A Prospecting Proposal

[nanO.bytez]

After roughly 30 hours of this game completely consuming my life I do not have many gripes with it at all.

There is one issue however that is driving me insane and that's the process of exploring the asteroid belt.

There is a list of stellar bodies in the game and it even shows you how far off the ideal launch window you are but you can not sort it by launch window nor can you filter out already surveyed bodies or bodies that have probes inbound. You also can't launch probes directly from that window either.

Instead you have to skim the list for bodies that haven't yet been surveyed by looking for question marks in the resource column, make sure it's relatively close to the ideal launch window for maximum resource and time efficiency, hope it's not a rock you already sent a probe to 2 weeks ago, click on the "go to" button, which closes the list, dispatch a probe with up to 3 mouse clicks, open the intel window again, switch to the "Solar System" tab and repeat the entire process at which point it's a LOT faster and less fiddly to hunt for likely rocks directly on the Solar System view. There are a lot of rocks.

This could be substantially streamlined by adding filters to exclude bodies with a higher than +/- 10% (5%) deviation from the launch window, exclude surveyed bodies as well as make use of drop-down context menus that would allow us to send missions to stellar bodies directly from the "Solar System" and "Prospecting" tabs of the intel screen.

Having these capabilities would naturally play to the bi-weekly flow of the mission phases as most players would probably use the start of each new phase to quickly hop into the intel screen to see what asteroids are up for easy grabs this week, send out a couple of probes then continue with the main gameplay loop.

Right now prospecting for resources forces the player to set aside several minutes at a time for tedious busywork that detracts from an otherwise absolutely stellar experience. After a couple of these exploration cycles it will become extremely difficult to find things you haven't already surveyed.


'nuff nitpicking. It's really just a minor annoyance that can spiral out of control in the mid game. Apart from that this game is truly amazing. It's the game every paradox game wanted to be when they were little. It's the X-COM spin-off that never was. It's The Expanse of Sci-Fi strategy games. So yeah, for once I don't regret buying into an Early Access title at all.

Thanks for giving us nerds this tiny slice of heaven and keep up the good work.

Cheers!