Arcen Games
Other => Off Topic => Topic started by: madcow on June 15, 2012, 09:04:19 am
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From the diablo thread I know there are some fans of Din's Curse, and well I didn't want to derail that thread anymore (plus its on the very deep inevitable discussion about big-name developers/publishers "are they evil or not"). But sorting through Din's curse I saw stuff about Drox Operative from the same company, and its on beta now - with beta access if you prepurchase.
So the question is, what do people think so far. It looks very interesting and is tempting! Anybody given it a go?
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Since AVWW 1.1 deployment was most of yesterday and didn't really involve me, I spent a fair bit of time on the Drox beta. It just became available yesterday, so it's the very first public version, but it's already very fun in general. I've run into a situation at the end of my first sector where I need to make an alliance with one more race and it's dragging a bit because either there aren't particularly fast ways of getting relations up in that situation or I just haven't found them yet :)
And I'm figuring the Dryad race (which is now swimming in credits because it's colonized like 90% of the sector) wasn't supposed to have just now gifted me more money than I could have made in a month solid of adventuring at this level, but hey, beta ;)
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I have so far heard only good things about Drox and I've followed Shadow (the dev) on Twitter during much of the development and it seems to be a fairly deep game. Once I get some more time on my hands I'll definitely look into it.
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I played a whole bunch yesterday and the game is awesome. My only real gripe at the moment is that the movement speed of your initial ship is too slow, but I think he may tweak that in a future patch. I also think he is going to do some more to differentiate the races.
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Are the different factions constantly battling each other? That's pretty cool if so.
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Are the different factions constantly battling each other? That's pretty cool if so.
If they're at war they send attacks against each other's planets and eventually someone gets wiped out (or they make peace).
In my first game it felt like the Dryads were playing MoO on easy as they quickly colonized about 80% of the galaxy, but everything was pretty peaceful. Right about the time I reached the highest level systems in the sector a bunch of declarations-of-war flew around (some against my one little ship) and I had to flee back to Dryad space. Didn't take long for the Dryads to kill everyone except the Lithosoids (their allies) and my main remaining task was building up relations with the Lithosoids so we could all be allied and I'd win the sector (alternatively I could have provoked the Dryad into killing the Lithosoids which might have been faster but if I'd gotten caught bad enough to make the Dryad DoW me I'd have been up a creek without a ramjet).
In my second (current) game the RNG also put me in the Dryad's starting system and I've helped them by exploring planets and sending them the data (which makes them like me a lot) and they even asked me to do the actual "run the colony module over" phase of a couple of their colonizations (more +relations). I was figuring on encouraging it to play out the same way as the first game but this time the Hive colonized a system right in the path of the Dryads such that they only had two systems to work with; they could just split the next system with the Hive and moved on but I wasn't sure it would work out well. That and the Hive were real jerks to me in the first game by demanding that I DoW their enemies and getting really mad at me (and eventually DoW'ing me) when I told them no. So I allied the Dryad and DoW'd the Hive. The other two races that I've not even met also attacked the Hive then and I think we might win, but it's kind of hard to tell. If the Hive gain the supremacy I've probably lost this sector.
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Wait, its possible to provoke races into war with each other? That is awesome! Are there a lot of options for new game settings, either currently or planned?
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Wait, its possible to provoke races into war with each other? That is awesome!
You can do diplomatic proposals with any race you have contact with at any time, and one of them is "declare war on... (pick race)". Another is "make peace with... (pick race they're at war with)".
Those won't work generally if they have really good (or bad, respectively) relations with the target race and/or not-great relations with you, but you can use the "start rumor" action to try to improve/reduce their relations with another race, and you can give them stuff and do a lot of other things to improve your relations with them.
In my case the Humans eventually took out the Hive, so now it's just the Dryads (who are my eternal allies at this point, basically), the Humans, and the Drakk. So:
- Asked the Dryad to give me contact with the Humans, and they like me so much they were willing to for free.
- I'd already killed a lot of bosses that the Humans were worried about so there were like six quests I'd inadvertendly done for them that I was able to turn-in all at once upon contacting them, popping me up a level due to XP and making them like me pretty well (hopefully getting my foot in the door to stop a war between them and the Dryad if one happens).
- I learn that the Humans are at war with the Drakk and are a bit on the rocky-relations side with the Dryad so I bought contact with the Drakk from the humans and then gave it to the Dryad and asked the Dryad to declare war on the Drakk.
Presumably the Drakk can't survive all that, so then my main challenge is either keeping the Dryad and Humans from killing each other long enough to ally each other and get the humans to ally me (winning the sector) or build up the Dryad enough and get them to DoW the humans and kill them all... wait, (*checks which planet he's playing the game on*), that might not be good ;)
Are there a lot of options for new game settings, either currently or planned?
I don't know, ask the developer :) My guess is yes; I saw a lot of new options pop up in Din's compared to what was available in its first beta version, and there's a very strong sense in which Drox is "Din's in space", though the actual gameplay is really different (diplomacy wasn't really a part of Din's, for example, though it was in DoP).
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Keith, you're a good salesman of other people's games :D.
It sounds like these sectors are less "epic sized" MOO galaxies are more like the towns as in Din's Curse (I played the demo of that one at least). In terms of level scale/time of competion, is that about right? What I mean is, a game is divided up into sectors that are similar in scope to a Din's Curse town, rather than a huge galaxy map.
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It sounds like these sectors are less "epic sized" MOO galaxies are more like the towns as in Din's Curse (I played the demo of that one at least). In terms of level scale/time of competion, is that about right? What I mean is, a game is divided up into sectors that are similar in scope to a Din's Curse town, rather than a huge galaxy map.
You can set the sector size; I'm playing on small and it's giving me about 12 stars per sector. And yes, sector is analogous to a Din's town in the sense that you win or lose a sector and then move to the next (with the details of the previous one being gone from the game's memory).
It's different in that each race (and to some degree each inhabited planet) is sort of its own "town" in that it gives its own quests, can be taken out individually, etc. Even on "small" sectors each individual sector is probably taking me 3x as long as an average town in Din's.
Playing a really large sector might be interesting, I dunno if it would bog down or not.
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How's the gameplay/visual feel aspect of it? The depth and ideas are definitely there, but at least with Din's Curse, the gameplay left something to be desired. Do you really feel like you're fighting huge epic fleet wars in space, or playing Diablo 2 on a black background? Making it feel realistic and immersive is half of the fun of it for me. It's not enough to just be deep.
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How's the gameplay/visual feel aspect of it? The depth and ideas are definitely there, but at least with Din's Curse, the gameplay left something to be desired. Do you really feel like you're fighting huge epic fleet wars in space, or playing Diablo 2 on a black background? Making it feel realistic and immersive is half of the fun of it for me. It's not enough to just be deep.
The visuals feel more appropriate to the genre than Din's did to its genre (though I honestly didn't much mind the visuals in Din's).
The gameplay itself doesn't feel like huge epic fleet wars in space, no, it feels like:
- a space adventure game
- in a dynamic world where it really matters what you do with your time (and whether you succeed)
- with a critical-to-your-success diplomacy system
- and an amazingly interesting gearing system (the interdependencies between stats, equipment, slot count, power-load, etc are ground-breaking, I think)
So a lot closer to Diablo 2 in space, so probably not what you're specifically looking for. When there's a demo I strongly suggest giving it a chance, though, because there's some truly new and innovative stuff being done here that's a lot of fun.
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So whom did you bribe to get into that early not-beta? ;) Because when that is even remotely like you describe it I want to test it, you know my judgments about games can be very accurate sometimes, and when it's released, it'll be too late for anything if you just read my rant on why game X sucks because of reasons Y, Pony and Z. And you all know there is gonna be a reason PONY in there somewhere. Not seen a single Indy game that did not have a fatal flaw in control or gui design (please by the heavens, do not make the GUI yourself, DIN's Curse GUI is even more atrocious than SOTS2 (Which I admit, nowadays actually got a lot of fixes..)
Hehe ;) That said, even if the beta remains out of reach, it sounds Interesting, but I'd need to see how combat is handled before I give a "hyped or not hyped" verdict. ;)
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So whom did you bribe to get into that early not-beta? ;)
The pre-orders started a few days ago when the beta started, and include beta access :)
There were a few private-alpha players, but I wasn't one of them.
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So whom did you bribe to get into that early not-beta? ;) Because when that is even remotely like you describe it I want to test it, you know my judgments about games can be very accurate sometimes, and when it's released, it'll be too late for anything if you just read my rant on why game X sucks because of reasons Y, Pony and Z. And you all know there is gonna be a reason PONY in there somewhere. Not seen a single Indy game that did not have a fatal flaw in control or gui design (please by the heavens, do not make the GUI yourself, DIN's Curse GUI is even more atrocious than SOTS2 (Which I admit, nowadays actually got a lot of fixes..)
Hehe ;) That said, even if the beta remains out of reach, it sounds Interesting, but I'd need to see how combat is handled before I give a "hyped or not hyped" verdict. ;)
Yes Eraser, please spend your money for the good of the herd. I want to hear your opinion first before I try it :D
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Yes Eraser, please spend your money for the good of the herd. I want to hear your opinion first before I try it :D
Yea, I tend to "want" to enjoy certain games and anything from Soldak is like that for me so I'm probably just not noticing a ton of things that would bother other people not deliberately wanting to enjoy the experience. eRe4s3r, on the other hand, if he says more positive than negative things about a game, it's good ;)
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I'm just a poor college student so I have to spend my money carefully. As an Indie developer Keith, I know you're heavily biased towards the plight of other Indie developers, which isn't a bad thing at all. In fact, Drox Operative will probably be a wonderful game either way, but it doesn't mean I'll enjoy it. I tend to be very picky about my games, simply because one small mistake can ruin an otherwise wonderful experience for me. I've no problem supporting Indie companies btw, I'll most likely get it no matter what, but the question is whether I should wait until it's more polished, as not to ruin the experience.
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I almost was interested in it, until I realized that it wasn't really about having a giant space war that you are in the middle of. Diablo in space is not a great advertisement. If you want a hack and slash RPG, or arcade RPG regardless of the setting, space games don't really match up well.
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It seems like it has the potential to be either really great, or fairly meh. I guess how beta goes will determine which way it tips. So I'll keep an eye on it, and might even buy it while its in beta (that 25% discount is pretty nice), but I doubt I'll play it until full release even if I do end up buying it while its still in beta so I don't get the game spoiled by a lack of polish/features.
Cyborg summed it up pretty well. If it feels like diablo in space, eh. If it feels like you're part of a war and influencing it as a merc or playing civs against each other (running sabotage missions and blaming it on other races to incite a war for instance) - then that would be very cool.
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What I said is that it's more like diablo-in-space than like giant-space-fleet-battles. Not that it is diablo-in-space. If you try to play it like diablo in space you'll probably lose because the game doesn't give you the "step a, step b, step c, etc. step z and everyone lives happily ever after (or whatever it is they do in blizzard games, usually not that)". If you just do every quest you see and/or spend tons of time searching for and killing every monster you can for xp/loot you'll probably wind up with a race that's relatively happy with you but gets crushed by its adversaries who hate you, and you can't stand up to NPC fleets alone (at least I haven't been able to take them head-on in the first 5 sectors).
That's not to say y'all will definitely like it, just wanting to avoid giving the wrong impression. It's not giant-space-fleet-battles, but that is not the only possible space game that can be good :) There's something genuinely new here, and I find it incredibly fun, even in its early beta form (not that there aren't things that would bother me if they never changed in future releases).
To give another concrete example, which may or may not interest you:
In my fourth sector, I started in the home system of the Blunt. Who may as well be called the Dense, because they couldn't research their way out of a paper bag (constantly have setbacks that reset their tech research). But they fight well. I had a decision to make: try to make them my puppet to win the sector with (almost certainly via conquest instead of diplomacy due to their lack of... manners), or search further afield and hope I find another race or relatively stable group of races to work with instead. I could try to exploit all of them and rake in a lot more xp from doing that many more quests, but that's more risky (perhaps overly so in the current beta) than I wanted.
I decided to back the Blunt. First thing I did was fly around the first system and scan uninhabited worlds. Each time I would call up the Blunt on the diplomacy screen and gift them the info on the planet (I could have sold it for credits, but I got more +relation with them this way). Imagine how you'd feel as a 4X-space-game player if in the first few turns some hero unit shows up and gives/sells you data on nearby planets. I'd go for that like a shot ;) The NPCs will scout stuff on their own pretty quick but giving them a headstart is a signifcant boost on the way to getting them to the #1 spot on the power charts (kind of like a 4X, again).
They also had a few quests for killing some specific space-monsters/raiders/etc in the system. That can be "uprisings" of a type of monster that if left to themselves will cause bad events on inhabited planets or start other uprisings or just directly attack the NPCs; probably other bad stufff too, I don't sit around and find out. It can also be named bosses that are quite dangerous (particularly when they form a fleet with other bosses) and who can do all kinds of nasty things if left alone (start uprisings, build nasty devices, send scout or assassin units/bosses to other systems, attack in person, etc). Anyway, I made a point to kill what they wanted dead and in general I swept the area near the planets to allow breathing room for colonized worlds.
Speaking of, about that time they asked me to colonize a world for them. They can and do build colony ships and send them out themselves, but it's apparently a lot less costly for them to build the colony module and put it in your ship (displacing either a heavy or medium component, somewhat reducing your combat ability) and have you run it over for them. Anyway, same-system colony runs aren't too hard, so took care of that for them. And proceeded to defend the new colony as the nearby monsters took an interest, then swept a bit wider area around it of any monsters so it would have time to build its own defense ships (which are generally quite capable unless bosses or big monster swarms get involved). I've had some really tense fights desperately trying to keep a new colony alive; that's one of the things that really sets it apart from any diablo-like: you really can lose the planet, the game engine does not care if you get the result you wanted, it just leaves you to deal with the consequences. Anyway, I win this time and get some major +relations with the NPC race from killing monsters attacking their planet (as well as +relations for the colony quest).
At this point I'm actively sweeping the outer zone of the system for starlanes to other systems so I can make sure my warrior puppets expand enough to be capable of what I need them to do (namely, exterminate all other sentient life). Once I find one I pop through, run quickly for the central part of the new system to find and scan planets (and send the data back to the NPC dudes), while fighting off the local fauna. Then I search for starlanes there and keep an ear out for quests. One quest type which usually pops up by then is the "help our research" one where you have to gather some material (either from monsters or naturally occurring) and completing it gives the NPC race a new tech (say, Fusion Beam III, which will then be eligible to show up in the shops on that race's planets). You can also find technology files directly and choose which (if any races) you want to give/sell it to. Another common quest in this phase is the "terraform" ones which are generally multi-part: buy a device from some planet and sell/give it to the target planet, then gather some resources, and maybe another step. Early in the game, upgrading a planet can make a big difference for the NPC race's power.
By now relations were high enough to form a non-aggression pact, which gives me some extra assurance that they're not going to turn around and declaration-of-war me midgame (which would really, really stink). I could have pushed for a mutual-defense-pact or even an alliance (if you and all surviving races are all allied with each other, you win the sector), but I didn't want to commit myself to getting drawn into any of my puppet's hostilities... yet. Anyway, I've got them data on planets on a few nearby systems and have in general got them off to a pretty good start power-wise. If I'd been playing them in a 4X game, I'd be really, really happy about how much that NPC hero had just helped me.
Then there was a wrinkle.
While trying to hunt something for a quest in one of the not-yet-colonized systems, I hit an unstable wormhole and got warped clear across the sector. The higher level monsters were a bit disconcerting (about now I was running into the guys that could jam my missiles and send them back at me, iirc; that led to me discovering that beam weapons really are pretty nice in moderation). I scanned a few worlds and sent in the data, but probably my allies had no earthly clue how to get anything out there. I could have used a jump-gate for a one-way trip back to my starting area but wanted to poke around and see what I could see.
Next system over I found... all 5 of the other races in the game. Not outlying colonies. Their homeworlds. The RNG has no concept of a "balanced start" :)
Needless to say, it was an interesting situation. Relations were degenerating but it was still early enough that no hostilities had started. I had before me a ton of quests I could do for quite a lot of xp. Bosses and uprisings and whatnot were really running rampant, and the races had been starting lots of unrest on each others worlds via propaganda and sabotage (which you can do also for money and risk of relations damage), which opens up still more quests to get non-lethal (or lethal, particuarly for actual rebellions) ground weapons to the target planets (and sometimes quests from an opponent race to rush guerrila weapons to the rebels). Ripe for mercenary pickings, you could say. I got started, carefully picking quests that wouldn't help any of them too much since they would almost certainly be enemies to me or my main ally at some point. It was going pretty well.
The another wrinkle: declarations of war started flying between the races in that system, and then the Lithosoids declared war on me. Annoying rocks. Anyway, I was sailing into port at the Cortex's homeworld to sell them some weapons to calm down some unrest (or was it terraforming gear, I forget), and just as I'm about to establish contact they declare war on me. My shield indicators promptly change from a nicely full bar to the message "Not Cool!" (not really, but you get the idea).
I get away with my skin and consider my options. Not all the races in that system had declared war on me so I could probably still squeeze some opportunity out, but I didn't think that was going to last long. Also, even helping a friendly race would often help all the races there if it was a kill-boss or whatever quest. But I also didn't know how to get home from where I was. Again, I could have one-way-jumped back but then it could take a while to find a way to get my friends out there to clean house. And if any one of the races there took out the others they might build up enough power to defeat my intellectually-challenged buddies. So time was kind of of-the-essence.
So I scouted my way through a few uninhabited systems but hit a deadend and found I was in a branch not connected to my starting area (except through the hornet's nest). Not so great. So I took a one-way jump back home. A little concerned about the time but it turned out to be a good thing that I hadn't been able to "harvest" more of the quests in the 5-race system: all those bosses and nasty guys were doing a number on that system. Uprisings and assassins all the time. To their credit those races held off the monsters effectively, but it was taking a lot of their time and resources to do so.
That's another thing that made the game feel really new to me: I've seen games where monsters can "attack the town". I've seen games where the monsters can actually destroy the town. But I've never seen a game where it was a critical advantage (and delight) that the monsters attack (and preferably destroy) the town.
Anyway, from there on it was relatively smooth sailing: eventually I scouted a path from my allies to the 5-race system, and helped my allies (now truly in Alliance with me) expand in that direction, and between the infighting among those races killing off some, and my allies attacking, and a little discrete "orbital nuclear-missile bombardment of a densely inhabited planet" of my own, victory was mine.
None of that gets into how cool the gear system is (a really satisfyingly complex set of interlocking requirements for using better stuff, possibly the part I most like about the game actually), but I think it covers why I say it's not really diablo-in-space (just closer to that end of the spectrum than as if you were a hero in the middle of a big fleet fight in AIW or whatever).
Um, so, kind of a long post there ;) For numerous reasons this will probably be my last in-depth attempt to explain what it feels like. Still not interested? Wait for the demo.
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Very in depth post Keith, thanks! And I think we know how you've spent your weekend. :D
It sounds very interesting, so I'll likely give it a shot and maybe try it out in beta, but hold back on any serious playtime for the full release.
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I've had some really tense fights desperately trying to keep a new colony alive; that's one of the things that really sets it apart from any diablo-like: you really can lose the planet, the game engine does not care if you get the result you wanted, it just leaves you to deal with the consequences.
I think of everything you've said so far, this is what I like the most about the game, and possibly what sets it apart from all other RPGs.
RPGs are famous for forcing questing upon you, with some empty utterances about impending doom should you fail, but which in actuality have no consequences at all. It's nice to see a developer really immersing the player in the Universe by immediately starting him out with a real sense of danger.
This is one of the things AI War did so well. When you open up your galaxy map and see your one little green dot surrounded by all the red dots, you're kind of like "holy shit, this is bad". It's a hilarious feeling to have, and really makes you get involved in the game. It's actually something I was rather disappointed that AVWW didn't have. I never felt in-danger with that game, or felt like there were major consequences for my decisions. Even if I died I just resurrected, maybe the worst punishment was a time sink but nothing more.
Anyway, from what you've said so far this game sounds like it has a lot of potential and I hope to see more RPGs heading this way in the future!
edit: Oh, one thing I forgot to ask. How are the difficulty levels handled? I'm not sure how a game this complex could be made more or less difficult easily, other than possibly making the races inherently more hostile to you, or the monsters more dangerous.
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It's actually something I was rather disappointed that AVWW didn't have. I never felt in-danger with that game, or felt like there were major consequences for my decisions. Even if I died I just resurrected, maybe the worst punishment was a time sink but nothing more.
Yea, we experimented with a lot more brutal options for that. For the first part of the beta if you died enough that there were four "loose" vengeful ghosts out there they would actually band together into a group on the world map that would advance one square towards your settlement each strategic turn. You could fight them out in the wild, but if you didn't get them and they reached the settlement... "slaughter" wasn't really an adequate term. You could fight them there too, and probably "win", but not much would be left.
But, frankly, the players did not like it, so it was removed. Same with the later experiment where the overlord would actually destroy the continent if you didn't kill him in time (time measured by number of missions done, since strategic turn had already been removed by that point).
