Feedback: Endgame breaks down

[Kuukunen]

I'm a sucker for making numbers bigger and checking boxes, so I mostly enjoyed the game a lot. In the beginning it seemed very polished and I would've liked to even do all the objectives. Unfortunately the late parts of the game feel pretty much unfinished. There's a slew of bugs and balancing problems that made me stop. There's too many to go to detail with, so I'll just list a few here.

• Some objectives reset for me when I restart the game. At least the "Destroy X enemies without releasing the fire button", (...even though it's not a button) the "Play without a weapon equipped for X minutes" and the "Make X executives happy/angry." It might've started after I left it on for the night, but probably not.
  
  
• Because of that, in the end every time the game checks the objectives, it displays the "You got all the objectives!" cutscene. This was actually the final straw. I possibly could've kept playing doing the objectives, but after couple of dozens of times seeing the cutscene playing became unbearable. The game thinks I now have 619/594 objectives.
  
  
• Enemy damage scaling is unbalanced. I saw you added it in the last patch, (?) so I guess as a new feature it was a bit untested in late game. For example, the enemy beam weapons do ~no damage and there's no need to even dodge them because my shield will recharge fast enough. Meanwhile the missiles in Sol almost one-shot me. At 128 health and 78 shield one single missile leaves me at no shields and 20 health and of course missile + anything else is instant death. (I'm at level 127.)
  
  
• Speaking of shields, the recharge upgrade is busted, it recharges the energy way too fast for it to be balanced with other gameplay elements. In the endgame for a while I thought nothing could hurt me, but then I get hit by wrong kinds of things too quickly in succession and suddenly I'm just dead wondering wtf happened.
  
  
• Overall the two things above make late game fighting pretty horrible. First time I died and lost about 110 managers I didn't even know what killed me. I think I somehow got stuck in an enemy, got shot at and died in less than a second. Pretty much all deaths after that felt like "BS that wasn't my fault".
  
  
• Also the fighting would be a lot more interesting if it was less encounters but harder. (Mostly more bullets would work I think.) Right now the enemies are like mosquitoes: More annoying than anything and if you swat them away, they come right back within seconds.
  
  
• The weapons are not very balanced. I'm not sure if this on purpose or not. I get that finding the good weapons could be a thing, but it doesn't really work here for multiple reasons and just makes most weapons useless and simply not fun.
  
  
• Case in point: I love the idea of the Singularity Pockets. Unfortunately trying to use the weapon for anything becomes an exercise in horrible frustration: Even trying to destroy 200 asteroids with it is a chore: The explosion only slightly damages the asteroids and even worse, then throws the rocks around the solar system. Similar problems with fighting enemies, with the extra fun of getting sucked into it yourself. Suggestion: more damage, much, much less knockback and no player suction. (Or maybe 10% of the current one) Another cool option would be to remove the knockback altogether, (and player suction, of course) and increase duration so the main use would be to set up enemy groups to combo with other weapons. Some other currently unfun weapons are Mines, pretty much all missiles, Particle Beam Refractor.
  
  
• Also the Laser Unicorn Attack Squad is way too overpowered to the point that using any other weapon feels silly. I accidentally killed the final boss before it even fired a single dangerous volley in either form.
  
  
• It would be nice to have a crosshair/aiming indicator. Most twin-stick shooters don't have them because generally the weapons are rapid fire, but in this game some weapons are very slow. Especially aiming the Ion Accelerator is horrible. It would be enough to just have a small dot 2-3 ship lengths away. Possibly even have the dot on certain weapons that fire slow and need to be aimed.
  
  
• Rewards from enemies, asteroids, races, everything should probably be rebalanced. Right now 95% of the time doing absolutely anything in space is completely useless. I know it's a trope of the genre for the production to make everything else useless, but it seems in this game you're trying to take it out of the pure idle game category, so actually rewarding players for doing races, destroying asteroids etc would probably be a good idea. Making it actually work in a non-broken and non-trivial way is of course very hard and left as an exercise for the reader.
  
