Few thjings from short play

[Drift]

I played the tutoirial a year or more ago & haven't looked at it since so maybe some of these are covered in teh Tut

1. Need the popup to happen faster when hovering over a tile that has a popup - I was moving off before the popup & didn't realise it was important or could tell me anything.
2. Population management in buildings. It would be good to scale back the staff usage in a building. I had excess food but no metal construction happening & was unable to do anything about it except for destroy the food building, putting me in negative food production but allowing me to make a small amount of metal. Trying to creat population (robots) before the food ran out but still needing enough metal to make the food factor again.
3. One of the scroll bars wasn't working (sorry can't remember the screen), I couldn't drag it up but had to click in the gap. It was a very long list so dragging would be needed.
4. When trying to tell a scout to search a specific area I couldn't tell which scout (under services) was which scout (on the map). As the serives scout highlights blue when clicked it be great for the on world scout to also highlight blue. Would be nice to also mouse over on world scout & have scout in services highlight as well.
5. Would be good to have a "Are you sure when placing a new city", I place a 2nd city & didn't realise it for a while. I didn't mean to place the city.

[Drift]

Playing the Zloq (water guys)
Why does my city start on land?
Why does it show fish on land (that I can't harvest)?
How do I make roads to the water to feed my people, built a Fishing coral reef but it's not connected to my city by a road.....
Staving to death in 5 turns, at least everybody is happy (100% morale & health)
I assure this is becvuase my city shouldn't have spawned on land?

Given their water enviroment Maybe the Zlog could have 3D roads as a race bonus giving them larger citys?
Edit: Also it would be a good idea for their drones to prioritise ocean rather then land for exploring

[Drift]

It seems that building the hospital & police station gives the research message again

[Drift]

Playing as Zloq: Unknown Resource (Requires Deep Core Mining)
Already have Deep core mining, still an unknown resource
Really hard to see crash ship sites or other interesting things.
Once discovered the click to planet button should take you to the site not to a city
Discovered some stranded colonists (3rd time this happened) this time I had no room for them & it poped up the research completed icon for the research I had completed last.
When in the Galazy view the Switch to Galaxy view should now say Switch back to planet (last planet you were on) Or Click a planet to view it.
A close button would be good for the Unexplored Start Window
When bombing a city you need to leave the planet view & return to it to be able to continue bombing it every new turn.

[Drift]

Breaking a farm from a city by demo'ing the road makes it complain that it needs to be connected to a city by road. It should look & see if it is already connected to another city by another road 1st.
The option to break only 1 hex or road, not the whole road.
Need some sort of population employed indicator. Maybe the "pop" indicator can empty (lighter secondary colour) from the top down as people are working. Putting your cursor over it should show you the unemployed amount.
Holding your cursor over a farm\refinery\ETC should show you how much food\iron it produces (without the need to click into it).
Building descriptions should be updated as their output changes EG if via research your hospitals now give you +1 research. Hovering your mouse over the hospital should show you this.
Doesn't look like the "Housing Office" does anything to increase BC, adding or deleting has no effect
Typing a save game name also moves the map
RP doesn't add up - citys RP 115+1+1 = 107? (moral heath & security = 100%). Found it, not enough people. City output should highlight this.
Given that refiners don't get "Metal" except a small amount unless the bonus resource is there, have the farm in a static shape leads to a lot of wastage.
RP doesn't add up (again) - citys RP 106+1+1 = 99? (moral heath & security = 100%) Have saved game if interested (population ok).
Hovering over alerts (research\crashed ships) should give you the info in short, Right clicking the alert should dismiss.
Click the Ship build alert should either tell you what it is or take you to the ship (not the galaxy map)
Like building you don't have enough BC for, the BC shows in red. The ship build menu should do the same
On getting my science vessel in space, my home world shows as fully explored, except the drones are still uncovering new areas
While scanning a plant the ship seems to drop out on your ship count & is no longer in the fleet menu?
The ability to set tax rates on a per planet bases would be great

[Nyphur]

I just wanted to say thanks so much for the focused feedback, it's great to get another detailed perspective on the game! I'd like to respond to each point you've made and see what elements we can look into.