Lots of stuff I was excited about (in general Chris wasn't behind any of the more obviously DM-like ploys like those... just the raptors that stalk you from lava), but in practice the players really did not want to be in the game. So they're not in the game :)
Anyway, from what you've said so far this game sounds like it has a lot of potential and I hope to see more RPGs heading this way in the future!
It's a welcome form of variety. I think the pre-scripted storyline ones are great to have too, as long as the story is compelling enough (which, admittedly, is rare). I prefer ones that at least have a branch-point or two for if the player somehow actually beats the overwhelming odds at some key point that normally they would lose... but even just a straight-up linear story can be a lot of fun. But it's definitely good to have some games out there that scratch the itch of "I want my decisions/performance to matter".
edit: Oh, one thing I forgot to ask. How are the difficulty levels handled? I'm not sure how a game this complex could be made more or less difficult easily, other than possibly making the races inherently more hostile to you, or the monsters more dangerous.
The main "difficulty setting" is the base level you choose for a sector when you create a new one. It defaults to about 2 levels lower than yours, which is a moderate but satisfying challenge to me (so the monsters in your starting area aren't too hard, but at further-out stars can be pretty tough). Or you can crank it up (all the way to the top of the current "tier" of the game you've completed so far: the level cap is 100 and each 25 is a new tier, though I don't know exactly how it's handled as I'm only level 21 right now) and really have to fight for your life more. Or you can drop it to a lower level for an easier time; potentially really low if you just want the fun of running roughshod over a dynamic world of bugs you can squish at will ;) Either way, it naturally affects the amount of xp and quality of loot you can expect.
You can also change the pacing of the game so that monster-respawn and quest-escalation is slower or faster (escalation is things like unrest turning to rebellion, power-grid-outage causing other problems, unkilled bosses forming fleets, bosses building nasty devices, NPC ships needing rescue getting killed, etc).
There's also other set-at-the-start (of the career) settings like hardcore, semi-hardcore (you lose 5 points of your base vitality/structural stat each death, and if it hits zero it's permadeath), and in Din's there was stuff like "can only use epic/artifact/set gear", "can only use cursed gear", etc, but most of those rules don't translate easily into Drox so I dunno what we'll see there.
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Yea, we experimented with a lot more brutal options for that. For the first part of the beta if you died enough that there were four "loose" vengeful ghosts out there they would actually band together into a group on the world map that would advance one square towards your settlement each strategic turn. You could fight them out in the wild, but if you didn't get them and they reached the settlement... "slaughter" wasn't really an adequate term. You could fight them there too, and probably "win", but not much would be left.
But, frankly, the players did not like it, so it was removed. Same with the later experiment where the overlord would actually destroy the continent if you didn't kill him in time (time measured by number of missions done, since strategic turn had already been removed by that point).
Lots of stuff I was excited about (in general Chris wasn't behind any of the more obviously DM-like ploys like those... just the raptors that stalk you from lava), but in practice the players really did not want to be in the game. So they're not in the game :)
I'm actually really disappointed to hear that. As you said, it's fun to have linear storylines (or even open-world storylines), but there's something special about the feeling of challenge and danger; the stakes are so much higher. Ah well, I understand your need to cater to your players after all ;p
Maybe someday in the future you'll get another opportunity (perhaps a "feature" for an expansion). Lord knows AI War v5.0 is barely recognizable compared to the first release.
It's a welcome form of variety. I think the pre-scripted storyline ones are great to have too, as long as the story is compelling enough (which, admittedly, is rare). I prefer ones that at least have a branch-point or two for if the player somehow actually beats the overwhelming odds at some key point that normally they would lose... but even just a straight-up linear story can be a lot of fun. But it's definitely good to have some games out there that scratch the itch of "I want my decisions/performance to matter".
I agree with you. You certainly feel more like the hero of the story when your decisions actually do make the difference between victory and annihilation.
The main "difficulty setting" is the base level you choose for a sector when you create a new one. It defaults to about 2 levels lower than yours, which is a moderate but satisfying challenge to me (so the monsters in your starting area aren't too hard, but at further-out stars can be pretty tough). Or you can crank it up (all the way to the top of the current "tier" of the game you've completed so far: the level cap is 100 and each 25 is a new tier, though I don't know exactly how it's handled as I'm only level 21 right now) and really have to fight for your life more. Or you can drop it to a lower level for an easier time; potentially really low if you just want the fun of running roughshod over a dynamic world of bugs you can squish at will ;) Either way, it naturally affects the amount of xp and quality of loot you can expect.
You can also change the pacing of the game so that monster-respawn and quest-escalation is slower or faster (escalation is things like unrest turning to rebellion, power-grid-outage causing other problems, unkilled bosses forming fleets, bosses building nasty devices, NPC ships needing rescue getting killed, etc).
There's also other set-at-the-start (of the career) settings like hardcore, semi-hardcore (you lose 5 points of your base vitality/structural stat each death, and if it hits zero it's permadeath), and in Din's there was stuff like "can only use epic/artifact/set gear", "can only use cursed gear", etc, but most of those rules don't translate easily into Drox so I dunno what we'll see there.
Ah yes, I'm very glad to hear this. I loved all of the "difficulty" options that Din had. It reminded me a lot of AI War in that way - having so many options to make the perfect experience for each person. I'm glad he's put so much thought into this.
Thanks for all your help!
edit: By the way, how do you lose? If all the races turn against you is that defeat, or just defeat in terms of getting destroyed over and over ;p
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Well that wall of text convinced me to at least jump in ahead and pre-order it, it's sufficiently discounted for that. We'll see what comes of it, game is only 200mb for now ;)
Just as a heads up, payment is handled via bmt-micro so Europeans have to pay 19% VAT which pushes the price into the 16€ range. Likely Soldak doesn't know this, which ends up only being a 6% discount (still cheap enough)
Gonna be posting my impressions when I have some ;) One thing Soldak should improve is sending me an actual personally written thank-you email when I buy (not manually, but at least something other than BMT-Micro standard mails), BMT-Micro's standard emails are like a robot caller. Feel very uninvolved. I have a very drastic contrast to that too, when I bought Kerbal Space Project I got an obviously honest "thanks for supporting us with your donation" email. It's small stuff like that that matters. Not for me, because I just notice this, but others might not buy from you again if it feels like a robot handles their orders and no human ever sees it.
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@eRe4s3r: whatever you do, don't watch the intro movie ;) It's his first attempt at one and... ahem. Not an indicator of the game's quality. I think the game would be better without it. But perhaps it will be improved. I'd rather he put the time into the game.
edit: By the way, how do you lose? If all the races turn against you is that defeat, or just defeat in terms of getting destroyed over and over ;p
If they all declare war on you and you stay in that state for 10 straight minutes (I dunno if it totally resets if any one of them stops being at war with you, haven't been in the countdown phase before), then you lose. You can die as much as you like (assuming not hardcore) though you gain xp more slowly for a bit after dying and if you have no friendly NPC planets to repair your broken armor that can be hampering.
But basically you're fine as long as you make sure one race really, really likes you (fairly easy to do if you've put your life on the line a few times to establish/defend colonies for them and that kind of thing) and then make sure that one race never dies, and then work on picking off the other races by genocide or alliance. At this phase in the beta that's basically the optimal overall strategy, which I hope will change, but it's certainly a fun one for all the sectors I've played thus far, since there's plenty of variety inside it.
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A new beta patch is up on the soldak forums. There are some bugs with it but it's worth grabbing before you try the game because it adjusts the speed of your starting ship.
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Ok I am positively surprised ;) The game is essentially like a improved DoP in space. Progression only happens via a single stat however, which I find VERY weird. There is absolutely no incentive not to put points into command at all times because a 4th heavy module makes all the difference in the world, if you can field 4 modules in each you are already superior even with bad equipment to most enemies. Secondly the other races advance very quickly and there are no mission indicators, something that they really need to fix. In Din you didn't need them because a level wasn't large, but here a sector IS large and you can essentially never even run into your quest objective because it moves every now and then. This is realistic, but not fun. Movement is also pretty heavy as a large ship should be, however.. we don't fly a large ship at the beginning.. some more diversity and a new stat for turning rate boost is needed.
Hehe, as for the Intro movie, I skipped it and didn't notice it had one :D But yeah, I don't care about intro movies, he might be well advised to improve that (also in ogv is a perculiar codec choice) but he can only work with what he got ;P
Ships are looking OK effects are good, my first ship to level 5 i accidentally messed up really badly with the Cortex, and they don't take a sorry once they declare war, with them being totally 100% allied with the only other surviving race (I messed up with them to prevent extinction of Hive ;p) I ended up restarting ;p Was my own fault though, and I love that one can actually lose by making *very* bad calls.
However, the game needs, as expected, a lot more GUI tweaks. Mission location indicator for one, a proper indicator where the fog of war is and where it isn't in the game view, a better (larger) minimap that has directional ring indicators to locations, and most importantly planets you discovered. Lastly, the game needs a "set location as waypoint" function. In space it is a bit of a huge hassle to "guess" the direction based on the minimap.
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You might post some of this on the Soldak forum, if you are so inclined.
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There is absolutely no incentive not to put points into command
Two words: max speed.
Or do you like flying a snail? ;)
The higher you upgrade your ship, the higher the base weight gets, the lower your thrust/weight ratio gets, the lower your max speed gets. I find the max possible of 200 pretty workable, but anything less really cramps my style of getting stuff done fast (and being able to get away in combat, though the thrust consumables can work there too).
So you need more thrust.
To get more thrust you need better thrust modules.
To use better thrust modules you need a higher Helm stat.
You also need more power-load, past a certain early point, particularly in conjunction with more powerful weapons and actually _filling_ your slots (unless you're filling all the extra ones with more power-load, and in that case are they really a big help compared to not having them?).
To get more power-load, you need better reactor/solar-panel modules (reactor is a lot better on power-per-slot, but it's a heavy slot as opposed to medium).
To use better reactor/solar-panel modules you need a higher Engineering stat.
And this doesn't even get into when you need better armor or structure modules (Structural stat), etc.
I say all that because I really hammered command at first, and regretted it until I finally caught up in other areas :)
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You are right, my issue with command is that it should not be something we choose at level up, it should be the whole of all other stats, the potential and experience, a reward. This is the 1 main reward mechanic, and its not rewarding.
I will post on Soldak but doing some GUI mockups, because I do not like the GUI ,p
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You are right, my issue with command is that it should not be something we choose at level up, it should be the whole of all other stats, the potential and experience, a reward. This is the 1 main reward mechanic, and its not rewarding.
Perhaps a different model would be better, but I've been at 11 command (the second upgrade; 4/4/3 light/medium/heavy) ever since part way through the first sector and I've felt a tremendous sense of reward at each step when I managed to squeeze in enough stat points and just the right gear to be able to (for example) drop down from 1 reactor + 1 solar panel (1 heavy + 1 medium) for power-load provision to just the reactor (freeing up the medium slot for a computer, which gave me enough attack so I could hit things reliably without relying on a bunch of +attack stats on my shield module and reactor module that was holding me back from obvious upgrades that had better core stats but without the +attack, and so on).
So I really don't think it's even the main reward mechanic, in practice. I've just now gotten to the point where I'm saving up points for the next command upgrade (because I've got the thrust to maintain near-max-speed even with 20 more weight, and I'm getting to the point power-wise where I'm feeling the need for 2 reactors at least until I find something better than my +662 power-load Nuclear Reactor V), and when I get that 4th heavy slot that's going to be a very rewarding moment. Of course, it's going to take two upgrades because the third upgrade just doubles your base structure (which I think could be more attractive, yes), and thus a bit more helm so I can use some of the better thrusters I've stored away, but I'll get there ;)
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Mhh, you are right again, gonna remove that point from my (future post) in beta feedback forum ,p I did the error to skill that first I guess.
Ok, lol, I give up. Posts are moderator approved, and I didn't see that (actually I've never seen that in a forum until now). So now 3 times the same topic is in the queue, but not showing. Well sod it. I can't wait for ages, i wanted to link it here but it takes too long. So here is the post thats gonna show up eventually at Soldak. but I don't care, I got other things to do now ^^ Like actually playing the game ;P
First of all this is rather a collection of things from a discussion over here and some other stuff
http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,10939.0.html
If you know me from there, you know you can expect some deeper points on GUI in this topic ;p
Now not going to write too much, just some points. This is not going to be about what I like, because it's a lot. It is about what I think needs some do-over for this to become a great game, as such, it is my personal opinion. It is going to be linked from that topic above as well.
- The game needs quest direction indicators as a RING direction indicator on the minimap (at the very least) because space can be huge, and objectives move. The game is already way too fast paced to "search" randomly for kill missions. Of 12 kill missions I did not reach a single one before it ran into a planet or got killed by something else. (Probably it's me sucking)
- The game also needs a "set quest goal as waypoint" and "set waypoint here" function in the system map, display the way point there, and display quest coals there.
- The minimap needs to be.. better, show more, and be slightly larger.
# Directional outer-ring indicators for quest objectives (Golden) and Waypoints (blue)
# Different zoom levels
- The GUI (and oh boy, this is gonna be a huge point) has peculiar design choices everywhere
# The font is peculiar
# the color choices are particularly peculiar
# The GUI is extremely uninformative on first glance, I also don't like when GUI elements hide information that is vital from you (with my lazy mockup next to it attached the worst offending piece of GUI) I am not a huge fan of splitting armor and hull apart in GUI display of health, . Because it's health. So 50% health would mean all armor is destroyed. These bars are also not random, there are 20 bars for the ability to display 5% increases or decreases, for health 10 bars double as armor display when armor is installed.. Notice that in my mockup you can instantly see you are at full health and bars no longer clip over when they are above a value in relation to other bars. And further note, less strong colors, because the last thing you want in a GUI is R Y B at literally 100% saturation.
(http://i.imgur.com/qplSn.jpg)
And also.. one never ever uses the FULL saturation values of colors in a GUI, NEVER, EVER. Open up the mockup in photoshop if you want to see what color values look pleasing, and for all I care, reuse the bars although they are the laziest possible bar design (I am not exactly going to put any large effort in mockups). All my mockups are free to abuse, discuss rip apart and modify. In fact, my mock-up is not to be used as-is but rather as an "this is how it could look"...
- Maybe turn rate should also be a stat on engines?
- More interactions between items, these are not armor pieces that exist without connections, what is connected to what, and what is in a slot next to what or below or above what could matter.
- When I select very slow game pace, I do not want that the game should have major events every 5 seconds. Maybe the pacing still needs some adapting ;)
- Because this is an indy game I am not gonna bash the Intro movie. Though it might be advisable that when Drox gets on Steam not to play it at the start then. ;)
- I actually like the explosion and weapon effects, kudos for those ;)
- the fog of war and the border of the system need to be displayed properly in the actual game window. Having to explore by looking all the time on the minimap to see where to go is suboptimal.
Well that's all. Flame, enjoy and comment ;)
So yeah, that's my thoughts so far. I spend way too much time on that, nearly an hour o.O. I should really start to save my mock-ups.. I still haven't found the cool font i used for the AVWW gui mockups again.. blimey ;)
And obviously my noob'ness in reading that the topic is moderator approved is gonna be hilarious if all 3 topics are approved (lets hope someone sees my fault and corrects it, but as I now have no idea when my topic is posted, I can't edit it to fix the image link, which somehow lost it's .jpg ) ^^ Also Soldak forums limit you to 5 images, that means 5 smilies OR 5 real images, or 5 real images, and no smilies :-X :'( :-* ::) :o How am I ever to post there without smilies?
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I didn't read it all (in an MP game of something else right now) but I love your alternate bar graphics.
One point of fact: armor and health are different; taking armor damage is just armor damage, but when you're taking structural damage you're also taking component/crew damage, which can hose you up handily.
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Okay, so I tried it out for an hour:
* Don't know where I'm going despite having quests to go there
* Upgrading and items feel clunky. I can't tell when something is an upgrade or what slot it goes into quickly and easily
* Combat is annoying trying to click everything as fast as possible, including incoming missiles
* Quests feel like standard fetch and postal from MMORPG's
I'm going to give it more time, but I didn't get near the feeling of what you posted. I decided to try it because it does have a money back guarantee.
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Yeah but in display there is really no need to have 2 bars for something you can do in 1. ^^ When armor is gone, it's much more noticeable when the bars are gone and your HP reaches 50%. That way you don't have to keep track of 2 different bars. And you could even turn the color of the percentage to red when actual structural damage is taken. In any way, such "switch-over" gui bars are pretty nifty because you can quickly see WHEN you have armor how much of it is intact and if not, the health bar doubles as a full health bar. Obviously takes some effort to code that ;p
Also it's worth noting that the default GUI does not have bars. Without hovering over it, you would never know what the bar represents right now in terms of value. and 1% Health would be far more informative, and adding armor would add it to 51% which means, 1 green bar and full dark grey bars. Superior in every way ,)
Obviously the 0,0,255 blue GUI is overall something that pokes at me badly. As I said, you never do GUI with single full saturation colors of the base RGB level. It's like the first thing they teach you at digital art. In nature, 0,0,255 does not exist so humans regard it as unharmonious and alien.
And yeah, missile defense needs to become automated, items have very bad separation for categories. It's extremely hard to tell what is small/medium/heavy and combat needs a eve online like system for targeting, click and it shoots at it until its dead. It doesn't help that the Item Info text is also extremely ugly and overcolored (heh, yes there is such a thing ,p).
Gonna mock that up later depending on when my topic appears officially (haven't checked yet whether it has ,p) because the points mentioned by Cyborg are a good part 2.
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* Don't know where I'm going despite having quests to go there
Yea, you have to scout to find starlanes and wormholes and go through them to find out how to get to the various stars. Getting that done fast without taking too much time away from other critical early game activities is one of the challenges. But it would be better if:
- add a diplomacy option to give/sell info on the location and destination of starlanes/wormholes. This is already doable for jump gates in the player-buying-from-race direction (races don't use jump gates, so they wouldn't care) and for planets in the race-buying-from-player direction (though that would be nice to be done in both directions though it might generate a longer list than desirable).
- have races not give quests for places they don't know how to get to. I mean, c'mon :) Quests for "we've heard of star so-and-so but don't know how to get there, please find out how" would be ok, I think, since it wouldn't surprise the player if they didn't know where it was.
-- that said, since I started my second sector I only rarely hear about quests I care about where I don't know how to get there since I'm really aggressive in early scouting.
* Upgrading and items feel clunky. I can't tell when something is an upgrade or what slot it goes into quickly and easily
You can tell what type of slot takes an item by the borders: blue triangles in three corners is a heavy slot, orange triangles in two corners is a medium slot, a green triangle in a single corner is a light slot. Cargo holds go in cargo slots but you won't pick those up often at all (I've seen about 1 per sector).
Edit: but I would dearly love some way to sort/filter my inventory and/or a vendor's items by slot type or main-stat (like +max-power-load or is-a-weapon or +attack or +thrust, etc). I would have loved something similar in every ARPG I'm aware of; I think some WoW addons actually had workable features like that, but that's the only place I've seen them. But my breadth of ARPG experience is relatively narrow so I may just be missing a good example.
* Combat is annoying trying to click everything as fast as possible, including incoming missiles
Mouse-only targeting is basically the same finger-buster as it has been in any ARPG for me. Thankfully I've not had to do mouse-only targeting at all in this game:
- if I press 1, it uses the ability in slot one on the nearest target eligible for it. And 2 uses the second slot, etc. Simple flight and combat is actually possible one-handed if you leave movement on WASD and the abilities on Alpha1, Alpha2, etc; I've moved movement to Numpad8,4,5,6 so I more readily access all 10 ability slot keys.
- There is some annoyingness in how once you have locked on to a target mashing the button won't do anything if the locked-on target is out of range; that makes sense from one perspective but not from my standard "make something die, there's like 20 things on my tail" perspective. Given the number of input-mode toggles already present, I think he'll be willing to add one for "make direct-trigger abilities ignore locked-on-target if said target is out of range".
* Quests feel like standard fetch and postal from MMORPG's
A lot of the individual tasks are pretty similar, yea. The difference is in what they mean:
- In an MMO or most any other ARPG, if they tell you something like "go buy some non-lethal weapons and sell/give them to planet X so they can handle some unrest" then the game will jolly well wait 20 years for you to do that and totally not care about the delay (and possibly refuse to advance the game at all until you do as you were told).
- Here:
-- In the meantime, that planet's production and whatnot is actually reduced, making it harder for them to build/replace defensive ships (edit: or combat ships to explore/patrol/attack, or passenger cruise ships for money runs, or diplomacy ships for +relations runs, or colony ships for new colonies; I've seen all those behaviors), and contributing less money to their race, etc. That can be significant.
-- If you wait too long, either the unrest is resolved naturally (rare) or breaks out into a fiercer unrest or even outright rebellion (more penalties; I don't remember actually seing a planet change owners through rebellion, dunno if that's implemented).
-- Depending on which race it is and the diplomatic situation, you may not want to help them with the unrest. And the game does not make you do it. You might want them to get hurt. You might have started the unrest yourself. You might choose to run guerrilla weapons to the rebels instead.
