Big A8 walkthrough

[Greeba]

I've been playing since Alpha 1 and have to pry myself away from my long running save games and ships, but was wary that I should try the Alpha 8 early game and the tutorial and compare notes with newer players, especially as there are lots of comments about how the incoming hostiles are difficult to manage.

The purpose of this post is not to play through in 'smug mode' and show how I can survive it so why can't you... more like, I'm examining how the game can be played at the moment, which ways of playing are making sense and which are simply exploits or things that don't make sense yet, so players and devs can discuss and feed into development.

And maybe this is all stuff you've all thought of already, in which case tldr, sorry to bother you.

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To start with I build up the JMC Miner and progress to buying the Industrious as the tutorial directs. Some factors in the makeup of my sector start to inform how I play from early on - there are asteroids to mine in the Stargate sector as you might expect, and NPC ships are very enthusiastically mining them out. There is a comet in one of the systems within the nebula, and meteor showers in both, so no easy way to scoop fuel.

Early on I start with a few passenger missions, as once I've got the Industrious up and running she has plenty of cabin space (boot note: you don't have an in-game option to take any Habitation space away from ships, only add it - this is something I have raised as a ticket[github.com] long ago, but if you run Lassi[github.com] on a savegame you can delete *all* of the cabin space from a ship and build it back up from scratch). Missions help to build up some cash, but there are lots of lovely resources flying around because those ships are doing mining, and there is a big water comet flying through one system which won't stay in range forever. I want to start making fuel and water for myself rather than buying them, sustaining my fleet and turning those resources into goods.

The first problem with making either fuel or water in this sector is those pesky meteors. The Industrious isn't a very tough ship and I've not no armed ships yet. The Industrious isn't going to be a fighting ship or even an all-rounder of much merit, because she's quite flimsy (in fact her construction is absurd and shouldn't be allowed by the editor, or if it does she shouldn't hold an atmosphere, since her dorsal walkways aren't separated by airlocks, they just act like there's some invisible forcefield?!) So, I fit her with Gatling Guns, and before long, Short Robot Arms to auto-load them while the crew refill the loading spots as and when. This doesn't work the first time I enter the system, the meteors knock big holes in the ship and I have to return to a Shipyard to buy repairs. Then I remember that Battle Stations has to be active to make the guns fire on incoming targets, even if they're not hostile ships. Having four PDCs on each side of the ship deals with most meteors but not all, so the next thing is to just get out of dodge. Burning away fom the middle of the system, the meteors stop flying and you can relax. This also comes naturally if you are chasing a comet to mine water from it - as it drifts from the centre, you will naturally outrun the meteor zone to catch it and mine it.

Realistically you will only get one or two goes at mining the comet, because it's moving further and further away and it takes lots of fuel to burn your way to catch it (this didn't use to matter as much, but now we have multi-system simulation, it trundles along when you're not looking). When mining this comet, charmingly there are some NPC ships following it all the way (with severe bruising from those meteors), and leaving a handy trail of missed ice to scoop up before I get to the comet itself. I only do my own mining on the second trip because the Industrious doesn't have the power capacity to fire her mining lasers much (though this is a mistake I could correct if I went back, since I forgot to wire up a couple of Reactors...) still, when using sparingly you can use the Mining order to toggle the lasers on and off, and keep an eye on the Battery meters on the in-game graphics rather than checking the Power Grid view, so you can mine just enough as you go without getting blackouts. Meanwhile the NPC ship is plugging away at the same time so there are enough pieces for us to compete over with our drones and fill our holds. If you go to the Tactical view, match velocity with the comet and left-click to match the vector, you can leave this going for some time as long as you have the power and fuel.

I could have tried fitting more Engines and fuel capacity to have more goes earlier on I suppose, but bringing the Industrious back with its hold bulging with Water Ice, and fitting an Ice Grinder to the JMC station, helps to fill a Huge Tank with water via a Purifier. This is still being processed some time later, so I guess two hauls was enough for a good start anyway.