Originally posted by Drift:

1. Need the popup to happen faster when hovering over a tile that has a popup - I was moving off before the popup & didn't realise it was important or could tell me anything.
2. Population management in buildings. It would be good to scale back the staff usage in a building. I had excess food but no metal construction happening & was unable to do anything about it except for destroy the food building, putting me in negative food production but allowing me to make a small amount of metal. Trying to creat population (robots) before the food ran out but still needing enough metal to make the food factor again.
3. One of the scroll bars wasn't working (sorry can't remember the screen), I couldn't drag it up but had to click in the gap. It was a very long list so dragging would be needed.
4. When trying to tell a scout to search a specific area I couldn't tell which scout (under services) was which scout (on the map). As the serives scout highlights blue when clicked it be great for the on world scout to also highlight blue. Would be nice to also mouse over on world scout & have scout in services highlight as well.
5. Would be good to have a "Are you sure when placing a new city", I place a 2nd city & didn't realise it for a while. I didn't mean to place the city.

1. Agreed, though some people prefer them slower and we've gone for a middle-ground. I'm going to add a tooltip delay slider into the options menu and set the default value to a shorter delay. We've also improved tooltips by making the mouse cursor change to a "?" cursor whenever you mouse over something that has a tooltip, so you know to wait.

2. Population growth is one of the core mechanics designed to limit the speed of planetary development, the other being metal production. Robotic races are an unusual case as you have to build the population manually, and we consider that to be one of the unique challenges of running a robotic empire. We even had to write a whole separate AI routine for robotic races colonising planets because they need to explore them first and find a more ideal setup. There are a number of technologies that reduce the amount of staff needed for a piece of infrastructure, but we are open to modifying the staff mechanic if it's not fun. If you have any ideas on how it could be improved, please let us know.

3. We've noticed a few of these since switching to our new robust mouse and keyboard handlers, I'll add this to the bug list and take a look at all of them when I get a chance.

4. Solid usability ideas! This would improve the pre-warp era, and fits in well with our other plans for improving the pre-warp gameplay. We won't be getting around to iterating on this part of the game until after V1.0, but I'll add these ideas to the pot.

5. We could do this, or we could try to make it clearer that you're placing a city. Right now the only indicator is that some hexes light up green or red, but that's the same as for when you're placing a piece of infrastructure.

Originally posted by Drift:

Playing the Zloq (water guys)
Why does my city start on land?
Why does it show fish on land (that I can't harvest)?
How do I make roads to the water to feed my people, built a Fishing coral reef but it's not connected to my city by a road.....
Staving to death in 5 turns, at least everybody is happy (100% morale & health)
I assure this is becvuase my city shouldn't have spawned on land?

You're correct that all of these bugs are related to the starting city being on land, which doesn't happen often but ruins the start of the game. This is a persistent little bug that we've fixed at least 4 separate times but it keeps coming back via new mechanisms. I've just started 12 games in a row for the Zloq and only one had this problem, but it's a big problem. I've added this to the critical bug list.

Originally posted by Drift:

It seems that building the hospital & police station gives the research message again

Could you explain this bug a bit more? I haven't been able to find any bugs with the hospital and police station.

Originally posted by Drift:

Playing as Zloq: Unknown Resource (Requires Deep Core Mining)
1) Already have Deep core mining, still an unknown resource
2) Really hard to see crash ship sites or other interesting things.
3) Once discovered the click to planet button should take you to the site not to a city
4) Discovered some stranded colonists (3rd time this happened) this time I had no room for them & it poped up the research completed icon for the research I had completed last.
5) When in the Galazy view the Switch to Galaxy view should now say Switch back to planet (last planet you were on) Or Click a planet to view it.
6) A close button would be good for the Unexplored Start Window
7) When bombing a city you need to leave the planet view & return to it to be able to continue bombing it every new turn.

