Impressions of the First Kind

[Shrugging Khan]

Warning: I probably sound unappreciative and overly critical. Ignore that. I'm always like that when I first play a game.

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Title screen music reminds me of old JRPGs. I like, but for the wrong reasons, I fear. Lots of ship sprites floating by int he background - space seems awfully crowded. Their designs seem to be aesthetic instead of functional, nothing to reinforce the idea that those are supposed to be spacefaring vessels. Oh well, such is Sci-Fi.
Story seems to be purely nominal, as per the usual with Arcen games. Nevermind, on we go.

Tutorial fight. Controls and flow are reminiscent of Leviathan Warships or Stellar Impact. Feels most like Drox Operative, but less intuitive. Lots of little fliers around, pretty chaotic - no way to tell which are the primary targets. Generally no idea what all those little things are. Don't know what's a threat and what's not, probably need more experience with those enemies. AI War was the same; don't know what's dangerous until it kills you.

Flying circles around the enemies is trivially easy. No threats after all, but neither do I kill the targets. Having the minigun autofire at small targets, I get rid of some them at least - but their spawn rate seems to be higher than the rate at which I can kill them. I notice that I fail to kill the capital ships because I need to switch weapons. Stupid me. I switch, blow one up, and the fight is won.

This first battle didn't feel very good. No challenge from the AI, unsatisfying controls, no apparent tactical options other than kiting. I'll blame that on it having been the tutorial.

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Off to the strategic map. I dick around for a while, looking at charts, reading tutorial messages and surveying my options. Apparently right now the obvious thing to do is smuggling technology before they discover it on their own. I do so.

Aaaand that was stupidly easy. I just flew straight through all the supposed obstacles, onto the drop zone - I wouldn't even have had to fire a single shot; my shields easily tanked through with only 50% lost. Once again, no challenge. Playing on normal/normal, mind you. Getting extracted automatically upon mission completion also irks me as exceedingly simple, but eh. I guess other approaches were tested and found lacking.

I get a brief on technology. Smacked in the face with a giant chart. Ow. That hurt a bit. But it's easy to digest after the first impression, just a standard who-got-what affair. "Laser Pistols" and "Vibroblades" as a prerequisite for ground warfare. I sigh. Cliché everywhere, and no military tactics in sight, but once yet again - such is Science Fiction.

And more of that, too - upon closer inspection of the races populating the solar system, I notice that they conform practically universally to the standard Sci-Fi races template. Alright, alright, I'm nitpicking, and it's things nobody but me cares about - back to gameplay.

Another smuggling mission. Let's get some Burlusts into orbit. This time I get stunned by a laser turret. Finally! Resistance! Thrills! Oh no, I just shot it and now I can fly straight onto the green circle. Mission won, auto-extract. Off we go. Since the 5000 credits are supposed to be a lot of money, I look for the next smuggling opportunity...but now it says that I'll ruin my relationship with the Burlusts if I do it again. Ingrates.

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I decide to bank on a more reliable ally, called the "Skylaxians". Names, gentlemen. Names. Their smuggling mission seems just as easy, but this time I try to shoot the turret before it gets me. I notice that my ship flies faster than my shots do...lol wut? I try to manoeuvre my way past, but I have no idea how to tell the ship to fly two curves in one turn. I know it's possible, but neither the tutorial nor any on-screen clues tell me how to do it. Oh well. Off into a wall of turrets, autofiring all the way, and onto the green circle. No difficulties encountered.

SPECIAL ABILITIES UNLOCKED, it tells me. Battles will grow harder, it adds, and much rejoicing was had. FLAGSHIP CUSTOMISATION UNLOCKED. So it's Drox Operative now? Sorry, sorry, I'll shut up about that.

