This game's great point and its lackings: My Thoughts.

[Dubious Drewski]

*This game is so much fun. Micromanaging many units in 1/4 time, carefully setting ship accuracy and position: such fun strategizing is possible! Great job on improving the AI's battle maneuvers in that recent patch; they're much trickier to hit with bombs, and they seem to move more intelligently overall.

*Anyone else use 'Ram' as their only mode of transportation? Especially with fleets in close formation. Using 'Move' causes your ships to be too cautious, making them hit the brakes every time they feel they're too close to another ship, even if that ship has the same exact speed vector! The AI slamming the brakes actually CAUSES more collisions than it's trying to prevent. So, using 'Ram' all the time is the best way to move your fleet around. This seems like it needs looking at.

*Setting up ship positions before battle is fun, but it's really tedious when the same 4 ships reset before each battle and I have to manually place them back into formation. Could they please just remember where I placed them?

*It's too easy to manipulate the AI in campaign map. If I want to attack my neighbour, but I want to avoid his nearby fleet, I simply click 'attack' on his farthest territory, and all his ships automatically start flying there to defend from my feigned assault, then I just immediately click on the nearby city I actually intended to invade; the one sitting right under me, and the AI never changes course after that to intercept me. I just get the town for free.

It's like when you trick a dog by pretending to throw a ball. It's fun to exploit, but feels cheap.

I can use the same exploit to invade deep into enemy territory: I never just click "Invade" on an enemy province; that sends an alarm to every enemy fleet to come intercept me. Instead I click 'Move' on monster rubble or attack a completely different enemy's territory to move my fleet into position over my target, and THEN attack it. And their main fleet is nowhere near to defend. Just too easy. I suggest that the AI react to the player's actual position, not their far-off, pipe-dream destination. That would fix all this.

*I love that this program alt-tabs so flawlessly. Keep this up. There's nothing worse than a game which locks up every time you go to change an album on Spotify.

*May we please have a campaign-map option "Players Can only conquer neighbouring provinces"? Currently, it's too easy and too tempting to just attack any enemy captial city (near or far) and just ignore their provinces. This wins games way too easily.

*We need a way to Attack Area/Attack on Cursor during battles. This would completely change the feel and pace of the game, but it would be great to be able to hit Ctrl-Click and have your selected ships fire at that spot, whether a "valid ship" was there or not. Currently, ship debris can float around and block your ships from moving, but you can't shoot the debris down because it's "already dead" and your ships ignore your command to clear the debris and choose to fire at far away enemies instead. Enemy debris can even have guns actively firing on you, but you cannot return fire! It's kind of annoying.

*Could there please be a simpler way to move your ships? Key-Click, key-click repeatedly gets annoying. Why not one button, like right-click, to move all selected ships? This is such a heavily-used game feature, so why the extra step each time?

*Could ships please, PLEASE turn quicker after arriving at their destination. Flanking a target is painful because ships sit with their asses toward the enemy for EONS while taking fire. Can they please start turning earlier in the move?

*It would be really cool if on the campaign map, we could get an indication of what kind of weather was in the area. (And by the way, fog is way, way too common) But weather is not a problem if you're willing to withdraw and re-attack from a fight until the skies clear. This is another exploit which is too irresistable to use.

*Ignoring monsters on your territory isn't a big enough deal. A temporary 60% income loss on one of my small, non-income-generating provinces? Who cares? The reward for killing them is nice, though. Enemy encampments should be more of a severe harrassment against both the player and the AI; They should matter more.

*During battle, your out-of-range guns display the text "NO TARGET AVAILABLE" in big red All-Caps letters, and it takes up way too much screen space. You can't even see your own ship! Could we please instead have a small symbol, like the classic red circle/diagonal line? It would communicate just as well.

[Prophet_01]

Not bad. A lot of pretty good suggestions. Especially the quality of life stuff for combat would be a nice addition. The game feels a bit rough around the edges at times (but that's to be expected with a one-man-show!).

I wouldn't put these above more content or some improvements to buildings and ground vehicles though. Depending on the effort involved, they'd be nice long term goals of course.

[Zarkonnen]

Thank you for the very detailed feedback. I appreciate it. I'll do my best to reply to each item in turn.

Ram vs Move: Yeah, IIRC the AI currently assumes that obstacles are stationary rather than taking their movement into account. Fixing that will probably help. It could also take into account whether the collision is actually going to do any meaningful amount of damage.

Remembering ship positioning from last time: yeah, I should put that in.

Yep, the AI is very easy to trick right now. The AI actually being aware of the spatial position of your fleet rather than its supposed destination would help. And/or I was thinking about making mid-flight course changes require radio technology.

Conquering adjacent provinces, etc: I plan to put in a supply/logistics system that will roughly speaking achieve that. Though if that doesn't work properly, your suggested "can only conquer neighbouring provinces" rule sounds nice and simple.

Firing on debris: I don't know, this seems like kind of a niche thing. I worry that it would cause inexperienced players to waste ammo.

Right click to move: in principle, easy, but when you're moving multiple ships, where do the ships actually go relative to where you clicked? Does the group center on the cursor?

Currently, ships do move-then-flip, but in some situations, flip-then-move would be better. I can add this as an option in the move command. Note that turning speed is also based on ship speed, so if you want to shorten the turn delay, add more engines.

People used to complain that monsters were too dominant in blowing everything up, so I made them tamer. I think having monster nest aggressiveness based on difficulty level would help with that. As for the reduction in income, maybe it should switch to an absolute value, like -$20, instead of a percentage one. Otherwise, if your starting city has a monster nest that eats 70% of income, that's pretty crippling. Hm. Or monster nests only turn up in non-city districts, that'd also work.

The "no target available" thing is one of those "new players vs experienced players" issue. I want it to be really clear why a gun is not firing for new players, but I agree that it looks crowded.

[Dubious Drewski]

I just want to say that I love that you read these. Even if you don't implement any of it, it's so great to know you listen and consider suggestions fairly. Seriously, you're awesome.

"Right click to move: in principle, easy, but when you're moving multiple ships, where do the ships actually go relative to where you clicked?"

Ooh! I just thought of it: you hold down either the move key or right mouse button, then the ship-placement highlights display like normal after a 50ms delay or something. How's that?

" I was thinking about making mid-flight course changes require radio technology"
"I plan to put in a supply/logistics system"

That all sounds stupendous!

[Dubious Drewski]

Oh, and thank you for "Rapid Commands". It's just more fun to manage large fleets now. I always enable this one.

[Dubious Drewski]

Here's an idea: Implement a new hotkey called "Fire all Guns". Nothing else needs to change, so it's not more confusing to newbies. Hitting this key will fire all working guns within cursor range onto any position, even when ships are set to "Hold Fire". Doing this introduces two fun possibilities: Guns now have an option to fire upon debris, but more excitingly, attempt highly-skilled shots on fast-moving targets which the AI always, always misses.

Volleys are currently possible by tediously enabling 'Hold-Fire' before engaging and then rapidly tapping 'Aimed fire' and 'Hold Fire' to release a volley when the enemy velocity is favourable for a shot.

OH BOY, It would be nice to have this in one key press!