Community Feedback List (Updated Dec 3, 2018)

Very nice! I can see some suggestions I made in there - happy to see what you guys think about it (and that you like some of them)! Even more excited for the final game now!

There is just one idea which came up in discussions that I liked but apparently did not make it to the list (unless I did not see it for some reason) - what about the idea of being able to "mothball" ships? The goal being to build up a stock of ship hulls which are not, currently, in use (and thus not eating away command points or their equivalent), but which could be brought back in case a conflict arises and part of the fleet is lost in a big battle... MoO2 had something like that in the sense that ships which were being updated at star bases did not consume command points (but "mothballing" then meant constantly updating them to the same design over and over again, which was tedious and, to some extent, pointless...).

 

This is great guys! I'm glad you chose your targets for those areas of the game and shared this with us. When is the next dev diary coming in?

 

Great list! Here's my own 2 cents:

- Economic focus and special resources are a big deal to me - we all love combat, but I also enjoy feeling the accomplishment of a strong economic empire

- Having a special popup with music and/or animation for research completing helps the player feel accomplished - please don't have the research complete just be a text notification

- Constructors a la Space Empires and Distant Worlds that let you build anything anywhere I think are excellent for player freedom

 

Good list over all and I certainly hope that adding these features will enhance the core game rather than distort it, judging from what I see here I do not anticipate serious problems.
Reading through this was like an abridged version of some of the posts made here, it is very refreshing to see that the devs payed this type of attention to them.
I noticed that our group is still small but very high quality, it seems that a lot of members have expertise or passion for different aspects of the game and it is quite rewarding to see it reflected here.
My gut feeling is that by the time this game is released it will be what 2056 should and could have been, if that's the case I will be very happy.
P.S.
A belated happy new year to all of you!

 

Come on guys! I need my Space Sector fix! When is the next dev diary, I'm itching to flood you with suggestions...

 

A big thumbs up so far!

 

Get the feel of playing in a universe "alive", I think it can keep re-playability, virtually indefinitely. They need not necessarily be events that affect the player directly, but also the potentially allies, or other encountered species. I imagine a species that has a world where the sun is about to become a supernova and needs help to find another habitable world, or help to carry its own population.

A request for planetary help, an epidemic ... things we have seen many times in the series of science fiction, but I think they can be easily "scriptable" (or even be customized ). Maybe manageable by sending a ship (via a simple click), which can then lead to an escalation in which the player can be directly involved with more pondered choices and the use of more resources (in the short and medium term).
Naturally these actions can be beneficial, or even lead to problems.

The feature list is intriguing, and if then the final version (also with various DLC)
would also cover those features in "red" would be a really addictive game. ;P

 

Hi Adam Solo,

Now for the more subjective aspects of ISG. Let me first preface this with the comment that I concentrated more on playability than I did features.

Bugs:

• Only had one that I could not get around without exiting the game and restarting it. When upgrading a ship, then deciding not to, the upgrade window overlay cannot be dismissed by clicking the triangle in the upper right corner. You either have to go ahead with the upgrade, or save the game, exit, then reload.

Gameplay and features:

• I would love larger maps, even if I had to scroll/move to edge to get around or even zooming in/out, though the problems inherent in Unity probably preclude larger maps. Just my preference for epic space games. I thought Stellaris was great until they required you to use starlanes, now it's more of a boring grind that sets you up to fight those adjacent to you rather than empires that oppose your ideals.
  
  
• I have seen some comments pertaining to pre-warp and moons. I like the suggestions, and barring the Unity problems, would love to see detailed colony development as long as each building had distinct positive and negative impacts. For example, what good are tech labs if you don't spend money on education to man them? I do hesitate when suggesting things like this as they easily lead to "mission creep" and you end up with Aurora (Dwarf Fortress in space), completely unplayable. Just a thought.
  
  
• More politics. Not just "We hate them because they're bugs!", but does the empire's ideology closely match my own. I would love to see a game where a player's actions defined their ideology and political beliefs (nobody has done this yet, though several have tried and failed). You can't be a peace loving hippy type that goes around committing genocide. Barring Trump, would the US attack Canada?
  
