General Suggestions

[Kreldin Starfeather]

Let me open with the fact that I've been really enjoying the majority of this game, and I'm really excited to see how it develops. Almost every aspect of the game has been fun, and I can still see so much potential just waiting to be filled.

With that said, however, There's a lot of little things that are frustrating or simply irritating I'd like to address, that are stopping me from really enjoying the game to it's fullest. I apologise if this seems long, but i'm going into detail as to why something is a problem, and a suggested solution.
Minor spoilers follow.


Firstly, the Camera feels very fiddly to control. Between the screen edge movement that has a different sensitivity for vertical and horizontal movement, and the fact that the camera moves with the rotation of the ship, it's very hard to aim accurately while maneuvering to keep good shield facings or come about to pursue a target. This is especially prevalent with missiles, since they track your mouse and therefore require a steady aim to hit a target consistently.
Adding an option to change to a direct mouselook camera control, and/or unlocking the camera from the ship movement (with the possible exception of Roll) would help improve this immensely.


Secondly, it's extremely hard to care very much about my crewmen. There are several reasons for this.
A) Healing them from an injury takes a very long time, which is the same regardless how much health they've lost. This is compounded by the fact you have to manually finish the healing with a button press, and there's no visible timer, or completion popup to tell you when it's finished, and checking manually requires you to bring your ship to a full stop, open the inventory, and then switch to a different tab.

B) They die so easily, in combat or events (such as the amusement park at the start of the game killing a crewmen with zero warning immediately after grating you a positive perk), because they have so little health. A poor RNG roll, or series of, (such as rolling three 'item' hands in a row, vs three enemy strong attacks, in a forced fight in a story mission) leads to crew deaths you had no way of preventing.

C) The ship bonuses they provide are arguably pitiful, and barely worth bothering with. Most ship fights rarely last more than 20-30 seconds, with the exception of some of the larger story fights, so having a crewman give you, at max level, a 5% bonus to kinetic weapon damage is a bonus that's never going to be felt, or really make a difference.

D) If you have a full crew when you get one of the special crewmen, like the resin addict, or the stowaway girl, the special crewmen just disappears, with no option to drop a crewmen to take the special one in their place, or a way to see the stats of the crewmen you would be receiving.

E) Why are fragile, important, specialist crewmen, with great reaction times, but seemingly extremely weak weapons being included in boarding parties and ground teams? Where's the ship's security personnel? Why doesn't your captain take part in fights, even those where he's obviously present, such as in the prison?

F) Considering how fragile you know your crew are, why can't you give them armour at the start of combat, even in combat you know you're walking into to, such as boarding a pirate ship? Do they really carry a crate of two dozen armour vests around with them at all times? Is your captain carrying and distributing them in the middle of combat? Is this why he can't fight - because he's weighed down by 400lb of body armour and twelve sniper rifles?

As it is, it's very hard to get invested in a crewmen you know you're likely to randomly lose within a couple of hours, with little to no control over who or when.


Thirdly, the Travel engines. Having them bring your ship to a full stop every time you return to normal speed is very irritating,since the two most common causes of this are coming in to dock at a station, and entering combat, both cases in which you almost always want to be moving at full speed.
Also, having to transfer power to engines manually when entering travel speed, then back to weapons or shields when dropping back to normal speed is tedious, and something that really ought to be done automatically by your asteroid dodging pilot, since there's never a reason not to set power to engines.


Fourthly, Commander perks. So far, the events that gave them to me seem to be largely random, with little to no indication that you'd get the perk. Since they're permanent (even a hangover, or permanent engine damage that somehow moves ships with you), and in some cases seem to have a pretty significant effect, a warning that a particular choice or conversation path will lead to a perk would make a big difference.

Fifthly, The lack of visible information and explanation. For a game where your choices are supposed to make a large impact on the game, it's very hard to make informed decisions with how little information there is. What is 'Crew tactics level, and why is lowering it a good perk? How good is a shield generator with +188 shield? is that +5% of my shield total, or +50%? Why do lasers have 100 accuracy, but flak cannons with spread have over 240? How much bonus experience am I getting from Veteran, Familiar, Solidarity, Fullness and Compromised? Is weapon cadence Spread or Energy use? What exactly does 'auto fire' do, and why is it so powerful with missiles?
All these are questions with important answers that make a big difference in choosing what to do and how to outfit a ship. Having tooltip information, and a combined, detailed stats page to explain what everything is, and what it does would help immensely. Give the percentage modifiers for bonuses from character perks, don'make players guess as to whether a choice will be worth it.


