Hi guys, I just want to share with you couple of things I've noted during my last play. It will be bunch of bugs&ideas mixed together in one post, to not flood the forum Random thoughts on gameplay. 1. Star base without missiles. Once I fought enemy which hadn't missiles installed on a star base. I don't know how weapons are installed by A.I. but I think missiles should be always installed. Otherwise, you can just hang around with your fleet beyond distance of star base's other weapons. You can finish off enemy fleet and then approach star base or just kill star base with your own missiles without any retaliation. 2. Unable to manually shoot enemy missiles with PD / any weapon. I think it has been discussed already. I know that ships will fire them automatically, but I want to be able protect a specific ship and I did not see this happening on my battles. I mean for other ships to protect ship that will receive a huge amount of missiles. So, please make missiles targetable and fighters too. 3. Display missile information. Regardless of the decision to make missiles targetable, you can provide information about missiles if they are coming from scanned ship. So, I hover my mouse on the missile and I know what type it its. 4. A.I. missile strategy. So, currently A.I. will fire most (if not all) missiles at one of my flagships. In my battles it wasn't uncommon to have 60 or more missiles flying towards my single ship. My ship was able to take 2-3 of such missile waves. When I knew that it could not handle any more I gave a flee order. Ship fled and all these missiles now flew to nowhere. So basically by escaping with one ship I wasted 3-4 turns of enemy missiles shot at my ship. So enemy wasted 200-300 missiles and I had no harm. 5. A.I. is afraid to attack me even with an advantage. I was at war with Moltar, they had really strong fleet stationing in nearby system. My fleet was stationing on the outpost. In my opinion they could easily fend me off, yet they did nothing. 6.0 Hardcore is too easy. I know that this is tied to A.I. capacity being at 1/3. I just wanted to let you know that I had no problems defeating my enemies and I haven't lost a single ship. On top of that, I don't consider myself a very good player Random ideas. 1. I miss transport ships from MOO2. Transport ships in MOO2 were a nice idea. They served two purposes. First, they allowed to transport colonists. This is something that we are currently lacking. I think that it is a really nice addition to gameplay, it allows your new worlds to grow faster. I would use them in 99% of cases. Second purpose was to transfer marines to invade planets. Currently we have assault ships and while I like the whole occupation of enemy world I think it still can be improved. Why not to introduce transport ships and refit them to assault ships in later stages of the game? 2. Marines and assaulting of a planet. Again, marines were present in MOO2, here are invisible. I think that currently it is to easy too assault enemy planet. You can produce assault ships quite quickly. I would introduce marines (and perhaps other types of units) that are generated on a planet. For example, 1/2/4 marines per turn (needs testing) and then I would took them with my assault ship to invade a planet. Enemy planet defends invasion with their marines and with colonists too. So I think that in some areas (planetary bombardment) we have step forward but in others (assault) we have a step backward in comparison to MOO2. Just my opinion. 3. Let the poor Space Dragon use his claws. So Space Dragon is flying to the closest possible distance to my ship and sits there without any reason. Add him new weapon type so he can attack ship with his powerful claws Some other things I am unsure off. 1. Production is the most important thing in the game. I am not sure this is a good thing. You just need to focus on production because it gives you everything: 1. If you don't produce ships / buildings you can produce trade goods. 2. Trade goods can be converted to research points, in my game I have increased RP by 100% and still I have +4000 gold. 3. Production allows you to terraform faster and to increase eco-engineering levels faster. 4. Finally production allows you to build infrastructure faster. So as you can see, production is the crux of everything. 2. Eco-engineering tied to production I've mentioned earlier that you can "build" eco-engineering with a production. The more you have the faster you finish level on a planet. I am not really fond of an idea that you make ecology of a planet better by having more factories on it Unfortunately I don't have any idea how to change that. 3. Pollution is missing. In MOO2 a rapid growth in a production was somehow stopped by pollution it generated. I think we missing pollution mechanics. Let pollution hinder production output. Give us some technologies to better manage production and limit pollution. Also, let pollution have an impact on ecology, on a current ecological level and how fast we can reach the next one. Of course there might be some races which do not mind pollution / radiation and it only helps them! 4. I don't feel the impact of my colonists on research. In MOO2 you micromanaged how many colonists will work on research, how many on food / production etc. I really like the