Alpha .700 released, with main game (solar map, etc) for the first time!

[x4000]

Release notes here, relating to the non-main-game changes, such as they were: http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=The_Last_Federation_Alpha_Release_Notes#Alpha_Verson_.700

Okay.

So there's some things to know. 

1. Firstly, we made a lot of changes to the solar map stuff recently, so there is broken stuff all over the place.  It's not horrible in the sense that you can't play, but this is Round 0 big time -- please report the issues as you find them, and we'll fix them quickly.  Please do not get huffy or annoyed with us about this, though, because frankly this is what you signed up for.

2. In some cases there will be some things where you might go "did they test this at all!?"  And the answer to that is "yes, but then they changed a bunch of stuff around it, and have not had time to re-test."  If we wanted to spend the time re-testing, we wouldn't be able to get you this for another week or more.  And frankly having more people banging around on it is a lot easier in terms of ways to find stuff.

3. You will likely find some balance issues, some minor and some severe.  See #1.  We changed how combat worked very substantially (no more fleet levels, among many many other things), and the amount of testing we have done to make sure that all makes sense in the new model is light.  We've been mainly testing to make sure that the user experience is as clean as we can make it (relatively), and that the solar simulation itself is working properly.  So there may be some things that are off.  Combat encounters used to be much faster, for instance -- so if the amount of BP you are gaining from contracts feels glacially slow, for instance, then it's probably related to that at least in part.

4. We changed how the time system works in the game not that long ago, to something more thematic and easy to understand.  That said... that caused a bit of a mess under the hood as we had to straighten out literally three different time models and get them into one.  I think I've gotten most of that sorted out, but if you see things like events happening so quickly they are annoyingly fast, etc, then let me know.  Events and actions were happening about 3x and 8x faster than I meant them to tonight, and it took me a while to hunt up why that was and fix it.  All seems well now, but I figured I would mention it just in case.

5. There's a bunch of GUI polish still needed on various secondary screens, as noted here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/15rzBesR85AbPUT78m_SaZDwmBvcZySLsaZw8c1ZR9fc/edit  If it's already on that page, you don't need to tell us.  If it's not on that page, please tell us.  Quite a few of the interfaces are final-quality or nearly so, particularly the ones you use the most (well, politics and contracts aside).  But some others are rough visually.  We'll be chewing through that pretty fast this week.

6. There are some parts of the game that are likely not explained well enough.  Haha, that's actually a joke.  The "likely" part, I mean.  There ARE parts of the game that are not explained well enough.  A lot of the last two days has been spent on getting game text in to explain all the things that never had to be explained until now, and so a huge amount of that is done.  But there is still some placeholdery text in some places (the reasons you can't undertake a contract at the moment is the biggest one), and some that are too vague in what they tell you (there is a specific list on the above document, all related to actions), and there are some contracts themselves where you probably need more info other than just the name of what it is and then the literal results.  If you come up with something you think we don't know about, particularly meaning it is not on that document above, PLEASE tell us!

7. All of the above said, please don't let that scare you off.   There are a lot of sawhorses and tarps around, but damn if I'm not having a blast playing this, myself.   Hope you do as well, and thanks for helping us polish things up.  We're shooting for a release on the 24th, which might sound crazy given the above statements, but you'd be surprised how quickly a lot of things can come together.  This is our biggest game ever, and so it's taken us a while to get to this point, but we're in the home stretch now in my opinion.  And if we're not ready by the 24th -- well, then we won't be releasing on the 24th.  But we're going to try our hardest for that, for sure.

Enjoy!

[Misery]

Okay, so far, I've jumped into this a bit and everything looks promising, but there's a couple of major problems.

The biggest one, which to me is a game-breaking issue, is the new combat additions. 

I'm going to quote what I'd said in the mantis report for this one:

"This one has to do with the new battle additions.... the turrets and everything associated with them. Since these were added, I've found that every single fight is completely unbeatable. Going anywhere near the turrets, regardless of tactics, just gets my ships blown up almost instantly. And that's WITHOUT the enemy flagship's interference. Already invincible enemy structures become even more ridiculous when they're covered in swarming enemy ships.

The enemy seems to simply stop applying strategies altogether with this... they just choose turrets, and sit on them, and that's it. The battles as a whole feel like they lack the dynamic qualities that the previous version had. The same is true with the turret rings... for the occaisional one that is sorta doable, there's typically exactly one way in, and if you cant use that way in, generally due to enemy hordes, you cant do anything about it. It feels like the game is more pushing the player to find the one existing solution to a puzzle, rather than encouraging them to come up with tactics for a battle.

None of the flagship abilities help here, either.

Honestly, in my opinion this addition to the combat scenes simply doesnt work. It's not bad in concept: The idea of having these various useful things that you can go after to gain advantages is interesting, and the idea of defeating defenses to get at some of them is interesting too. The problem is in the implementation. The battles become ENTIRELY about piercing these rings, and the rings generally just cant be broken through. The strategy completely falls apart with all of this so far; the only thing I've found that has any effect whatsoever is just charging your flagship through the rings, by itself, dashing through the thing inside, and getting back out. But this only works for grabbing those (which dont seem to help much). It wont work for defeating the enemy flagships, because you need your fleet to do that, but they're killed off almost instantaneously when any sort of attempt is made.

One way or another, my thoughts on this is that some major change is necessary here. This mechanic as it is now is likely to cause only frustration and confusion in most players."


So yeah, there's that.  Currently, I cant really test too much, because many things end up requiring that a fight be won, and it just doesnt happen regardless of what I try.

And I'm not one to declare something to be impossible very often at all.