Another consideration for the Industrious' trips to the Comet system was the NPCs with Fighters. They attacked me for no reason, this happened on two visits/ with two ships' complements of fighters, and my PDCs had to fight them off as the ship isn't more heavily armed than that. Fighters should attack you when their mothership does, but right now they're like angry hornets that launch when their host is aggravated, then attack anything in sight until they're killed off. This is a bug for which I have raised a ticket[github.com].

Having lots of water enables the next attempt at self-sufficiency - hydroponics. I get two Hydroponic Gardens and fit them up to the water and power lines, and buy a few stacks of seeds. I'm used to this being a ever ending supply in my long game, but I realise here that my early small crew aren't producing much Compost so I'm needing to buy what I can from the markets to keep this going. It's still a lot cheaper than buying food, as long as you're not burning much fuel to power it. More on that later.

Once the comet is out of reach, the main reason to return to the meteor systems is to make fuel. Adding Gas Collectors, Refineries and Chemical Labs, Industrious can make plenty more fuel than she's using once she's stationary and collecting Metreon. Crucially compared to previous plays, I don't need as much fuel because of a big A8 innovation - Solar Panels. Buying these from the market (and later making my own) enables me to generate lots of power without burning as much fuel, so the fuel Reactors slow down to tick-over (2Mw) when the sun shines. In my previous playthrough the JMC Station was bulging with fuel tanks and Gas Collectors as I needed oceans of the stuff to drive the fleet, and she could sit in the cloud and scoop that fuel without interference from meteors. Now I'm building a stash more sparingly than before, as the JMC Station hardly needs her Reactors at all once she's up and running. The Industrious benefits from a solar array as well to curb her fuel usage, but still needs Reactors to keep her power levels up when she's in the cloud and the panels are collecting at half power (and I'm wary of them getting smashed up by meteors, even mitigated by the PDCs).

The key new gameplay feature since Alpha 7, and I can't stress this enough, is being able to have ships working in parallel in different systems. Get the Industrious safe and doing something useful like mining or fuel scooping, then switch back to the JMC Station and do some more work there. This wasn't possible up to Alpha 6, you had one fleet in one location and the clock stopped in the systems you weren't in.

So, back on the JMC I'm building up capacity. Research is important to enable more useful and lucrative tech - I'm going to build lots of Robot Arms and Track to automate my production flows, so I want the unlocks to assemble them myself rather than buying them off the market. I just install one Research Station and Supercomputer so I can afford them and they won't overly drain the power grid, and hire one Scientist. As I'm trying to play at my own pace, I find there is time to unlock everything on the research tree while doing everything else. Maybe buying one or two things from the market if the unlock to fabricate them myself is still pending, but not too many. Also it's worth taking the Industrious to any system with a marked derelict early on and salvaging all of its goodies as you never know what you may find there - in this playthrough I bagged a few valuable items like a Supercomputer and a Fusion Reactor which I just sold as I was more after the money at the time, but if I'd gone earlier I'd have at least installed the salvaged computer instead of buying one. Other bits and bobs like Metreon (refined or otherwise) you can feed into your production using Loaders, or also sell.

One recurring issue I keep getting is that right-clicking on things to change their modes will stop working until I click the install menu on and off again. I don't think this is necessarily tied to the context menu being open either - I think it's just a GUI bug, so I've raised a ticket[github.com].

Once the research tree is complete, the Scientist is relegated to the status of Oxygen Waster. As there's no way to fire him, I buy a small useless Newship from the Shipyard market with no life support, use Fleet Logistics and docking to leapfrog the scientist from the JMC via the Industrious to the Newship, then sell it. The Scientist will soon suffocate and die, but as an NPC so I don't get the alarm. I long ago raised a ticket[github.com] for a 'sack crew' feature, but hey ho. I buy one more Spacesuit to replace the one my Scientist took away to die in.