Raiding a pirate convoy. Feeling a little overpowered, I rush in and fly straight through them - turns out that counts as boarding, and I steal all kinds of miscellany in doing so.
I actually take damage in this battle! Spamming special abilities to nullify incoming fire seems to work, as my shield recharges after two turns of doing so. I also find out that pressing ESC lets my plot a second curve within a turn. Nifty. Still, the battle is extremely chaotic, with all those colourful, slow-moving projectiles and lots of small fry moving about. I essentially just fly circles around the enemy and exploit my superior firepower.

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Enough for now.

Recommendations:

• Make it more obvious that one can in fact plot multi-part movements in a single turn, and how to do so.
• Clean up the battles a little, so one can actually see what's going on.
• Make the early-game battles and the tutorial a fair bit harder.

Again, sorry about the tone. It always takes me a while to warm up to a new game.

[Darloth]

There is actually a tutorial about waypoints (which you can use to fly in interesting shapes - I use shift rather than escape though, ESC might be a bug ), but it shows up rather a fair bit later.

I would like to see it just before the second battle, personally (the first battle is almost always trivially easy, and it's really not necessary then).

[Cyprene]

Let's not make the tutorials harder.  That seems a bad idea.

For everybody who's like, "eh this tutorial is kind of boring" I would imagine there are 10 people who would quit if they got blown up during one.

[nas1m]

Let's not make the tutorials harder.  That seems a bad idea.

For everybody who's like, "eh this tutorial is kind of boring" I would imagine there are 10 people who would quit if they got blown up during one.

I have to agree here...

[PokerChen]

 On the other hand, smuggling spacefaring by bum-rushing the drop zone does not seem acceptable to many players, including me.

 Easier to remove the auto-withdraw for the mission... > : )

[Professor Paul1290]

Let's not make the tutorials harder.  That seems a bad idea.

For everybody who's like, "eh this tutorial is kind of boring" I would imagine there are 10 people who would quit if they got blown up during one.

I somewhat disagree.

Skyward Collapse seemed to have the opposite problem. The tutorial was easy so a lot of people quit partway assuming that the rest of the game was like that.

Making the tutorial easy is fine, but it often runs counter to being able to "sell the game". Perhaps it is unfair that a game still has to "sell" itself even though you are already playing it, but that's the way it works these days.
Nowadays, just because the game was purchased doesn't mean it's going to get a fair shake. You still have to "sell" and "show off" the game within the first few minutes of play, or you aren't going to get the next hour. Having the best tutorial ever is pointless if the player doesn't think it's worthwhile to go through your tutorial.

A player who just gets blown up can still know there is more game to play and try again, most players understand that's what games do sometimes.
A player who is unimpressed just goes to do something else and doesn't come back.

[Shrugging Khan]

I really meant that as a package - "the early-game battles and the tutorial".  Not just the tutorial. For the first four or five battles I fought, there was absolutely no sense of danger, challenge or even involvement. I was just letting the overpowered ship do the work for me. That changed a bit in the last one, but only because I was flying pointlessly unproductive manoeuvres to entertain myself - as soon as I got back to actually trying to win, victory was handed to me on a silver platter.

At this stage, the final goal of establishing the federation still seems nebulously intangible, none of the mid-term objectives I accomplished so far seemed to have any impact whatsoever, and there seems to be no risk of failure apart from ruining some my diplomatic relations. Maybe the enemies will grow stronger later on. Maybe I will mess up my options by playing aimlessly, only noticing that when it's too late. Maybe all the impact is below the surface, hiding in the numbers, waiting for me to learn to identify it.

But right now, some 90 minutes in, it looks like the last Hydral already did all the work when he stole a super-powerful ship, and for some reason I'm supposed to do the chores leading up to his already inevitable victory.

[Professor Paul1290]

I agree with that as well. I do feel like the game, at the moment, might be trying too hard to be nice to the player while they get their bearings.

There actually did used to be more "wrenches thrown in your works" early-on when it came to solar-map/strategy-layer play, but a lot of that got slowed down more recently because some players felt it was too chaotic.
I feel that with a lot of the recent fixes and refinements that have been done maybe it can be sped up again to some extent without as many problems, but that's just my opinion.