Lastly, a number of smaller irritations:

The percentage hull health is very difficult to see placed directly on the hull visual itself.

The lack of names on station and planet locations until you mouse over them, so you have to play hide and seek with them to find the one you want each time you visit.

The bloom/glare. An option to reduce or to remove this would be nice, since sometimes it's hard to see enemy ships past the massive engine flare.

The inability to reorganise the active abilities to the numbers you choose.

The lack of a multi-save system. This really compounds several of the other crew and perk related issues, though there is design value in a roguelike single save system, the randomness of bad events makes this especially punishing.

Can you invest in some extra RAM sticks for the ship's computers, since they don't seem to have enough to store scan data from one ship when scanning for the weakpoint of a second?

The randomised perks at the start. Having a random captain is allright, but an option to choose perks rather than having to click randomise for anywhere up to 10-20 minutes to get the combination of perks you want. A points system would work well for this. Start with one point. Green perks cost a point, red give you one. Grey cost nothing. Since the biography is perk based anyway, having it update based on perk combination would still work fine.


And finally, A personal preference. While I can see the value of short, intense combat scenarios, the battles in the game feel less like battles, and more like distractions. Most of the combats are over so fast, I barely have time to look at my health or adjust my positioning. Very often, when I get pulled out of travel speed, since I tend to run a missile boat by the time the first ship appears, I've launched enough missiles to kill it, with enough left over to put a sizable dent in the second ship. It's rarely worth taking the time to scan for a ship's weak point, because they're usually half dead by the time the scan is complete, regardless of the weapons I use. I'd love to see the frequency of interdictions dropped, but have all ships have two, three or even four times the health, so that battles feel tactical, and using shield facings and good positioning/maneuvering actually makes a real difference.

If you made it this far, congratulations, and thankyou for taking the time to look over my feedback. Please leave your thoughts and other feedback below. I really look forward to seeing how far this game goes.

[VDmitry]

Not only your own health percentage is difficult to see, but I have big troubles understanding any percentage on enemy ships. Shooting them like blind.

[bcasner50]

The only thing I'd add is to allow us to make our own save points, so we can redo some of the "GAME OVER' fights.

[Wildcard]

I really hate the ship system. I mean, i have to buy a new ship instead of selling previous one, ok even if so, why the game do not allow to sell previous ship which i will never use?

[the_deejus]

The Hanger area should be upgraded to not only buy ships but also have the ability to sell your old ship - like a trade in on that new updated model.

[Kreldin Starfeather]

Selling old ships would be nice, yeah. Also some Indicator of when new ships will unlock.

[Batailleuse]

i agree that fights are very short,

the moment a ship goes Red, or come out of warp the entire enemy screen is dead in 1 activation of the burst skill with gatlings.

106 hull, 60 shield damage per hit x5 ... it instantly zap out of existence any threats.

The only interesting fights were/are:

- Huge station fight with huge amount of enemies
- early fights when i had no gear
- fight that involve 4+ enemies.
- Boss Fights (arguably thats every sector's end)

[brewsterbuffalo]

(Note, I own the GOG version)

Yeah, the negative permanent traits that you can't possibly know how to avoid are annoying and not really fun game design, especially in 'normal' mode. It's a beginner trap that means that any encounter or event that isn't simple combat is better off being ALT+F4ed and avoided it until you know the correct options to pick or your stats are better.

Otherwise you risk gaining permanent negative effect that can be seriously detrimental. At least the Lax 'xp loss trait' can be fixed with successful cargo search, but the game doesn't tell me this. Maybe have an option to turn on description text that tells how remove the negative trait ?

Also, maybe instead of straight up having the crew member always die in event combqt, have a chance they are instead 'crippled' and have to heal for longer? I also agree that healing time should be determined by number of lost health points and should have a message to tell me when the timer and any other timers are done, since checking inventory requires a full stop.


