Achievements So Far
The Two Paths
Future Growth
Schedule Changes
Staff Changes
We Remain Committed
This Isn’t an Engine Overhaul
The 40+ Page Design Document
Looking for Modders!
What do we WANT from modders?
Short Term Goals
Long Term Help
Glad to hear we're sparking your interest again, Sounds. That's definitely a good sign. :)
And thanks, Cyborg -- seems pretty much everyone is in agreement. I feel glad about the decision, at least.
I worried this might need to happen when you last spoke about changes to the UI (which were definitely needed) and the time needed to do it right.
I had hoped to help out at some point UI wise, but my own schedule meant that it was nigh on impossible. Even with the little time I had spare to help every time I opened the alpha/beta I could see the game was drifting from what I actually loved about the original. So my thinking up (until this post) was "oh well, I'll just keep playing the original as the new one is not for me.".
As of now you've sparked my interest again. :D
It's very natural to not feel well at a time like this Chris. This is a stressful shift and not at all something you were hoping for when this all started. Please don't take anything negative here personally, it is from love and a desire for this to succeed that I put this game through the paces.
Just curious what was the thing(s) you loved about the original that were being drifted away from? Not that I disagree, but I've been trying to pin my finger down on what it is. A lot of people have said "depth", but I wasn't sure what depth was lost besides a lot of different ships and minor factions and AI types, but that's not really right at the mechanical level, that's mostly just content. Right?
A few comments. There is a "Automatically have X engineers and Y remains rebuilders per planet" option in AIWC already. Did using that not help with the engineers/rebuilders issue?
You can get supply deep into AI territory by "island hopping"; just go capture a single planet deep in the AI space (put the 5 or 6 colony ships in a transport and hope one makes it). You never have to conquer everything.
The AI could be tactically stupid even in the first game. The most obvious offender tactic is to have one of your planets with many turrets destroyed by the A.I.; all you need to stall even a huge fleet is to keep sending new remain rebuilders from the nearby planet and micromanage them to keep rebuilding the turrets, easy to do especially if you built the sniper ones all around the planet "border". I used this tactic to massive effect to gain enough time to replenish my warhead stockpiles and deal with several attacks which were otherwise too massive for my defenses to handle. Not sure how much of this is due to the lack of advanced unit types, though.
I see that engineers and remain rebuilders are back in the game; for the love of God, either replace them with the new planetary controller or allow them to be automatically rebuilt even if the planet is under attack. By far the most annoying thing in the whole campaign was the micromanaging of the rebuilding of those two units during a planetary defense. Or maybe flat out forbid them to be rebuilt and/or warped in from a nearby planet during an attack; this will block cheese tactics like mine above, but note it will also make defense much harder.
Keeping all the units at the latest rank is an easy win over the first game.
The revert to the gazillion hull and weapon types is, I think, a mistake. On paper having a hugely complex rock-paper-scissor subsystem is good, but in practice, it will get ignored the instant it becomes unmanageable due to the lower cap between player skill's and game controls' abilities to actually use it to your advantage. I didn't even try to start fiddling around with ship and turret types and just went straight to "build as much of every type as you can and throw everything at the A.I" stage. Maybe an advisor of some kind which tells you the most prevalent A.I. hull types observed so far and which units/turrets kill them most easily?
Rally points for ships being built from a mobile dock. Pretty please?
I know that I sound like a broken record here, but fleet build caps specific for control groups would make waging a multi-front war so much easier for the player.
Sorry if you may have answered this somewhere else, but with the heavy focus on modding, do you plan on having steam workshop for this game?
Ugh, that sounds like really annoying micro.
The problem with this removing civilian units like that from the game is that it isn't clear how much logistics that drops out of the game. (see comment from .hawk.) And then trying to figure out a new system to give the same depth to replace them with would be a gamble. And we found it that it didn't necessarily block those cheese tactics since the planetary controller was rebuilding turrets and causing the attacking AI to keep retreating to destroy them.
