Aeson: It would be nice if the item shop carried a few more items, especially lower-tech items (which would presumably cost less). This could be done as a reward for successfully completing missions, too - since you're presumably securing more of the city (sort-of), the shop people have more area to scavenge in and therefore have a wider variety of stuff to sell you, though not all of it is necessarily an improvement on what you have.
The reasoning for the current mechanic only having high-value items is so that you have to anticipate those for a while, being unable to get them too frequently. I was thinking about this sort of anticipation while playing Civ with my wife. They basically have all these systems that increase anticipation between turns, helping lead to that "one more turn" nature. Specifically I am thinking of the polices, the technologies, the production per city of various things, and so forth. All those things having somewhat-long timers on them, but not all lining up and finishing at any one time, lets you anticipate things constantly, and thus never be at a point where you want to stop.
Here when I thought of the shop, I thought about making it fit into that same sort of thing. You have the missions that you can see but not yet reach that you can anticipate, you have the shop items that you can see but not yet afford, you have the customization of your exos that you want to do but might not have all the parts for, and I think that's it.
Keith and I discussed adding "candy items" in the shop: basically those that are very inexpensive but also not really worth it, and thus which "rot your teeth." We have some candy techs in AI War as well. But that's really kind of entrapment for the player, and in this case also undermines the anticipation.
Anyway, hopefully that thinking makes sense.
Aeson: If shields and health are meant to be identical, please use only one name for it. If, on the other hand, shields are meant to be a restores-over-time health bank or something like that, please have the statistics distinguish between shields and health.
This seems to be a common point of confusion, and I made a change in the next version to say "shield-system stats" instead of "shield stats." Hopefully that alone will help clear up the confusion some, but also in the help sections in the customization screens where it explains all the stats, it will be addressed there.
But basically there are no shields, per se. The shields are a system, just like propulsion and computer and the weapons. Health is the actual stat, like attack power or hacking points or stealth points or whatever. The shields system is responsible for things like health, system damage protection, regen, and so on. So the words shields and health aren't interchangeable.
Any ideas from anyone on how the game can make this more abundantly clear from the start, aside from what is already done and planned?
Aeson: I don't know if there's something like this in the game already or not, but it might be nice if there were, say, a rechargeable powercell for energy weapons, which allowed you to pass turns to gain ammunition for the weapon it's installed in but reduces the total number of rounds available between recharges.
Basically anything that wastes player time in exchange for a tactical advantage is out. Where the player is just running around or hitting spacebar, there's no point to a mechanic because they will just do that between battles. Ammo being really scarce in the main (good ammo, anyway) is also a big part of the mission structure.
Though less so lately, given how we shrunk the mission map sizes so much right before starting the alpha (they were interminably long prior to that, turns out). I probably should drop the general ammo of your exos by half or more (for the high-ammo weapons at least), so that you wind up having to use more exos in a single mission. What are people's thoughts from anyone on that? It could be troublesome given exo mortality rates.
Tridus: It's not at all clear how the enemy bots react to my movements. I moved a bit and nothing happened, despite a Wyvernbot being visible in the open. One more move and it started moving too. Did I run out of movement points?
This is a side effect of all the art and animations not being in place yet. If the bot does not have pessimistic line of sight on you (as opposed to your permissive line of sight that your bot gets and that is used for firing lines once activated), it won't activate. So most likely there was some cover between you and it.
This would normally be more clear, because the bot would look deactivated and not be animated, etc. But as it stands now, it's just a subtle particle effect difference on some of the bots, including this one. If you look at bots like the DumBot or similar, that's how it will work in the near future for all the bots, which should hopefully alleviate this trouble.
The other part of this is: you act, they act. There are no action points. We had those for a long while and it was slow and fiddly and confusing. So we moved away from the more tactics-game like feel (which is pretty slow) to the more roguelike-game feel (which is much more fluid).