way it was handled in MOO2. I understand that probably devs wanted to abstract away the game even more thus they removed colonists management. Was it a good idea? Time only tell. However with this move I see some potential drawbacks. For me personally it lost a bit of immersion, because now I don't see these tiny humans that I can grab and move Getting back to research, I think research should be independent branch on which you work on a planet. Or controlled in some other way because currently I don't "feel" the research. The important fact here is that in MOO2 you had to split your resources between production and research so you could not produce like crazy. In ISG your colonists are producing research regardless so it makes production again more powerful than it should be. Perhaps, instead of a triangle we should have rectangle in which we decide how to split our resources. Forth corner would be research. 5. Production is too impactful. Yes, I am repeating myself because this thing is so important. The more I think of it the more I see how MOO2 was a great game in that regard, they did it right! You see, in MOO2 you couldn't eat cake and have cake and that is what is happening in ISG. You can produce like crazy and your colonists will research anyway in the background. In MOO2 you had to divide your resources into three categories, food, research and production. In ISG you have only one category: production and then you are disposing this production into thee categories: 1. Construction, 2. Engineering, 3. Infrastructure. Do you see the difference? Do you see how important production is in the game? In ISG production has also impact on your population growth. The more production you have, the bigger population growth you have. I am afraid that this focus on production might lead to not many different races or unbalanced races. In MOO2 race could won not only by production, it could offset it by big population or by being creative. 6. Gold is abundant. This is something I've noticed from the early releases. As I've said earlier, in my current game I have +100% spendings on research and I am still +4000 gold. I am not saying that everything should be now more costly. Probably the reason is again my large production which part of is converted to trade goods and taxes. Bugs 1. Autoresolve is wrong. Unless my crew was severely drunk there is no way in universe that my destroyer could lose to frigate: yet it happened twice on four tests. I don't think it is a real bug but maybe autoresolve mechanism needs a little tweaking. Thank you for reading this. I hope some of this will be helpful to the devs.
Wow! Phookin brilliant! I rated this helpful but only because I cant't do it justice. So here goes. Agree with you and confirm the experience. Agree with you Ok, Agree here too Agree, have won suicide runs on account of this Super agree and thank you for bringing it up!!!!!!!!!!!! Yes... but, take care of some of the above, especially the passiveness of the AI and you fix this by default. The AI doesn't take the initiative even with an advantage, that means you have time to build up to the point where its advantages on Impossible or hardcore are negated. Absolutely, and you have so many ways of enhancing it that the AI doesn't take advantage of which... leads you to the above The rest also makes a lot of sense @Wodzu but it would be easier to deal with such things as credits when other factors are brought on-line, Espionage missions for example could cost a lot, pollution perhaps could play a role the more a player focuses production on construction. As for Dragons, I leave them alone believe it or not, but your idea has merit. The only thing I don't really support is adding more sophistication to the ground combat of things, visuals are ok but actually producing marines... I can't see the AI handling that well, it already does a poor job with the current system, at least in the dozen games I've played on PA10. Anyway, hat off to you sir, outstanding post!
Thank you for the kind words Chris. As for the marines, MOO2 and its A.I. could handle this and it was over 20 years ago, have a little faith in our devs In MOO2 marines were produced automaticaly, there was no interaction with the system. They've just generated over time when you've build a garrison. Look how cool it was back then
You are most welcome sir, well deserved... and ok, just the screenshot brought a smile to my face, you won me over. I do have faith in our devs, quite a lot, as far as devs and programmers... my concern isn't there. The finest dev, can execute a brilliant program with these type of games,but it must be done with an understanding of strategy and tactics... Case in point, the passive AI you brought up. From a certain point of view, it could be looked at as an attempt to allow the AI to better defend itself by not being overtly aggressive, it would make sense... in reality it can have the opposite effect as a "too passive" AI allows the player to plan and execute his/her strategy un-hindered, even at full capacity it would be dis-advantaged then. So I was apprehensive when you mentioned enhancing Marines, I know they can program it to perfection, but the thresholds must be set right, otherwise you and I will exploit it and the Ai will not use it to its maximum potential.