Moving the research tree along, and getting more capacity, enables making more stuff and progressing the Stargate Phases. But here's the rub - I don't want to trigger the end of Phase 3 until I'm good and ready, because that's when the Hostiles start attacking. I sell the items that are needed for Phases 1 and 2 because these are valuable and you get bonuses for them, but I am holding off on finishing Phase 3. My plan to start with that is to just avoid selling any Copper Ingots, but this doesn't work, the counter goes up anyway as it counts the ingots that other ships are selling to the market - this is a bug for which I have raised a ticket[github.com]. So instead I hold off on selling too many Stargate Frames, and hope the other ships don't push me over the line in the same way. They don't seem to be selling any, so this works. Crucially once the research tree enables making Energy Transmitters which sell for $170k a pop even when they're not the current phase goal item (they're for a future phase...), that's when the money starts rolling in. Before that, I'm selling Precious Metals (but not too many, as they are needed for production) or Tilium Crystals which I don't need so many of; I pass a few bales of those to the Industrious to make FTL Charges, but otherwise they're just currency or mission goal material.

What those NPC ships are doing, is mining the heck out of the asteroids in the Stargate system. A bunch of large ships are doing their level best to mine out every deposit, but thankfully their drones are less enthusiastic so they are leaving a pleasing donut-shaped plume of mined fragments around each rock. I deploy the Industrious to scoop these up with her drone bays and offload them to the JMC for smelting. I rig one Docking Bay of the JMC with a large conveyor belt with robot arms to streamline load-in of big hauls, as otherwise it ties the crew up forever at the bay doors. I keep the belt four rows wide so the crew can still get either side to load objects out (I've raised a ticket[github.com] to suggest an option to design specific goods-in and goods-out squares which could help to automate this too).

Also for the Industrious, after a little experimentation I've come up with a track carousel arrangement; four drone bays, two either side of the central hull section, one square carousel of track, and Short Robot Arms offloading goods to every available space inside the square. Once this is up and running the drones can harvest the plumes of mined deposits at ludicrous speed. To get this installed, as with many things while Boxes are arriving and being loaded by Track, one very annoying bug persists (for which, you guessed it, I long ago raised a ticket[github.com]) - even when you've got lots of the required equipment in cargo storage, the Install menu will often favour the Box that's on a Track waiting to be offloaded. If you try to install that item, the job gets cancelled. You need to be patient to get around this, or just make sure you're not letting incoming Boxes get loaded onto your ingenious new Track arrangements until they're good and ready to mitigate this problem. But this bug needs to die in a fire.

I'm saving my progress as I go and could totally 'save scum' this game and go back and make some of these improvements earlier and try to do better/ get more ice/ get stuff done quicker, but I think it's going okay and I've not triggered the Hostiles yet, so I've just kept pushing forward. As my Fabricators have needed more Copper to get Energy Coils and Motors made, I'm scooping lots of Copper deposits as well as Metallic for Frames (having long given up on that buggy Copper counter I mentioned). I've not got round to making ammo yet but that's easy, I just need to scoop more Metreon to make Explosives, and once combat starts I expect to salvage lots of ammo from the ships I kill. All of this at time of writing is still coming via the leftovers from those big ships doing all the selfless mining, apart from one time I targeted and mined a Precious deposit to make some cash.

[Greeba]

(continued):

To move on from here the plan is to make lots of money, build up a combat fleet with at least one more FTL-enabled ship, and one non-combat fleet with the Industrious jumping them away whenever Hostiles turn up. When combat is finished the Industrious can pick the defeated enemy's bones while the JMC station plugs away fabricating the mission goals. I could try shopping for existing ships from the market, but I'm tempted to buy my own ships from my other game. My 2H Tanker is the first ship I buy - she has one job, jumping around and making lots of 2H (Deuterium). She's defenceless but super efficient and quick, and she can jump away with the other civvies (and make yet more 2H into the bargain). With this up and running I can fuel a fleet of Fusion-powered attack ships who can shred most ships with Railgun fire before they even get close. And to help save up for that fleet, excess Deuterium fetches twice as much as Fuel when sold.

But I am very much prolonging that tipping point before I let the Hostiles in. A bit like those XCom games where once you get over the learning/ research curve and you're in the driving seat, you build your squad and base and telepaths up and up as much as you can before triggering the endgame.

