With you wanting to keep all tiers of units viable all game long, although I am normally against tech trees I think they definitely do need to be added. Instead of an additional UI element though I would like to see more tech buildings ala Starcraft with unit modifications that change unit mechanics. You could even tie the existing attack/defense/etc upgrades to buildings and give them a build time. This would help flesh out bases as well as introduce more potential for raiding as you would want to try and destroy a building before your opponents upgrade completes. Another late game tech building that I think would be cool is a metal to radioactive converter that you can place on a strategic point instead of an amplifier. This would convert the metal production into radioactive production but not allow you to get the amplifier bonus from that resource node.
I would like to see a few paths you can go down such as Economy upgrades or Defensive upgrades or offensive/rapid strike upgrades or air upgrades etc.
9. Re turtling. The repair bays and drone bays along with smarties and sentinels would seem to do everything you'd want for turtling. What functionality do you feel is missing here? I.e. is it a balance issue or is it just not using the full assortment of tools?
Personally I feel that there needs to be a few more defensive options (I know you're not the biggest fan of shields but something along those lines to protect valuable buildings/units) I also feel that the T1 AA/point defense structures aren't quite where they should be.
I would also like a standard ballistic/laser based T1 cannon that is relatively cheap and efficient against t1 units but fall off as soon as cruisers come out. You could then make the smartie a more powerful T2 option that is better against cruisers due to slower firing rate/more damage per shot and susceptible to T1 swarms if not joined by the T1 cannons. Finally, a late game T3 basic point defense system would be nice, one that fires normal projectiles/lasers again and is a straight upgrade from the T1 defense at the downfall of costing radioactives and being expensive. It would chew through T1 units, and up close T2 units and would be countered by artillery cruisers. The downfall of defensive structures is being immobile which is already a huge disadvantage compared to building units so I think they could use some tweaks. Coupled this with a tech tree buildings that focuses more on upgrading turtle ability and I think that it would help make it a more viable strategy.
The nexus I also believe needs to be up-gradable severely as late game it is way too fragile.
TLDR: shield esque defensive structure + more defensive buildings for each tier + defensive tech upgrades + nexus upgrades = IMO a better defensive option as currently units are usually a better option for defense than static structures.
I think at this point tracked/walker units should be a third race. This would really help a new race stand out aesthetically without undermining the hover focused nature of the existing races.
Personally I don't feel as invested in an orbital strike. I can't put my finger on it but I really enjoy tactical missiles/nuclear missiles (much prefer tactical missiles though.) I think it has to do with being forced to build the super expensive structure and then having to wait for the nuke to build. While I realize that ATM the nuke build time = quanta cost it isn't the same. With nukes you have to invest a significant amount of time after completing the structure before firing whereas with orbital strikes you can bank quanta before hand. I think orbital abilities are cool but I don't want them to entirely replace normal long range structures. I miss my long range missiles/artillery. I don't think that we need artillery like the Duke or even nuclear missiles but having SupCom t2 esque artillery/tactical missiles would be really nice.
On the topic of orbitals, it would be cool to see the structures have purposes other than unlocking an ability. They could double as tech structures to increase the effectiveness of their abilities. The orbital strike could start as a smaller radius kill zone with upgrades. The incursion could be upgraded to include bigger/better units. Etc.
I like experimentals but I don't think they are needed until we get a much more fleshed out unit composition for each race + more fleshed out tech paths.13. re Audio. What sounds would you prefer and what do you mean by low quality? As in the recording fidelitiy or soemthing else?
I kinda know what he means, I can't name specific sounds right now but some feel rather sub-par while others are better.14. Re Eye candy. Indeed. Eye candy is an art budget thing. Given that we're an independent studio, our ability to do eye candy will have to depend on sales.
Not too worried about this, I'm sure as more terrain/water (with naval) gets added it will really help the feel of the maps. Gameplay > Prettiness
Extra thoughts not related to these responses:
Excited to see a more fleshed out air force as right now I feel they are a (admittedly powerful) afterthought. I really think we should have weak T1 bombers that can be followed with the more powerful bombers we have now. Then a couple tiers of interceptor types + gunships + transports + maybe flying builders? and we would have a much more fleshed out air force.
I still really want to be able to build builders from other factories, not just the nexus/calldown.
I won't go into detail as a few others have mentioned it but the Empire Tree needs to be fleshed out alot more IMO, right now it exists only to tell me how big my control group is when it could do so much more and provide so much more intel. I feel this is rather necessary as I still don't feel that I have the knowledge I want about my unit compositions unless they are in an army or I count out my units. I know it is hard to translate from SOASE to a ground based RTS with this feature but I really think it could be cool.
If you don't want to add a ctrl-z feature to select all units that are the same as those currently selected can you add a select all air units on screen/overall function?
Draginol, if you want some inspiration for better graphical effects, just look at Bailknights Graphics mod for Sins of a Solar Empire
https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/368651
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:
Sign in or Create Account
