Alpha impressions and issues

[topper]

.852
First try of the game after solving some problems with Avast! Antivirus
1. Looks nice, nice music as usual.  Quick start, Normal-Normal. Intro is nice, though I can read faster than the text was appearing, so I will be pushing hurry up every time now, which is a little annoying.

2. First Battle:
--Why is a nuke listed as my most damaging weapon after I take down the shields with the energy blaster. I didn't know I had a nuke.
--See first screen shot. I am moving, then clicking the missile shield nearby using energy blaster, but it still shoots at the ADC Calvary at the top of the screen instead?
--It is not totally clear from the beginning what is a flagship and what is not. It would be awesome if you could hover over the objective bar at the top, and it would drop down into a list of all the objective units, then you could click on any one to zoom to it.
--The "First Encounter" text at the end of first combat seems late, if it is describing events that already took place.
--A bigger close button near the middle of the screen would be convenient for the battle summary page.

3. Solar Map
--Looks sweet, planet tool tips are good, but kind of text heavy.
--When I zoom out, it is the right size for the whole solar map, but when I pan, I can still go so that I cant see any planet. I would recommend a smaller rectangle that defines the window position if you zoom out far enough.
--While I was just still looking around, the Skylaxians somehow became spacefaring? Missed opportunities?

4. Peltians
--I click Peltian planet, that moves me there, ok. Left clicking the Peltian icon does nothing. Right clicking works to interact. Maybe a hovertext explaining if someone tries this?
--Missing localization on race screen, see second screenshot.
--Aha! Missions are at the bottom of the screen under "local actions"
--Smuggling spacefaring to them. Having the icon of the drop zone up on the objectives bar would make this easier to know what I'm looking for, or consider my previous suggestion about listing objectives where clicking one will zoom to it.
--For the mission, my plan is to loop around, pick up speed, then zoom onto the drop zone without firing. This mostly works, except I'm stopped abruptly by some kind of weapons fire. A scrollable list of all the damage you have taken and the type would be nice on the side.
--"Preparing to withdraw, sir! Turns remaining before calculations complete: 5" This seems off since it lets me withdraw immediately after getting to the drop zone.

Ok, enough for one post ;-) More later.

[topper]

More stuff. Wow, that turned into a ton of text! I am enjoying the game so far , it has a ton of depth that I am just scratching the surface of.

5. General comments
--The introduction of new concepts seems pretty good right now, having some kind of timeline that tells you what you have to do to unlock the next thing would also give a new player guidance on what to do next.
--The tan text color for how many credits I have is difficult to see on some of the race backgrounds.
--When there are no actions to do in a category, it should say so instead of just being blank.
--I think I would prefer an auto pause after a mission ends. Mainly, just having controls under the extras settings that let me choose what I want to have, since I would prefer to have auto pause after every single action including moving between planets.
--Some kind of a calendar, or just a bar filling up until "end of next month" would be nice during dispatch missions and even when just watching the action.
--Hydral tech mission has no clear indication of progress, so I had no idea if I was going to make it before I died (luckily I did).


6. Possible bugs and suggestions
--After the third mission I did, for some reason I was on the Hydral homeworld instead of on the world where I had just completed the mission.
--On the race relations screen, it seems like when I hover over a different race, it should show the relation lines between them and all of the other races, but it does not.
--I think that left clicking a planet after you are already there should open the friendly acts panel by default since that does not do anything right now.
--On a related note, links to some of the planet pages from other pages would be time saving too. I picture it as an arrow on the right and left side of the "friendly acts" page which says "go to: hostile acts" and "go to Peltian Collective"
--The text describing Hydral Golems in battle is overflowing out the bottom of the box (on 1600x900)
--A tutorial screen of "Hey, you have taken hull damage in this battle..." would be nice so that I was not left looking for whether I had taken permanent damage.
--In addition to the RCI values, having the planet name pop up when you hover over it might be nice.
--Operation Kamachi and Raptor and such seems to not be deploying as many ships as the description makes me think it should. At least in the first mission with special abilities.
--In the tooltips that describe the various notifications, it would help to list the race that it corresponds to since a new player may not recognize the colors from the beginning and I had to keep on checking to be sure who they were talking about.

7. Main issues as of 0.852
--Again, as I said in the previous post, the speed that text appears on the intro screens is slow for me, so I am a little annoyed each time I have to push the hurry up button (which is every time). Maybe add a check box for "always show all text"?
--The main struggle for me in combat is identifying what the targets are and where they are. This involves mousing over a ton of ships. Either a "highlight mission targets" button is needed, or something like what I suggested before with a drop down list from the top objective which allows you to zoom to each objective.
--To reiterate another thing, I think the close button for the various screens should be larger and closer to the center bottom of the screen. All of my clicking happens around there or lower except for needing to move the mouse really far to close tabs.

[x4000]

Thanks!

Couple of things:

* Fixed an issue where weapon switching was saying "skip turn" when it should not have been.

* Added the following text to the end of the "first time you're in attack mode" explanation popup:
** IMPORTANT: [#b38dff]You are currently in autofire mode[#ffffff].  Unless you change this, then your ship will always pick its own targets to fire at (best ones based on your selected weapon) regardless of where you click.  Clicking just confirms your orders.  [#b38dff]If you want to attack a specific ship, switch to Select Targets mode[#ffffff] (it's one of the buttons in the bottom left).

* Fixed an issue where before your special abilities were unlocked, it was still showing you the DPS they would do when hovering over enemies.

Clarifications:
a. It should be auto-pausing after all combat missions, to my recollection.  Although maybe that changed.
b. There is a calendar right at the bottom of the screen, with a bar filling up, on the solar map.
c. Noted on the lack of progress indicator on docking/capturing, that's on our list already.
d. On the race relations screen, it should indeed work like you are saying, but it only shows ones where they are not neutral (if they are neutral, no line is drawn, to have less clutter).
e. For the close button, any time you see one of those you can also just hit escape.  There's not room to put those elsewhere, or make them bigger.
f. The objectives highlighting is a good one for mantis.

Running like a madman right now, let me know if I missed anything important that you felt I should have responded to.  Glad you're enjoying it despite those things!

[topper]

* Added the following text to the end of the "first time you're in attack mode" explanation popup:
** IMPORTANT: [#b38dff]You are currently in autofire mode[#ffffff].  Unless you change this, then your ship will always pick its own targets to fire at (best ones based on your selected weapon) regardless of where you click.  Clicking just confirms your orders.  [#b38dff]If you want to attack a specific ship, switch to Select Targets mode[#ffffff] (it's one of the buttons in the bottom left).

Yeah, I figured that out after a couple battles, having that note should help.

I will drop a few things into Mantis.