1) Interesting, this seems to happen only to the deep core coral deposits added in 0.9.9.0. It's purely a display bug and the deposit can be harvested normally when you have the deep core mining technology. I'll add it to the bug list
2) and 3) We're planning to make these stand out more, and another player had a great idea to put shortcut icons on the screen for the rare deposits that you can click to go straight to them. This is a low-priority issue that we'll deal with as part of the planet UI iteration after V1.0 but we're definitely going to do this in some way.
4) Stranded Colonists and Salvaged Cargo are intended basically as a bit of a bonus when playing in the pre-warp stage and a way to compensate for slow population growth or metal production in your starting strategy, but I'll admit the mechanics of it need some improvement. You can find them and have no space for them, for example. We'll be revisiting this in our Pre-warp game iteration after V1.0

Originally posted by Drift:

1) Breaking a farm from a city by demo'ing the road makes it complain that it needs to be connected to a city by road. It should look & see if it is already connected to another city by another road 1st.
2) The option to break only 1 hex or road, not the whole road.
3) Need some sort of population employed indicator. Maybe the "pop" indicator can empty (lighter secondary colour) from the top down as people are working. Putting your cursor over it should show you the unemployed amount.
4) Holding your cursor over a farm\refinery\ETC should show you how much food\iron it produces (without the need to click into it).
5) Building descriptions should be updated as their output changes EG if via research your hospitals now give you +1 research. Hovering your mouse over the hospital should show you this.
6) Doesn't look like the "Housing Office" does anything to increase BC, adding or deleting has no effect
7) Typing a save game name also moves the map
8) RP doesn't add up - citys RP 115+1+1 = 107? (moral heath & security = 100%).
9) Given that refiners don't get "Metal" except a small amount unless the bonus resource is there, have the farm in a static shape leads to a lot of wastage.
10) Hovering over alerts (research\crashed ships) should give you the info in short, Right clicking the alert should dismiss.
11) Click the Ship build alert should either tell you what it is or take you to the ship (not the galaxy map)
12) Like building you don't have enough BC for, the BC shows in red. The ship build menu should do the same
13) On getting my science vessel in space, my home world shows as fully explored, except the drones are still uncovering new areas
14) While scanning a plant the ship seems to drop out on your ship count & is no longer in the fleet menu?
15) The ability to set tax rates on a per planet bases would be great

1) Currently the only way to demolish a road and re-build it is to use the Advanced Roads feature, and it's expected that you'll demolish one road and build another afterward. If you build the new road before demolishing the old one, it won't connect and you'll see the end of it is faded. We can make the game try to auto-detect this edge case and fix it, I'll add it to the bug list.

2) This is actually very complicated for technical reasons relating to how roads are implemented under the hood. We can take another look at this after V1.0 but it's a low-priority issue.

3), 4), 5) These are are great ideas, small changes that will improve the game. We'll add them to the idea pool for the pre-warp gameplay iteration after V1.0.

6) I've re-tested this and it definitely works. It increases the city's contribution to the planet's economy, which you can see in the stats tab when zoomed out. This only comes into play when you have set a citizen tax rate, and the effect is much greater in cities that have more population. Building one does increase the tax output by a percentage and deleting it does reduce tax, though the money indicator doesn't update immediately after you demolish it.

7), 8) Cheers for the bug reports, I've added these to the bug list and will check them out when I get a chance.

9) This is intentional, it's up to the player to figure out how to make the most of the resources available on a planet and there are different approaches. Some players will only build Ore Refineries if they can capture 4, 5 or 6 deposits, for example, and use the other infrastructure slots for farms or other useful things. Some people will spread them out to make sure they get 6 attached to a city and rely on factories inside the city to multiply the output. The size of deposits is also a key difference between high and low mineral density planets.

10) That's a great idea, hovering over the alert could make a tooltip show you the title and first sentence or two of the report. We plan to add a number of new tooltips throughout the game, so this will be one of them. We're also planning to have more icons and alert types, and possibly allow you to selectively filter which types of alert you want to see. Right clicking icons in the notification bar does dismiss them, by the way.

