It feels much harder to click on things in this release. I feel like you have to click on things extremely precisely or it just doesn't work.
Bizarre. Same on linux as on OSX? It works fine for me, in both dev version and steam version.
"T" no longer opens the Tech Menu, which is unfortunate.
Odd, will fix. I'm guessing that it's conflicting with the new rules about when the tech menu can be shown (to prevent it overlapping the build menu, etc), but it's simple to address.
There's a problem with the Build Menus, especially for the Starship Constructor. To reproduce, start a new game and hit B a few times. After you rotate through the Planetary Controller, you'll only have the Infra Menu available for the starship constructor. Clicking "Starships" doesn't help. However, if you get the Build Menu for the Planetary Controller, click on "Turrets" then hit B again to get to the Starship Controller, you can then click "Starships" and that menu will open.
That's pretty weird, but I think I know what's going on. Honestly I forget about keys like B and T and don't test them.
If I am trying to build turrets, it's really hard to click on a turret, holding shift then move my cursor up to build things without accidentally causing the tooltip to suddenly be a different turret (since I'm moving my cursor up through the rest of the build menu). Perhaps if you are holding Shift for repeat build, it will always hold the tooltip as the unit you are going to repeat build?
I could look into that, but does the different tooltip interfere with your placement of the clicked type?
It feels like Usurpers aren't recapturing planets. See Mantis https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view.php?id=19289 (which includes a save game). Usurper fleets seem to often include Mark IV ships, which is surprising to me.
Thanks for letting me know on the non-capturing thing.
The MkIV ships are conceptually fine to me, but looking at the code I think it's supposed to be applying the MarkLevel_RequiredAIPLevel filter, so I'll look into that.
Waves have a strong tendency to get to a target planet, realize there are strong defenses and immediately run away. This makes sense as threat behaviour, but it means that Waves can feel anticlimactic. I'd rather they give a good faith effort to take a planet first (maybe something like threat units "won't retreat until timeOnPlanet > X"). What do others think about this?
That timer-based approach is what AIWC did, and we can do that here too, if desired.
Oh, that bottom bar rework helped a lot! Still rough but definitely usable now!
Glad to hear it :)
Getting the tooltip for hovering over a unit/structure only seems to be working if you hover over the model, not the icon you get when zoomed out.
Weird, icon works for me. Win/OSX/Linux?
The Pause/Break key doesn't pause the game
Yea, I need to add support for multiple mappings to the same function. Right now it's just P.
Selecting things by dragging a box selects everything, instead of just mobile military like in the first game
I can't remember if I added that or not, will look into it.
The sidebar doesn't highlight when things are selected
It should recolor the control group icon when you select that control group (specifically, not just happen to select all the ships in it). I'm not sure if any of the others do. I think it highlights when you mouseover something, but I may be misremembering.
I don't like all of the turret types in the research menu having the same icon. Too samey.
I'd like to do different icons rather than the colored flairs under them, in general; the main question is whether it's reasonable for people to know all those different icons.
That said, I've found it very helpful to just look for that "chain" tractor flair to know if I can't steamroll a particular cluster, or the "plasma bolt" flair to know if there's something I need to kill sooner than later if I don't want my shields to die quickly.
Having the objectives in the bottom left window is kind of odd. I'm assuming it's a placeholder.
Where else would it go? I think we're close to the limit of how many buttons can go on the "surface" without getting back to the problem we ran into with the bottom bar. In AIWC the Objectives button was buried in a whole other screen, along with a bunch of other stuff.
I like what you're going for with the quick select numbers in the menu. Like 0-4-3 selects docks. I suggest changing the menu hotkey from 0 to ` so it's easier to do `-4-3 with one hand.
Not everyone has that backtick (`) character, and not everyone has it in that position. But I can make both 0 and ` work for it.
I hadn't realized that the ship cap was so low now. It's also really quick to build up to the ship cap.
It's squads instead of individual ships/turrets, for the most part. Build times could be made longer, those haven't really been tuned.
Control groups being 1-0 and menu hotkeys using the same keys seems conflict. Maybe move he menu down to qwerty?
There's already camera functions using Q, W, and E, and pause uses P. That only leaves 6 keys in a row, on a particular (albeit very common) keyboard layout.
And no other region of the keyboard is going to be intuitive enough for it to make sense.
And having the 1-9 row and the 1-9 NumPad be default-bound to different functions isn't going to fly (many don't have a NumPad, and even if they do it won't be intuitive to have them be so different).