  While we're on that though, it would be nice if once you sign a mining treaty that the AI/other player ask before they set up shop on your front lawn. At present (and this is true of other games with this feature as well) , the AI will bum rush your territory and occupy any and everything they can. Maybe tying mining treaties to specific star system(s) would be a better solution.

​

That's all I can think of at the moment. Hope I've done more help than harm.

 

This is a very intriguing chart.
I am not even through it, but I would love
"Captains Log" (Thank you for this soo much cause I might be one of those who triggered this) and the
"Sector Starmap" would be very very awesome indeed.

Ah, while I am reading through, FPS and Ground Combat Mini Game, yes, sounds familiar. Thank you for taking it into account!

While I am at it, what about:
- In-Built "Ship testing ground".
Never build ships that die in combat because you understood some mechanic wrong
Some might as well like it NOT to know how it works, but hey, some people do not have the time to test this in a "real" battle.
Some might play further with a faulty design, others go back to the save where the intentionally wrong design was made.

Others might say: Hey, its kind of part of the game, to find out how the battle system behaves, but I think, this will not happen if the game itself has more to give than just ship battles.
and in this case, there is much more to it than just ship battles.

So, maybe you add to the list the point "Prototype Tester", did not find a better name.

EDIT:
If this is not that easy to implement, what was said about the option to refit the ship(s)?
How is the update mechanic done?
Are Rally Points also an option?

 

Thank you for this!

As a side note, even if ground combat mini-game is not very likely to be realized, may I make a new thread to explain it?

 

Thank you! (sorry for my english
I have some suggestions about "people overflow debuf" in morale of colony: now it is FIXED=14 pop, but (!) for some races with subterrain it is very small value...

Suggestion: "people overflow" count as HomePlanet size value !
- that is more really. For races who live at big-size planet (Large Home Planet) more comfortable is large planet, but if you race choice small planet, you don't have debuf for planets count.

And for balancing, races have Planet Count Debuf (as Civ):
Large HomePlanet = -4% to Morale for Colony count (10 colonies = -40% morale!)
Medium (normal) HomePlanet = -2% to Morale for Colony count
Small HomePlanet = -1% to Morale for Colony count

So that, many strategy can be: Big "chineese" races must have a little count colonies but BIG size planets, and "Small races" must have much colonies in tiny/small planets without morale debuf !!!!!!

Your game's FUN: Sergey.

 

Just posted this on steam but figured I'd be thorough and copy & paste it here too haha..

(some people complained that the start is too slow and you guys responded about the speed/efficiency adjusters coming)
Yeah I was gonna say research was quick in my game, maybe too quick yet I see others complaining its too slow! No offense to those guys but I think this is influenced by how good a player you at 4x games and also your luck with planets near to your start lol. I’m still playing my first game which I set to medium and I didn’t experience this ‘slow start’ people complain about lol. I set my starting planet to small and poor to free up race pics (which should have made things even slower lol) yet I was building colony ships in no time and everything came to me on a platter resulting in me dominated the AIs. So next time I think I’ll be going up 2 AI levels and using that slow production and research feature for sure!

I’ve posted this elsewhere and have messaged you guys on facebook but I gotta say again that I absolutely love your game. Thank you so much for making this. Super excited to see how you expand it over the years to come. I run a retro gaming website and youtube channel called Blake’s Sanctum that promotes a lot of indie projects and fan games/mods so I’ll definitely be cooking up something for your game as more people need to know about this.

Anyway I’ve been playing for a few days now (almost continuously haha) and have a few suggestions for improving the game in future patches or addon packs. Apologies if these have already been covered in depth as this thread is too big and mostly filled with out of date posts that predate patches to read in full.

