Ah yeah
, don't be sad please if I just call you "zeh developer" but I can't remember names on the intertubes and It sounds super weird if the nick is the name.. feels to personal, and the intertubes are supposed to be impersonal (that's also why I say x4000 and developers and not keith because keith is too personal, I actually have to force me to write names ;P)
With slow I just mean compared to Arcen.. (ok, maybe you should not take an example on how the beta's here go to begin with given that they can often reverse the curse of a game by 180° and can end up even in a totally different genre *cough* ;P).
And I know my comments are always very harsh but please remember I play nearly EVERY game that exists on the PC, at least once, (unless it's a F2P or MMO) either at friends or myself (although with some hefty delay usually) so I am getting a lot more focused on what I do not like in games I play. And based on my subjective view I often see the fatal flaw (what draws
me away after round 1 so to speak) instantly nowadays.
If at all possible I hope you can find some "hook" so that it doesn't feel like a living universe that we have absolutely no reason to interact with save for trading and repairing at a planet. The dynamic nature of the race system you made is exceptional and the unique feat of your game, however, it also destroys the narrative in the game because the missions are just "trailing behind" the dynamic races and whatever they do. Colonization and Kill missions are the perfect example, if we dawdle or have to find our way it often happens the mission is over before we even found where it was supposed to happen. Yet the mission is not just over but the objectives were COMPLETED by someone else, that means our potential failure penalty is 0. We literally can not fail in this game, if at all,
we fail upwards. Ie, the planet is colonized and the super dangerous elite threat destroyed so we can farm his minions instead and then repair at the newly colonized planet that we were supposed to colonize.
Off hand I don't even have a clue how to fix that, in Depth of Peril the management of the clan was what bound us and made us care. Was what defined what goals were worthwhile and how to handle them. However in DROX there is no narrative, we are not a "part" of anything. Our decisions shape the battlefield but we
don't have to fight on it unless we chose, and even then only when and how we chose. We got too much choice and too little actual defining consequence when it's a bad one.
I suppose this is a very typical thing to hear from a AI War player ;p Given that the only fail direction in AI War is to the game over screen, hehehe..