11) Currently this opens the galaxy screen and then opens the system window at the star the ship was built at. The best improvement I can think of for this would be automatically opening the Friendly Ships tab and highlighting the new ship. Either that or having a popup from that notification and a button to open the system window.

12) Agreed, that's a small change that'll keep things consistent. I'll add it to the bug list so we get around to fixing it when we get a chance.

13) Interesting, I have just tried to replicate this and found that the Explored meter rounds up. This was a quick fix, and will be rolled into the next patch.

14) This is correct, the ship enters orbit and is no longer visible in the Fleets menu, I'll need to fix it so that these show up at the bottom of the list. I'll also need to make it so they still contribute to the command point total, as currently that can be exploited to build massive fleets.

15) This is something we've talked about internally, and we decided against it because it could lead to excessive micromanagement and we want tax adjustment to be an empire-wide management task. Managing your empire to ensure all planets have good morale is also important to the gameplay. In the late game you can also use spies and propaganda transmitters to lower enemy morale, forcing them to either correct the problem with more entertainment centres or lower their tax rates across their entire empire.


Thanks so much for the detailed feedback, ideas and bug reports. Please keep sending them in!

Cheers,
-- Brendan, Lead Developer

[Drift]

Population management, really need a way to shut down a building (so nobody works there) & then later turn it on again. Only needed in early game but it can make a big difference.

I'm all for the player having to find the best way to use a resources but if you have EG a large iron deposit with some coal mixed in. It renders the iron almost unusable as you can't place your iron down if it's going to go over the coal. You also can't use the coal because you can't build a road over iron

Without being able to set different tax levels for each planets I find your economy crashes down as you need to wing back your tax rate when you settle on a new planet.
With regard to "excessive micromanagement" wouldn't placing the locations for farms & refiners on each planet for each city also fall it to this category? :)

It seems you can avoid the penalty of rejecting other races diplomatic offers by just changing the offer slightly & then hitting exit.

Haven't yet found a way to add pods\upgrades to my space station.

Some way to know what I can & can't build a road\railway over, maybe the hex shape outline of the cursor on the planet could be red when a road or railway is selected if you can't build on it. 1st time on a molten planet & it seems I can't connect the city to the resource I want. Do all molten planets have an impassable equator?

Should I be charged for "building" a 2nd road over an already existing road?

Ice planets shouldn't be found close to the star with molten planets further out.

Matching the race colour's on the galaxy map with the diplomacy screen so I can tell who is who

Once you have scanned a planet being able to later bring up the stats again (#ore & food & tech)

When a ship has just left a star system you can no longer select it to get back into that start system until the ship has moved off

A tab on the fleets menu or a way to see ships being built would be good

Auto save at 40 turns is fairly useless, who wants to go back & replay the last 40 turns? I just loaded an old save from 11 turns ago what i really meant to do was save over that file....

While saving (either auto & manual) occasional the screen goes black with "Saving" displayed. It stays this way until you click something

The refinery shows that it should get a bonus from the "Special" resources like Osmium-186. But when I built a refiner over it & clicked in it shows as +0

Do staff count towards tax income or is it only those that are not staff?

Should be posable to ask a race via diplomacy to stop a blockade

[Drift]

Are there asteroids in the game? I haven't found away to use my Asteroid miner.
Move Other ship modals above Non-Combat Modules
Should you be able to build a star base on a planet while it's getting bombed?
How do you rotate a ship in combat (spin on the spot)?
I have loaded a game when i meant to save a game a few times now, need a clearer way to notice which tab you are on
It looks like Enemy Ships\Starbases attack their own fights some times
On the planets tab any negative value (the addition each round) should be red
The option to start at the city with the star base would be nice when looking at a planet
Trading stuff between your planets: the values for metal look odd, probably because the industry tax is playing with them
Got a blight on a planet for over faming (8 or more farms) the planet can have 6 citys. Does the over farming scale with the planet size, 1.25 farmers per city doesn't sound like over farming?