1. Firstly I’d like to report a bug. I noticed after playing for 4 or 5 hours that the game starts to slow down, it responds a second after I click on things (resulting in the wrong news items getting closed grr) and visual glitches start to appear in the galaxy background nebula (not the foreground interactive ones) animations in that they keep resetting the animation when not finished resulting in a continuous distracting jerking behaviour. Exiting the game completely and coming back in seems to stop the issues. My system is old though (2013 I7-4771 with no dedicated 3d card so just the intel 4000) but nevertheless I thought I’d post the issue as it seems like some sort of memory leak. Maybe it takes ages to kick in as I have a lot of memory for my video editing work (32GB).

2. Add the ability to demand a planet from the aliens in diplomacy options as currently you can only gift them a planet. If you can do one then surely having it go 2 ways would make more sense. I’ve got a subservient ally who loves and fears me who’d therefore do almost anything for me, but the bastard snuck a colony ship into my empire and took a planet right before I got there. I didn’t wanna reload as I’d spent the last few turns doing hundreds of things lol so now this ***hole is in the middle of my empire and I don’t want to have to attack him and undo all the hard diplomacy work lol. Would rather demand the world from him lol.

3. Add the ability to culture capture an opponent’s world if that’s not already in the game as this exists in many other 4x space games and civ games when borders start to overlap. The annoying alien planet I spoke of above is looking rather culture crushed at the moment as its nearly all my colour around his system now haha but it still belongs to him stopping me from colonising other planets in it. I’m hoping you do have this feature already and that it just takes a while so I can peacefully get the system back. If so then ignore this suggestion.

4. Would be handy if there was a button allowing you to back out to the system view from planet view like in other 4X games (I say button as you don't want that all the time so regular exit should still be back to galaxy view). Would also be handy if the system view showed what the planet was building. Otherwise the system view becomes almost useless after the initial discovery, scans and colonisation/extractions.

5. Shift click move orders. Was rather shocked to find this not in the game resulting in me having to manually move fleets around nebulas and often forgetting about them! This is a pretty standard feature in games these days.

6. Speaking of forgetting ships on the map. I told a guy off on youtube for doing this but now I find myself doing it too. So I think this is more of a game issue to be solved instead of just telling people to ‘remember your ships better’ haha. A solution could be like how Civilization deals with units where until a ship is ordered to hunker down you’ll keep getting an idle warning. Eg every ship in the game could support a command (via a little button in their top icon corner or something) called ‘patrol’ or ‘stand by’ which makes then stay where you left them without warnings. If you don’t give this order then every turn an icon appears saying idle ship. This way it would be impossible for people to forget what their ships are doing. As right now you have to stare at the long list of ships in the ship management tab but when heaps of them are the same type you don’t really know which is on which mission forcing you to go back to staring at the main map trying to find all the shield icons to make sure you haven’t forgotten one of the 50 different operations you’re running lol. There has to be a better way!

7. Ability to que infrastructure picks. Would save a ton of time if you can plan it out for a world.

8. Like above being able to que greyed out buildings you can’t build yet would be IMMENSELY useful. Once the planet gets to a queued building that it can’t build you get ONE warning so you can go make sure its progressing with unlocking more slots asap.

9. Being able to build a ship endlessly until I say stop. Other games like Civ, MoM, MOO etc usually only cleared the build window after buildings, for units it would just leave them there producing forever unless you had things after it in the que. Needs to be like them!

10. Setting a rally point for new ships would be good too as I sort of have a ‘mustering’ system where I put outpost and colony ships ready for the next discovery and having to manually send them all there is annoying.

11. Remote planet construction. I already posted this in a thread elsewhere here:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/984680/discussions/0/2566438792549451579/
But my game is filled with systems that don’t have colonisable planets meaning you can’t convert their gas giants and belts to planets. So in that thread I posted 2 alternative ideas to implement remote planet construction:
a) Adding the ability to the existing support ship.The support ship sacrifices itself (like a colony ship does) and converts itself to a planet construction site on your target of choice.
b) Adding it to the production options when clicking on an outpost resulting in it converting itself (and the location it was placed on) into a planet construction site.
Each option should naturally cost way more than the one you build from a planet.

