7.0 Initial Feedback

[Garheardt the Black]

Feedback!

Nice intro. I like having a clearer purpose, but I think the wording of the English translation could be smoother. 

I like the captains idea. Unique play styles are great. Here were my initial takes on them

Boxer:

• A good beginner captain, but the name was odd to me. I have a hard time seeing anyone placing a state of the art, experimental star ship in the hands of a boxer. I could see a mechanic, or a military veteran, maybe, but a boxer does not a good captain make.  %bigger and %stronger energy shield would be nice to know. 

Pilot: 

• Gotta go fast. I love it.

Miner:

• With finite resources, it has a neat place. Drills are problematic though. They're heavy, terrible weapons, fairly fragile and if you lose one, you can't dig effectively. 

Engineer:

• Wireless everything. Tons of logic. Half deploy costs. It's really, really good. Possibly too good. 

Researcher:

• This one was problematic to me. Out of the gate, the description was confusing. I didn't understand what "weapon Editor and technology tree" meant until I learned that it's the only one with access to the old weapons tree. That alone makes it strong, but I'd rather see all the pilots have the tree and give the engineer something else to be more unique. For the second perk, "Batteries Power Thrusters and Have a High Recharge Rate" was vague compared to some of the clearly stated other perks. Pilot says 2x thrusters, for example. "Thrusters use energy instead of fuel", "Batteries recharge x% faster" would be useful info when weighing perks on a first play through. Using energy for fuel is novel, but the perk didn't really work out that way in my run. I didn't see any more energy blocks than in the other runs, but I still saw fuel, making me feel as though I had less overall resources than the other captains. 

Other observations:

• High air density maps with the newer, faster, dual snakes will drive a man to drink
• Low air density maps with Uber hammerheads are similarly hard on the liver
• Due to high part launch costs, logic was hardly worth using, even as an engineer
• Because part number is the limiting factor, small parts were always worse than their larger counterparts. 
• Because of the previous bullets, my drones weren't very interesting
• Timed one-shot missions weren't worth the added threat to me and had a high chance of failure. 
• Nitpick: The Nimbatus just suffered massive external damage, enough to rip off it's ftl drive, but it starts at 100% health?
• Debris on planets behave erratically when effected by magnets after contacting the drone. The physics get really weird. This can be frustrating since they're worth resources.  

That's most of my notes! Thanks for all your hard work and good luck on the next phase!

 

 

[Garheardt the Black]

Brutal feedback time.

Speaking for myself only, campaign mode isn't fun. I spend next to no time innovating. I spend tons of time doing tedious things. I can't create anything to make it better because of random part limitations and launch costs. Nearly every weapon I find is useless and it feels bad. I don't bother with logic, even when it's available. None of my drones are interesting. All I do is build a generic drone and replace small parts with larger parts I find in order to make a cheaper, more efficient generic drone. 

Creative mode isn't fun. I can make really cool stuff there, but now that campaign mode is a thing, I feel like I'm playing with cheat codes on. There is no challenge. I want to build cool stuff and be challenged to build even cooler stuff, but I'm not. 

Versus mode is fun. I get the to play with all the parts. I innovate. I have hundreds of designs. Since I'm up against other players, there are always new challenges to face that can really get me thinking.

The other two modes, not so much  

[Sidetrack]

I'd like to echo the above comments.  I love the campaign idea but the implementation is not so fun.  Deploy costs make for silly uninteresting drones although perhaps an easy way to address this is to add much more resources to planets.  More difficult planets get even more resources.  Let us offset deploy costs with rewards more easily attainable with complex drones.  As it is right now anything other than a bare bones drone drains resources faster than they can be collected.

 

Threat seems a bit too steep... and sometimes seems to trigger twice in one move.  I like the FTL feel with forcing you to choose your moves carefully, but unlike in FTL where a careful route can get you to the exit ahead of the fleet, so far there is a guarantee of getting attacked at least once if not twice before getting to the next system.  ...Maybe this is implemented already but possibly start off with really low threat generation but it ramps up as you advance in systems.  Let people have a chance to do a little exploring and collecting parts before ramping up the threat toward the end...   ...Or perhaps higher threat for exploring planets but a small decrease when moving from one planetary system to another.  This rewards those who complete planets quickly and would also reward building larger complex drones to ensure you complete a planet in one go.  

 

Just some thoughts  :)

[Antelope Syrup]

I'd like to repeat everything that was said, although I am to lazy, I know threat was implemented to prevent players from racking up tones of parts and resource in the first system. but It should Decrease when moving towards the exit not increase. It was put in place to add tension, to stop players from amassing large amounts of parts early, and to create interesting decisions. Right now it's doing a bad job. The way it is now is broken. Taking damage is unavoidable, It stops players from exploring, taking risks, and playing the game the most fun way. I do think it should work like FTL's fleet. A visible force that moves through the map, allowing players to out run it. Right now, all galaxies are generated so that there are only 2 paths that are exactly the same  length that do not allow for choices. All you can do is accept that you have to take damage and just repair later. Then the rest of the campaign is the same missions over and over again. Before you could experiment and expedite, create creative and fun drones, but now your limited to generic small drones because of deploy cost. I think that adding threat to deploying is a good thing, but not resource. Without the tech tree resource feels like it was shoehorned in a little, only being used for Buying lackluster weapons (that you can't even scrap anymore) or preventing you from being creative. I think that the tech tree needs to be accessible  to everyone, and that the researcher just gets a bonus to research or something. But right now neither campaign or creative are fun, and competitive is all people ever play. (just like before) (for those wondering I have 179 hours in nimbatus.)