First Impressions and Simple Questions

[unseen4ce]

I hope no one will mind if I post another first impressions and questions thread, I have 2 brief questions at the end.

Firstly my impressions. This game is, in my opinion, the greatest RTS I have ever played; it is soon but I think this will have a place in my top 3 games of all time beside FFIX and Ico. It is genius, and perfectly refined for maximum enjoyment. For example, when I did my first battle in the intermediate tutorial, I became agitated when my enemy started to gain an upper hand. In my excitment I started right-clicking every enemy in sight and noticed to my astonishment that my ships started to fire with my mouse-clicks, speeding up significantly ...allowing me to quickly wipe-out the opposing forces. It was such a natural thing to do in this situation, and this game takes advantage of it. Very smart. The force fields are alot of fun to destroy, when you finally pop that bubble, and then run-through the rest of the AI contained inside. They also allow complex strategies besides simply defending your core units. Building and repairing is effortless, it is easy to keep track of everything while enjoying the battles in the game, perfectly balanced gameplay.
I like the wormholes idea, guarding them, they allow you or the enemy to quickly access eachother for battles. It is also great, in a tower defense spirit, setting up defenses around the wormholes and placement of core units and core planets through wormholes. Then there's the little things, how you can have engineers auto-repair, freeing you from the burden of constantly repairing turrets or maintaining a fleet. How you can set the game to select only battle units, so that you aren't going to battle with an engineer you accidently caught in your selection field. The ease with which you can set groups, or pick certain types for certain task. It is also great how you can command all your ships into FRD mode, so that they partol easily. All these things were taken into consideration to allow one to focus on the most captivating aspects of gameplay.


This game takes RTS to another level, it has been so long since I have played such a great game (I started to think I wasn't a gamer anymore after so many disappointing mainstream releases), I have renewed faith in gaming. To think that indie games have definetly surpassed the mainstream market where games have become hollow and unsatisfying. To sum-up and clarify, this game is hugely satisfying and fresh, finally something that is fun and challenging; not dumbed down and violent.

My first question is this, will all highlighted battle units respond to right-clicking of the mouse. Is it just my imagination or do battle units speed-up and fight better when you start clicking on your target more...

Second question, I have noticed that some units tend to stay back while others get in close automatically. Is there somewhere where I can change how units behave, like the freedom to have units NOT at their optimum distance or does the game make it easy by putting all units at the optimum distance for you. How do you check a unit's optimum distance, I saw someone on youtube making the game display "distance-rings" for this.

[zoutzakje]

hi and welcome to the forums ^^
Like you I also believe that this is the best game in the strategy genre I've ever played. There is so much to learn and do, it never gets boring.
As to answer your questions...

1) military do not move faster when you order them around. All units travel each with their own speed. I do believe ships have to "accelerate" when they're going from standing still to moving, but I'm not sure about this. It is true that your ships fight more effectively if you order them around by right clicking, x right clicking (attack mode) and v right clicking (defend mode), but they won't deal more damage or anything of the sort. It's just that your ships don't do much and won't actively go hunting for the enemy if you don't give them orders.

2)I'm not sure if you can change it. Units staying at their optimal distance has something to do with auto-kiting I think but I could be wrong. The only thing I can think of is the Auto-kiting option in the Controls tab, which is located ingame on the lower left of your screen. But like I said, I could be wrong.
If you want to know a ship's range, move your mouse onto the ship. A lot of info will appear and one of these things in this so-called tooltip is the range. If you want to see those distance rings, press and hold the 'z' button.

hope this will help a bit.
enjoy the game =)

[unseen4ce]

Yeah it does, I had forgotten about 'x' mode, I'll never forget that from now on; 'x' mode for attack, 'v' mode for defend. Man this is another awesome part of this game.

Thanks for the 'z' thing as well, that's what I was looking for.

[zoutzakje]

glad I could help =)

[keith.lamothe]

Welcome to the forums, very glad to hear you're enjoying the game so much

Generally if you order a ship to attack another ship it will move closer if it needs to but will stop shortly after coming into range.  Attack-Move (X) and Free-Roaming-Defender (V) will also tend to stop while in range of their current shooting target (which it picks implicitly, though I forget what happens if you V+right-click directly on an enemy unit).  If you really want them to get closer you could probably right click the target ship and then right click empty space right next to it; that would make their autotargeting prefer that type of ship (though no guaruntees it will pick that one) and the normal move order tells them to keep moving no matter what.  You could also right-click the space near it and shift-right-click the target ship to queue up the orders.

And yea, auto-kiting does some crazy things with holding out the range

Other than that I think your questions have already been answered but let us know if you have more

[Cyborg]

I recommend using the auto kite option in the control menu only with very specific units. For example, you don't want range units that have less than the kiting value (-500) being held at a range that they cannot fire.

Also, if you combine that with dampening abilities, you have a very potent combination, as it further limits the range on your enemies. I believe the stealth battleship is probably the best unit to try this out with.

edit: I wish that auto kiting also had a planetwide control, for specific strike attacks.

[mindloss]

Note you can also see enemy's ranges by holding z and pressing x (very useful to know), and you can see the "would-be" range of your currently selected ship by holding z and pressing a (occasionally useful ).