12. Rebalance ruin gift system. I got given adamantuim armour, a chaos chain ray and a positron torpedo all EARLY in the game making me invincible. I’m still playing my game because for me 4x games are more about exploring and colonizing aliens worlds that fighting battles but knowing that I’m in zero danger has taken some of the fun out of it. Need a system that looks at everyone’s tech level and only gives something a bit higher, and not super techs better than the best stuff you can research even in the end game lol. Also these super techs don’t get added to the tech tree so you can’t read about them unless you go to the ship design area where they get mixed in/lost with everything else. They need to appear in the tech area (like special resource techs do) in the final tier of whatever school they’re a part of so players can look them up and know what they got and not forget about them.

13. I don’t really care about graphics much but the ship textures could be bigger. The models are fine but the simplicity and lack of detail in the textures make them look 20 years old (particularly noticeable when you’ve got a big titan filling up 2/3 of your screen in design view or battle kill zoom in) which is why I think some people have posted rude dismissive comments here and on other sites which is a shame as they’re missing a friggin brilliant game because of one silly shallow thing. Here's a screenshot of the ship designer from Imperium Galactica 2 from 1999 made by a small Hungarian team whose textures don't look much worse than what you've got. I know you guys are a small operation and I know you've already made a lot of improvements to them but you're gonna need more to stop putting people off.

14. Another graphical thing that’s not a big deal but is noticeable is that I’m noticing that some of the biiig galactic wonder buildings on earth like terran worlds seem to be ‘floating’ in mid air due to not being placed on the ground properly or being placed on a slope so half of the building is on the ground but the other half is floating. Because you have 3D lighting effects light actually travels underneath the floating bits which is what makes these glitches obvious. If there was no light bleed underneath stuff it would be less obvious but you’re probably better off with a different solution. Eg a massive thick base that's not visible due to going through the ‘floor’ planet surface ensuring any slopes are covered on their lower end.

15. The Human hero summon special race ability just brings back the same hero each time like 40 turns later. I didn’t want them before and I don’t want them now lol.. waiting so long for an ability to get a disappointing result is such a shame. Glad it levels up existing heroes sometimes too though.

16. Add a mighty Dreadnought class between the Battleship and Titan. Having dreadnoughts is kind of a must in a 4x space game or any space game haha, just feels wrong without them. Would also alleviate some of the complaints I’ve seen from people saying not enough classes. If you feels there’s not enough room between the battleship and titan than maybe make the current titan a dreadnought and make an even bigger class for the titan lol!

17. Add planet destruction weapons. I’ve seen people complain about no death star doom ships from Gla Civ etc. I don't need that but personally I enjoy being a god like world builder in MOO games. If there’s a sucky world I don’t like and know that it won’t be all that good even after terraform etc then I just gift the planet to an enemy and blow it up entirely with a stellar converter. Use planet construction to make a new better world and then colonise and terraform that haha. Is quite fun purifying and optimising the galaxy (I sound like some sort of super space villain don’t I lol). Would have been fun to do that in this game.

18. Make planet construction less random. Right now I can get huge worlds from tiny asteroid belts and tiny lousy planets from gas giants and large asteroid belts. What the..

19. Make it easier to setup games with more than 6 players. Right now it seems like I have to create and manually give names to a whole bunch of custom races just to increase the player count. It causes unnecessary confusion and disappointment eg I had someone say to me on a forum a few days ago that they wouldn’t buy your game because it only supports 6 players forcing me to correct them and try to explain your custom addon race thingo lol, I don't think they changed their mind as the initial disappointment had planted a seed in their mind. Would be better if you could just increase the player count and the game duplicates existing races (just like other games do) if you haven’t bothered to setup custom ones. Also the game wouldn’t let me disable the original factions so as a result when I played an 6 player game with myself as a custom human the bloody default humans ended up in the game too taking one of the alien slots meaning I missed out on meeting one of the cool alien races. I’ve seen talk in these forums about disabling them but the disable button is greyed/locked out the moment I select one of the original 6.