  
• The races could use some more love too. I kinda like the idea of having more things to do in space, but other than artificially incentivising it with the objectives and unlocks, they become pretty useless pretty fast. Some rebalancing would be nice as mentioned above, but also some things like more rewards for faster time. (I don't know if this happens already.) Another thing would be to manually design (and name) more interesting races, a couple per system. Including asteroid placements etc that gets spawned when the race starts. This way you could have high scores and the player could learn the race and try to beat his time. I think this would instantly make it vastly more engaging.
  
  
• And one more thing that makes the races not fun: you can't really see where the next checkpoint is properly. (Unless you use the SpaceTime Distortion field, which makes the races pretty trivial and very slow... not very race-like.) Relying on the radar is not a very good way of doing it either and also not fun. One solution would be to zoom out a bit, but this breaks a bit of other things. (And fix the camera, as mentioned below.) Could try to make the next checkpoint indicators even better too. Or if nothing else works, you could even disable the boost, but that would probably feel bad. (Either way you should probably disable the SpaceTime Distortion field for the race duration.)
  
  
• Also enemies should probably be despawned when the race starts, especially if you disable ship systems.
  
  
• As for the camera, currently there's some (a lot of) inertia when you boost. What you probably should have is inverted inertia, so when you boost you see MORE of the area ahead of you, not LESS like right now.
  
  
• Managers are pretty much the most important thing on the radar and noticing them is crucial. The sun indicator on the other hand is completely useless. They're the same colour and the sun is a huge yellow blob on the radar, making it harder to notice when there's a manager. This is a problem.
  
  
• Speaking of which, I purposefully didn't upgrade the sun indicator to the second level because of that, (and even first level was by mistake) but the game forced me to to unlock stuff... and the term "Ship Upgrades" seems to refer to different things in different places. It took me a while to realise why it wouldn't unlock even if I upgraded my ship with stuff like shields.
  
  
• One small thing is that in the beginning it's not very clearly shown/explained you can use bumpers to navigate both the motherbase and the pause menu.
  
  
• And speaking of menu navigation with controller, I like using the D-pad for it. I have impression other people do too since using stick to navigate is pretty wonky. It's a good thing that it works, then. ...except when in the weapon upgrade menu, where it not only doesn't work, trying to use D-pad for navigation actively destroys your setup and you have to figure out the weapon combination you had there before. This has caused multiple loud guttural injections and as far as I'm considered is completely unacceptable from UI design point of view. Quick and dirty solution would be to have an "Assign" button instead.
  
  
• Some objectives are not very balanced. Especially the "Kill 10000 enemies" one. By the time I got to 5000 I was pretty much done with the game and if the bugs mentioned above hadn't happened, this probably would've stopped me from getting all the objectives. Way too repetitive.
  
  
• Also especially the pacifist objective is pretty lame. Flying around without a weapon equipped is not really something you'd want to do normally and apparently it even resets if you use a weapon. (On purpose or not?) Otherwise it could be something you do bit by bit while upgrading planets. I got to 8 minutes or so, but then got stuck in a nasty screen lock battle and had to shoot them only to find out the objective started from the beginning.
  
  
• As mentioned in another thread, once you are at 12 executives, keeping them happy just becomes way too tedious. Some way to feed them faster would be nice and maybe late game upgrades that increase the yield of gift crates. Because let's face it, later in the game the minigames stop being fun (except the Woodguy Jr one, but that just gives food) and going around destroying enough asteroids for the gifts gets tedious too. It's kind of ok for one, but once you get 12... you just have to do it 12 times as much.
  
  
• The economy could use a lot of rebalancing. Most of the upgrades (or even buildings) are useless. Especially the "Get a minor bonus for each [higher tier building]". For example Shopping mall getting a bonus from Media Corporation: If you're at the point where you have enough Media Corporations for it to make a difference, you're probably making a trillion times more money with other things than with the Shopping Mall even with bonuses. So in early game the upgrade does nothing because you don't have any higher tier buildings and later it does nothing because the lower tier building is completely overshadowed by other things. I think it would be nice if new things always had at least some effect you can see in the income. I know this is very hard to balance well with the exponential growth and all, but that's what Excel is for.
  
  
• Speaking of overshadowing, some of the combos completely overshadow everything else. Most notably in the end the Casino combo makes about 10 billion times more money than everything else combined, including the more expensive Videogame Developer.
  