Hey Wodzu, thanks a lot for the detailed feedback, this is most helpful. Now some comments on each of your points. Good point. The thing is, the AI may not have researched any missile tech at that point. If they did have researched missiles, then that is a bug, as star bases should be equipped with missiles when they're available. We'll look into this. We plan to allow targetting missiles and fighters with point defense weapons. This should be added in the next few months. Good one. We should add that information, when applicable, so that the player may know how many missiles are involved and of what type. Possibly for fighters too. Yes, the combat AI is still very rudimentary. It should evolve considerably when we enter Steam Early Access. The strategy layer AI is still quite basic in many aspects and in defense in particular. We estimate that it's still at around 1/3 of its full potential. Like for combat, the strategy layer AI is also expected to evolve considerably for Steam EA. Having freighters transport colonists around is not off the table yet as we we're still entertaining the idea of having some kind of POP migration mechanic in the game. When and if we add that, we still don't know if it should be an automatic feature, where population moves from one place to another slowly, or if it should be something you do explicitly POP by POP. We may revisit this at a later stage before release or bump it to the post-release phase, possibly through a later patch, DLC or expansion. Assault ships serve the purpose of transports ships in MoO2. They carry marines, vehicles and armor just like in MoO2, just in an abstract way now in ISG, to facilitate the micromanagement aspect. More on this on the point below. As for being easy to produce assault ships and invade colonies, ok, we will have a look at that. This is one thing that we expect to keep tweaking through the rest of the development until we get it right. As for marines, they are still there, only presented in a more abstract manner through the planet guarrisons and in the assault ships. I understand it's a question of immersion, to actually see little figurines and people fighting on the planet during the ground invasions. We liked that aspect in MoO2 as well and we wish to see something like that during the invasions, a cutscene of some sort to give you a taste of what's happening in the planet. We'll see what we can do. You mean, the Space Dragon didn't fire at you at close range? If that's so that's a bug. In any case, adding a claws-type of attack would be great. It's one of those things that we'll need to see if we have the time and budget to explore. The colony management model was one of the first things we wanted to address going in. It was also one of the hardest design challenges in the game. Trust me when I say that we went back and forth for a long time until we achieved a model we were reasonably happy with. We don't think it's perfect, but, ultimately, we don't think any is. But before doing a deep dive on the economy model, and why research was designed like this, let me first address a couple of points you make about pollution and production. Pollution doesn't apply very well in our vision for the game. Yes, it is a problem, now, in present Earth. However, I'm not convinced it could be a big deal in the far future. And besides, since ISG went the "races with very different biochemistries model" path, it's not clear if all races would suffer from this. As you say, some races (and we don't have many) could even like the pollution, and to be satisfied by being radiated by it, etc. So, we decided to abstract the pollution concept via the planetary engineering model, where in this model an empire potentiates its economy through improving the biosphere, which has an impact on morale (production, research, taxes, culture) and pop growth via the eco-engineering path, and morale, pop growth, pop capacity and maintenance, via the terraforming path. In a way, the food concept, as the pollution, can be seen as having been abstracted into the whole planetary engineering aspect. We may need another way to hinder production later on, but I suspect pollution will not be it. The other main point you make is about production. As you say, production is key in ISG, no doubt about it. The question is, what will you do with it? And, in what will you specialize your colonies on (that's where the infrastructure perks come in). Because, you may invest 100% in constructing a ship, but you could be obtaining 200% production if you'd be constructing a building instead. The same applies to planetary engineering. Or, should you be developing your infrastructure/industries further instead, for added production but also new effects from infrastructure perks (which are not strictly related to production enhancement features, like research or crew XP)? As for winning via other ways other than sheer production, we're currently working on that, in giving the races more personality and different ways to approach the game. Race modifiers, special abilities and even powerful race unique abilities will be added for the next release. Some races will have big pop growth modifiers, others will be better at ground assaults, research or space combat. The unique abilities, in particular, will bring new powerful effects in the game that could help turn the tide of events. Ruins are still under-utilized at the moment, as powerful ships and technologies will be found there. The same for strategic resources. There will also be events for added diversity and flavor. All this, combined with a challenging AI, should be more than enough to provide distinct experiences, different strategic options and good replayability, or so we hope. Now, getting back to the colony management / production model, and the reasoning behind it, the main driver for it was on how to avoid colony micromanagement hell. MoO2 was great in many aspects, but one where it was not very good was on colony management, in my opinion. Especially the aspects about having to move POPs around constantly, and to keep fiddling with the queues at all times. I also loved to move those POPs around (moving those tiny figurines around was great!), but I hated to have to do that everytime I wanted to switch gears and had to switch the entire population from production