And of course the ol':
- "if you don't kill this uprising, it might promote one of its members to a boss" (just saw this happen)
- "if you don't kill this boss, it might form a fleet"
- "if you don't kill this boss fleet, it might do a bunch of other nasty things, like start uprisings or even invasions" (just saw a three-wave invasion go across the announcement log)
- And the part that was new in this game compared to Din's for me: that invasion made me happy, because it was in the territory of the main remaining opponent race, so I was cheering for the monsters :) Of course if it had been in my allies' territory I'd have felt differently about it.
I'm going to give it more time, but I didn't get near the feeling of what you posted. I decided to try it because it does have a money back guarantee.
The first sector had some oddness for me; the Dryad were colonizing like crazy in a way I haven't remotely seen in any of the other 4 sectors I've played. I didn't mind so much, but it did lead to some other weirdness (the Dryad just giving me heaps of credits towards the end of my time in the sector, etc) and it does indicate that there may be bugs more subtle than any one tester is going to necessarily notice, but which lead to an undesirable range of experience. I don't think that's what's going on here, I think partly it takes a while for interesting gear choices and quest situations to both happen and the player to understand what's going on. That's a flaw, but I think it can be worked out in the beta.
And yes, the money-back guarantee is a good point.
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One of the primary gameplay issues is imo that you have no idea where anything is, but the game is way ahead of you if you explore first (Dryads.. yeah, they wiped out all 5 other races before i even got to the 3rd sector) I wasn't even able to find a system the Dryads had not yet reached, because their colonization fleets where the only easy way to find planets and space lanes
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One of the primary gameplay issues is imo that you have no idea where anything is, but the game is way ahead of you if you explore first (Dryads.. yeah, they wiped out all 5 other races before i even got to the 3rd sector) I wasn't even able to find a system the Dryads had not yet reached, because their colonization fleets where the only easy way to find planets and space lanes
Sounds like you had a similar first sector to mine. Future ones have seen maybe 1/10th that intensity of colonization (I think it's because the monsters actually bite).
To find starlanes, just circle around the edge of the system such that you're just barely revealing the very edge, and you should find every starlane/wormhole (I generally see 2 per system, sometimes 3, rarely more). Planets are all generally closer to the center. 0.901 added a tip about the starlane placement thing.
Regrettably, 0.901 also made missiles and mass drivers cost way more energy because apparently it wasn't intended that they be roughly 1/3rd and 1/2 (respectively) as much energy-per-second for sustained fire as beam weapons. Seemed fine to me before, but now I really have to guzzle the energy-recharge consumables to fight much. That works for me since they're cheap, but hopefully a different balance point will be found on energy costs, or it will be made clearer what sort of builds we're supposed to run if we want to be able to finish a fight without running dry (battery packs, backup batteries, emergency power, etc; I've seen several kinds of cool-looking toys all in some way designed to give you lots of energy, I just preferred the passive-regen ones... that aren't cutting it anymore).
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Yeah I find the early game (new ship) now nearly impossible. Or at least, you die a lot more, which means everything takes even longer and moves by you even faster. That said, by now my topic has yet not appeared and that makes me sad. I think I am gonna chalk this off as "maybe next week" ;p
I think the best way to beta test balance is by starting a really new game. Because you know nearly no beta tester is actually gonna do this ;p
I am gonna do some more GUI mockups for giggles though ^^
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Went ahead and got it. I'll probably play a sector later this evening.
Edit: I know we were warned about the intro video, so I just had to watch it. Ahahaha, its like Keanu Reeves is doing the voiceover, its hilarious but unintentionally so I think.
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So apparently my topic on Soldak was not approved then as it is not visible yet. Mhhh that's not exactly improving my motivation to bother continuing my constructive dismantling of the current flaws. Game is in a unique way fun though. But this reminds me why I only bother to be helpful here. Elsewhere people see -1- Post topic listing all the flaws and think I am just hating. Gah. I really should stop caring. :D
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I suspect there was some sort of error in the forum system. I've been using the Soldak forums for years, and Steven is not the kind of guy who would disapprove of feedback about Soldak betas.
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Well to be fair I kinda misunderstood the forum system to begin with. If you know SMF you see the message after a post at first it said too many images (which really confused me, like since when are smilies images in that sense :o) so I hit back and repost and for some reason that worked (or at least no message appeared), Guessing all smilies including the jpg i originally added got somehow killed on the way. But as the post didn't appear and it didn't redirect me to the posted topic (I had a second tab open because I wanted to add some more feedback that was posted here) I hit back and the post was gone (argh) so i pasted it in via some browser history trickery (thankfully that saved it) and forgot again to fix the image link back to jpg (but this time I removed the smilies by hand). So I am guessing there are 3 times topics with some more or less the same Thread Title in the queue. I must look like a fail spam bot lol.
So in between that and there.. I wouldn't blame him if he got confused as well. Just for the record, it didn't help that the "moderation awaiting" page looks EXACTLY like the topic posted redirect wait 3 seconds page. I have seen that so often I do not even perceive whatever comes after I press "new thread" anymore, so if anything, I am 66% to blame at least. As it was my first post I do not expect to be special for anti-spam reasons but this was extremely unlucky, as you can tell the post was kinda large with potential to get huge (large enough to edit it after you posted it at least a dozen times as new things are added). So even if the delay is not intentional it already destroyed my motivation to continue the topic. And it's just how I am, I was playing that yesterday, today.. was 33°C and I feel like a zombie. Not like writing sweeping beta feedback :D
I like the way the game can go so i am not in some way hating on the guy. It was just an unlucky thingy-ma-bob. I hope I get some email when the topic is approved, or I might never even know, as I have no link.
As you can tell, I am a pretty big noob when it comes to forum software that is not how I am used it. ^^ I often forget that arcengames forum also was shaped by players back in the 1.0 AI war days where a lot of graphical suggestions came about from various people and that got all limitations on images and most attachment limits removed near instantly. ;P Anyway, I have no ill intentions or something It's just that, with my erratic nature my next Drox post is likely not gonna be until we got some more beta updates.
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Sounds good. I'll let you know if your post happens to pop up over at Soldak.
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Still struggling with it. I accidentally sold my shield generator, nowhere to repair, and choosing heal at a planet does nothing but repair my components.
Flying around, still messing with the combat mechanic. Trying really hard to like this game, but I'm not getting into the politics at all yet. How long before it gets good? Is this really just a boring beginning or is the whole game like this? It feels like I'm mowing the lawn trying to clear up fog of war and mashing buttons to kill the monsters while I do fetch quests.
I guess I was hoping there would be a giant space war that you can affect or be a part of.
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Well the start certainly feels like that, the exploration part of this game is solved very awkwardly. You essentially play the game just on the Minimap when you explore. (Else you wouldn't know where you already explored or not)
And from what I can tell, diplomacy only matters little as the game will always speed by you more or less (the more you explore, the more it speeds by you ;P) Not saying player decisions don't have an effect, they do. But it is all kinda localized. I am sure in later levels we could potentially change the outcome of a war (if both sides are at least evenly matched) but It doesn't seem easy to prevent the extinction of anyone no matter your tech, you get a mission and have to do it, and then you fly away and 2 seconds later the planet is dead.
It may be worth considering getting that money back after all. I expected the game to be like, a 4x game, except we play a mercenary while the AI plays the 4x ;p But so far I am not seeing it taking that direction.
Still I am waiting at least until 1st July to decide. On that matter, the site doesn't actually say anywhere how we could get our money back if we wanted. Does anyone know? Not that I am considering it "strongly" right now (heh, Mantis speak is taining me) but I would at least like to know.
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You will need to email Steven Peeler at the contact address if you want to use the money back guarantee. Might I remind everyone that this is a beta game from a one man developer that has been out for less than a week, and the game may stay in the beta stage for 2 months or more? I'd venture to say that the game is in much better condition at this point than AVWW was at the same time in its development cycle. There's only been 1 Drox patch so far! Give the guy some time.
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I don't feel particularly urged to get my money back. I was just wondering how it would work. But I have absolutely no idea how beta's with Soldak games go... do we get drastic gameplay changes and additions, or even revisions or is it all just fine tuning? Because the whole race/sector idea needs some serious overhauling. Because there is just not enough to do and affect (or worse, there is too much to do and nothing really doable). In land based games you are exploring the dungeon and finding stuff and assorted but in drox it just doesn't pull you in right yet. I guess, my main qualm would be that the dungeon teleporter mechanic has no counter in drox. Which slows the game immensely down imo.
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In my experience the betas typically skew toward fine tuning but there are occasionally some drastic game play changes if those changes are realistic to implement. There is a big discussion going on over on the Soldak forums about much of what you mention, so the designer of the game is definitely getting the message about people needing a bit more direction and involvement with the races.
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It's funny. I very nearly bought this entirely on the back of Keith's in depth write ups.
Then Cyborg and eRe4s3r detracted somewhat and I held off.
Very much on the fence now!
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I accidentally sold my shield generator
There's a buyback option on the vendor screen for the last two things sold there.
nowhere to repair, and choosing heal at a planet does nothing but repair my components
There's a few buttons at the bottom of a planet vendor screen: Identify All, Repair All, and Repair Structure (there's also one for repairing a single component, iirc). Repair All is just your components including your armor, Repair Structure is your green bar.
Your shields cannot be insta-healed by anything, but if you click on a friendly planet so it brings up the menu it should also give you a +recharge buff that speeds up your shield recharge. There's also "Ancient Recharge Stations" out there that do it much faster but are harder to find.
Trying really hard to like this game, but I'm not getting into the politics at all yet. How long before it gets good? Is this really just a boring beginning or is the whole game like this?
My first sector was weird due to some thing that made one race colonize everything really fast (hasn't happened again in 4 more sectors) ; it was fun at first and kinda boring at the end because there were just two races allied and it took forever to get enough +relations with the second one. Never felt bored after that.
It may be that this game is just peculiarly suited to me and to none of you. Some games thrive off of mentally filling in details, but having played Crusader Kings 2 recently I found that I thoroughly enjoyed it almost entirely because of mentally filling in details (it gave me mostly bare facts, but it just screamed that there was a real drama going on in there, great stuff), and I don't feel like I'm having to do even 20% of that in Drox and I'm enjoying it more.
But yea, helping a race in the early-4x-colony rush, making ruthless political decisions (I hope that boss finds you tasty, dudes, because I'm outta here! My allies will be by in an hour to clean up the scraps), making careful stat and gear choices to deal with a lot of interlocking dependencies to make my ship powerful enough to fight well, rejoicing when I find just the right piece of gear from a drop or a vendor, fighting for my life against boss fleets and knowing that whether I kill them or not matters... I find all that really, really fun. As I've played more I've found myself wanting more (fleet fights with NPC allies are possible because they can send multi-ship patrols into monster or enemy space, but I want a lot more of that), but I'm happy with what's here.
If you're not, well, thanks for really trying to like it, and I dunno why our experience of it is so different... but I guess that's the way it happens sometimes.
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That's not helped my fence sitting one iota! :)
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That's not helped my fence sitting one iota! :)
Fences are uncomfortable objects upon which to sit; if that is insufficent motivation to cease sitting upon a fence, I'm not sure what I can provide ;)
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I'm finding the control options a little confusing. I didn't have as much time to play around with it last night as I thought, but the default controls are really weird (I spent some time flying in a circle because I couldn't figure out why I wasn't turning, heh) and I wasn't able to find one I like, probably due to my own missing of an obvious option.
What options do you guys that have the game use control-wise?
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eRe4s3r, your post should be up now. To combat spam, we moderate a new user's first 3 posts. :(
I'm reading all the feedback here also though.
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That's not helped my fence sitting one iota! :)
Fences are uncomfortable objects upon which to sit; if that is insufficent motivation to cease sitting upon a fence, I'm not sure what I can provide ;)
Actually, I probably spoke too definitively before. It has made several iotas of difference. Namely: I intend to play some Crusader Kings 2 first (which I picked up just a few days ago on special); and try to ascertain how alike you and I are!
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Actually, I probably spoke too definitively before. It has made several iotas of difference. Namely: I intend to play some Crusader Kings 2 first (which I picked up just a few days ago on special); and try to ascertain how alike you and I are!
Let me know if you wind up being a little-known Scottish count who takes care of his people, suffers under various unsavory kings (that he nonetheless feels duty bound to be loyal to), endures personal tragedy, and in his last years becomes king of Jerusalem!
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I don't feel particularly urged to get my money back. I was just wondering how it would work. But I have absolutely no idea how beta's with Soldak games go... do we get drastic gameplay changes and additions, or even revisions or is it all just fine tuning? Because the whole race/sector idea needs some serious overhauling. Because there is just not enough to do and affect (or worse, there is too much to do and nothing really doable). In land based games you are exploring the dungeon and finding stuff and assorted but in drox it just doesn't pull you in right yet. I guess, my main qualm would be that the dungeon teleporter mechanic has no counter in drox. Which slows the game immensely down imo.
Your Drox post is live over on the Soldak forums but I'd like to see your GUI Mock up (it isn't appearing in the thread). Can you post a link to it over there?
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It may be that this game is just peculiarly suited to me and to none of you. Some games thrive off of mentally filling in details, but having played Crusader Kings 2 recently I found that I thoroughly enjoyed it almost entirely because of mentally filling in details
I love Crusader Kings 2. I bought it when it came out (rarely do I purchase games new). I wholeheartedly agree that it needs a little bit of imagination to enjoy the drama as it plays out.
I'm just not seeing that in Drox Operative. I'm going to wait for another patch to see if there are any mechanic changes that bring some excitement, but right now this game is way too slow for me.
Like others, I think we assumed that a 4x game was being played by the computer while we were playing a part, but that's just not getting across right now, and the combat mechanics need an overhaul. Right now I'm just spamming weapons at the greatest range possible.
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It may be that this game is just peculiarly suited to me and to none of you. Some games thrive off of mentally filling in details, but having played Crusader Kings 2 recently I found that I thoroughly enjoyed it almost entirely because of mentally filling in details
I love Crusader Kings 2. I bought it when it came out (rarely do I purchase games new). I wholeheartedly agree that it needs a little bit of imagination to enjoy the drama as it plays out. My favorite country to play is Ireland. I have started many different games trying different strategies just in Ireland, as a lot of the other countries have so much crap going on that it can get out of control to manage without really documenting everything.
I'm just not seeing that in Drox Operative. I'm going to wait for another patch to see if there are any mechanic changes that bring some excitement, but right now this game is way too slow for me.
Like others, I think we assumed that a 4x game was being played by the computer while we were playing a part, but that's just not getting across right now, and the combat mechanics need an overhaul. Right now I'm just spamming weapons at the greatest range possible.
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Like others, I think we assumed that a 4x game was being played by the computer while we were playing a part, but that's just not getting across right now
Yea, it does feel that way to me, but I agree that it could come across a lot clearer (just having per-planet displays of how much stockpile/income/expenditure of each resource and what is building and how long it will take would go a long way, I think).
and the combat mechanics need an overhaul. Right now I'm just spamming weapons at the greatest range possible.
I ran a two-missile build for the first few sectors and it was really effective. So effective I didn't really feel the need to try mass drivers or beams.
Then I ran into the monsters that can cause your missiles to reflect back against you. Ow. Manageable, and two-missile was still a viable choice, but I now run beam-missile and probably get more kills with the beam than the missile now. For a while I considered two-beam but some monsters (who I'd been facing for a long time, just hadn't noticed this as being so significant) would heal others which made my "takes multiple shots to kill a monster" beams way less effective than the usually-one-shotting missiles.
Unless I'm bombarding a planet, then it's two-missile all the way, but hopefully at some point planet guards will actually, you know, take exception to the guy dumping nukes on their planet from a couple meters out of their range.
And long-range kiting was really effective but I ran into problems with that sooner: generally in the fights that really mattered doing much kiting would almost inevitably lead to me running into another pack of monsters. Not great for survival. So a kind of preplanned kiting path combined with mixed weapons for handling various foes (and, at least unless energy costs are toned back down from their .901 levels, a lot of energy consumable spam) is how I tend to run now for serious fights.
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Here is my newest GUI mockup for the one I did before, just.. you know, way better ;)
(http://i.imgur.com/2QA3S.jpg)
I put way more effort into this one, actually, I would consider this the kind effort I do for professional projects (well, in the first revision stage, anyway ,p).. not sure the 100% isn't too small but short of using Arial at 10pt I have no idea how to do that better.
The font's used are Tahoma (because it's on every Windows Machine) and Tajan Pro for the 100% numbers.
Font sizes are 10pt for the Shield/HP/AP/Power on bold Tahoma
and 8pt Tajan Pro for the % ;)
The background of the GUI isn't exactly "solid" in the sense that you could put it in the game but the hud would work even against bright white BG. Gonna post that on my DA page because I kinda like it ;P
The PSD with INTACT /but unnamed\ LAYERS can be gotten here -> http://filesmelt.com/dl/Drox_Mockup_2.psd and you can reuse all . Well, except of course the fonts as I don't own them.
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That GUI is gorgeous - well done!
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Well this is the extended version of that ;) Now my mockup frenzy is over for a while
PSD V3 -> http://filesmelt.com/dl/Drox_Mockup_3.psd
Click on image for full res
(http://i.imgur.com/AmfAw.jpg)
Most of the details have transparent BG for now.. makes it easier to change stuff ,)
I guess it's now too chaotic or something.. but I can't decide where this best goes, top or buttom.. hence the "open" placement of various boxes ;) There are 10 XP crystals which can display the usual percentage value.
In drox there are 9 colored icons to various screens which I think have absolutely NO place in the bottom center of the GUI and the skill bar could still fit beneath the GUI design so far, obviously 5 left and 5 right slots, not 10 connected ones (for that the cargo space thing would have to either move on top of the credits bar or to the side of it... Imo this consolidates the GUI nicely (the top left thingy is completely replaced) and the current bottom is taking less space and looks spiffy. Level and Ship Name are yet to be decided.. no idea where that would be best displayed..
Ah well, Somehow It is turning into a masterpiece ;) Now with 10 skill slots and better layout
(http://i.imgur.com/3Mdfg.jpg)
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I can has that GUI in Drox now? ;)
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That's a very spiffy UI. If I'm not mistaken, I'd say you've worked with art design?
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Very nice. I'd say it's a little too busy now with all the text -- I'd remove the percentages and switch back to mouseovers. Also pretty similar to what I did with the DC and DoP GUIs, though I didn't put effort into drawing any more than I absolutely had to ;D
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I'm just not seeing that in Drox Operative. I'm going to wait for another patch to see if there are any mechanic changes that bring some excitement, but right now this game is way too slow for me.
Like others, I think we assumed that a 4x game was being played by the computer while we were playing a part, but that's just not getting across right now, and the combat mechanics need an overhaul. Right now I'm just spamming weapons at the greatest range possible.
You can find many of my criticisms of the current build on the Soldak forums. However, I will say that there are certain things that make the game more fun. If you get a sector where everybody's allied with everyone else and there's no fighting, just dump it and move to another sector. IMO it's a bug in the behavior of the AI. You'll run into sectors where the only known species are duking it out, and then you get to choose sides and it's awesome.
Another thing is, playing a sector for a long time will mean that you're probably much higher level than the monsters in any system. That's a recipe for boredom, and it's a result of using the same monster level mechanics from DoP and DC (which worked in those games but doesn't work so well here). If there's nothing special going on at that point, feel free to move to another sector.
In general, the victory (and losing) conditions suck. They want you to keep plodding along until everyone's allied with you, which can take forever and makes the game feel MMOish (doing favors for factions just so they like you a little more), which it really shouldn't. The problem with this type of game is that it's really hard to come up with good victory conditions. Hopefully these will change with time though. The good news is that for now, since you're always advancing in levels and gear, you could just get your fill of a sector, and when you get bored, move on to the next one for a different experience.
Also, once you get to have mines, combat will become more interesting -- dropping mines behind you and having them blow up anyone chasing you is very satisfying. I'm working on ideas to improve combat though and hopefully Steven will make some good changes in the next patches on that front as well.
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I am just self-taught freelance 3d render artist tbh, usually I don't do pixel art or GUI's and I never saw an art or digital design school from the inside but.. well I do freelance and so some work was in that direction even though not directly... and it is my hobby too ^^ ;) And while it's nice to look at turning it into a game GUI would likely take some decent coder quite a while to do. In fact you'd likely have to code the GUI systems to transform values into percentages and then how those affect the image you are trying to blend in a position and stuff.... I think, that is the reason you don't see that many decent gui's around, it isn't exactly something you get working without a LOT of effort. And I mean hard, coding, effort.
And most of the really bad GUI comes from people just choosing really really bad names for stuff and generally ignoring how Information and color flows, bright colors in a gui are hotspots, thus if anything in your guy is bright in any way, it better be an important info (or guiding the eyes to relevant info). In Drox the GUI is glowing blue (I call it, the indy bright color blindness syndrome) because SOTS2 has the same problem... and it makes using the GUI extremely evil.