I crack on with making loads of money to build a defence fleet. I refactor the smelting and production lines in the JMC a couple of times. They're probably over-engineered and under-efficient, I should probably go back to the drawing board but they're pumping out the goods and I can't be bothered to go back over them.

I buy my 2H Tanker and start flitting her round the systems to make Deuterium for not much cost (Food, Water, a little Fuel, and FTL Charges or Tilium Crystals to make her own). Once I've filled a few Huge Tanks of 2H as a cache at the JMC, I'm selling the surplus of that too for more money. (Note: to fill a Huge Tank from scratch, fit a Chemical Lab nearby and set it to make Deuterium, join the pipes, then dismantle the Lab - like other liquids and gases, there is no way to nominate a type without attaching something to force it like this, which I raised a ticket[github.com] about many moons ago).

I make my next 20M pretty quickly selling 2H and Energy Transmitters (and inflation over time makes these more valuable despite my not being on the relevant Stargate Phase yet.)

I'm building up the Industrious as well; she's getting more Fuel Scooping/ Refining capacity and more PDCs to improve survivability in the meteor showers, because a feature of this sector is that all the fuel and some of the mining is in stricken zones so making Fuel and minerals is a more perilous/ less relaxed pastime than in my previous games. At one point I wonder why she's taking more hits then I realise she's out of ammo down one side, and vow to load her up with alot more before the next sortie. I start making Explosives as well as Fuel on the Industrious (handily the Chemical Labs are plumbed the same either way, so you can just switch over as desired) and making Bullets at the JMC using two Munitions Benches. I give the Industrious more classical Reactors making her more of a gas guzzler, but she's making it faster than she burns it in the cloud, and drawing solar power when in the clear, and supplying the rest of the fleet with Fuel. When mining, I need to remember to target the closest deposits so the lasers don't look further afield and give my drones too much to do. And to keep an eye on the energy levels and stop mining when they need to recharge. And to watch that ammo count on the incoming side. And watch that multi-tasking, as when you switch back you may find her batteries drained and ammo out and she's taking hits (an alert for a ship in another system taking damage would be good...) Also when you're perpendicular to the meteors, it would be good to be able to deactivate the PDCs on the trailing side so they don't burn ammo shooting rocks that have already flown by. Currently I'm achieving this by disconnecting them from the power manually, which is clunky (especially if you forget to plug them back in). (Ticket)[github.com].

NPC ships are trying the same with mixed success. The big Titans that were doing all that mining have largly seen their crews die off and become ghost ships. Amusingly, so has another 2H Tanker - she doesn't suffocate her crew but she will starve them if you don't load her with food (others have raised tickets[github.com] about this...) In the meteor sector, some NPC mining has gone on but less so as the ships need to survive - one big Juno is wrecked, giving me some juicy salvage. The ghost ships are technically still active which is funny. They should probably become derelicts. If you attack a ship whose crew is already dead, is that legit salvage? And if a spaceship falls in a forest...

Meanwhile there is a crewless ship mining. That shouldn't be a thing, if you don't have a crew you should be dead in the water! (ticket)[github.com]Still, it'll provide some salvage in a minute when it dies of meteor hits, and my drones are grabbing more ore than its are.

Now I've made some money, I buy attack ships. I could shop around for other players' designs, but I do kind of that but with my mods, by exporting the attack ships I'd built up in my other game, and buying them in this one. This brings a few advantages such as them already being loaded up with fusion power, ammo and crew, and lots more goodies. On one ship which I modified from an all-rounder design by Nandomo and renamed the Corvette, I forgot that there was also a modified Swordfish (by Johnny Struggles) docked with it so I end up with both. I also have a modified Tolkavian Cruiser by Johnny Struggles, and a modified Colossus by Scruffee. By this point it's probably time to start letting the Hostiles in to the game and progress the Stargate project past phase 3.