I'm not saying you're wrong. I dislike having engineers/rebuilders as well. I hate to say "wait for them to be reimplemented and then make good points to remove them again or make them less annoying", but I think that's the only option on the table (from my understanding).
Now, your idea of an advisor... perhaps a science advisor that is recommending you build X and Y type ships because the AI is predominantly building A and B ships is interesting. I'm afraid it might end up being bad advice because perhaps the player just hasn't seen enough AI ships yet or maybe those ships aren't the ones the player should be worried about, but I think it's worth exploring for post-fun-point. Any suggestions on how to implement?
Might not be viable, but what about a special launcher or something similar that can easily be installed and allows easy and universal access to mods for your games that are posted on the launcher? It might be too much expense and manpower, especially with the current conditions of the company, I don't know if there is a cheap way to do it, but even if it isn't for a while (even a few years), a lot of people seem interested in something like that eventually, for both modders and mod-users, and over time it may help the modding community since it wouldn't require either modders designing an easy way to download their mods or mod-users going through the hassle of manually installing them. Probably not very viable currently though, if ever, perhaps something for the modders themselves to eventually design if they are interested enough to do so.Sorry if you may have answered this somewhere else, but with the heavy focus on modding, do you plan on having steam workshop for this game?
Probably not; it seems like a really clunky system from what little I've seen of it, and we want to support GOG folks equally. If there's a C# api for it and a lot of demand, then we might consider it. The C# bindings from valve themselves are useless; they don't even compile. There are various wrappers with c# apis on the unity asset store and on github, but I can't recall if there was one for workshop.
The problem with this removing civilian units like that from the game is that it isn't clear how much logistics that drops out of the game. (see comment from .hawk.) And then trying to figure out a new system to give the same depth to replace them with would be a gamble.
And we found it that it didn't necessarily block those cheese tactics since the planetary controller was rebuilding turrets and causing the attacking AI to keep retreating to destroy them.
Engineers and rebuilders have one and only one logistic effect: they speed up the building/repairing of your mobile/immobile units but also put more strain on your economy the more of them you use.
Might not be viable, but what about a special launcher or something similar that can easily be installed and allows easy and universal access to mods for your games that are posted on the launcher? It might be too much expense and manpower, especially with the current conditions of the company, I don't know if there is a cheap way to do it, but even if it isn't for a while (even a few years), a lot of people seem interested in something like that eventually, for both modders and mod-users, and over time it may help the modding community since it wouldn't require either modders designing an easy way to download their mods or mod-users going through the hassle of manually installing them. Probably not very viable currently though, if ever, perhaps something for the modders themselves to eventually design if they are interested enough to do so.Sorry if you may have answered this somewhere else, but with the heavy focus on modding, do you plan on having steam workshop for this game?
Probably not; it seems like a really clunky system from what little I've seen of it, and we want to support GOG folks equally. If there's a C# api for it and a lot of demand, then we might consider it. The C# bindings from valve themselves are useless; they don't even compile. There are various wrappers with c# apis on the unity asset store and on github, but I can't recall if there was one for workshop.
Do you feel there shouldn't be a cost to repairing or speeding up unit build time or that its just too high in AIWC? Metal did feel more sparse in AIWC but as a result it felt more valuable. You could wreck your economy pretty quick if you tried to speed up everything... but that's part of the point I'm trying to make with this wall of text. Both their placement and their use were options that, when used wisely, could let the player live to fight another day when facing tough odds. When used poorly it could leave you weak at exactly the wrong time.
In my opinion, it was one of many meaningful player decisions that could make or break your game. That it added another layer of strategy and real depth. This is not to say "know" I am right and anyone who disagrees is wrong. The above is part of what one guy thinks is missing from the sequel.
Not the units themselves necessarily, but the different aspects of the game they impact though decisions the player makes.
Just a little poke to ask if the next patch will take much longer time.