And second thing to do in GUI. Information likes company
@Bluddy (partially ,p)
That means, even though the % is not vital to be displayed displaying it in the same color as the descriptor and bar creates visual coherence and a "block", without the % value the information would not be visually distinct to other information. And obviously my color choices just flow nicely because I am 25% red/green color blind, so you will NEVER see me use true 0,255,0 or 255,0,0 colors (RGB). ^^ the % would need to be done with whatever the in-game engine can do anyway so it could easily be made a toggle, however, I absolutely hate when a GUI does not give me information on first glance, and mouse over is not first glance and impracticable in combat. As this GUI is a lot less bright than the default you wouldn't even notice the % unless you were explicitly looking at it. (obviously you are doing that now, because it is a mockup so you got nothing else to look at ;)
The idea behind the % is by the way. Normal pattern of eye movement, first to name then bar then %, and you got instant visual feedback, you don't even need to read it, most humans understand the % scale without thinking about it. (often even to their detriment ,p) Yes, 50% health is very very relative. I know ;) But there is no way around that. Mouse Over should display the ACTUAL values though.
And lastly, as humans love patterns it just takes little effort in arranging information clusters /Shield/Energy fit together, as does AP (Armor Points) and HP (Health Points). It isn't exactly rocket science, and you can get that knowledge basically from just looking at how most decent AAA games make their GUI. Then just keep some basic symmetry and you can't fail.
But really, all a good GUI needs is a good font, a good layout and a good flow. It ain't rocket science, but when I look at most Indy games (AI War is a nice exception ,p) I get severe cringes. And then there is of course, that in-game the realities of most font renderers means that everything would need VERY careful formating and placing and a very decent font renderer to begin with, one that can do colors and opacity and blending effects, at the very least.
One of the only things this mockup does not tackle is how to keep the game background from flowing into the GUI. I would probably need to do some actual 75% opaque "underlay" of some kidn that sits beneath the GUI graphics and darkens everything behind it but does not fully hide it. Otherwise everything would have to be protected by full opaqueness.
Anyway, don't forget that it's easier to create mock-ups than it is to make that work in a game ;) This just was really fun to tackle because nobody ever asks me to prototype a GUI and I wanted to do it for a while now, well nobody asked me but the game GUI made me think "how can it look better" and that's usually leading to pretty images, at least most of the time :D
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I can attest to Bluddy's awesomeness. What he did for Din's Curse is nothing short of amazing!
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@eRe4s3r: I think it's not easy for Indie devs because you need a good aesthetic sense to do GUIs right, just as you do for all art, even if GUIs are relatively simple art. Most Indie devs just can't do art.
I have to say I'm surprised at how good Drox looks. I knew spaceships are easier to make pretty, but Steven really outdid himself with those new particle effects and explosions. It looks much better than anything in his previous games.
@Moonshine Fox: Thanks!
One of these days I really have to sit down and finish that balance mod, especially the mage part.
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Most Indie devs just can't do art.
Is that the part that isn't numbers or letters?
;)
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I don't buy that. I know coders have to be creative, they also have taste. I guess it is just.. you know.. tunnel vision just for developers? They have a GUI, it works. They have no reason to change it even if isn't pretty. Except it is ugly and most people who see the videos of these games with GUI are not even considering playing the demo.
And then of course, most developers also have nobody that is bugging them to change the GUI showing how it could look (and this mock-up is not what I consider super-pretty, it is merely "acceptable" pixel art, imo). Also as you demonstrate the idea how information has to be arranged is not alien to humans, your GUI mod does the same thing (well, as far as rearranging goes). I think with Drox it's "sticking to a layout" because it is very much the same same to Din (the top left "bars of rainbow doom" so to speak ,p)
That said, I do post these mockups for feedback and I love all feedback ;P
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BTW I don't think this GUI would be too hard to do using Drox's code ie no real changes to the code would be necessary for the most part. The only thing the code wouldn't support is to have the experience bar the way you have it with shapes filling in rather than a bar filling up. I think the percentages are doable. The font would also have to be created -- there's no truetype support.
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Well you can use the PSD and whatever is in it for mods however you want ^^ v4 is gonna be posted tomorrow (minimap and the other missing MAIN gui stuff will be in it clock, those 9 icons, name/level/location) for the rest.. well the style is KISS - anyone can continue it with pipette and pencil (in photoshop, obviously ,p) as long as the colors stay same. After V4 I will be kinda finished though. I won't do actual GUI border elements or things specific to any other screen, because that is very DROX specific and would make no sense to anyone if I posted it on my DA scraps
Do you mean that the game uses bitmap fonts? Anyhow, I still hope that official changes are made ;p The XP bar is not terribly vital but.. well you'd need to come up with an alternate design if you wanted that long thing to fit into this gui design. I changed it for a reason. Notice how short it is (And the drox XP bar isn't) ;p It is not perfectly balanced right now in terms of where the center is but making it any shorter would be possible if you were to make it a pseudo hexagonal pattern. Obviously would need support for shapes that fill up though because a bar can't change direction ,p That is actually Why I haven't posted v4 psd, the XP bar currently disturbs the balance. It is not much but it is enough to bother me ^^ (A bar that is short as required would be not very informative)
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I was still only partway through my first sector before patch .902 came out. But my thoughts so far are mixed.
Its a fun game, but each solar system seems a little -too- big (or the speed is just too low), especially when you need to go across multiple systems travel and worse exploring can be a little tedious. Using jumpgates to get around is pricey, and traveling through starlanes tediously slow - but I saw they lowered the price on jumpgates so maybe that's improved. It would also be nice if we could see system connections/planets in a system before we find them. The controls are wonky, I still haven't figured out how to control ship spin with keyboard as opposed to mouse. Its bound to be an option but I must be missing it.
All in all, the gameplay itself I'm finding enjoyable (combat, messing with colonies/politics, ship building), and if my last paragraph sounded negative - I do think its a fun game. Its just a lot of the stuff between "play" during the downtime that feels like it needs improvement. I haven't seen or done all the quests or gotten too in depth into play. So that's just impressions from a few hours in the first sector.
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As promised here is the final GUI mockup.. more or less final anyway
(http://i.imgur.com/wzpvx.jpg)
- Changed and condensed XP bar and made it a full part of the GUI
- added location and ownership coding as well as time
- Added ship name (Although why we need to know this at all times is beyond me
# Missing
~ The 9 Icons
~ Minimap
And here is the PSD with intact layers and everything
http://filesmelt.com/dl/Drox_Mockup_4.psd
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And seeing as there is a new beta patch, there are some changes to how the start of the game plays now (for the better, imo)
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Yea, 0.902 drastically improves the energy-cost situation (I'm back to missile/beam, and I'm seriously considering giving missile/mass-driver a try) and provides an option when starting a sector to pick how well-established the races already are: I think the higher option will skip most/all of the colony rush phase (which I enjoy but it can feel slow and leads to the strategic situation often favoring one race massively) and just get to the part where races fight each other, but I haven't tried it.
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thanks keith. i'm happily bopping around my first sector lending the shadow a hand as they slowly conquer the galaxy. As you rightly said there is innovation, dynamic world and meaningful choice all over this game...
so far excellent... i think spending a couple of days reading here and the soldak forum helped me with the early game experience but everything seemed to click in straight away for me. thoroughly enjoying myself.
first game i've bought since valley way back on beta release day. nice to dabble in something new... cheers
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Bit the bullet and preordered yesterday and hooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo did the hours flow by. I almost missed making my Let's Play episode of the week for Dwarf Fortress because I was busy with Drox. It sucks me in far more than Din's ever did, and Din's was great! I'm still trying to wrap my head around how it all works, and it appeas the Cortex were extremely badass in my playthrough because everyting else is just mega-extinct by the time I got out of the first solar system.
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Drox Op isn't too bad. One thing I'd wished it mentioned was the quest list is in the relations screen so you can figure out where things are, instead of just randomly wandering around trying to figure out where to go.
Also, it'd be nice if your first ship had a decent engine in it (for the weight). 'eh, It'll work out I guess. Decent game, not sure how long it'll hold my interest though.
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Okay, I've spent a little time with this game and it definately is in the middle of a serious sand and polish mode.
The core gameplay is decent. It's not something you'd play forever but it's alright. The concept is cool as hell if Soldak can ever nail it down.
There's a number of little things in this that are annoying me. One is post moderation. Very difficult to have a discussion and get into it as a newb when a mod needs to come by to approve everything first. Anyway...
Another is the shop mechanics. Yeah, fine, it's all randomized. You'd think though that most of it would be stuff you could use unless you purposely set the game over your level. I'd say 75-80% of the stuff in shops that I'd be looking to get is actually above my current abilities by a level if not two... and that's if I sunk all my points into that. I got pretty heavy on Helm because I got tired of driving like a slug through the universe. I expect the rest of my gear to suck. I don't expect the shopkeepers (all of them) to be only selling Tiffany's.
A third is this MASSIVE fleet of ships you end up fighting. An example. My current build is a 'run like hell' build. Fighter Bay, EMP, and Mines. Remember, I'm speedy! I'm at 170 speed for crying out loud. You know what I can outrun?
Nada.
So, I end up flying into the NEXT set, inside of 30 seconds, of another fleet of 5+ ships... until you've got 30-40+ ships that you've collected going through areas you JUST cleaned out and are picking up more. I don't feel like it's ship on ship combat with tactical assets, it's "Can I dump enough damage or get to a friendly world before I die?". This is not pleasant to me. Every enemy feels the same to boot. They've got this HUGE library of models, but I'll be damned if I can tell you what the different ones do. They chase you at matched speed and shoot you with lasers. Some have more hitpoints... usually the smaller ships. Narm? Maybe they heavily differentiate at the really high levels, I don't know. If it suddenly changes heavily later though I'm going to be frustrated.
Alright, so now we're going to get into the whole loot randomness. RANDOM LOOTZ IS COOLZ because it beefs you up compared to standard gear at your current... WTF you mean the same item as a rare means I need more of x stat because it's better? Oh, come on. Screw it, I'll just shop at the markets. Between weak assed crap in the drops and the fact that my stats probably can't support a 'better find' anyway since I need another level to use the same item with a boost, let's concentrate on quests.
... Ooookay, or not. "Please go scan this world..." Okay, sure. What system? Errr, um, looks like that connects to it, I'll pop in over there and... "Obsolete." THE HECK? What, were you already there and teasing me? By the time you've built up your sector map all of those missions are basically useless. Either the sector's allied or its at war and fully colonized... which brings me to the next point. Are you actually supposed to be able to participate in that war?
I'm dragging back fleets of 30+ monster ships to AI worlds so they can help me obliterate them before I get gakked. They're eating them. Now, you want me to run a weapons supply UNDER THE ENEMY who has equivalent firepower? Which one of us is insane here?
Okay, so no war quests unless I can find a friendly in the middle of attacking some planet. Deliver xyz quests are pretty danged hard at the beginning too as your 3 heavy slots are usually - Weapon/Power/Engine. You have to give up one to deliver colonists or other random things to far-flung worlds, or resort to playing hide and seek for the Medium/Light equivalents (thrust comes to mind) and completely reconfigure to attempt it.
That leaves... Pirates and Hunting missions. Any name you say ends up as "Bring back five Black Bunny Butts" and "Kill Random Boss Spawn". Neither of these really make me feel like you're influencing the events of the 4x going on around you. So, the empire with 28 worlds lost one. Boo Hoo, here, have a cookie.
So, the real component of this that should make it stand out is the politics and the influence. You make cash to get influence right? Well, I went on a whisper campaign to attempt to break an alliance to see what it would do. In my first playthrough I sold some technology for about 150k each to the different races so I was pretty set in credits.
100k in credits later I'd managed by using the most expensive option to lower the race's opinion by about 15 points. My guess is they were improving it in between. Now, admittedly, I was trying to snap an alliance in half and have them go at each other. On the other hand for about 45k I was able to get them to just simply declare war. Woots.
Espionage... I'm assuming I'm supposed to get a tech the same way that knowledge drops when you rt-click will give you. If there's a list of techs I've got available I can't find it, I can only see the ones I have that whoever I'm trading with doesn't. However, apparently I managed to steal about 15 level 1 techs when I tried, cause I never saw nuttin.
About the only useful one is getting worlds to rebel, and I haven't really played with it enough to know how heavy handed I need to be with it yet.
So, the space-side influence is pretty meh. How about direct politics? You're an ant. You're treated that way. They want to give me 200 creds for info on worlds they've never been near, have no interest in information on their enemy, but once I'm allied you'll basically let me pick your pockets clean for belly button lint. Which gives me money to do... what exactly?
Then there's a ton of minor interface things that just make me wonder.
- Why does 'repair all' not repair the structure of my ship and need to be done via a different button?
- Why does the game not pause in the Trade Screen? It does everywhere else.
- Why when a pickup object and a planet overlap does the planet get priority?
- Why can I NOT move a cargo bin while it has items in it to my stash? Isn't that one of the benefits of having subdivided inventories?
- I realize they're still working on a 'good approach' but the entire item value and where it goes screen just doesn't work for me yet. Blizzard uses a particular color scheme for a reason, including color blindness. If you're gonna build a kill and loot game, why not stick with convention? And those triangles just really don't work, but that's something still under experimentation.
- I still have no idea why my 'speed refills' aren't able to be dropped into the Rt-Click bar. I can put weapons (which I have under 1,2,3,4...) but I can't put the items I CAN'T hotlink to the left trigger, like speed heals/refills. Narm? If I can, I certainly haven't figured out how in 3 sectors of randomly trying in frustration.
- A tiny little thing: When I miss because my attack was too low, TELL ME I MISSED. Don't make me wonder if I STILL haven't quite figured out the range of this thing...
- Personal gripe: If I put in 3 fighter bays with a max of 5 fighters each and want to move like a dead slug with no power, I expect to be able to launch 5 of EACH fighter, not a total of 5 and be able to pick my flavor.
- If you're going to have the base race seem important, make it important. I'm long past where 5 points in any direction meant anything, particularly since I gained four levels randomly flying around trying to figure out the interface. Basically, beginning race is 'what ship looks cool'. It really has no effect later.
Alright, so, that's one hell of a gripe list. However, there's a number of things it does RIGHT:
In most politics screens, you end up playing a massive guessing game with the other faction trying to figure out what they'll want in return for what you desire. One shining mechanic that Drox includes is simply the "What'll it take to get this to happen?". Talk about frustration removal.
Heavy Duty Customization. Aside from my gripes about misleading fighter counts and overzealous shopkeepers, the customization (once you learn to read that purple (why not red?) means it's going to COST you something and gold means it GIVES you something and white means it's a bonus...) is amazing. Shields and Armor need a bit more differential (why would I take one I pay to repair over one I don't when they do the same thing) and there needs to be more intuitive stat to ability traversal other than "Hit head here" until you get it, but you can customize to an amazing degree. There's a TON of depth in customization and specialization... I can see it going tons further as you get more levels.
The concept is cool as crap. It's worth saying twice. The idea of being the rogue hero or influential mercenary unit in the middle of the 4x war is cool as crap. I adored Battletech and most of that game was based around the mercenary and small unit tactics, as true wars were beyond the scope of the tabletop version... at least if you wanted to get a game done inside of a week. Pacing is part of the problem for me but I think that's a core idea of the game that it's supposed to run past you and you hang on for the ride. There's already discussions going about how to increase your feeling of effectiveness and importance in the sector, so I won't belabor that. Just... Cool.
The game handling is pretty tight. I'm pretty 'whatever, does it function' when it comes to pretty for a UI, particularly when it's not a AAA developer. You go where you're supposed to, you shoot at what you target. There's minor miffs I have (in 9.003 your target isn't obvious with all its bonuses anymore, like it was in 9.000) but you never get that 'what in hells name is my character doing NOW?' feeling. It feels reasonably responsive (particularly for my speedy ship). The combat is fast and furious but that's more a 'Are you into this' kind of thing than preference. Right now I have to pause to examine any ship in detail and it's just not worth it. I'm still going to fire a nuclear missile at it and hope it does some damage.
The exploration feel for the game is alright. I'd rather there were less chests (alright, anomalies, space junk, and storage bins) that were worth more a piece, but they're there and help keep you from feeling you're flying through nothing for long stretches... because that's what you're going to do to find space lanes and gates... Room Doors and teleporters for the rest of us.
The galaxy definately feels alive around you. There's constantly monsters attacking something somewhere. It's particularly gratifying to be sitting at the trader screen browsing and selling and watching your influence and xp go up a bit because your fighters are going to work on some invader.
I think I'll come back to it in a few patches, see how it 'feels' then. 3 Sectors was enough to get a feel for the game (2 nights) and I won't say I didn't get my money's value out of it for $15 even if I walked away tonight, just on the "How many movies could I have gone and watched" question.
There's just a lot more I could see it being.
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Excellent comments Wanderer. Can't wait for them to show up on the Soldak website.
The reason for moderation is that the Soldak forums used to be littered with tons of spam. Not sure how Arcen manages it.
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Excellent comments Wanderer. Can't wait for them to show up on the Soldak website.
The reason for moderation is that the Soldak forums used to be littered with tons of spam. Not sure how Arcen manages it.
It helps that we're more than a one-man shop. :)
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The reason for moderation is that the Soldak forums used to be littered with tons of spam. Not sure how Arcen manages it.
Whack-a-mole!
I probably wind up doing remove-topic&ban 3 times a day when I see a spam post on a recent-unread-topics pass, and I imagine Josh and the others do more than that.
@Wanderer: good feedback. I think part of your combat difficulties is in the "doing it wrong" category in that I find the "nibble a bit at the edges" approach to monster swarm works fine. Particularly starting the "grass mow" as a traversal of the outer edge so you've got plenty of "extrasolar" space to kite into if you need to. But in general lots of kiting is risky due to running into other monsters, and I think that's a good wrinkle.
Also: if you're not going 200 (the max speed), you are going too slow. That's perhaps not what the developer intended but it's what I've found. Even going 192 I've found is a significant tactical disadvantage compared to 200.
The game could make clearer what it expects people to do in terms of combat style, but one can hope :)
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off hand what instantly is apparent is that Soldak is not the same feedback level as ye got from Arcengames, It seems like the developer doesn't want to talk specifics for one reason or another and doesn't have any proper overview over feedback (there is no suggestion subcategory). Anyhow I posted my piece but it was drowned out by posts so that is that ,) I don't think I should expect any change on the GUI so meh ;p The game is essentially unplayable to me with the opaque information FLOW, ugly colors and badly designed GUI layout. Now that I actually bothered with a mockup I can't even go back without thinking about the GUI. I spoiled the game for myself by myself. Awesome. ^^ Remind me to never do GUI mockups for games I should play instead again! ;)
The beta progresses really slowly too and I think the game suffers the same issue as all other of this ilk. A dead universe. Nothing NEW and FRESH and UNIQUE to experience outside the mission system. It's literally Diablo 2 in space, with some more depth, empire warfare where you don't participate at all and less loot. I shudder to say it but I actually prefer a randomized event system of Diablo 3 above this. At least then you never know what to expect, well until you know the event (which for some reason are not random themselves..)
Relevant read
http://www.blog.playscifi.com/explore-and-expand-or-exploit-and-expire/
By the way, it is kinda funny that because of a way the mission system works the game can never actually develop a proper narrative. We are not taking part in that universe, we are just bumping into some random part of it at times but besides that you could sit back and wait 3 hours and the game would have played itself because you are not PART of the game, you are an merc that is not bound to any particular planet. You'd just need to kill monsters every now and then. Seems like the biggest design flaw of them all. If you stand around and wait in AI WAR you get killed and game-over'd faster than you can count the first wave ;p
I still think I might have over-estimated what this game is gonna be able to do and what not. It is not a Depth of Peril in space and not a Din. It is actually more shallow. In DIN if you ignore everything, you can lose. In DOP you can lose nearly instantly if you don't partake in the world. But in this game, you can not actually lose.
And speaking of losing, how could you possible lose in a game like Drox? As it is made now we have nothing we could call a "base" I guess you could potentially lose if monsters somehow kill all races but that isn't exactly losing in any way.
It is kinda hard to describe what I mean, but I guess I mean that in DoP i always regard that clan MINE. I cared for them, but in Drox that feeling eludes me. And I don't think that is a "beta" issue ^^
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On a side note, I tried to put up two different topics, breaking down the information into smaller chunks so it wasn't quite so overwhelming. It's just the impression I get from that board. I also got an answer for one of them... start a new low level character to go shopping for you. Seriously, this is expected?
Only one of those topics was approved. I guess the 'tone' of the other one wasn't preferable. I don't know, I didn't see a particular response in my PMs. With that, I'm pretty sure this topic won't go anywhere if I tried to post it in its entirety.
Oh well, not everyone can be Arcen. I sometimes forget why I avoid a number of Indies in general and usually stick to AAAs... Keith and Chris have been spoiling the crap out of me, and I like it.
Keith, I might be able to see 200 speed being nearly required for hit and runs, but at the moment either I give up a gun or my power to stuff in another ram jet. I did finally find a thrust module, so maybe I'll try it. However, to the kiting, my problem isn't particularly the 'you ran into another herd' it's 'Pick a direction and you WILL run into a herd'. The universe is a bit densely populated to my taste on that, I just want a little breathing room.
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On a side note, I tried to put up two different topics, breaking down the information into smaller chunks so it wasn't quite so overwhelming. It's just the impression I get from that board. I also got an answer for one of them... start a new low level character to go shopping for you. Seriously, this is expected?
