Sup. As I said, I've just bought the game, and have been really enjoying it over the past few days. I normally wouldn't do this, but since the devs seem to enjoy reading every post on their forums, something I've never seen before, and since the person I normally talk about games with isn't really into grand strategy or RTS, I thought I'd post what I'm thinking. And ask for a bit of advice.
First, the game is really good, on the whole. It's similar to Sins, but without the useless and 100% mechanical civ parts, and with better AI. You have no idea how appreciated both of those things are. And instead, it has rank and better coop (which I need to try) and shit. I don't want to insult you by comparing every aspect of your game to some other game, as if said other game is the standard (it's not), so I'll compare the rank to a game you've probably never heard of instead.
There's this little shoot-em-up called Battle Garegga. It's very Japanese, as shmups are wont to be. Notice the terrible romanization: Garegga really means Garage. Anyways, Garegga is a good shmup, with some
really great music. It also implements a system of scaling difficulty, called 'rank' by the people who play it. Garegga's rank, however, is completely obscured and invisible to players. If you aren't told about it, you won't know it's there. And it scales difficulty up for
everything - firing a shot (and it differs for specific types of shots; if you pick a ship with piercing, it goes up way faster), picking up powerups or score items, etc. If you don't know about it, you'll do fine until stage 5 of 7, at which point you'll start dying horribly. The actual way to play the game is very interesting. Since the only way to decrease rank is by dying, since you lose more rank the fewer lives you have when you die, and since you get a life every million points, you have to do well at the scoring system to get extra lives, to die, to keep rank down. If you're good you can even time your suicides, which gives you extra bombs and damages everything on screen. Rank is so important in this game that it's almost impossible to beat it on one life; the one guy who did made a video of it and distributed it online, as if it was one of those insane high-score runs. Unfortunately, the main way people learned about rank was through lots and lots of experience, and romhacking. Which is why I never really played the game, because seriously, hug that.
This is a very roundabout way of saying
thank you so much for making AIP and the ways to manipulate it visible. Best decision you made in regard to this game, bar none.
I have more things to comment on, but they're a lot shorter than that, so let's get some bullet points up in here.
-Scouting is kinda bad in this game. Early game, you can only ever scout like two planets beyond your borders with mk i scouts (unless I'm missing something; I've just been sending groups of 5+ scouts on suicide runs). When you get some psyite, then you just make a spire scoutship and run the thing through 10-20 planets at once, then repair it, then do it again until you've uncovered the whole map. I'm usually very adamant about playing in fog, but the later planets don't ever
do anything worth keeping an eye on in this game; only alerted planets do. So you just have to know whether they have stuff you want to capture. Since intelligence is mostly a one-off thing, I just play with fog off.
-There's a lot of ships in this game. I mean a lot. Most of them are kinda redundant: take the cutlass vs. the vampire claw vs. the viral shredder vs. the blade spawner for the hell of it. It would be a terrible state of affairs if which ones you get weren't entirely randomized. As it stands, I can't tell whether it's still a bad thing to have so many ships with minor distinctions from each other in this game, or whether the randomization makes it not matter. Instead I'll just ask, is there any way to stop some specific ships from appearing in the map select? Without turning off whole classes of ships in the menu, I mean.
-Hybrids are jerks.
-The neinzul viral clusters seem kinda silly. If you have riot ships they die, if you don't they take a while killing your fleet, only to spawn a thousand of them, which then can slaughter every planet you own if you don't have flak guns or lightning rods set up at wormhole exits. I guess attritioners would work too, although since they aggro the entire planet I haven't used them much.
-Also jerks: spire blade spawners before the patch. Seriously, those things were mk. i or ii ion cannons, and there were several per planet, including next to my homeworld. Once I found out that they were nerfed (the performance improvements helped too), I was kinda forced to update, which I'd put off thanks to the broken mac updater. Definitely recommending you push that update out asap.
-Is there any way to delete priority tags entirely from a planet in galaxy view?
-Golems are a lot of trouble. Their self-attrition is very annoying, made more so by the fact that, once I had more than one, the only one my engineers would autoheal was the cursed golem, and not my armored, or my botnets. Had to manually do that. Since they would also clear planets just by existing, I didn't feel like I was getting enough depth for my trouble. I've turned them off since...
-Do Spire Civilian Leaders actually do anything if you capture them? The -3 they're supposed to give you every hour doesn't show up in the list with all the +1s.
-Games take so long it's way too easy to restart them with different settings. I don't think I've played past 10 planets in a single game so far.
Hopefully my current game will change that; I have a good feeling about it.
If you actually read all that, then thanks.