So if the menu keys can't live on the 1-9 row they just have to go away entirely (in terms of defaults, anyway, and if they're default-unbound we're back to the situation with AIWC's context menu where like 0.1% of the players knew about it and even fewer used it).
That said, I'm guessing most of the conflict comes from "1 followed by 2" does not "select control group 1, then select control group 2", but instead does "select control group 1, try to click menu button 2".
So I can make it so that having a selection does not automatically open the context menu, it just makes it so that if you do open the context menu it shows your selection commands rather than the top-level menu (System/Tech/Objectives/QuickSelect). That way any combination of numbers 1-9 still only selects control groups, unless you specifically press a button to open the context menu.
The tractor beam turret looks like mines? Placeholder?
I haven't checked recently. There are still a few units using the kinda-spherical-gray-ball placeholder model but if it's not using that it's probably final or near-to.
It feels like I'm controlling 30 units instead dozens? hundreds? The only time I can tell that each icon isn't one ship is when I zoom way in. Partially zoomed in the unit models still end up obscured by the icons.
We made stuff about 25% smaller recently, that may be contributing.
No range indicator when building turrets.
Did AIWC show it by default? In AIWC and AIW2 you can show it by holding Z.
Why is the tractor turret under defense?
Because it doesn't have a gun.
I'm not sure how to get more power
A fair point. It's per-planet in AIW2, and the main way is by researching more turret techs, but it totally doesn't tell you that right now :)
There's also the resource converters, which only affect things up to a point, and some planets have more or less power than average (shown on galaxy map through tooltips or the resource display mdoe).
All of the above stack, so a high-power planet with converters shunting metal and fuel into power will gain much more from the turret-tech increase.
Fuel looks like a form of supply cap. Why that and a cap on individual ships?
Exactly the same as AIWC with ship caps and energy.
I didn't have enough power to fortify all the wormholes in my starting system.
Yea, power is still pretty low by design, though with some turret techs I suspect it's closer than one might think.
Control+2 doesn't assign things to control group 2?
It did, but I don't know what all's happened there. Will check on it.
Capturing planets seems harder than in the first game. I failed to take any of the ones neighboring my starting planet.
In AIWC
First game's process:
1) Select fleet on Origin planet
2) Send fleet from Origin planet to Target planet
3) Switch view to Target planet
4) Select fleet
5) Right-click Target command station to give kill order
6) Switch view to Origin planet
7) Select builder
8) Build Colony Ship
9) Select Colony Ship
10) Send Colony Ship to Target planet
11) Switch view to Target planet
12) Select Colony Ship
13) Click desired command station type
14) Place command station
If you don't worry about losing a bunch of colony ships you could shave it down to:
(have a bunch of colony ships already built and with your fleet)
1) Select fleet on Origin planet
2) Send fleet from Origin planet to Target planet
3) Switch view to Target planet
4) Select fleet
5) Right-click Target command station to give kill order
6) Select Colony Ship
7) Click desired command station type
8) Place command station
But in practice I don't think that was commonly done, as colony ships died easily.
Second game's process:
1) Select fleet (including a planet claimer like an Ark or Flagship) on Origin planet
2) Send fleet from Origin planet to Target planet
3) Switch view to Target planet
4) Select fleet (may already be selected due to new active-selection rules, but probably not if you did stuff between the orders)
5) Right-click controller to give kill order
(Ark/Flagship will automatically claim controller once it's neutral, and no guardians are present)
6) Select controller
7) Move controller to desired position
Those last two steps aren't necessary if you're re-taking a planet, or otherwise are already happy with the controller's position.
Using standing orders you can cut it down even more:
(from the galaxy map, clear the "do not capture" standing order from any planet you want to capture)
1) Select fleet (including a planet claimer like an Ark or Flagship) on Origin planet
2) Send fleet from Origin planet to Target planet
(ships will auto-target the controller when they're in range and nothing higher-priority is, so either send long range stuff or send them on FRD)
(Ark/Flagship will automatically claim controller once it's neutral, and no guardians are present)
Granted, you'd only be
that hands-off in a case where the actual battle for the planet would be trivial, but you get the idea.
In short: the process is certainly different, yes, but it's in no way harder. Quite the opposite.
The tutorial does bring you through the process, including the bit about "kill all the guardians" and "give the order to kill the controller", but it will need to do a better job.