I've never run into the "can't use what I can buy" syndrome, and I tend to buy my upgrades before I'm quite to the point of using them. And I have three light slots with pretty good crew so I have maybe 6-7 levels worth of points more than I would without special crew.
But I think if you really did need to be able to buy lower-level components you could start a sector that was lower level and fly it with your "main" ship, too. Creating a lower-level one would just be if you needed to do it while your main was in the middle of a sector.
Anyway, yea, that was a pretty amusing response ;)
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eRe4s3r: There is only one of me. We've released 3 patches already, that's pretty quick. I don't discuss too much on the forums because I can either discuss everything or make actual progress on addressing the issues. I do read everything though. Even that is taking a lot of time right now.
Wanderer: Both of your threads are up on our forums: thread1 (http://www.soldak.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5211) and thread2 (http://www.soldak.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5212). The only reasons so far that I have ever deleted or not approved threads was because of spam or duplicates.
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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..
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eRe4s3r: There is only one of me. We've released 3 patches already, that's pretty quick. I don't discuss too much on the forums because I can either discuss everything or make actual progress on addressing the issues. I do read everything though. Even that is taking a lot of time right now.
Wanderer: Both of your threads are up on our forums: thread1 (http://www.soldak.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5211) and thread2 (http://www.soldak.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5212). The only reasons so far that I have ever deleted or not approved threads was because of spam or duplicates.
On the plus side, this thread is making me seriously consider Drox Operative :) .
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Wanderer: Both of your threads are up on our forums: thread1 (http://www.soldak.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5211) and thread2 (http://www.soldak.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5212). The only reasons so far that I have ever deleted or not approved threads was because of spam or duplicates.
Ah, excellent to know, thanks Steven. I may have just hit it at an odd time or something. At the time, only one made it through. It's just frustrating.
Edit: Thanks for removing that mod approve everything restriction my account had. I no longer feel like an unwelcome doormat. I realize that's not the intent of the process, but it's definately not a friendly feeling on this end of the keyboard, no matter how much my brain tries to explain it again otherwise.
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And, eRe4s3r, just letting you know that there have already been discussions (by Soldak) concerning your UI comments/criticisms/suggestions since your post several days ago (post 32). As Steven ("zeh developer") mentioned earlier, there are many issues (and not just with the UI) to be dealt with; and Steven's feedback might show up in the game rather than in the forums. Some minor UI changes will be in the next patch, but not a complete redesign as per your mock-up (yet). Things may change further, time permitting.
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And, eRe4s3r, just letting you know that there have already been discussions (by Soldak) concerning your UI comments/criticisms/suggestions since your post several days ago (post 32). As Steven ("zeh developer") mentioned earlier, there are many issues (and not just with the UI) to be dealt with; and Steven's feedback might show up in the game rather than in the forums. Some minor UI changes will be in the next patch, but not a complete redesign as per your mock-up (yet). Things may change further, time permitting.
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why more than 75% of my games are Indie developed.
AAA response? "Pff, shove it. We know better than you. Buy it and like it! Have some DLC while you're here. Good boy!"
Indie response? "Hey that's...that's actually a cool idea. I'll see if we can wing something together with that. Nice!"
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Yeah but what is the point of "discussions" relating to my mockups and points when they are not in the topic with my mockups and points ;P I don't have an oracle telling me someone is talking about my suggestions elsewhere ,p To me, no reply on my last post in my thread means nobody cares. How else would you interpret it? This is also why I still didn't post the latest revision on soldak, mainly because I am.. kinda lazy with this now. My mockup and care boost is over, so to speak.
Link to that
http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,10939.msg108160.html#msg108160
I guess I am to attention hungry related to this ;) Maybe I expect too much. I am just used to direct feedback even if people hate it (Deviant Art just trains you like that) and if I don't get feedback that generally means it really sucks and I should move on. Anyhow..
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Well, it could also be because Soldak is a one man show. He's excessively busy, as far as I'm aware. But I agree, the responses were rather tame. I posted there to kick it back to the top, but I'm not approved yet ;)
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Yeah but you know, I also would like to know what other people (besides teh dev) think. ;p But thanks for effort, but moderated posts get added retroactively, so between now and your post appearing, the topic will /likely\ not actually get bumped to front page.. not that I care ;) If GUI improvements are coming my goal is achieved.
I just, you know, like replies to my topics, generally speaking ;P
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I know exactly what you mean ;)
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Yeah but what is the point of "discussions" relating to my mockups and points when they are not in the topic with my mockups and points ;P I don't have an oracle telling me someone is talking about my suggestions elsewhere ,p To me, no reply on my last post in my thread means nobody cares. How else would you interpret it? This is also why I still didn't post the latest revision on soldak, mainly because I am.. kinda lazy with this now. My mockup and care boost is over, so to speak.
I guess I am to attention hungry related to this ;) Maybe I expect too much. I am just used to direct feedback even if people hate it (Deviant Art just trains you like that) and if I don't get feedback that generally means it really sucks and I should move on. Anyhow..
A new patch was just released that incorporates changes to the interface inspired by your feedback. The changes are modest (i.e. not an entire UI redesign) but they are definitely for the better and you can tell that your mock up and feedback inspired them. I suspect that the changes will not satisfy you, although I very much appreciate them.
You were also mentioned in the patch notes here for version .904: http://www.soldak.com/Drox-Operative/Patches/Changes.html
Perhaps this will satisfy your admitted hunger for attention.
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Yeah but you know, I also would like to know what other people (besides teh dev) think. ;p But thanks for effort, but moderated posts get added retroactively, so between now and your post appearing, the topic will /likely\ not actually get bumped to front page.. not that I care ;) If GUI improvements are coming my goal is achieved.
I just, you know, like replies to my topics, generally speaking ;P
If it helps any Eraser some of my own posts are ending up discussed in other threads too. *shrugs* As long as they're considered, I'm cool with it. Admittedly, feedback as to why something won't work or why it's felt to be a bad idea by the designer goes a long way towards me having *better* ideas towards what their vision is, but I can understand the x hours in a day problem 'zeh developer' is having. Considering he's getting inundated with over 100 people worth of ideas (at the LEAST) and you can't remember HIS name.... yeah.
Relax. It's like the waitress not remembering your name but remembering your order. As long as it shows up hot, without mushrooms, and with the side of Ranch you wanted... *shrugs* It ain't perfect but it's life. 8)
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@Wanderer True ;p I have so much stuff going in and out of my brain daily I can't even remember what I typed 2 hours ago. I do freelance and hobby 3D besides posting silly stuff in forums. (Maybe that is why I haven't done anything spectacular lately.. mhhh... food for thought.) As you say, when at the end things change for the better, goal achieved ;)
@ Castruccio, now I am happy :D
And it's a good start. Less bright blue can never hurt ,p But with attention I really meant.. opinions and feedback, although it does make me even happier when said suggestions are resulting in changes for the better. Though I like to know what is good or bad so that my future suggestions might be more on target (that is really why I said I grave for attention, a good suggestion comes only from interaction, never from just solo action) so yeah ;)
By the way, I can remember his name, I just refuse to type names on the intertubes when said people are involved in the discussion (or when it is about their game). It becomes too personal, and on the web, where you can't judge my tone this is too easy to be misunderstood.
It really is a persona I am talking to, I can not ever bring me to make a person out of a persona. It would change my style to reply and make me think to much about the how, and not enough about the what. (probably hard to understand unless you are involved in many thousands of comments on DA...)
Wait, what was this topic again... Drox, yeah, good patch ;p
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It really is a persona I am talking to, I can not ever bring me to make a person out of a persona. It would change my style to reply and make me think to much about the how, and not enough about the what. (probably hard to understand unless you are involved in many thousands of comments on DA...)
No, I understand. For too much information if you ever find yourself on SQLServerCentral.com my tag name is Evil Kraig F... so I understand the need to not invest too much into any one post. However, I've found that forgetting there's other people on the end of those personas is very... dangerous... to the psyche after a while. It is for me, at least. Every persona is a person, and I have to always remember that or my posting comes far too close to either generic or trollish instead of a conversation with a particular human being.
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Wewt! New patch!
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It really is a persona I am talking to, I can not ever bring me to make a person out of a persona. It would change my style to reply and make me think to much about the how, and not enough about the what. (probably hard to understand unless you are involved in many thousands of comments on DA...)
No, I understand. For too much information if you ever find yourself on SQLServerCentral.com my tag name is Evil Kraig F... so I understand the need to not invest too much into any one post. However, I've found that forgetting there's other people on the end of those personas is very... dangerous... to the psyche after a while. It is for me, at least. Every persona is a person, and I have to always remember that or my posting comes far too close to either generic or trollish instead of a conversation with a particular human being.
Well forgetting is not an issue, but it's healthy to refuse to see them as anything but personas unless necessary. I never judge, expect, or know who or what is behind one. That is the reason I am even posting in forums. Obviously a human is behind the persona, but I don't want to know their name or too much personal information, it would drive me insane. I have a healthy social conversation life outside the web, but inside the web I am eRe4s3r, and not anyone or anything else. Unless you contact me via email and even then I wouldn't give you my real name unless you'd be asking for it and I'd feel obliged. I think what a lot of people in the Information age do wrong is consider the web as an extension of real life. The web is there to enhance your life, but not to intermingle with your real-life (as you can tell, I would never use facebook). And so when I know someones name it would be absurd to talk about them by name in a forum topic. It would indicate that I know them, which I do not. And unless I physically meet someone I do *not* know them, and thus am not feeling that I should know their name, or use it.
This is an interesting topic by the way, I assume many people have many different ways to view social interaction on the web.
As an example, I have no problem referencing to x4000 but calling keith keith is already too much ;) We are on the web, use personas. It should be law.
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Obviously a human is behind the persona, but I don't want to know their name or too much personal information, it would drive me insane. I have a healthy social conversation life outside the web, but inside the web I am eRe4s3r, and not anyone or anything else. Unless you contact me via email and even then I wouldn't give you my real name unless you'd be asking for it and I'd feel obliged. I think what a lot of people in the Information age do wrong is consider the web as an extension of real life. The web is there to enhance your life, but not to intermingle with your real-life (as you can tell, I would never use facebook). And so when I know someones name it would be absurd to talk about them by name in a forum topic. It would indicate that I know them, which I do not. And unless I physically meet someone I do *not* know them, and thus am not feeling that I should know their name, or use it.
Perhaps that is the difference. For the record, I don't use Facebook. However, my real life DOES intermingle with my online 'persona'... my real name is in my signature there. However, it's a professional site and one of the purposes of it is exposure for future consideration for work, as I'm an IT contractor. Because I have professional articles written there as well as using it as a reference for my resume, it actually IS an extension of my real life. Is this game? No, not particularly, unless someone wanted to see my approaches to problem solving and resolution in a non-professional environment.
That exposure over the last two years, however, has made a significant difference to how I approach posting on forums and general web interaction. I don't expect a persona to hide me when I meet a person. There are people who use personas like you say that I'd like to real life punch in the face, right through their masks. I don't get mad at the internet, I get mad at specific people using it, though usually I'm a Troll Hunter not the opposite. It's fun to calmly blow them up... Errr, I'm seriously derailing this conversation.
We can start a new topic if you like on the pros and cons of this but suffice it to say we have very different viewpoints on internet interaction. I don't use facebook or livejournal or any of those because I really don't feel like I need everyone up in my bizness, including my bestest friends. I consider a forum conversation to be just the same as a number of personalities sitting down around a table having a conversation with a CCTV hooked up for everyone in the hallway, with the door unlocked. I try to treat it the exact same way as I would if the person I'm about to piss off was right there able to take a swing at me, or how badly I'd feel if I made them cry in person. Personas and the view you take removes that from most people, including me. It's one step away from the anonymous of 4chan. I don't want TOGO to become my primary internet experience, I spend far too much time in the interwebs for that to be my approach.
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If you make a topic I will post there tomorrow but name it something proper, not just "Wanderer and eRe4s3r talk about social interactions on the web" ;) Just to not end this without a reply, that are good points and very interesting to know.... and now a big .. wall of text
I consider a forum conversation to be just the same as a number of personalities sitting down around a table having a conversation with a CCTV hooked up for everyone in the hallway, with the door unlocked. I try to treat it the exact same way as I would if the person I'm about to piss off was right there able to take a swing at me, or how badly I'd feel if I made them cry in person. Personas and the view you take removes that from most people, including me. It's one step away from the anonymous of 4chan. I don't want TOGO to become my primary internet experience, I spend far too much time in the interwebs for that to be my approach.
I consider forum conversations like a flowing river with personas floating by, your avatar defines how I see you, i throw stones with scribbles in (posts), (the river is the topic), others pick them up and walk with them and then throw 2 or 3 scribbled stones in further down the river that then get picked up by others, or me. That is how my conversation style goes, I do not expect specific replies and i positively hate when people quote 1 sentence and reply to it specifically. You either pick a stone or you don't. (Even though I quoted just your paragraph, I am really replying to your post as such, but it gets kinda cluttered if I'd quote all separately)
But as for seeing personas as humans. You would find me a stone. You would have to do something extremely hardcore to make me even care as a human (anymore). To me, personas are digital lifeforms. Puppets yes, but still more or less independent from their puppeteer. You can make me care if it's a topic that I feel strongly about, but on a gaming forum those are like, non existent. And equally I am active on the intertubes and I find that any other approach makes me care too much. And that is never healthy to a conversation, at least in my case. I won't deny that I can be made to care, but as far as most web topics go.. nah. I can sleep soundly after all discussions ^^
And as I am freelance artist and all my art is under eRe4s3r I have it easier I guess. Never a need to be "me" on the web. But my persona gets all the credits, it's how I want it to be. Anyway, If you want to, please make a topic relating to this, it ought to be interesting ;)
It's true that dispersonification of personas can lead to trolling and flame wars, but I hope I never cross into that. If I do, tell me ;) Anyway, if you want, quote my wall-of-text in the new topic ;)
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Going to chime in. My "persona" is different depending on the forums. I feel somewhat compelled to hang around here just to make sure nothing crazy happens to AI war. Look away for an instant, and who knows what's going to go on? You need hard-core players around to maintain player freedom and ensure that the skill ceiling is high enough that players feel like their own abilities can make or break a war for the human race. I see that as my purpose here, seeing as this is probably one of my top five favorite games of all time.
On other forums, my purpose is different. I, too, shy away from trolling, although I want to be specific about this: there is nothing wrong with a passionate discussion about game mechanics. If people get fired up, they start tossing words around, that's fine within reason… I wouldn't want anyone screwing up the game for my experience, I can understand they feel the same way.
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This conversation has taken a slightly techno-sociopathic turn...
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Didn't realize that we would take the sub-forum title "off-topic" so literally for these threads ;)
King
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Didn't realize that we would take the sub-forum title "off-topic" so literally for these threads ;)
King
Seriously. If you guys want to keep talking about whatever it is you're talking about, please branch into another thread.
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Didn't realize that we would take the sub-forum title "off-topic" so literally for these threads ;)
Taking together the prominent behaviors on these forums into a single image, it would probably need to be a bunch of dwarven ninjas colliding with each other while helping passengers onto a train that obviously has only a tenuous connection with the tracks :)
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Didn't realize that we would take the sub-forum title "off-topic" so literally for these threads ;)
King
Seriously. If you guys want to keep talking about whatever it is you're talking about, please branch into another thread.
Yeah, sorry about that. I realize most people didn't read our rambling but that's precisely what we decided to do there at the end. I don't think either of us realized how... involved... we were going to get on that topic.
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But reading what we wrote might be more educational than many other topics in this forum ;P
The latest patch for Drox did indeed fix some major complains regarding the GUI I had, thats very nice to see ;p Though I still don't know why I am playing drox, I don't seem to have a goal and it's just fed-ex quests and monsters so far.
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Ok people, I know this thread was created with a sole purpose of making me buying the game. You all can relax now, I've bought it as of yesterday =)
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Ok people, I know this thread was created with a sole purpose of making me buying the game. You all can relax now, I've bought it as of yesterday =)
Mission accomplished, time to call it a day!
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But reading what we wrote might be more educational than many other topics in this forum ;P
Well, I read it all and now I think you're both quite mad. :)
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Another patch (0.905) adding more race-specific ship touches was put in today. It looks pretty cool.
Since I'm already posting, one thing that I think could use some reworking is victory conditions. Personally, I would love if we had a bunch of options and could pick the victory condition we wanted on starting a new sector. The "one race left an allied with it" seems counter to wanting to play a mercenary and make as much money as you can. So it would be cool if there were a variety of victory conditions you could pick from when starting a new sector (or leave it up to chance).
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Yea, I think it would be cool if each sector had a "special win condition" like "find super-powerful artifact X" or "destroy the superboss Y" or "destroy race Z" (which would start big or with some kind of special guardian or whatever).
And you could win either the "normal" way (good relief valve in case the RNG sticks you with a nasty special-win-condition) or the special way. The latter might be more of a "marginal victory" in the wargame sense: the entire sector hasn't been brought under the thumb of the Drox operatives, but a significant gain was made nonetheless. So it could give you a smaller reward chest (or just one really high-roll item) and then you could decide to go for the full victory (and the full reward chest) or just move onto the next sector (without penalty, unlike normal abandon).
Or the special win condition could be more Dins-ish: a collection of (super-)quests that have to be done to "win that way".
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Aye, I'm currently working on a document with different win conditions that I intend to suggest on the Soldak forums. It definitely needs more than "Kill everyone except one race and then ally with them".
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Some victory conditions I thought would be interesting would be playing more to the mercenary aspect. It seems like if a Drox operative wants to milk as much money as he can, he would want the races to be in a constant power struggle.
Making a certain amount of money, and/or making sure there are a certain number of races alive within similar powers of each other. For instance.
Other possibilities include keeping a certain star system from being colonized, making sure a certain number of colonies from all races are destroyed, even maybe protect the NPC monsters long enough for them to build a super weapon.
These are just ideas off the top of my head, but the general theme is - you shouldn't necessarily have to care in each sector who wins. You want to milk the most out of them along the way.
And maybe the Drox have some other even more esoteric goal that you are working towards.
Edit: I guess I just like the idea of playing as a sneaky backstabbing SOB... play both sides for all they got and then moving on.
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That's a very interesting way of looking at it :P
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Heh, well if there were conditions you could pick. You could decide if you wanted to play honorable or sneaky, or somewhere in between. Though I wouldn't be against randomly generating them as well.
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I'm all for picking from a multiple of victory conditions when you start a sector. I think it would add a huge amount of replayability to the game. I don't know how hard it would be for Steven, but I'm going to pester him for that, just like many others have. Maybe we'll end up with an extended beta period so these things can be implemented. But the wait would be worth it imo.
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I've been pushing for different victory conditions for a while.
My favorite is reputation gain. You'd only get the best quests (and reputation reward) from allying with a race and they'll demand that you declare war against their enemies to give you their best quests. This is really important to get you caring about what the quest system generates IMO. Betray that closely allied race and you lose reputation, which takes you further away from victory.
This can then be combined with random victory conditions per sector to make things interesting and varied.
Just having the random victory conditions would be good too, though there isn't as much to get you to be emotionally involved about what's going on in the sector. I definitely agree that as the Drox, you shouldn't care who takes over the sector (unless it's a secret objective of yours).
Glad to see you're interested in this sort of thing as well, Stephen!
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Bluddy, why are you made of so much win? Agree completely with your suggestion there. That would truly be interesting!
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I've been pushing for different victory conditions for a while.
My favorite is reputation gain. You'd only get the best quests (and reputation reward) from allying with a race and they'll demand that you declare war against their enemies to give you their best quests. This is really important to get you caring about what the quest system generates IMO. Betray that closely allied race and you lose reputation, which takes you further away from victory.
I don't have a vested interest anymore, but I would think that this would be called vendor lock-in. You would never be free to backstab or switch alliances without penalty. Also, grinding reputation has never been fun. Ever. Having multiple win conditions is a good thing, but I think it would be better if that condition was something the player set (or had a hand in setting). The way that Crusader Kings 2 does it is very satisfying in the sense that as a player you decide what you want to do. Your choice in starting country and year plays a big part, but as a player that makes you think, "I wonder how far I can take this?" The computer keeps score.
Right now, I don't think drox is well-defined as to what the game is supposed to be. Is it or is it not a 4x? Is it or is it not a Diablo themed adventure in space? Is it or is it not a mercenary sandbox? I don't know. Narrowing the win conditions would make that more clear, but it would also shut a lot of doors.
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I've been pushing for different victory conditions for a while.
My favorite is reputation gain. You'd only get the best quests (and reputation reward) from allying with a race and they'll demand that you declare war against their enemies to give you their best quests. This is really important to get you caring about what the quest system generates IMO. Betray that closely allied race and you lose reputation, which takes you further away from victory.
I don't have a vested interest anymore, but I would think that this would be called vendor lock-in. You would never be free to backstab or switch alliances without penalty. Also, grinding reputation has never been fun. Ever. Having multiple win conditions is a good thing, but I think it would be better if that condition was something the player set (or had a hand in setting). The way that Crusader Kings 2 does it is very satisfying in the sense that as a player you decide what you want to do. Your choice in starting country and year plays a big part, but as a player that makes you think, "I wonder how far I can take this?" The computer keeps score.