to research, for example, because I wanted that tech. It had great aspects to it but quite some problematic ones, as well. The ISG research model was designed with the goal of being easy to switch gears from research, to production, to money, to culture, back to research, etc, without the need to have to drag all those POPs from labor to the science labs. The research model in ISG is somewhat different from MoO2 in the way that a good chunk of all the research is funded by the empire with cash obtained mainly from taxes (from POP taxes but mostly from production taxes). Some of the research comes from the POPs directly and from the research structures present in the colonies (so, from the industry, the corporations). Other sources of research are: research treaties, space culture perks, leaders, asteroid research, interstellar research, among others. However, the lion's share of all the research done in the empire is payed with taxes (government funding, universities, special tech divisions). I understand what you mean when you say that you "don't feel the impact of your colonists on research". Part of it is by design, as there are other sources of research that are not strictly related with what your POPs do, like government research funding, research treaties, research outposts on asteroid belts or around black holes. The real reason why you may feel that disconnection though, is because perhaps the tax / research conversion factor may be just too high at the moment (1 BC per 2 production points taxed, with a 1BC to 1RP conversion). As you say, in your "Gold is abundant" point, it's currently not that hard to get research to 100% and still make a ton of cash, especially when doing trade goods, because of the way "so little" money is needed to fund research to 100%. So, I think the issues are related. My guess is that when POPs and structures in colonies will have a greater weight on how much research is done, compared to government funding, you will feel that colonies and POPs matter more for research. When you usay "in MOO2 you couldn't eat cake and have cake and that is what is happening in ISG. You can produce like crazy and your colonists will research anyway in the background.", the thing is, if you raise your taxes, to finance research, for example, you hinder your production up to a factor of 50% less than optimal. The problem again may be that one is currently able to allocate 100% income to research and generate a lot of of it, and still have taxes at 0%! That, if it is allowed to happen easily, is a problem, and must be resolved. So, again, if you want to increase your research considerably you should have to raise taxes, which will hinder your production, up to 50% less (that's a Battleship in 12 turns instead of 6, for example). We'll look into these issues and see how we can balance the whole thing better, so that colonies and POPs have more weight on the overall research production, that money isn't so easy to come by, and that there will be more ways on where to spend it on. Already covered in the point above about production and research. The idea is that money will not be so easy to come by in the future. It should not be so easy to fund research as is now, and there should be other ways on where to spend money on, to make it a scarcer resource. By the way, we just finished implementing the hurry-construction feature last week. Now you will have more options on where to spend what we hope will be your hard-earned cash Well, your crew could actually be drunk. Or that could have been one of those unlucky days Seriously now, the autoresolve feature is placeholder at the moment and it will be replaced by the real thing when we enter Steam Early Access. Thank you Wodzu, my pleasure. Those were very helpful insights, in many areas of the game. This is outstanding feedback, the type a dev dreams to receive, so thanks again for putting the time to playtest and to write this. We took note of these issues and we'll make sure to address them the best way we can.
I understand your concern sir However, I would look at Marines as an every other feature in the game. If human can use it so do A.I. If A.I. is not using it right, that gives us humans an advantage. So for example, if A.I. is not setting its taxes right and has a lot of unused gold which could be spend on research, that is a problem too. Granted, we can't exploit this because we have no interaction with this part of the A.I. but the root cause is the same - smartness of A.I. @Adam thank you for finding time to answer my questions. It surely had missile researched because I was fighting ships as well and they had missiles. Yes it didn't but apart of that, Dragon is so big that I would be nice to see how it crashes smaller ships between its claws Lets hope not I respect your choice not going this path but I think it was an interesting option. Also, in MOO2 around middle game you were able to eliminate pollution completely through technology. Correct me if I am wrong but now we also have a pullution trough planetary bombardment. The thing is that it is not that much different now comparing to MOO2. Because now we have sliders or triangle to move resources and in MOO2 we had population in three rows which bascially was sliders too I must admit that by having "research in the background" you've eliminated one reason to move sliders, as you said, to move large amount of pupulation to research. That is a good thing. For me, moving resources in ISG is not that tedious as it was in MOO2 but it is not because of sliders, it is because I need 5-8 planets to win a game. Maybe it is because I play on a default size of map. In MOO2 I always played at the biggest map so I had to operate on 30 worlds. I agree that was tiresome. I think the difference between ISG and MOO2 lies in a key resource. In ISG key resource is Production, in MOO2 it was Population.Of course without population production in ISG would be much less but still that is my feeling. I am not saying that as a critique, it is just an observation that I've made playing latest release. Thanks and I will be waiting for the next release
A quick question @Wodzu My friend, did you encounter any enemy, (AI) assault ships during your sessions? Either actively used against you or parked around an enemy planet within your scanning range?
