AI War 2 feedback for each version

[TheVampire100]

As the development goes on, i will try to give, at least to some extent, give feedback for each version released.
Might not be much feedback considering my free time but I will try my best.
I'm currently playing 0.722 and I can say more after that.

I migth repeat me over mutliple versions in terms of feedback when I see that earlier issues I had with the game have not been fixed.
The feedback might not apply to the current version changes at all because I look what I actually want the game to have and not what the game has changed with the latest version (unless it is something I suggested or find very good).

[x4000]

Cheers, I appreciate it.  I think we're mostly a month and a half out from really needing that at the moment, at that level of detail, anyway.  There are a lot of basics we need to clean up in that period, then a month and a half after that where we need exactly that kind of feedback before we hit Early Access.

[TheVampire100]

Okay, here are some suggestions I have to make:

Additional info in Tool Tips
Tool Tips at the moment are mostly okay. I think you can keep them but the problem is, not all information needed is given. I know the Ui is still not 100% done but I say this now so you can include my idea in the next batch.
As of now the tool tips show us HP, DPS, weapon type, armor type, range and speed plus some description text.
What I'm missing here is attack speed, attack damage (raw damage per hit), units with splash damage have no definition how big the splash damage or radius is (does it deal full damage on all units hit? Does it do only partial damage?). For speed and range we also have no numerical values which I appreciate because it makes things easier (units are more unified in their values and therefor you can easily group them together unlike in AIWC were you had 1 different units with 15 different ranges and movements speeds).
However, the player still needs the exact information on this, just not all the time. Dota has soemthing that I really like: Additional information is hidden. This means all tool tips show the typical information of abilities and items but when you press  aspecific hotkey (it's "alt" in Dota) the games shows you more information with highlighted text. This would work perfectely well in Ai War 2 too, you can show the damage on hit and attack speed when the player presses a hotkey for this. On some units this is simply not relevant because the dps value is relevant enough.

Fleet ships in general attack often enough because of their large number. Some ships however neeed this, snipers for an exampel.  A sniper has often a very slow fire rate but high raw damage and because of this you won't get many shots out but you have to make sure that each shot dishes out enough amage. It is also relevant for "instakill units" (again) snipers to see if a ship can instakill a unit with raw damage alone.
Maybe other players would know other information we would need on ships and structures that could be included on the "add info hotkey".


Fighters

From all triangle ships, Fighters feel the mos underwhelming so far. They generally have a higher movement speed as other early game ships but the additonal speed is very lackluster, they have less health than the other 2 ships and their dps is also low.
I struggle to fit the fighters into any specific role for this purpose.

Let's look at bombers and corvettes to compare. Both hae the same health and their role are very easy to understand. Bombers are short range dps units with high damage, mostly sed to destroy structures and tanky units. They are the perfect early game damage dealers in close combat situations.

Missiles corvettes are also damage dealers but in different situations. They come in lower numbers (half the amount of units as the bombers) but with the biggest range of the three starting ships. Because of this they can kill ships before they reach them and weaken fleets are however weak once it goes to close combat. This works perfectly fine with bombers, bombers try to engage in close combat and kill units there, missiles weaken enemy squads from long range until bombers are close enough or the enemy has reached them.

Now, fighters struggle to find their place in between them and the most logical situation would either be chaser or tank. Chaser would mean its a high speed ship that can chase down fleeing ships (or those who want to hunt down your slower/weaker ships like the corvettes). For this they need a higher movement speed than most other ships expect the fastest of all ships, they also need a decent dps value, mostly in regard of attack speed because these ships need to dish out constant damage rather than "one hit kills".
A tank would obviously be a different situation. They would need more Hp than the other 3 ships and slightly faster movement speed than them because it needs the first to be on the field to bind enemy units to them until the other ships arrive. This would work well with the "slight faster movement but still slow enough so it does not outrun your other fleetships" that fghters have now. However, with 300 HP per ship your ships go down so fast, they can barely tank anything.
I realize of course that they have the most amount of ships per squad (20) from all 3 triangle ships but this does not cut it when you look how shooting mechanics work and that you are most of the time outnumbered anyway. As shooting meachnics work, "overkills" of multiple shots are instead dealt to other nearby ships, so the ships don't fire 50 shots at the same target when 10 would be enough. This makes obviusly sense and it removes a lot of frustration and micromaanagement (you don't have to make sure all your ships fire at another target) but the problem is that low HP ships get instagibbed en masse with this. And don't get me started on splash damage which makes them even more useless.

So unit number per squad is not the right solution.
Idea: Make fighters have 400 HP (3 think this much is already more than enough) and remove 5 ships per squad, so you have 15 ships per squad but each one has 100 more HP. If you sum this up, the raw value is the same: 5x 300= 1500. 15x100= 1500. Or: 15x400=6000 20x300=6000
With this change you can also keep dps and movement speed the same because the additional 100 hp per ship let the fighters live long enough to dish out at least soem damage (and obviously you have two other ships for damage anyway)
The other idea would be that fighters keep the same amount of units but get a small dps and movement speed buff. I think the first solution is better (personally) because te starting ships lack a proper tank (except the prototype flagship) and we don't need a chasing unit so ealry in the game.

[x4000]

I'll let Eric take the tooltip feedback, since he's the one working on redesigning that data.

On the units, bear in mind that every unit in the game is getting its stats 100% obliterated and rebuilt as part of the pivot.  No unit as it exists at the moment will have the same stats whatsoever.  That's kind of why I was saying it might be good to wait a few weeks on the gameplay parts in particular.

THAT said, the interface is fair game, though even a lot of that is already scheduled for redoing with some fairly concrete designs already.  We're going to need a ton of this sort of feedback, we're just in a "tear down the house and rebuild it" moment, so the shape of a given room doesn't matter right now since the room won't exist much longer.

[TheVampire100]

Okay, I will wait on the unit balance changes then and will simply try to mod my units, so they fit my playstyle better.
So basically, you look mostly for UI feedback and general ideas what would make the game more fun/easier to play?

On the theme of modding, do I have to change the files in "pre pivot configuration" or simply the "configuration" files?

[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!