Right now, I don't think drox is well-defined as to what the game is supposed to be. Is it or is it not a 4x? Is it or is it not a Diablo themed adventure in space? Is it or is it not a mercenary sandbox? I don't know. Narrowing the win conditions would make that more clear, but it would also shut a lot of doors.
The reason it wouldn't be lock-in is because together with this, non-allied races would offer you high rewards for betraying your chosen race. So you can choose to betray the race you're allied with, but you'd take an initial reputation hit. Also, another thing I'd like to be in the game is that larger races would give you less profitable quests than smaller races (they don't need you as much). Sticking with a race as it takes over the galaxy would become less and less profitable for you, which encourages you to switch to help the smaller races.
In terms of reputation grind, the idea here is that it's something similar to 'make X money from quests', except more easily quantifiable than money. The reputation I'm talking about here is NOT from grinding faction, trying to get races to like you. It's from accomplishing big things. The small quests - finding planets and such - would give you minor rewards. The big quests - defeating an enemy, defending a planet from invasion, espionage - will give you a lot of reputation. Really, by making it about reputation rather than what's there now (making sure one race takes over the sector and allying with that race), you allow the player to do whatever he wants to do. I agree that you don't want to force the player to force the space race to end in any particular way. What you want is to tell the player: do what you do as a mercenary. Become famous by doing cool stuff. Choose which faction you want to support, and how you want the sector to turn out (one race destroying everything, cold peace... whatever).
The basic idea is, a. let the player play given the backdrop of the 4x. b. Make the player feel invested, especially in the plight of small races. c. Don't force the player to wait until the 4x resolves itself -- just long enough to 'establish a reputation' for the Drox, at which point the player can move on.
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But let's be realistic, this beta is started, usually, unless you are Arcen Games and you make AVWW, in a beta you do not change the defining characteristics of a game.
I see some problems with the suggestions, not that they are bad, they are just not going to work out the way we want.
1) Due to not knowing where anything is at the beginning, we can not realistically influence any races start-up phase. AT ALL. Even if we are level 50 if a race gets pummeled that we are supposed to keep alive there is no way we could match another races fleets, because at the beginning everything is the same level as you.
2) If we are lucky, and our target race becomes the dominant force, we don't even need to do anything except stir up some trouble, trail 1 of their ships and kill anything near it. You could also call that an indirect reputation grind.
3) It is not uncommon for 3 out of 5 races to be gone just 30 minutes in, thats a 60% chance of losing right there.
4) The combat and movement doesn't work for this at all, if races can fly the same ways we can there is nothing that makes us superior or gives us an advantage. If you think you can outcolonize the dryads you have not played against them. I see colonized planets every minute pop up, by the time I found where they colonized, they colonize 2 or 3 more somewhere else.
5) Because combat is very, let's call it carefully "arcade" there is no tactics involved in engagements, NONE. Poking and running then keeping 1 pressed is not a tactic ^^ the amount and way monsters/enemies behave plays into this too.
To me, if you want this to be a proper "merc in a 4x world" you have to give us
a) A way way bigger ship with the possibility to properly guide upgrades, over at least 50 or 100 stages, with at lest 2 or 3 choices for each upgrade. And a factory, lab and hangar expansion option, including resource refining etc.
b) a proper crew we can assembly with personality, not just crew as equipment, so that they have a moral and a race that relates to ours (so that race choice matters at all)
c) Auto-firing turrets
d) Star Farer style movement
e) Non-race entities that exist outside of our goal and outside of the race system, independents, so to speak.
f) way less enemies, that are way more interesting to fight. Sprawling flak fire and torpedo engagements, carrier vs carrier with dozens of fighters, barrages etc.
g) A proper directional armor system + a directional shield system, so that running away is never a good idea unless you really really want to run away (in which case you put all energy to engines and shields and run like hell.. not "train mobs"
h) physics based weapons ( I am not huge fan of target and throw a dice whether it hits or not weapons)
i) Races that start established and away from each other, but not at war with each other unless the random generator decides that.
j) proper motivations for races, expansion is not a proper motivation, a colony should take much in-game time to get running, require continuous support that a race can not use for war or development of established colonies. Goals, fancy resources to go for etc.
k) Resources that are not just on planets but also asteroids
l) A better way for races to travel that is not a -1- point stargate system, like jump drives.
m) Anomalies should feed into research aboard my ship, in my labs for my personal gain.
n) A more dynamic world, talking about everything besides races, those are dynamic.. but the rest isn't.
o) More things to explore that awe us, including interactions with npc's. Should be highly moddable
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eRaSeR (sorry your name is hard to reproduce without copy-paste. Hope you don't mind), I think your point detailing the problems with goals to safeguard a race is good. You'd have to come up with a good way of doing this without making instant loss a problem.
A lot of your points I find to be design decisions. Stat-based combat is more common in RPGs, for example.
I do agree that the combat is lacking. I think there's a way to improve it, but it'll take some work. I'm looking more for tweaks though, rather than complete redesign.
There are indeed way too many enemies. Rather than feeling like space, it feels like you're inside the body dealing with the immune system. In most sci-fi notions of space, space isn't packed with monster ships. You can't travel for 5 seconds without bumping into monsters. This is ok for a dungeon teeming with monsters, but not so much for space. Additionally, combat with enemy vessels should be slow and tactical. You should need to bring down their shields, or hack them, and then do structural damage. For this you need fewer, more powerful enemies -- just as you've described.
Other problems with combat involve the fact that you only really need one weapon to fight. This really feels underwhelming for space combat. Enemies should have different weaknesses, and your weapons should only be good for certain things. For example, shields could repel lasers but not projectile weapons. EMP would wreck shields etc. This would make a variety of weapons necessary, which would also require the ships to enable equipping more weapons.
Still more problems involve the fact that the range of beam weapons is too long. I've adjusted the range down in my game and the combat feels more orderly and somewhat more tactical. This is a big deal, because it makes the difference between every monster on screen attacking you, and only the closest monster attacking you.
Anyway, I agree that there are issues, but I think some tweaks could take care of most of them. Other things I see as valid design decisions. The other really big thing I want to see is inter-race political quests (go attack this planet; go defend this planet; spy on what race X is doing). I'm not sure if those will ever make it into the game, but IMO they would improve the game considerably.
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Just say eRe then ;p
If you haven't done so, I would say, take a look at how Star Farer does combat, that game is still not anywhere near done but the combat is incredibly well done. And well, i just love to fly my own ship + fleet ships that work independent. Add to that crew management, experience, a decent damage and shield system and combat is great fun. And best of all, combat gets incredibly intense with large fleets, I mean, so intense you often lose track of what happens, and that is imo what a good space battle should be, chaotic outside of your awareness, intense inside your awareness. With strafing ships, orientation mattering, etc.
But you make a good point, with some proper modding the combat model could become a lot more fun, especially when we get auto turrets that take down missiles and fighters. And some way to strafe (flying sideways)
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And this brings us back to the beginning of the never-ending discussion on this forum of how to make a true 4x.
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one of these days this discussion WILL end up in a true multi-staged 4x. I can not believe there are no developers noticing this distinct lack in the genre. There hasn't been a proper 4x game in years, MOO3 was the last true attempt of revising the genre (with as many great as failed ideas). There is Endless Space but it is more a stream-lined 4x game, i don't dislike it but it is not exactly what I want.
There were some great "4x adventures" back in the Amiga and Dos times though. Which is all the more bestumpling, that entire sub-genre instantly died out.
Imo the 1 game that will break this stagnation can be made, but only if is absolutely focused on maintaining 100% moddability. Because the dynamic nature of the galaxy can not ever work without (little moderated) user created content. People have so many ideas for this kind of stuff, that no developer alone could ever make them happen, but users can, if the framework is there.
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Imo the 1 game that will break this stagnation can be made, but only if is absolutely focused on maintaining 100% moddability. Because the dynamic nature of the galaxy can not ever work without (little moderated) user created content. People have so many ideas for this kind of stuff, that no developer alone could ever make them happen, but users can, if the framework is there.
And it is this fact that will more than likely exclude Arcen, which seems to be allergic to that concept. I know there is a thread about why somewhere. It's a shame because I think they could have done it, skill-wise.
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one of these days this discussion WILL end up in a true multi-staged 4x. I can not believe there are no developers noticing this distinct lack in the genre. There hasn't been a proper 4x game in years, MOO3 was the last true attempt of revising the genre (with as many great as failed ideas). There is Endless Space but it is more a stream-lined 4x game, i don't dislike it but it is not exactly what I want.
There were some great "4x adventures" back in the Amiga and Dos times though. Which is all the more bestumpling, that entire sub-genre instantly died out.
Primarily because it takes too long to play. Heck, even CIV has removed the 1 game - 3 months level of micro it used to take. Couple that with the people with that much time (children) don't have the money to afford a top end 4x'er, so the market's a bit busted up on that one.
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Civ V still easily takes 12+ hours to play on large or beyond, so that argument doesn't count. Complexity doesn't have to be terribly impossible to manage (like in those old amiga and dos games).
I simply hope some other developers read this topic and notice our demands, or maybe gamers read it, and pester developers to make it. I am not really sure. I think someone could make a great 4x game with little money (around 100k$) as long as full mod and script freedom was there, the system needs to be basically a engine that runs entirely on LUA or similar for its game logic. Nothing hardcoded, absolutely nothing. Yes, the counter thesis to Arcengames games current stance on this. I absolutely don't agree with x4000 that mods would splinter the userbase by the way, because that can only happen for competitive games in the first place, and Arcengames hasn't made such games so far. But then I am just a gamer and 3d artist, to me some things (like the serial and mod stance) of arcengames are very confusing, but they still make fun games.. so yeah.
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Imo the 1 game that will break this stagnation can be made, but only if is absolutely focused on maintaining 100% moddability. Because the dynamic nature of the galaxy can not ever work without (little moderated) user created content. People have so many ideas for this kind of stuff, that no developer alone could ever make them happen, but users can, if the framework is there.
And it is this fact that will more than likely exclude Arcen, which seems to be allergic to that concept. I know there is a thread about why somewhere. It's a shame because I think they could have done it, skill-wise.
It's not that we don't want to do moddability, but it would seriously conflict with our rapid-iteration approach. It's one thing to have giant mods out there that have to be updated every three months because of an official patch; it's another thing if the modders are having to at least check to see if something needs updated multiple times a week. The alternative would be our having to make sure all of our patches don't break what the modders are relying on, which would drastically slow us down and/or restrict the kinds of changes we could make.
On the player-base-fragmentation thing, eRe4s3r, that would be very real even if it were a purely singleplayer game: if there were 3 different big "balance mods" out there for AIW (and there would be), then the feedback on the actual game's balance would both diminish and become diluted with reports that really only apply in a modded situation.
Not to mention less significant issues like having to ask every single bug-reporter "what mods were you playing with?"
But sure, the actual code-work for moddability would not be hard the way we do things, and where it makes sense and doesn't have costs that outweigh the benefits, we're happy to include it. For example, graphics modding in AIW and AVWW, levels in Tidalis, rooms in AVWW, etc.
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On the topic of modibility. Its great and really extends the life on a game when the Dev team makes it, patches the bugs, then forgets about the game. With constant development that relies on player feedback, I don't think mods are really necessary.
So open mods don't really fit Arcen's model. But for the other 99% of dev teams that forget about their game once its finished and working, yeah they really need to leave modding as an option.
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Well with modding support I was mainly talking about the yet unannounced 4x game by Arcen :D But for AVWW you really hurt yourself with the lack of quest modding/scripting. Because as you noticed no doubt, making fun quests is a pain in the backside and just having a lot of user made maps doesn't help at all (in fact, it makes it even worse because you can't use any of them for missions unless you test them properly). It is better to have a very modular mod system for quests so that people can easily pick flavors, that way, you have fast prototyping and could quickly spot popular quest ideas.
But yes, for AVWW and AI War there would be no point in mod support now because.. the games where not made for it. Too many things are too tightly hardcoded, I don't mean balance, I mean scripting and how quests/npc's/AI reactions/buildings work. But also the effect system is very hardcoded (now that is something i can not fathom at all)
The lack of a "spell level" variable that can be used in math functions in the AVWW spell effect xml comes to mind. But also IF this spell hits THAT spell do THIS kind of scripting. I haven't even got special ideas, I just think a good magic system needs this by default.
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On the player-base-fragmentation thing, eRe4s3r, that would be very real even if it were a purely singleplayer game: if there were 3 different big "balance mods" out there for AIW (and there would be),
Cyborg's Balance Mod and everybody else's. I don't disagree with that strategy right now for AI war, but in the future when you put it down, make sure you leave yourself something for retirement of that IP.
I see your point of view on all points, and it's rational. It just wouldn't be appropriate for a 4x.
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i've been playing and thoroughly enjoying drox for a while now.. and today i got approved on the soldak forum and was able to post up a thread of my feedback/ideas.... its rather epic (which i hope wont put everyone off from reading through it?!) but its my feedback as requested - concerning mostly the coherence and feel of the game, proper lore, long term sustained play potential and win conditions both in the individual sector and galaxy wide....
echoing something eraser said earlier in this thread i would really appreciate feedback of any kind... so i thought i would drop a link here....
http://www.soldak.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5313 (http://www.soldak.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5313)
cheers ;D
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New patch is up. 0.906
http://www.soldak.com/Drox-Operative/Patches.html
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.907 is out and Drox is becoming rather brilliant! :)
Next time you get a holiday keith i think your going to rather enjoy the developments... ;)
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It's definitely shaping up!
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Speaking of the win conditions, apparently Shadow is working on alternate win conditions for an upcoming patch. Win, win, win!
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Speaking of the win conditions, apparently Shadow is working on alternate win conditions for an upcoming patch. Win, win, win!
Speaking of an upcoming patch with alternate win conditions. ;) I just noticed a new patch is out, 0.908, with exactly that. Economic, military, diplomatic, fear, and legend winning conditions. Awesome!
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Yep, that patch was indeed made of win, pun intended. The new win conditions add a LOT of depth to the game.
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There's been a couple new patches since any last posts. It looks like the game has been drastically improved in the latest ones. Though its been several patches since I've played a Drox sector, wanting to wait until its out of beta before really getting into it. Anybody still been keeping at Drox?
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I've definitely been keeping at it. It is getting better and better. They have fixed many of the most glaring issues.
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Yea, I've been keeping up on the patch notes and each one makes me more enthusiastic about what it's becoming (though I don't think it's fundamentally changing in the ways that some folks would need it to, just a different game). Would love to dive back in but will probably wait until release. Seems like there's enough feedback coming in from players that my piling more on would probably just be more-piling ;)
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I've been enjoying this way too much lately. The game gets better and deeper with every beta patch.
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I've been enjoying this way too much lately. The game gets better and deeper with every beta patch.
Yea, it's at the top of my to-play list, but I keep deferring because I think I'll enjoy it more if I wait for the official release.
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I've been enjoying this way too much lately. The game gets better and deeper with every beta patch.
Yea, it's at the top of my to-play list, but I keep deferring because I think I'll enjoy it more if I wait for the official release.
You likely will. SO MUCH have changed lately. I'm finding it to be so much deeper now too with race choices, play style and damage types. It's quite frankly quite awesome. :)
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I am kinda glad zeh dev takes input so seriously because many things improved for the better now. Though combat is imo still a sore spot, I mean just how it feels, so floaty and nonphysical. Guess I am asking for better explosions at this point heh. That's a good thing ;)
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Posting this just for you, eRe4s3r:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/217290/
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Well with modding support I was mainly talking about the yet unannounced 4x game by Arcen :D
YEt UNANNOUNCED 4X GAME FROM ARCEN WHERE
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Posting this just for you, eRe4s3r:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/217290/
WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT!?!??? It finally got on Steam!??!?!? I must buy it again!
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Well with modding support I was mainly talking about the yet unannounced 4x game by Arcen :D
YEt UNANNOUNCED 4X GAME FROM ARCEN WHERE
He's kidding.
I mean, I'd love to make that game, but there's a lot of things to make first and it would basically be a "when there's financial stability and I can afford not breaking even on the game" situation ;) Not saying it absolutely wouldn't break even, but most of the extreme 4X fails I've seen lately appear to be due to trying to appeal to a wider audience than MoO did, so it looks like the options are "try to make a space 4X that has broad appeal, and thus make a pile of junk", "try to make a space 4X game that has the traditional audience, and accept low financial return", or "don't make space 4X game" ;)
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"when there's financial stability and I can afford not breaking even on the game" situation ;)
Translation: Next Tidalis inc around 2014 once AI war expansion 5 finishes :D
Yeah, I'm not a huuuge fan of just 4x games ("so you just sit here and poke at management screens?"). No worries.
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Well with modding support I was mainly talking about the yet unannounced 4x game by Arcen :D
YEt UNANNOUNCED 4X GAME FROM ARCEN WHERE
He's kidding.
I mean, I'd love to make that game, but there's a lot of things to make first and it would basically be a "when there's financial stability and I can afford not breaking even on the game" situation ;) Not saying it absolutely wouldn't break even, but most of the extreme 4X fails I've seen lately appear to be due to trying to appeal to a wider audience than MoO did, so it looks like the options are "try to make a space 4X that has broad appeal, and thus make a pile of junk", "try to make a space 4X game that has the traditional audience, and accept low financial return", or "don't make space 4X game" ;)
That's awfully pessimistic.
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That's awfully pessimistic.
Pessimism is quite common in my views on the business side of things, largely due to my firsthand experiences. It's a pretty narrow set of data, I admit, but it's all I've got to go on that isn't based on a wildly different situation than my own.
All that said, I really would like to make a 4X space game; MoO is one of the games that got me interested in game development in the first place. I just wouldn't do it expecting a profit, because I think driving for that would inevitably compromise the design principles in a way that doesn't happen in more popular (or popular-izeable) genres.
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If you can successfully create an experience where the universe feels alive- it plots, it schemes, it operates with and without you- what audience are you alienating? AI War isn't that far off from creating that kind of a feeling, although it is a separate game. I don't want to derail this, but I think it would be a huge tragedy to write this off as a failure before you even start.
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I'm not writing it off as a failure, I just wouldn't bank on it succeeding financially. I think it would succeed in terms of providing a fun experience to the audience who actually wants that kind of game. If I thought it was hopeless I wouldn't bother talking about it :)
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Is anyone from this thread still playing this?
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Is anyone from this thread still playing this?
Fox is (I think), I would be but I'm on a serious AI War kick so all my other games are suffering neglect atm.
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Absolutely! Not daily, but I'm most definitely playing it. Almost reached lvl 50 on my main ship.
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Absolutely! Not daily, but I'm most definitely playing it. Almost reached lvl 50 on my main ship.
Are patches moving in right (from your perspective) direction?
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Are patches moving in right (from your perspective) direction?
Without doubt. The games has gone from "Wow, interesting idea, but meh overall" to "Holy crap where did the hours go?" Every patch fixes annoying bugs, balances things that are out of whack and introduces new functions and mechanics that makes the game more interesting. Combat is still rather uninnovative, but it's an ARPG, what do you expect? I play as a Shadow, and as such I use a cloak&dagger style with cloaking devices, bombs and long range weapons to exploit my damage bonus while cloaked. (Surprise attack). That alone makes it a lot more interesting.
I've found that the political game is much more fun now with so many ways to win (or lose!) and so many things to do. The only thing I wish for now is to have the "Fear" win condition nerfed further. It's so easy to get a fear win when you're actually aiming for military win. :P
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Thank you for the feedback. I might give it a try then. How far does it feel from finished game? (As opposed to beta)
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Thank you for the feedback. I might give it a try then. How far does it feel from finished game? (As opposed to beta)
Aside from the Fear issue, it could very well be retail now. But I know Shadow (dev) have a few things in his pocket he wants out before he sheds the beta status and goes live. Such as cargo bay drop rates for instance. They're abysmally low at the moment. There's also a lot of interface work to do that have been in the backburner so far. But other than that, it's definitely a worthy game (in my opinion of course)
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I would definitely be playing this if I had surplus gaming time, but as it is I've been waiting for it to get out of beta. Been following the changes, and very excited :)
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After reading here I got it yesterday. My AI War time will suffer a reduction :D
Game states it's in beta but from what I played it looks quite finished. And it's fun :D
I think I don't have enough stats but thats normal - all the toys I find I can't use.
Only actual issue is that I can't get my hands on additional cargo bay. And I failed miserably on my first operation due to not being allied with the winner - but that was my fault for playing it out badly.
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I'll buy it right away, even though I don't like the look of it. But the basic ideas sound right, and the company certainly deserves it (I loved Din's Curse).
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After reading here I got it yesterday. My AI War time will suffer a reduction :D
Game states it's in beta but from what I played it looks quite finished. And it's fun :D
I think I don't have enough stats but thats normal - all the toys I find I can't use.
Only actual issue is that I can't get my hands on additional cargo bay. And I failed miserably on my first operation due to not being allied with the winner - but that was my fault for playing it out badly.
Cargo bays are something of a crutch at present. The drop rate is bugged, so it's very rare to get any. It's about to be fixed up ahead.
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I find cargo bays at a reasonable rate. Must be bad luck for you gents!