In order to do that and follow my plan, it's time to fit Engines and Thrusters to the JMC. She's sat happily in situ all this time, but once the Hostiles start attacking she needs to be ready to turn and burn and jump away with the non-combatant fleet. I also install a couple more Reactors as she'll need a bit more power when she elects to move or go to cloudy places. The Reactors are donated by my attack ships which I think have too much fuel burning generation and should lean more on fusion, but I'm leaving a couple of boxed Reactors in each ship in case that goes pear shaped when things liven up.

I add a second Colossus, and am bemused to switch back to it after a few minutes to find 8 of her regular crewmen have suffocated. The O2 level is fine and the CO2 tank is half empty so something fishy has gone on there, seems there are some weaknesses in loading up ships with crew included (possibly covered by this player ticket[github.com]). At least the surviving/ replacement crew tidy the bodies off, unlike some of my older ships which have had permanent death alarms/ corpse ornaments for months (I should have tidied them in the editor when exporting them).

But now my fleet is ready. Time to move forward, but first time to get the attack fleet blooded by killing off the map Hostiles. First I un-map and re-map all the Weapons Console slots, as I've heard this may not survive exporting and importing. Then I posse up and go to the first system.

All orders switched off except Suits On, Repair Hull and Battle Stations. Jump in, pause on arrival and hit the Tactical view. The Hostiles include an Armoured Beast MkII which is actually a pretty tough target if you're not prepared for it. Her keel is showing when I jump in. She and her couple of Teeny Fighter escorts are in Railgun range on arrival. I target the Beast's engines at first based on Chris' comments in the A8 video, but soon she swings round and I'm more interested in making this one-sided so the second salvo goes on her railguns. After a couple more she's down to Cannons only and I've only taken minor damage. I target her engines again but it doesn't really matter, as the next salvo shreds her to tinfoil. The fighters have swooped in during all this but automatic fire splashes them at the same time. The fight is over in less than a minute. The Corvette has very hungry drone bays (not as super efficient as the Industrious, but the best in this group) so she picks the bones of the derelict Beast while the other ships tidy up after the fighters. She also has her own Smelters which are now going to make ingots from all the Scrap Metal, leaving the JMC to deal in ores. Also from this point, despite my having made a very all-singing-all-dancing ammo production line back on the JMC, I will probably never need to manufacture Bullets again as they come in the spoils.

As I'm basically undamaged (6% on the Cruiser and less than 1% which charmingly shows as 0% on one of the Colossi), I head straight for the next Hostile system.

This one is more run of the mill in terms of opposition, so no need to target specifics, just point and let the Weppos have their fun. The only complication is more meteors, so just need to remember to leave Battle Stations on and turn broadside to pick them off while mopping up the goodies.

So now the sector is clear of map-based Hostiles and my non-combat fleet has more places to go, but I still must remember to avoid NG4 due to those pesky meteors.

I notice that my Swordfish, being the only ship eschewing Weppos and left to manually tend its guns, takes longer to tidy its drones because Battle Stations is on, so only one crewman is left walking the ship. Perhaps a per-ship refinement would help. I just leave those drones behind and jump away - my stock of drones tends to swell after these fights anyway, along with ammo, Scrap Metal and Spacesuits.

I also haven't noticed any power issues, so less Fuel Reactors and two Fusion is apparently enough for each attack boat (with lots of battery capacity as well.) They burn 2H and Fuel when idling in the way the ships with Solar Panel arrays don't, but that's what the logistic support ships are for.

So I reunite the fleet at the Stargate system, and repair all the damage (except not quite all, there's cosmetic damage still to one Colossus' hull, as the Repair function is inconsistent - yes, I raised a ticket[github.com].)

Now I really am done faffing so I sell the Stargate Frames to move things along, just tend logistics in general, then start making Stargate Actuators. To fuel the fleet I jump the Industrious back to the cloud to scoop fuel and mine more metal, and jump the 2H Tanker all over the shop to scoop Hyperspace Isotopes.

By selling all the bits I want to sell, despite blowing all my cash on such an OP fleet, I'm back up to 18M in no time. Shortages are usually in materials to feed production - the Industrious is mining metallics a lot despite plumes of Tilium going begging, because the steel is what I need to make all the doohickeys. But more is now going to come via Scrap Metal from fights.