  
• Also in the end just having to go from planet to planet upgrading everything becomes pretty annoying. Especially since you have to do it over and over again. I think Casino was unlocked by building an R&D Lab (?) on every planet. This was the turning point. Up until that point there was always something interesting to do. Different things to spice up the game while going between planets, but at that point it just stopped being interesting and going through all 40 planets to unlock the next thing became boring. Quick fix for the Casino would be to use something like 15 planets instead. More general solution might be adding some new features, such as after beating the boss you could build an expensive space station or motherbase module that lets you build buildings on all planets in the system simultaneously.
  
  
• Another thing that makes cycling through the 40 planets uninteresting is that you're doing exactly the same things over and over and over again. It would be a bit of work, but it would be a lot more interesting if planets or at least systems had a different set of buildings.
  
  
• Losing all your managers when you die is a bit harsh. Incentivising not dying by losing things you've gathered is ok and used very well in some games. But the loss shouldn't be too much. Gathering managers for hours and hours and then losing them all because of some seemingly buggy collision stunlock almost made me just quit the game and not come back. Although later I figured I could just Alt+F4 out of the game if something bad happens. (Which is another thing that could be addressed.) Some solutions could be only losing some of the managers when you die. There could even be upgrades that affect it. Like for example in the beginning you lose all, but later you only lose 25% or 15 or something.
  
  
• There should be a way to fast scroll through objectives. (And going over the edge should go to the other side.)
  
  
• There should be a way to fast scroll through buildings on planets. (Or at least again going from one edge to the other.)
  
  
• In pause menu the top bar that shows the page you're on should probably always be visible. I got lost and frustrated in the overly numerous menus too many times.
  
  
• I... think the UI element that shows managers, gifts, bonus etc in top left corner is bugged? I'm not sure if it's supposed to be shown at all times, but for me it only shows after I pick up a manager for a second. One single time it got stuck on, but I'm not sure if that was the bug or the intended thing.
  
  
• The health bar numbers hide the healthbar making it pretty useless. Basically when you're at half health it looks like you're at 10%. One way of handling it could be to have the numbers invert the background or use smaller numbers with borders.
  
  
• Then one last big thing: The combat and space stuff could've used a bit more love for the game to succeed. Without the space stuff the game is basically competing with slightly less polished free games that have a lot more content. So to justify the $15 price tag I feel the combat should be good enough to be engaging by itself. Currently it's a bit too simplistic and this might turn people away.

I could go on with some other stuff, but I think at this point I've already written at least three times too much and if there's anyone still reading this and actually considering each point, I congratulate you. Also as a reminder, even with all the criticism for the most part I did enjoy the game enough to play 20ish hours of it (+idle) and get all the achievements.

PS. If you didn't guess, I'm also a game dev and I wish you luck.

[Lieutenant_Scrotes]

I agree with you on a lot of (not all) points. I am at the stage where if I die and lose all my managers I'll just quit the game and not come back. The diminishing returns of the later buildings means that the income bonus is crucial to make progress at a satisfactory rate.

Still, despite the many flaws this game has, I have enjoyed my time with it and feel I've extracted enough entertainment to justifty what I paid for it.

[Warlord]

I'm a bit disappointed in the amount of content I got from this for the price (compared to some idle clicker style games that are free and can entertain me for weeks), but it wasn't too bad. It's a shame then that the actual combat (the reason to pay for this) is so poorly balanced.

I pretty much agree with most of these points. Particularly the part about some upgrades that give paltry bonuses for having more expensive buildings. Like the final upgrade for real estate. The final upgrade is finally within my purchasing reach (if I spend, like a good 2 minutes of idle time). I can spend 45,000,000,000,000,000 to buy an upgrade that will increase my 225 m/s building by a whole 8% per bank owned! The banks only cost me 20,000,000,000,000,000 to buy (starting out) and give 2,000,000,000,000 per building BASE. TOTALLY WORTH IT! I mean, seriously. I don't even know if that will ever be a profitable bonus to get. Unless my math is wrong, I'd gain 18 more m/s per bank. I would thus have to have...... 111,111,111,112 banks to let my real estates give enough income to equal ONE bank.

Oh, and having to visit every planet to top off your buildings? /wrists

[lucromick]

definitely needs more solar systems or even more galaxies