General Category > Private Alpha Discussion

AI War 2 feedback for each version

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x4000:
Honestly, we're not really looking for feedback right now, though I'm hesitant to say that.  I have a solid month and a half of work that I know has to get done, and that no question you'll like and will get us closer to the finish line.  Keith is heads-down working on recreating the AWIC base game bits for the pre-fun-point, and won't be present here much at all until he can take a breath from that.  That would be in mid-July, probably.

As we're integrating new GUI things, we'll definitely want feedback on each piece, and hopefully Eric can share some of the GUI pieces and get some feedback on those prior to implementation.  On anything we're iffy on, we'll definitely do that.  There's a giant discussion about the galaxy map right now, and that's something that sorely needs people's opinions before I'm real comfortable implementing anything much.  It's too time-consuming to implement something bad that people hate and then have to redo it, and I'm not confident that we're where we need to be on the galaxy map plans just yet.

Eric has a lot of ideas, and I think they are good ones, but I'm mentally tapped out and I need other people to fight him over it in my place, if that makes sense. ;)  Basically if there's some problem with his galaxy map ideas, then I want those to be ironed-out ideally before I start implementing those in... I guess about a month-ish.

Things will open back up more as Keith and I get through our current workloads, but right now we pretty much have to put on the blinders and go turbo for a bit.  Particularly Keith.

etheric42:
Hey TheVampire100.  Sounds like you volunteered to give feedback and I'd love another set of eyes on the designs we have in the pipeline.  The big thing to keep in mind is that a lot of it has not been implemented yet, so there's a lot of "ghost UI" currently in game that are dead code walking (as in, they are just there waiting to be replaced).

As far as the balance goes, I think the team is making a hard shift to the AIWC balance, so rebalance suggestions are likely going to be about dead code until the "old" content drops.  For what it's worth, the damage carryover mechanic actually give the ships bonus stats to make of for the fact that they will be fighting at partial numbers.  I'm not sure if the bonus given is enough to make up for it, but it is there (I think it is under "granularity"?)  I agree that AIW2 fighters could use some changes (but at least they weren't as bad as missile corvettes before snipers were nerfed... those were useless).  I had a few ideas for how to fix them back when AIW2 might have been a more tactical game, but the shift to AIWC means that's partially dead code and we'll have to see what the AIWC->AIW2 fighters look like.  I also tried modding ships for my own fun awhile back too, it's pretty neat how easy it is to do that (although I wasn't a huge fan of having to edit ship->launcher->projectile to make sure everything was set up right).  It is interesting to see how different you can make a game by changing all that stuff.

Okay, onto the UI: basically the only thing in the game on the new plan that has been implemented is the in-game bar across the top (minus a few clickable reports), the sidebar (minus a few tabs and functionality), the profile selection page and the main menu.

Okay, now specifically tooltips: Any tooltip that shows up on the far left side of your screen is old tooltip from the placeholder UI.  Tooltips that show up close to the cursor/sidebar are ones that Chris made an initial pass on (or three in the case of the science tooltips), but haven't been subject to any full design review yet.  Now, considering we are bringing in a lot of AIWC elements, all the tooltips are going to need to change/expand to fit the concepts from AIWC, but we don't want to just copy the AIWC tooltips because we want to improve wherever possible.

Okay onto your feedback so far: The speed bit has been brought up by someone else, so you're definitely not alone there.  I have some slight reservations about "damage calculations" encouraging players to pause-and-micro to ensure proper hit allocations.  I don't necessarily want to prevent people from playing that way if they want to, but at the scale of units we are talking about, that seems like a lot of work (on the player's part) for only marginal benefit ( see https://www.designer-notes.com/?p=369 ).  I really like the idea about having visible/hidden stats, but it may also be fine saying something like "Speed: Fast (35)" or "Damage: High (128)", and saving the "alt" to do things like going from just showing DPS to showing full damage per shot and firing rate?

Other UI feedback: if you could rest your eyeballs on https://forums.arcengames.com/ai-war-ii/aiw2's-galaxy-map-is-bad-and-that's-bad/ I'd appreciate it.  We had a design that was similar to Stellaris prepared to implement, but some people have voiced that they'd prefer the static AIWC style galaxy map and I'm not sure how much of that was a reaction to the placeholder UI and how much would still have issues with the planned redesign.  If you could head over there and give some feedback on the proposed design, as well as some feedback if we were to head in the direction of a more AIWC style galaxy map, I'd appreciate it.

So I don't overload you with questions, I'll leave off there.  Feel free to comment on the sidebar and top bar as well (knowing that they are incomplete and will see some tweaks to accommodate AIWC stuff) if you want.  Thanks again!

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