As I type this I notice the first Hostliles Inbound counter. Game on, seven minutes. The Industrious can mop up what she's doing and join the non-combat fleet, and the combat fleet can be ready to fight on arrival. I've shipped 37/50 Stargate Actuators at this point, so I'm most of the way to the next Stargate phase before the first Hostile wave hits.

When the Hostiles show up the 2H Tanker will need to stop jumping for the sake of it, which is her usual MO. She'll jump with the civilian fleet so we know they're altogether and not getting mixed up who is fighting and who isn't. But between 7 and 5 minutes I jump her a couple more times to scoop the goods. I also bring the Industrious home at 4 minutes.

At 2 minutes, it's game face time. Battle Stations, Suits On. At 1 minute, switch off Fleet Logistics and set the civilian fleet to prepare to jump (nice and far to scoop Isotopes while they're at it). Positionally I huddle the attack boats unceremoniously on one spot, and the civilians in another so they're ready to fight or flee in something like a formation.

The Hostiles arrive, I jump the civilians away, switch to Tactical view for the battle fleet, pause and look for the Hostile, and it's... one Scavenger. Having prepped my fleet for the scary Hostiles that are reported in the forum posts, for the first wave they are massively OP and they splash it with one volley. After I reunite the fleet and sell off the Stargate Actuators I've already made, that's Phase 4 done.

Phase 5 involves Track and Robot Arms which I've long since been making and occasionally selling off, and Tilium Crystals which I've been selling as currency in vast quantities, so this breezes by too. I make a few Robot Arms and sell my surplus Track just to get it done.

As the fleet is quite content at this point I resume the 2H Tanker and the Industrious doing their thing until the next wave. As the Industrious has been distributing Fuel until I order her jump and there are now a few ships in the fleet, I note the drones are faffing and relaunching when they're not supposed to (ticket[github.com]).

As the Industrious arrives I notice that Phase 5 is complete, so now it's time to make Stargate Recievers and Hyperspace Isotopes. My 2H Tanker is full to the brim with the latter, and I set my production onto the former. 150 will take a while so I devote all six tables.

As I carry on with this the next wave of Hostiles hits. I follow the above procedure, and when the Hostiles come they're a Praxis Pirate and a TeenyFighter. Splash two.

The next wave after that, I've already sold enough Stargate Recievers to be onto making Energy Transmitters again for Phase 6. Two more Hostile ships in the next wave, splash two again. I wire up six Energy Transmitters on the JMC, and run the test on solar power plus four Fuel Reactors (two of which I had forgotten to hook up before the test, so I did it during, and the Power Grid held up.)

And there we are. At the end of the available Stargate Phases, with Hostiles incoming but yet to bother my fleet as it's massively OP (more will come, but I think the attack ships will be ready for them, as they were in my other long game.) I've got 28M in the bank.

It's taken a week or two of playing and brain dumping to write all this. So... how does that all hang together? Is it the right way to play? What is good or broken about the game in general? Lots and lots of things. But I'm still playing it for hours to do all this stuff and it's still something I feel like doing, so there is definitely a real *something* there. And hopefully this gives some useful feedback.

[Greeba]

Talking points (which many others have also pointed out, not claiming to have found them all myself):

-The Industrious is an absurd design that needs making airtight to be a credible example to use in the tutorial. And ships should vent air if they're not airtight. At one point, I saw a crewman don a Spacesuit and just step off the path like it was an airlock.

-Comets are only good for a sortie or two before they're too far out to be worth chasing. You can use Lassi[github.com] to reset them, but apart from cheating, they're only of time-limited use. There needs to be a mechanic for acquiring Water other than Trading or Scavenging in the middle-late game.

-Meteors only happen in the middle of an affected system. Is this a fair thing or an oversight?

-As Tom Yeltz has pointed out in his ticket[github.com] on the Github, there needs to be a more gradual and signposted learning curve to the Stargate phases, especially the impending Hostile attacks. If new players don't know how and when to prepare for them they will get thumped. And hovering for ages on the cusp of phase 3 is probably a cop out, but it's the obvious way to survive at the moment, so that's what you're incentivised to do until it works some other way.