Edit: BUT! Never right-click on a CB when you already have three additional ones equipped. The fourth will simply disappear.
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Edit: BUT! Never right-click on a CB when you already have three additional ones equipped. The fourth will simply disappear.
This should be fixed in version 0.919.
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Edit: BUT! Never right-click on a CB when you already have three additional ones equipped. The fourth will simply disappear.
This should be fixed in version 0.919.
Yup, it was in the 919 patch notes.
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I only noticed the patches after quitting. A bit strange of a game, to notify you when you press EXIT rather than upon starting.
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As far as I'm aware, the game does not notify you of patches at all. You have to find them and install them manually.
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It offers to open the Patches page when you exit.
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It offers to open the Patches page when you exit.
Odd. Mine just displays a page that gives you the option to go to the website, forums or patch page (or naturally, exit). This it does regardless of wether there is a patch or not.
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Yeah, that's what it does.. kinda counter-intuitive, you would not think "exit" leads you to the patch-page. Especially since that assumes people use exit.. and not ALT + F4 ;P
So anyway.. how is the beta progression this far? Anything major that changed?
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I took the plunge and got into the beta a while ago and have been enjoying it a lot so far.
I posted this on the Soldak forum and thought some of you would find it amusing as well:
http://www.soldak.com/forums/showthread.php?t=8856
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It's out officially now.
I haven't played it since very early in the beta, so it will be interesting to see how much has changed.
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Oh, I've missed pretty much all the updates since the Bounty Hunter update. Waiting for it to get to Steam now ^^
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Same here. Waiting for Steam.
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Well you might be waiting a while, but hopefully not. It took Steam something like 2 years to accept Din's Curse (Soldak's other big game).
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Yeah, they were insanely slow with that one.
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Yeah, they were insanely slow with that one.
It may have been slowness, or they may simply have been unwilling to offer him a distribution agreement for the game. DC is one of the better games I've played but their internal evaluation teams may have been put off by the graphics or something like that.
That said, with DoP and DC on steam already and probably having done not-terribly in terms of revenue (at least compared to a lot of the other stuff that's been getting on steam; I think their business model works more by keeping per-title costs down rather than requiring high per-title revenue) and Drox having a lot less of the potential put-offs (at least graphically) ... yea, it seems likely that it'll happen. When, is another matter, but I hope it's soon because it's an awesome game that more people need to play ;)
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When, is another matter, but I hope it's soon because it's an awesome game that more people need to play ;)
Absolutely :P
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I wanted to pull the Shadow into my alliance, and I saw they were willing to send a gift to one of the races in my alliance so I delivered it hoping to help relations somewhat.
Turns out it was weapons for a rebellion, and it immediately caused civil unrest.
I then moved my ship and ran into a nearby mine, I survived but some ship offering a contract was caught in the blast and destroyed. As soon as that ship was destroyed, the civil unrest immediately turned into civil war.
"WTF DID I JUST DO???!!!" :P
This game is fun. :D
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I wanted to pull the Shadow into my alliance, and I saw they were willing to send a gift to one of the races in my alliance so I delivered it hoping to help relations somewhat.
Turns out it was weapons for a rebellion, and it immediately caused civil unrest.
I then moved my ship and ran into a nearby mine, I survived but some ship offering a contract was caught in the blast and destroyed. As soon as that ship was destroyed, the civil unrest immediately turned into civil war.
"WTF DID I JUST DO???!!!" :P
This game is fun. :D
That sounds an awful lot like Drox XD
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So, what is the game like now that its out? I remember reading this thread awhile ago and there was some mention of beta then.
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So, what is the game like now that its out? I remember reading this thread awhile ago and there was some mention of beta then.
It's a lot better than it was when I first played it. The multiple victory conditions (and loss conditions) for sectors and the race-specific slots for the player ship are two big examples. There's also more insight into the quasi-4X side of things though it's still obviously in the background. The weapon balance is way better (lasers vs ballistics vs missiles all have compelling pros and cons).
All in all I don't think anyone who really didn't like it before would like it now, but it's a substantially better game now. I've had a fair bit of fun with it :)
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Argh, I don't have enough time! I really want to get back into Drox now that it's gold!
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Argh, I don't have enough time! I really want to get back into Drox now that it's gold!
I would say that it'll still be there when you're ready, but with Soldak games in all likelihood it will have run off to a deeper part of the dungeonsector and built a world-ending device while all your potential allies have gotten into some kind of galactic war.
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Argh, I don't have enough time! I really want to get back into Drox now that it's gold!
I would say that it'll still be there when you're ready, but with Soldak games in all likelihood it will have run off to a deeper part of the dungeonsector and built a world-ending device while all your potential allies have gotten into some kind of galactic war.
Yeah, that's what I'm afraid of :P
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Just tried the 1.000 version (retail). It's a lot slicker than it used to be, and some things are very streamlined (such as it's actually feasible to run a "carrier" setup with fighters, bombers and interceptors. Previously, that was such a mess.
I like it! Will probably sink a few more hours into this :P
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Bounty Hunters can be pure evil sometimes.
Also, there was a zombie infestation spreading among the planets of my allies. I fixed it, but soon after I got a mission to deliver zombies to my enemies. :P
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So what the hell happened to this game? We had this huge thread on it that lasted for month when it was in beta, and everyone was really exciting for release.
Now it's been released and nobody has talked about it for like 4 months.
Does it just suck? Gets boring quickly? Better RPGs?
What's the deal.
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I like it but I haven't had it for that long yet. Maybe there's just not enough to it to keep playing forever.
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I enjoy it quite a bit, I just don't have much time to play it.
I think it's an example of taking a base genre (action-RPG), adding genuine innovation ("living" backdrop, player influence on that), and executing it pretty well. I don't know if it ultimately was my "best game of 2012", but it's probably in the top 5 or so. Not that I really had enough time to do a fair survey of the field.
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Out of curiosity, what was your best game of 2012?
Inb4 Ancient Shadows :DDD
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I'd have to think about that ;)
I think AS was good, but I made it more for you guys (well, and the money) than I did for myself. I'm more of an RPG person.
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So what the hell happened to this game? We had this huge thread on it that lasted for month when it was in beta, and everyone was really exciting for release.
Now it's been released and nobody has talked about it for like 4 months.
Does it just suck? Gets boring quickly? Better RPGs?
What's the deal.
I'm guessing it's because of Valley 2, Shattered Haven, and a bunch of the other stuff that's been happening recently.
I've been playing it a lot since then, but I didn't post because I was the last post and I'm averse to double posting because a lot of forums/boards have rules against that. :P
Let's see, one time I allied myself with the Dryads and one other race (I think it was Human) and was trying to take out the remaining races not in my alliance or bring them in. I decided to destroy one. The Dryads had one or two worlds in this particular system and didn't have enough to attack, so I got the idea of speed rushing the worlds and doing sabotage on all the enemy worlds in that system to see if that would reduce ship production.
Interestingly enough it did work. After I did went around once doing that the number of hostile race ships went down considerably and I was going to build up the Dryads until they attacked or the hostile race's colonies were weak enough for me to take them out myself, whatever came first. However this did have an unintended side effect.
All of a sudden there was this absurd buildup of random mob ships on that side of the system where I crippled all the colonies. I was going to go take out one of the hostile race's worlds, but I was halfway over there when I started getting messages that the mobs were taking out those colonies already! I ended up running into this mass blob of mobs and turned back to get back to the two friendly Dryad worlds there to restock on shield boosts and repair, but when I got back the mobs followed me and curb-stomped both those friendly colonies as I was doing that!
I just made a run for the jump gate and jumped out of that system, and shortly afterward the system went white, as in none of the races had colonies in that system anymore it was all just mob clusterfuck.
In the end I did succeed in getting all the other races allied or destroyed and got a diplomatic victory, but that specific system was pretty much dead to me for the rest of that game. :D
EDIT:
I meant system not sector! Corrected.
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In the end I did succeed in getting all the other races allied or destroyed and got a diplomatic victory, but that specific sector was pretty much dead to me for the rest of that game. :D
An interesting twist :)
But by "sector" do you mean "that star and everything on the same map as the star" or "the whole sector of everything connected by wormholes/stargates"?
I wasn't aware of any persistence of "old sectors" in the latter sense; if that's been added I'm very interested to know :)
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In the end I did succeed in getting all the other races allied or destroyed and got a diplomatic victory, but that specific sector was pretty much dead to me for the rest of that game. :D
An interesting twist :)
But by "sector" do you mean "that star and everything on the same map as the star" or "the whole sector of everything connected by wormholes/stargates"?
I wasn't aware of any persistence of "old sectors" in the latter sense; if that's been added I'm very interested to know :)
Gah, I mean system. Sometimes I get the terminology mixed up.
I have played co-op and sometimes it drives my buddies nuts when I mix those two terms up. :D
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Gah, I mean system. Sometimes I get the terminology mixed up.
I have played co-op and sometimes it drives my buddies nuts when I mix those two terms up. :D
Ah, ok, I figured something like that ;)
But I wonder why the monsters didn't spill over into neighboring systems.
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I know race ships go between systems pretty easily, but I'm not sure if the monsters do so very much if at all.
I've noticed each system seems to have it's own set of monster types that make up most of the monsters in that system, which seems to suggest that monsters stay in their home systems for the most part. If they do bleed over then I haven't seen it that much and I haven't noticed boss monsters moving between systems either.
Perhaps monsters lack the ability to use starlanes?
Race ships on the other hand, do seem to go between systems a lot and the traffic appears to have an actual affect on the game even if it isn't military. I have noticed that races that are friendly to each other do send ships to each others worlds, and if these ships can go back and forth easily without getting destroyed then their relationship seem to improve more quickly.
I have occasionally seen diplomat ships and other such ships passing between different race's worlds, and if I start following them and escorting them through bad spots that they otherwise wouldn't survive through, then it seems to help things along.
It seems to help when I want an alliance between two races and don't want to spend too much on positive rumors. It can go both ways though as diplomats do mess up and "accidentally insult" the other guy.
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The game says that one of the "victory options" is to make all the races afraid of you by completing big quests and killing race ships?
Can somebody explain to me how that works? How do you even check how afraid someone is of you?
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This victory option is listed as fear victory on victory status screen.
You don't make any particular race fear you for this - you simply kill their ships and do some missions that increase that fear ratingg while avoiding missions that reduce it. Which missions do what exactly I'm not sure.
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I've been meaning to play it ever since it got released, but other things (and games) kept popping up to push it back. I'll be getting into it eventually though, just not sure when heh.
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I'll check this out. The whole dynamic world aspect of their games always intrigued me, but I never really cared for the art style and interface in the previous ones.
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"Dude, I found like a... giant... space... potato... thing..."
http://i.imgur.com/tA4bhEy.jpg
"Oh dear, I think I messed things up pretty bad!"
http://i.imgur.com/hj4JBO5.jpg
"I think I need a bigger ship."
http://i.imgur.com/CxemDd9.jpg
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"Dude, I found like a... giant... space... potato... thing..."
http://i.imgur.com/tA4bhEy.jpg
"Oh dear, I think I messed things up pretty bad!"
http://i.imgur.com/hj4JBO5.jpg
"I think I need a bigger ship."
http://i.imgur.com/CxemDd9.jpg
I can see why screenshots on their web site don't show the interface...
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I offered and posted PSD templates to base an GUI overhaul on (would have saved them 33% of the work) and they.. ignored them ;) At least some of my suggestions were implemented. Sadly it never changed that the GUI is really really ugly.
And dat font isn't a looker either. I actually hated the font most of all in the GUI of Drox, it's so badly formated and type-setted... argh, my artsy brain wants to rant... *deep breathes*
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I offered and posted PSD templates to base an GUI overhaul on (would have saved them 33% of the work) and they.. ignored them ;) At least some of my suggestions were implemented. Sadly it never changed that the GUI is really really ugly.
And dat font isn't a looker either. I actually hated the font most of all in the GUI of Drox, it's so badly formated and type-setted... argh, my artsy brain wants to rant... *deep breathes*
It looks like the exact font they use in all their other games. Do they not know that different fonts exist? And you nailed it on the type-setting.
These little things... they matter.
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Yeah these little things.. they do indeed matter ,)
Sadly more often than not, when I go somewhere and post that I am regarded as a smart-ass and ignored ;) Well my mockup is still here http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,10939.msg108160.html#msg108160
Anyhow.. doesn't change the fact that it is a pretty unique game. So I won't hold it in bad opinion just because of that. Zeh dev made the game he wanted to make, and it is by far one of the most unique ones I ever played. Not just unique, it has some great ideas ,)
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Yea, we indies can be tough to talk into making a game that doesn't cause eyebleed ;)
Us: "Hey, we made AI War!"
Response: "It looks awful, get an artist!"
Us: "Hey, we made Tidalis, with a fulltime artist!"
Response: "We still don't like how it looks!"
Us: "Hey, we made AVWW!"
Response: "(expletives deleted). Get some artists!"
Us: "Hey, we made Valley2, with a whole art studio working on it!"
Response: "And it looks like they faithfully reproduced the (expletives deleted)!"
Us: "Hey, we made Shattered Haven, with an art studio working in a different style!"
Response: "And it looks like a Commodore 64 game, how could you charge $10 for that?" (that's a paraphrase of a GoG commenter, fyi)
Why, exactly, should we keep trying on that particular issue? ;)
We still are trying, it's just pretty amusing.
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I sense a pro-tip for any would be indie game designers out there. Go into art not programming/game design and you can make a game that passes the million units sold mark too. Who needs good coding/design anyways ;)
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I sense a pro-tip for any would be indie game designers out there. Go into art not programming/game design and you can make a game that passes the million units sold mark too. Who needs good coding/design anyways ;)
Customers don't see your code.
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I sense a pro-tip for any would be indie game designers out there. Go into art not programming/game design and you can make a game that passes the million units sold mark too. Who needs good coding/design anyways ;)
I know people who pursued programming degrees to get into games, and I know people who pursued art degrees to get into games.
Mostly, the former category has had an easier time income-wise.
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Gameplay > Graphics. But there are times when the graphics actually detract from the gameplay experience. Some games are just painful on the eyes, rather than just "ugly". I personally don't like the graphic style of AVWW, for instance, but with the contrast mod, it's not painful on the eyes.
There are, however, games out there that are just plain OUCH on the eyeballs.
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I still remember version 1.000 of AI War ;p
Additive blending..................... ;D
To think how the game would have looked without some people complaining... hehe
Also AI War only got a proper font much later than 1.000 too. And only because people kept complaining ;)
That's why Arcengames rules. You listened and fixed things.
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That said, it never hurts to have pretty graphics ;)
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Gameplay > Graphics.
For fun value, certainly. But financially the "% of people who bounce straight off your steam store page" appears to primarily depend on your trailer and/or screenshots (and if you have no trailer it's quite likely a bounce regardless).
Once you get past that, then it's a matter of "does the idea sound interesting?" and such.
To think how the game would have looked without some people complaining... hehe
And we greatly appreciate your complaining. You're an olympic art complainer, in my book ;)
My frustration is with the hordes of people who will accept no accountability for their comments but just blast whatever visual style we do.
In your case, if we pursue the issue you'll actually have a conversation with us about it (albeit sometimes with a hammer in hand). This is often helpful to us, or at least amusing.
With the numeric majority of the art-bashers I've seen personally it's just recreational abuse and they would derive at least as much personal pleasure from our failure as they would from our success.
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There are a lot of games out there and screenshots are the first thing people see of them, often acting as a quick vetting process because in most cases the graphics and gameplay quality are roughly equal. There are a few outliers in either direction but they're far lower than the number of games that follow this rule (if you can't think of many bad, ugly games try browsing XBLIG) because often all parts of the game receive roughly equal amounts of effort and skill.
Anyway, I had a sector in Drox where I was fighting for one race or another and suddenly the Shadow showed up. I don't know if their colonies were cloaked or something but suddenly they're everywhere, have like 10x as many ships as the other races and keep gaining ground. Fortunately I managed an econ victory shortly after that. In another sector I was fighting the Drakk and they had a lot of high level defensive techs so killing them was a sloooooooow, arduous process and when I killed one colony another sprung up elsewhere. The constant nuking of colonies drove my fear rating up and so I won the Fear victory before making any real inroads against the enemy.
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Speaking of what bounces people of steam pages, I think AI War is one of these games that will never look good on a screenshot or in motion, no offense. But even if all the graphical suggestions were put in (I am talking engine trails, in-sector nebula areas, smooth lightning done with localized glow sprites, in-sector ambient "drift" of debris and particles and color mapping per sector, localized de-saturation and over-saturation filter) then the game would still not look good on a screenshot that's zoomed out even partially. Though it'd look neat in motion up-close. In the end, it would be fluff only but it'd potentially look neat.
In the end, if you ever are bored and want to improve graphics in AI War, there are still things you could do. Localized dynamic glow sprites to simulate light cast by objects (maybe even a blend mode that works differently to normla additive) and fog/nebula that drifts through sectors. Some nicer color filters (tint) and shaders (localized Distortion or Blur) or maybe even full blown engine trails that drift off depending on which direction the space weather blows... hehe
Point is, there is never a lack of ideas for improving AI War in terms of graphics.
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I'd like to improve AI War's graphics, but I'm actually really weak on graphics programming. Chris is pretty strong at it, so it works out, but you'd probably get frustrated trying to work with me on that because I'd be saying things like "amblu-collu-shad-what- what does that mean?" and "Chris, why can we not draw 200 rectangles 60 times a second in 2013?" ;)
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I don't mind the UI of Drox as much as the graphics and "effects" themselves. I mean, okay great, I understand you can't get a full-time artist and GFX designer blah blah blah, but can't you AT LEAST put things into scale?
For Heaven's sake, the ships are often bigger than the planets. The missiles are often bigger than the ships. It's really wonky and it just rips the beams out from under the 4th wall.
I swear to God, the concept is great, and the execution is even well-done. If this exact game (in terms of coding) was made with Corporate production values, it would be a commercial success.
Unfortunately, with corporate production values, also comes corporate decision-making, and it would probably ruin what makes the game good in the process so...It's a tradeoff I suppose. I just wish he had the money to hire better artists and graphics designers.
Off-Topic question: I see sometimes that I unlock technologies which I can trade with other races in a barter. I remember one time I opened up a menu that allowed me to see which research objects I had unlocked. Does anyone know how I did that?
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I'd like to improve AI War's graphics, but I'm actually really weak on graphics programming. Chris is pretty strong at it, so it works out, but you'd probably get frustrated trying to work with me on that because I'd be saying things like "amblu-collu-shad-what- what does that mean?" and "Chris, why can we not draw 200 rectangles 60 times a second in 2013?" ;)
Yeah but it is just 2d effects, so it wouldn't be an ambient occlusion shader. ;) But I couldn't explain how to properly implement it either. Since AI War runs on Unity 3 where I am a bit at a loss how the engine renders specific things and how you do internal stuff like how to tell the game where a shot hit or where the front or back of an ship is. Or how specifically you do the modules on ships. (It would be an idea how to do glow effects as light simulation just.. different) ;p
And then there is the question "Does it improve gameplay" which mostly would be a NO ;)
But I could think of a lot of cool stuff you could still do with AI War, especially a sort of "day / night" system except only the concept is like that, it won't actually get darker, just foggy/nebula'ish units activate lights and specific search lights would need to be used to spot ships. But all this just as an localized random dynamic weather effect not a full blown sector wide thing.
Also some kind of general glow effect for explosions that spawns on top of them (and the ships around) but blends slightly different to additive, so it appears as if a larger area is illuminated, sort of like a area based expanding and shrinking tint+20% brighter filter maybe.. mhh)
Well, needless to say, it would all be complicated to do...
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Amusingly, you could remove the ability to zoom in past icons and it wouldn't change the game for me at all. All that matters are the icons and the UI in AIW. The icons are great IMO. The UI could use tweaking, and the control scheme a rather extensive rework. But I'm really a UI guy so I tend to notice UI stuff a lot.
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Amusingly, you could remove the ability to zoom in past icons and it wouldn't change the game for me at all. All that matters are the icons and the UI in AIW. The icons are great IMO. The UI could use tweaking, and the control scheme a rather extensive rework. But I'm really a UI guy so I tend to notice UI stuff a lot.
Ironically my greatest change to AI War would not be to the graphics, but the logic. From what I understand, each individual unit makes its own decisions on where to be and what to do. Then there's an "squad" level decision making, and a "global" decision making. If I understand it correctly.
This is all really cool in theory, but in practice you have 1,000 Fighters all having to think for themselves, and who all basically come to the same conclusion, meanwhile obliterating your processing power for no reason. I think this is why when you get about ~700 ships on a single planet the whole game starts to lag, even on great computers. Each unit has its own decision-making process, and this is completely unnecessary. Most of the time it makes no difference at all whether 1 Fighter or 1,000 Fighters decide to do. In the end they'll probably all attack the same target or general area. I think we could just remove the "individual decision making" mechanic, and replace it with a more squad-based approach. For a game with such "humble" graphics, AI War should not lag AT ALL imo.
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There's not really any squad AI. Even the global level is basically nonexistent from the perspective of those fighters.