Doesn't help that new campaign can also heap negative traits on a new character, with no ability to re-roll except just delete the save slot and try again so you don't wind up with three negative starting traits...

[Mille]

Is possible to have an indicator (maybe the aiming cursor changing color) on autofire on/off toggle?
Is a bit confusing sometimes, specially if you use missiles too.

[Kreldin Starfeather]

A chance for crewmen to be incapacitated/crippled would be a fairly good way of reducing the sting of RNG taking crewmen from you.
The autofire indicator would also be pretty nice too, I forgot to mention that.
(Edit: seems they already added it, too)


Unfortunately seems I made the post too long for the Devs to have time to respond to, I know how busy they must be. Hopefully someone had time to go through it. I'm impresed by how fast they're working on improving the game and bugfixing after launch.

[crazylegs]

losing high level crew to a roll of the dice is harsh, i noticed at level 11 crew get an extra attack so increasing health for higher level crew would be a good improvement.

[Kreldin Starfeather]

I've yet to have a creman last that long, unfortunately. :/

[Shovah]

Originally posted by Mille:

Is possible to have an indicator (maybe the aiming cursor changing color) on autofire on/off toggle?
Is a bit confusing sometimes, specially if you use missiles too.

It's done, you can find it in the energy panel (right-down corner)

Originally posted by crazylegs:

losing high level crew to a roll of the dice is harsh, i noticed at level 11 crew get an extra attack so increasing health for higher level crew would be a good improvement.

We'll try to balance it as soon as possible. In the future the system should be fairer and less dangerous.

Originally posted by WildCard:

I really hate the ship system. I mean, i have to buy a new ship instead of selling previous one, ok even if so, why the game do not allow to sell previous ship which i will never use?

We'll do it something in a future update ;D Thanks for the suggestion.

Originally posted by bcasner50:

The only thing I'd add is to allow us to make our own save points, so we can redo some of the "GAME OVER' fights.

We want do it, but at this moment it's hard. We would need some days to do it and test it and right now we're to busy fixing bugs and answering. Remember we're two people xD.

As soon as possible we'll look in to it.

[Shovah]

Originally posted by Kreldin Foxclaw:

A) Healing them from an injury takes a very long time, which is the same regardless how much health they've lost. This is compounded by the fact you have to manually finish the healing with a button press, and there's no visible timer, or completion popup to tell you when it's finished, and checking manually requires you to bring your ship to a full stop, open the inventory, and then switch to a different tab.

We know it. We'll improve the healing system when we had finished with the bug correction.

Originally posted by Kreldin Foxclaw:

D) If you have a full crew when you get one of the special crewmen, like the resin addict, or the stowaway girl, the special crewmen just disappears, with no option to drop a crewmen to take the special one in their place, or a way to see the stats of the crewmen you would be receiving.

We'll add a location in stations or planets where you'll storage crew members.

Originally posted by Kreldin Foxclaw:

The lack of names on station and planet locations until you mouse over them, so you have to play hide and seek with them to find the one you want each time you visit.

We'll improve the UI panels in star map, planets, and space stations. It's in our list, probably we'll create a post with our objetives along the early access.

Originally posted by Kreldin Foxclaw:

The bloom/glare. An option to reduce or to remove this would be nice, since sometimes it's hard to see enemy ships past the massive engine flare.

We know too, we'll try to fix it as soon as possible but at this time we're focussed in the major bugs correction.

Originally posted by Kreldin Foxclaw:

The inability to reorganise the active abilities to the numbers you choose.

We'll include it in a future update, sorry for the inconvenience.

Originally posted by Kreldin Foxclaw:

The lack of a multi-save system. This really compounds several of the other crew and perk related issues, though there is design value in a roguelike single save system, the randomness of bad events makes this especially punishing.

As we answered in other post We want do it, but at this moment it's hard. We would need some days to do it and test it. Once we had fixing the major bugs we'll look in to in.



Thanks to all of you for the suggestions and reports. We'll do our best to improve all this things ;D

[Kreldin Starfeather]

Thank you so much for taking the time to look over my feed back and respond to it. I'm excited to see where this already great game goes.

[brewsterbuffalo]

The same, nice to see a developer communicate and respond to feedback. I like the game even now when unfinished, and just want to see it become better.