20. More planet types would be super cool for an addon as omg I love your improved planet screens so much. I know some still complain about their graphics looking old but I think they have a kind of beauty and charm to them. I often spend minutes just staring at each of them watching everything that’s going on (flowing rivers of water or lava, volcanoes burst, eerie blue suns glowing, buildings moving, ships flying by etc) and listening to the ambiance sounds which is something I used to do when playing the space adventure game Freelancer. So immersive and makes you care about the colony! So because I love them I naturally want more now haha. Eg an ocean planet where the base is either on an island or you’re putting buildings down underwater while giant fish float by and sun ‘godrays’ light up the background and ocean floor. Other types could be jungle world (make current swamp worlds less jungle like), a crystal world, a shattered world that’s been partly blown to bits (eg like the one's in Sins of a solar empire and X series games), and finally an actual proper Gaia/Paradise world like in MOO and other 4x space games. Right now Gaia is just an uplift tech that improves the echo stat and nothing virually but I’d rather have it as a full blown visual planet biome type that you can eventually get via end game terraforming but also maybe if you’re super lucky you can find one or make one via ruin event (think Arnie in Total Recall activating the alien terraformer machine on mars). Also a fertile Gaia world would look super cool as I find myself picturing something like the Windows XP bliss background but everything is glowing and full of life.

21. Add Moons to the game even if in a simple stat capacity. I’m one of those weird people that actually likes MOO3 haha and one of my favourite features of that game was that planets could have moons around them that increased the planets population limit and ‘sort of’ increased building space too (surface building limits remained the same but you could put defensive structures around the moons). This made colonizing and terraforming gas giants very fun as they’d have so many moons resulting in crazy population sizes after all the terraforming lol.

22. Make the galactic council more useful in that it offers special galactic treaties and events similar to the one in MOO3 and other games. As right now it’s just purely a victory mode that many people like myself are just going to switch off as we don’t want victory gift wrapped and handed to us. I’ve seen videos of your game on the internet of people getting handed council victories in the early game before turn 100 and they’d only just met all the races lol!!! But by turning it off I sadly miss out on nice graphics and a big game feature. So it would be nice if the council was expended and simply the victory portion of them be switched off so they (and all the effort your coders and artists put into them) can stay in everyone’s games! MOO3 has a system where you’d all vote on sanctions against evil players and agree to certain treaties which buffed a certain resource income or trade tries, if you were voted leader you'd get extra powers to propose these items. Was fun!

23. The above also makes me think that you should add some big galactic threats that require the races to work together.. eg super powerful invading aliens from another galaxy or dimension.

24. I mentioned this earlier but people seem to be complaining that the start is too slow.. Personally I loved it.. but maybe offer an advanced game start where the player gets more ships and a more developed starting world or worlds might combat the problem.

25. Create a new leader type that’s just for spying and does not have to sit on a planet or ship. I know you guys wanted to be different to other games, I get it I really do but sending a vital colony leader or ship commander off for some silly spy mission losing all their buffs and benefits where you’ve houses them is just weird and immersion breaking as in the real world you don’t send some old politician or mayor of your city to steal stuff from other nations lol. To be honest I’m basically completely ignoring spying and am reloading my save every time one of my leaders gets a spy ability during level up as it’s a complete waste of time and counterproductive to what I want leaders for which is to buff my colonies and ships, not wonder off into danger for info I don’t really need lol. Plus the AIs aren’t harassing me with spy stuff making me care even less about spy. I’d rather have a few spy leaders sitting in a counter intelligence area waiting for opps if needed. The spy system in most games is if you send them off then you weaken your defence against other spys. Leave the spying to the spies lol!

26. A lot of my leaders are getting greedy and envious. I know you guys fixed it in a patch but it’s still happening a LOT.


Anyway I think that’s everything for now. Once again I wanna say I friggin love your game so much so please don’t take any of this as me being negative or cr*ping on your work as what you’ve made is brilliant and just wanted to try and help refine a few things. Even my suggestions are all ignored I'll still love it lol. Can’t wait to see what you guys do next!