And ships of the same type (FighterI, for example) controlled by the same player within a certain range of one another literally share targeting data so it doesn't have to do the full scan and sort of potential targets. We added that in early 2010 and it made a pretty huge difference.
Much of the remaining "normal time" processing (leaving aside spikes like 200 photon lances doing hit checks against 1000 enemy targets once every frame) is simply from doing the movement/everything-else-that-happens-every-frame checks for each individual unit, as well as the less-frequent-but-still-frequent stuff like checking what it's protected by, etc.
To get that down, and as far as removing individual decision making entirely, we basically already have that option: lower cap scales. On the lowest setting it's basically like every fighter is really 8 fighters, but simulated as one ship.
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Anyway, I had a sector in Drox where I was fighting for one race or another and suddenly the Shadow showed up. I don't know if their colonies were cloaked or something but suddenly they're everywhere, have like 10x as many ships as the other races and keep gaining ground. Fortunately I managed an econ victory shortly after that. In another sector I was fighting the Drakk and they had a lot of high level defensive techs so killing them was a sloooooooow, arduous process and when I killed one colony another sprung up elsewhere. The constant nuking of colonies drove my fear rating up and so I won the Fear victory before making any real inroads against the enemy.
I have noticed the Shadow will either really sink or really fly in my games. A lot of times they get picked on by most of the other races and get killed off early, but every now and then they pull off a very devastating win like the one you describe.
I also notice they're sometimes a bit tricky to keep in your alliance when you're going for bigger diplomatic wins, as they sometimes flip out and suddenly decide they want one of your member races dead. If I'm going for diplomatic win with a lot of races I often try to pull the Shadow in last if I'm going to at all.
I have run into similar situations going against races with high defense or higher techs in general. It often helps to get more races hostile with them (the more the better) to wear them down somewhat.
Another thing that also helps is espionage. If a race has better tech than everyone else then sometimes you can get a lot of nice tech out of them by going in, quickly stealing it via espionage, getting out, then selling them to friendly races to even the odds a bit. Also, if their advantage is mostly defensive and you can get your allies more even with them on that then the friendly ships will be able to hostile ships occupied longer, so if they're still hard to crack afterwards then you can follow up with some sabotage to soften them.
Of course, occasionally a bunch of ships from a "high tech" race get destroyed and you get lucky and:
http://i.imgur.com/oQqFzEq.jpg
"It's Christmas!" :P
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Man, I really like this game. The more I play it, the more I love it. The higher level you go, the more intense things get.
The concept is just so unbelievably genius, and the execution is VERY well-done.
Just imagine if you took Drox Operative's concepts and mechanics, and gave them Starsector's graphics and battle system. HOLY CRAP. It would be the best game of the decade.
I swear, if I won the lottery tomorrow, I would buy out Soldak and Fractalsoftworks and merge them together. I would force them to make this game.
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I uh, dont actually see that depth going into drox.
Like I feel the game has huge issues. Its design seems all over the place. Also, missiles are useful until like level 2, at which point lasers have a minor window of useful. Somewhere around level 40? you hit the point again where beams are the only viable weapon type.
IT seems the only way to actually run a sustainable tank is to pump shield recharge consumables. (and for a while, until I got items to fix this, I had to run energy recharge consumables to shoot anything for any amount of time)
Also, how ships that arent drakk manage to keep their ship running baffles me.
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Playing 1.06: I restarted and I've been using missiles till level 9ish, as the Utopian (computer) ship. They've also tweaked balance, might be worth retrying, Lancefighter.
Without going out of your way, you always have a 95% tohit chance, and if you don't, the booster will take care of that, so missiles always hit if they don't run into a missile swarm first. Angle seems key for taking down certain enemies.
I've been running as the smallest ship class for most of the entire first sector, thanks to a lack of engines and thrusters. My general setup was:
Heavy: Drive, Power Plant (or Armor if not available very early on), best missile I could find
Medium: Deflectors, Medium Armor (critically useful), Manual Ram Accelerator/Battery Bank (when energy costs for missiles go up to 30/shot)c
Light: Battery Recharger, maybe one other green module, crew.
Keep your speed up, talk to planets for the recharge, and you can do a decent job of clearing things out. It also might just be RNG, but the "small" maps may be easier than the tiny, with less of a level jump for adjacent systems.
I do need to keep another weapon on hand for when a "200% explosion resistance" boss comes up.
My main complaint is that the bigger maps are, the smaller they feel. Basically, exploring feels like punishment rather than reward thanks to excessive fog of war. After you've seen them, derelicts, storage, pocket dimensions, ancient recharge stations should be marked on the map until they no longer exist. When you're in a new system, you should at least be able to see the locations of the planets on the full map screen, even if you can't fill in the details. Detailed exploration should be encouraged not required. Even if you're allied with a race, you cannot actually help defend their planets until you stumble around in the fog to find them.
I can see this getting more interesting later on, but the constant exploration with no shortcuts makes me perfer Space Rangers 1/2 atm.
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Wingflier: As far as unit scales goes = Representative gameplay. You didn't seem to complain about, say, Space Empires IV where every ship is the size of a planet and you can stack an infinite number of them on the same square.
It's not intended to look exactly like "real life", because then every system would be impractically HUGE. Imagine the size of a star, compared to your spaceship. Now imagine how fun it would be to find a single ship in a system that large.
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I can see this getting more interesting later on, but the constant exploration with no shortcuts makes me perfer Space Rangers 1/2 atm.
This was actually my complaint. It felt like lawnmowing. There needs to be a way to reveal the map or parts of it at least.
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No shortcuts? Stargates?
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No shortcuts? Stargates?
I think they mean to revealing the system you're in. "Mowing" the fog-of-war does get old after a while. It's not a critical thing to me, but it would be a lot better if there were some power tools you could get to do better at it.
Otherwise it's kind of like harvest-moon/rune-factory where you never get a watering can that does more than one tile at once.
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I must be playing the game wrong. Because I never feel the need to "mow the shroud" at all. Maybe I do fly around and look for stuff, but generally I enter a system, fly around the outskirts to reveal the exits, and then the rest of the exploration pretty much does itself as I perform missions in the system. The first populated planet might take a bit to find though.
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i end up doing a lot of mowing when I am trying to wage war, or find a planet in the system.
Systems are just so big.. Finding gates isnt too difficult, since you can find them via outskirts fairly easily and consistently (even flying safely off the edge if need be)
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I was referring to the jump-gate thingies though. The ones where you can instantly traverse the "galaxy".
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Well, those are pretty hard to find too
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Usually if I want to know where the planets and starlanes are I watch for where the traffic is going. Ships tend to fly to and from both starlanes and planets with colonies, so in a well populated system you can often get some idea of where planets are pretty quickly.
It doesn't work on empty planets or systems without that many colonies of course.
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I can see this getting more interesting later on, but the constant exploration with no shortcuts makes me perfer Space Rangers 1/2 atm.
This was actually my complaint. It felt like lawnmowing. There needs to be a way to reveal the map or parts of it at least.
Agreed. Maybe if you could barter with the races to reveal their planets and any area they've traveled for technology (or if they like you enough they'll give it all free). I mean hell, you can trade them planet data, why can't they trade you planet data? It would also be nice if, hidden on each planet somewhere was a "wide reveal" beacon, that just revealed the whole system if you stumbled across it. Then sometimes you wouldn't have to waste so much time scouting when you'd rather actually be playing the game. Maybe pirates could guard it to make it more challenging since they know new travelers will be searching for it. At any rate, I'll probably make a suggestion in the Drox forums about this, because I do find it to be somewhat fun-ruining at times, and I've only ever played on TINY systems. I can't imagine how frustrating it would be on a Huge one.
My only other complaint is that you can't turn up the difficulty of the factions themselves. Winning the game via the races seems super easy so far. This is because they are all basically neutral with you at the start. So you just find the most powerful race (usually Utopian for me), and do some quests for them until you can get into their favor, and then the rest is smooth sailing. If you can just ally with the top two most powerful races every game, and get them to like each other via rumors, you can basically win every game with no problems. This is way too easy to do in my experience. It would be nice if each race had a random disposition towards you at the start, so every game wasn't just doing the same thing over and over.
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If you're finding the game too easy, then it might help to turn up the pace setting. As with Din's Curse pacing is more or less how you control world difficulty.
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If you're finding the game too easy, then it might help to turn up the pace setting. As with Din's Curse pacing is more or less how you control world difficulty.
Ah nice. I didn't realize that's how it worked. It's nice that you can make the monsters nasty, but I'm looking to make the factions a bit nastier too :D
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If you're finding the game too easy, then it might help to turn up the pace setting. As with Din's Curse pacing is more or less how you control world difficulty.
Ah nice. I didn't realize that's how it worked. It's nice that you can make the monsters nasty, but I'm looking to make the factions a bit nastier too :D
I guess more specifically, setting a faster pacing might offset the fact that you're playing on tiny sectors.
Since you mentioned that you're playing only using tiny sectors and you can usually just ally with a powerful race and ride them to the top, it sounds like the game events are going too slowly to have enough of an effect.
The strategy of simply allying with the most powerful race to win is often impeded by the fact that larger and more powerful races tend to eventually get more internal problems over time. Often times factions that control more planets and have more stuff in general will eventually get more civil unrest, spreading conditions like disease, and other forms of internal decay just because they have more stuff to get messed up.
Since your playing using tiny sectors, it could be that this doesn't really kick in quickly enough or often enough to matter just because there's less planets/stuff to be had.
Turning up the pacing might allow such conditions to progress quickly enough to start matter at that scale.
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So you're saying that I should try "Huge" Sectors first, and see how I like that? I am a bit disgruntled by the fact that in order to play this mode, I have to do so much pointless exploring which is (in an RPG) a real waste of time. But from what you make it sound like, the game has its own specific mechanisms to make larger empires more fragile, so in the correct scenario, perhaps the game would be more unpredictable and exciting.
I've got another question though, I sometimes see these "Virus" or "Infection" races, which are like (from the description) barely sentient, anti-life species which usually only start with one planet. From the description, it sounds like if they ever established a foothold on the game, they would spread massive chaos and simply destroy everything in their path (like a virus), but since they only start with 1 planet, and have bad relations, they typically get wiped out almost instantly. Has anyone seen one of these races (such as the Talon) be successful? How did it happen?
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So you're saying that I should try "Huge" Sectors first, and see how I like that? I am a bit disgruntled by the fact that in order to play this mode, I have to do so much pointless exploring which is (in an RPG) a real waste of time. But from what you make it sound like, the game has its own specific mechanisms to make larger empires more fragile, so in the correct scenario, perhaps the game would be more unpredictable and exciting.
Not really. I tend to find sectors larger than "normal" to be too large.
Personally I usually play on small sectors, though sometimes I turn up the pacing to compensate for the fact that they're small and that usually works out pretty well and allows more unpredictable things to happen without having to up sector size.
I don't usually play on tiny, but I'm assuming the same "fix" can apply.
I've got another question though, I sometimes see these "Virus" or "Infection" races, which are like (from the description) barely sentient, anti-life species which usually only start with one planet. From the description, it sounds like if they ever established a foothold on the game, they would spread massive chaos and simply destroy everything in their path (like a virus), but since they only start with 1 planet, and have bad relations, they typically get wiped out almost instantly. Has anyone seen one of these races (such as the Talon) be successful? How did it happen?
I've had it happen a couple times, but it's not often that they get much of a foothold unless there is other stuff happening at the same time that favors them. I've only seen it happen if they can reach a bunch of free worlds without colonies early on or the other races don't decide to attack them or are weakened for some reason.
Usually, like nine times out of ten, they just end up being a temporary distraction until all the other races gang up on them and kill them off.
On the other hand, when they do show up they can sometimes come back multiple times after they get wiped out, so they do get more chances to get started than a normal race does, especially in longer games. However, as mentioned above the chances of them gaining a foothold each time they emerge is rather low, so they're a bit quantity over quality in that sense.
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Yes.. On a whim my group (was 3 at the time) decided to support and babysit one of them. It uh. It steamrolled literally everything after it got a few planets.
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Yes.. On a whim my group (was 3 at the time) decided to support and babysit one of them. It uh. It steamrolled literally everything after it got a few planets.
Interesting...perhaps a good way to win the game if you can keep them alive.
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The Talon and the Overlord do stay pretty angry at most other races pretty consistently, which is nice if you can prop them up and want to wipe other races out.
Also, I'm not entirely sure about this, but I have noticed that they sometimes carry some nice stuff to buy if they stick around a bit. I don't know if that's consistent at all, but if it is that would be something else to make them an attractive option.
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One of the special races also has neutral relations with monsters. As in, it can expand infinitely without monsters shooting down colonyships. Which is kinda big.
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One of the special races also has neutral relations with monsters. As in, it can expand infinitely without monsters shooting down colonyships. Which is kinda big.
Hmm, remember which one that is off-hand? I'd like to see that for myself.
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K, just tried my first game on a "Large" map, as opposed to "Tiny", which is my default size.
I have to admit it's a lot better so far. You have far less control over what's going on, and feel much more like a pawn in a huge chess match than someone who can just go around manipulating the races as you see fit. I've already had one race break a non-aggression pact with me because I was (inadvertently) helping their sworn enemies, simply because as I was exploring the galaxy (UGH SO TEDIOUS) their enemies happened to be the only race that could help me. It's the first time EVER that I've ever lost that much relation with someone, and I wasn't even doing it on purpose.
Seems a lot more like the way the game was meant to be played, which makes one wonder why "Tiny" is the default size. Oh well, I'll keep playing and let you know. I've been playing for about an hour and have discovered 8 or so planets. It looks like there's probably about 30-40 in all and many of the races are already at war. It looks like it's going to be an epic game.
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because as I was exploring the galaxy (UGH SO TEDIOUS)
Hmm, perhaps you could hire somebody to play MP so they can mow all the shroud for you while you're off doing interesting things ;)
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Probably the fog of war is why they don't default it that way. Honestly, I think if the entire star system you're in was revealed right from the start, it wouldn't detract from the game and would really just add to it. That fog felt like a holdover from fantasy style games that didn't belong in the sci-fi setting. Both from a gameplay perspective and the mere fact that your sensors OUGHT to detect where planets are. Hell just looking out the window should, not like there's a dungeon or even walls to block the view.
There would still be exploration region to region in finding the star connections. Heh and it seems the fog topic riled me up a wee bit ;)
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The fog does help you know where you've been and where you haven't. But I'd much prefer some kind of radar system that would work at some range and tell you "chunk of monsters here" or "lootable there" or whatever.
If your sensor package gets knocked out, then going mostly blind is fine.
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There is a 'radar' stat. I'm pretty sure it does absolutely nothing.
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There is a 'radar' stat. I'm pretty sure it does absolutely nothing.
I believe it makes stuff show up further away on your minimap. But we're not talking a substantial distance change relative to the system size.
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I remember the most tedious / time consuming thing from X3 being having to manually explore the galaxy. I understand "hostile" areas having to manually explore, but from within the neutral and allied zones it feels like a time sink for me. Probably why I haven't tried to start the game after my first blitz of it.
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I believe you can at least do automatic scouting in X3 if you fit out a ship with the right gear. You can even have a ship do that while you fly a different ship. In my opinion its exploration-tedium was a lot better than Drox. I just think its everything-else-tedium is a lot worse than Drox, where I'm rarely actually bored ;)
If Drox let me hire scouts to go and mark stuff on the map for me, I'd consider that a step in the right direction. Mainly though I just want a functional "points of interest" listing on the current-system-map, for the cost of some appropriate in-game resource/gear/etc.
Early exploration is fun, but after that give me the opportunity to earn some powertools that let me get to the fun parts with less mowing.
/me wonders if this is how people feel about m+c in AIW
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Metal and crystal are much-maligned in your eyes, and I have no problem seeing them merged in the future. I don't understand how it relates to drox. As far as timesinks go, this game is so far from where it used to be. I used to just fast-forward and watch a movie, there's a lot less of that going on now.
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Well, good to hear we've made some progress on that front.
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There is a RADAR, but its range is so ridiculously low that you barely ever notice that you actually have a RADAR. So it's, in effect, completely useless.
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I remember the most tedious / time consuming thing from X3 being having to manually explore the galaxy. I understand "hostile" areas having to manually explore, but from within the neutral and allied zones it feels like a time sink for me. Probably why I haven't tried to start the game after my first blitz of it.
The first "hack" I do, still do, and always do, is to uncover all sectors.... there are scripts that do it for you. It also makes all stations visible (but not in real-time) just their location. Which is imo another stupid design (especially the short radar detection range where you can "ping" a station and get it registered, just seeing it doesn't even count. Bah..
I hope they fix all that with their X reboot.
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I remember the most tedious / time consuming thing from X3 being having to manually explore the galaxy. I understand "hostile" areas having to manually explore, but from within the neutral and allied zones it feels like a time sink for me. Probably why I haven't tried to start the game after my first blitz of it.
The first "hack" I do, still do, and always do, is to uncover all sectors.... there are scripts that do it for you. It also makes all stations visible (but not in real-time) just their location. Which is imo another stupid design (especially the short radar detection range where you can "ping" a station and get it registered, just seeing it doesn't even count. Bah..
I hope they fix all that with their X reboot.
Eraser can you give me those hacks. I want to like this game but I feel that those elements are ruining it for me. The amount of exploration and whatnot is so tedious and pointless, it would be better if they were just removed from the game, or at least the player should have the option to disable them.
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I remember the most tedious / time consuming thing from X3 being having to manually explore the galaxy. I understand "hostile" areas having to manually explore, but from within the neutral and allied zones it feels like a time sink for me. Probably why I haven't tried to start the game after my first blitz of it.
The first "hack" I do, still do, and always do, is to uncover all sectors.... there are scripts that do it for you. It also makes all stations visible (but not in real-time) just their location. Which is imo another stupid design (especially the short radar detection range where you can "ping" a station and get it registered, just seeing it doesn't even count. Bah..
I hope they fix all that with their X reboot.
Eraser can you give me those hacks. I want to like this game but I feel that those elements are ruining it for me. The amount of exploration and whatnot is so tedious and pointless, it would be better if they were just removed from the game, or at least the player should have the option to disable them.
I would love to have those scripts too.
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its a pretty standard part of cycrow's cheat scripts. THose are still around, right?
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Yeah, I thought that script package is common knowledge heh..
To be gotten here
http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=216691
Here all his scripts -> http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=246321
While at it, be sure to read the instructions properly! If you install mods you know this, but most mods need that you change your ingame name to a debug unlock command and back. At which point your save is flagged as modified (doesn't do anything apart from visual shame ,p). (And you don't need to do this for this script mod afaik, but for certain mod packages you might) just mentioning it ;)
Also while at it, get infinite saves ;) And with the dock ship to.. command you can remote control your own ships and "teleport" them to dock with your big ship (saves you the trouble of the broken as hell AI) or warp yourself to them. I know this sounds cheesy but the AI cheats massively, so you can too.
I can't even imagine playing x³ without various scripts and mods anymore... the tediousness of it is too big, the AI glitches too large, and the economy too broken otherwise.
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As far as Drox Operative goes, here's a quote from the latest beta patch:
"Moonshine Fox fails epically at copy paste when he's hammered."
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Since I can't finish the sentence in the post above:
-now when you are in a system, planets that their race has a non-aggression pact or better with the Drox automatically show up in the system map
www.soldak.com/Drox-Operative/Patches/Changes.html
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Since I can't finish the sentence in the post above:
Happy now?
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Since I can't finish the sentence in the post above:
Happy now?
Ah the hazards of posting when drunk, yet not drunk enough. ;D
On a side note:
-virus weapons effect can now miss
Gah! Why must you nerf me!!!
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The biggest nerf I experienced in Drox were when they nuked the bonus on cloaks. My Cloak+Bomb combo Shadow ship was INSANELY overpowered before that :P
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So I recently went back to playing DO, and I do notice one thing more than ever before...all the ships are ugly. Capital everything UGLY.
It doesn't really feel like much of a cool ship if it looks like a box with too many cockpits, wings and spikes tacked on...sadface me. Wish there were mods for that one :(
PS: I'm not big on graphics; I'd play a good game even if it were in ASCII graphics only. I just can't stand the style here :/
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PS: I'm not big on graphics; I'd play a good game even if it were in ASCII graphics only. I just can't stand the style here :/
Not sure if Ascii Sector (http://www.asciisector.net/download/) has been brought up before, but this comment reminded me of how cool it is.
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So I recently went back to playing DO, and I do notice one thing more than ever before...all the ships are ugly. Capital everything UGLY.
Lol. That's what soldak does. It's quite consistent in all their (his) games. Gotta live with that.
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Lol. That's what soldak does. It's quite consistent in all their (his) games. Gotta live with that.
Yeah, but in the others they at least stick to letting humans have the right numbers of the right limbs, in the approximately right proportions. With the spaceships it's just...ugh.
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Yeah, but in the others they at least stick to letting humans have the right numbers of the right limbs
It's supposed to do that?
Man, that monsters-attack-the-town event I missed must have gotten dicier than I thought.
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Eh...where are you from, Edward?
Anyways, if you want to be good at this game, just remember this: When you create your ship and pick your race, you also choose which stats you will get 10-50% bonuses on. Focus on improving those stats; that'll give you an advantage.