The second issue is that there really isnt much the player can do at the start.  I can run around giving races the spacefaring tech, but.... that's about it.  Pretty much every other possible interaction remains unusable, even after letting the simulation run for awhile, so there isnt anything I can do to gain BP, or influence things.

Though, not that I'd know what I should be influencing as it is, being that I'm not really sure what I'm doing in this yet in an overall sense, but I cant really learn either with there being nothing to do.  I'm thinking there simply needs to be some more options open to the player at the start, after they've given at least one race the spacefaring bit, so that they dont feel like they've hit an immediate lull in the gameplay.


Also, holy complexity, Batman! You werent kidding when you said this is your biggest game ever.  Good grief but there's alot of STUFF here.  I dont know what half of it does, but I think I can see where you're going with the gameplay on the system map side of things.  This is looking like it's going to get very interesting.  I'm thinking this game's potential is quite high.


.....also, I note that in my first test it didn't take more than about 5 minutes for one of the planets to be gripped by mass insanity.  Among a couple of other screwy events and the Hive Queen's random mood swings.   And then the Boarine attacked one of the others for no apparent reason other than "because".

This game's Dwarf Fortress FUN potential is very, very high, isnt it.....   That aspect alone should catch peoples' attention, I think.

[jerith]

Every now and then I catch myself obsessively refreshing Mantis and thinking "come on, it's been nearly six minutes since the last ticket was resolved, what on earth are these people up to?"

Then I realise that bugs are often being fixed faster than I can report new ones and it's only the efforts of the other fine alpha testers keeping us ahead of the Arcen team.

Thanks Chris, Keith, Josh, and everyone else for the incredible turnaround time that makes it so much fun to do this.

[Hyfrydle]

Going to have a good session with the game this evening will post my thoughts later.

[x4000]

Haha, thanks very much guys.

Just a few notes on a few things that are coming:

1. More options at the start.  This was a kind of tough balancing act, because I wanted to make sure that it was not too overwhelming (ha -- nailed that one! /s), but at the same time having enough to do.  One of the big issues with the game right now as far as I'm concerned is that the opportunities for earning BP are all too samey.  The ones for spending it are incredibly, ridiculously diverse (200ish options, I believe).

2. There are therefore going to be some new ways to earn BP, and those will be available from the start of the game, and those will help make things more varied and interesting there.  As well as later in the game.

3. The combat with the turrets is only one of many forms of combat in the game.  Personally I can beat it, but apparently you really have to know what you're doing.  I think that what it accomplishes from a tactical standpoint is just so fun and awesome... but too much of a good thing, and all that.    And too early.  We have I think three or four major modes of combat right now, and the turrets one is only one of them.  However, it is being overused right now, and that will change.  We're also adding in a couple of other variant combat modes to spice things up even more, and to give you different ways to use your fleets and abilities.


All in all, while I was initially devastated at Misery's first post above, I'm really actually very pleased with how things are going, when I sat down and thought about it more.  The problems mentioned were not fundamental ones -- they mainly were about clarity (which we already knew we wanted feedback on), complexity (which I always worry is too low, with EVERY game we make, so it's a relief not to hear that this is too simple), and variety/difficulty (which can be scaled up and down respectively and tuned in a variety of ways using the infrastructure we already have).

In other words, nothing here is making us reinvent the wheel, unlike when we made the major shifts to combat last week.  Which is... ah... good for our staff, if you catch my drift.

[Billick]

Well, I was going to report some bugs, but I see in Mantis that they are not only reported but are already fixed.  Is the next update coming out soon?  Some of the issues are pretty hard to work around (and the tooltip thing is super annoying).  Also, is there going to be a tutorial?  A lot of things are confusing when you first start out.

[x4000]

I will do another release shortly, yes.  In terms of a tutorial... I am not sure how that would really work.  I am hoping to basically put in-game guidance in there to help out new players in quick-start mode in particular.  That way you can play a real game right from the start, but it tells you what options to consider and what they mean, etc.

[mrhanman]

So far, everything I've been to mantis for has already been logged and often fixed!

Kinda feeling old and slow.   

[YoukaiCountry]

Just got accepted into the alpha. I'm at work right now, but I'll have a good long session when I get home!

[Billick]

I will do another release shortly, yes.  In terms of a tutorial... I am not sure how that would really work.  I am hoping to basically put in-game guidance in there to help out new players in quick-start mode in particular.  That way you can play a real game right from the start, but it tells you what options to consider and what they mean, etc.

Yeah, I don't think a full blown tutorial is needed, but definitely some guidance.

[x4000]

I will do another release shortly, yes.  In terms of a tutorial... I am not sure how that would really work.  I am hoping to basically put in-game guidance in there to help out new players in quick-start mode in particular.  That way you can play a real game right from the start, but it tells you what options to consider and what they mean, etc.

Yeah, I don't think a full blown tutorial is needed, but definitely some guidance.

Awesome -- we're definitely on the same page, then.  It's just one of those Round 0 and Round 1 things of this alpha testing process that that isn't present.

[x4000]

And by the way, anyone who wants to make a list (or specific issues, either way) of "things that confused me at first" that you think we should give more guidance on, that is absolutely something we want feedback on!

[YoukaiCountry]

And by the way, anyone who wants to make a list (or specific issues, either way) of "things that confused me at first" that you think we should give more guidance on, that is absolutely something we want feedback on!

I'll make sure to write those thoughts down on my first run.

[mrhanman]

One thing that gave me pause was starting a new game and selecting which planet I crash on.  What difference does it make?  Maybe a tooltip would help here?

[x4000]

One thing that gave me pause was starting a new game and selecting which planet I crash on.  What difference does it make?  Maybe a tooltip would help here?

Yeah, that plus the difficulty level descriptions are on my list for sure.