-Similarly the Research Tree needs some work as it's still fairly easy to just unlock everything with one Scientist and then space him/ sell the equipment and never touch it again. This may be remedied by more unlocks, but they may also need to be tied in more with the Phases or something else. For instance, perhaps I shouldn't be making all my money from selling Energy Transmitters before I'm on the relevant Phase. And perhaps Scientists need something to do when they're not researching (I raised a ticket[github.com] suggesting they could at least fetch and carry when they have nothing better to do, and that's before you get to any other Science Stuff.)

-I've quoted things you can do in Lassi[github.com], but I'm consciously avoiding them in this playthrough to test how the game can work as-is. Still, there are a bunch of things that Lassi and the other online editor[phydaux.github.io] by Phydaux can do which the game needs to get right by itself - deleting habitation space, tidying away dead bodies (!), tweaking the hostile wave counter, righting the pivot point of your ships in the Tactical view, keeping Comets in mining range, cancelling abandoned missions, etc.

-The NPCs are doing more than they used to, like mining materials or attacking you if you kill a neutral ship - but their behaviours still have a long way to go, like ships that mine out the asteroids but leave all the yield for you to collect, or psychotic fighters, or ships that just die because they're not servicing their running needs, or NPCs that manufacture and sell Copper Ingots but not Stargate Frames. This is not some gotcha statement, it's just where we are in development right now. A good recurring feature of Introversion's games is that there's actual simulation of your opponents, rather than rubber-banding - going all the way back to Uplink where the NPC hackers were out there doing jobs and driving the campaign storyline, whether you noticed them or not. This is shaping up to be more of the same, but with a massive complexity which means it's going to be bloody hard to get right, especially when any player can publish a ship on Steam Workshop that then has to survive as an NPC without suffocating its crew in the first ten minutes.

-Hostiles also need curating. Some are good challenging opponents, others are useless (static stations you can just pick off, or unarmed mining ships). On the plus side, at least the ones with hundreds of guns are now unworkable without enough Weapons Consoles. Combat was utterly broken up until few Alphas ago, it's more playable now (though there are question marks over whether Weapons Consoles are firing all your Cannons when they should).

-Social/ other fleet gaming (props to my girlfriend for suggesting this line of thought while I was playing) - one of the things that Elite Dangerous added along the way which added a big dimension to the game, was the ability to transfer fuel to other ships using Fuel Limpets. From that feature the Fuel Rats player group was formed, and a whole social gaming aspect emerged. In TLS there may not even be any multiplayer, but something similar may prevent the game filling with stricken ships like it does at the moment. Give another ship what it needs using your Drones, be it oxygen, fuel, water, food, whatever. Add a destination other ship as a temporary column to the Logistics menu. ((ticket)[github.com]

-Also if a ship is dead, maybe add an option to dock with it and salvage it whole (or have NPC rescue ships do similar). Currently the only useful thing to do with a dead ship is destroy and salvage it, and that has repercussions if you're seen doing it. (ticket[github.com])

-Ship inflation seems to still be a way to just make money for nothing. I can buy my ships from the Shipyard for 9M, but having played for a while and not modded them much (indeed, probably sold off a few bits) I can now sell them for 25-35M - while still costing 9M to buy as Imports again. Even with lots of 2H canisters in their cargo I think the in-game ships have appreciated more than they're worth compared to the Buy Ship versions. I think the inflation factor needs to be applied to the Buy Ship prices to cover this. I'm open to feedback on this before I raise a ticket as I'm not certain.

-I will not stop going on about this bug as it is still the single clunkiest thing when you're building things in game with tracks already installed - for the love of Sepulveda, please select the nearest available Box before selecting one waiting on a track and cancelling the job. This one is like wading through treacle. (ticket[github.com])

[Greeba]

The full savegame set for this is shared on the Discord (couldn't see how to share it on here)

[Greeba]

Thanks to Bobnotarobot for fixing the boxes on tracks bug for Alpha 10... prayer answered.