[Shrugging Khan]

I played for another hour, and oh hey, wow.

The game started to redeem itself.

I got into some dangerous brawls, finally had the game unlock all those displays, info feeds, optional actions and customisations the absence of which made it feel so empty before, and when I just started getting into things, it even killed me. Nice shot, TLF. Just when I was lazily rushing another drop zone.

Still, that was over two hours into the game at an admittedly leisurely pace.

Minor issues:

• One fatal error advised me to restart the game, so I did. Forgot to fetch the file, sorry.
• Accidentally panned the solar system map so far out that the system was no longer visible. Found it again, but still.

Recommendations:
The Quick Start option should ask the player about their level of aptitude in strategy games. It's probably rather well suited for Novices, but more jaded players like me might be rather put off by the slow pace, sleepy early-game and sputtering appearance of the features - little [?]-Buttons around the interface to click and receive information from might be preferable to having most of the game locked up and the tutorial slowly drip-feed them to the player. In short: Ask experienced players to use Advanced Start instead. That would've probably prevented most of my gripes.

That said, the menu screen with the ships floating by still looks a but silly. I get that you wanted to use the side-view assets somehow, but it just seems a bit LOOK SPACESHIPS FLOATY FLOATY...it's 11 PM and I have a headache. Goodbye eloquence.

Second impression:
If all the features and potential that finally revealed themselves end up coming together in the right way, it might very well be an excellent game. Still feels a mighty lot like Drox Operative, though.

Now, I'll be starting another game right away, this time using the Advanced Start instead.

[Shrugging Khan]

Errors:

• Helping with building construction doesn't work, nothing happens.
• Trying to suppress AFA supporters leads to battle against 20-40 ships of the (federation member) race owning the planet, all marked as enemies but tagged with hold-fire, none of which do anything.
• Lots of OnGUI errors.
• A later expedition into an ice belt to find Hydral technology had the guard units completely passive. They very slowly flew towards the player ship but did nothing further. Also, they were impervious to damage.

Question:
To make the Burlusts join the federation, I need 10000 leverage with their Prime Warlord. I got 3000 for killing his predecessor, plus another 600 from the Secondary warlords. I can repeatedly kill the secondaries to get 800 more each time, or shell out 5000 credits for bribes or blackmails that get me 100 leverage apiece.
That means buying them out costs me around 300000 credits, or two hours of farming the secondary warlords to death. Both seem grind-heavy and unfun. Is this the way it's supposed to be?



Edit:
I seem to have borked the game. Even when starting new games, there is no enemy aggression anymore. Nobody attacks me. Sadface.

[Tridus]

Pretty sure that's a bug in the clearest patch, several people have mentioned it.

[Darloth]

For the secondaries, then you can convince them to put in a word with the primary warlord - so you start at 3k and work up.

I admit, 30k does feel a bit too high, I'd say somewhere in the region of 7.5k would be a lot more reasonable, that's still grinding through several warlords and dozens of bribe items.

Bribe items in general could do with a bit of a power boost I think - they cost 2500 credit to buy, and while the mission to retrieve them is pretty easy, it still takes some time and they are very random (which is good).  If it were me balancing it, I think I would make them at least 4x better.

[Shrugging Khan]

I seems to me that fights against strong enemies in general aren't interesting at all.

Whether it's Burlust Warlords or Assassins, it just comes down to flying circles around them while slowly whittling down their shields. The enemy AI and weaponry are incapable of stopping the player ship (unless the player makes some very stupid mistake), and the player ship (unless it's upgraded a lot, I guess) takes forever to actually chew through these ultra-tough enemies. The only alternative (if at all available) is to withdraw, which takes thirty turns of just flying away - which, again, the AI can't do anything about - until Withdrawal is permitted.

No fun at all.

[Shrugging Khan]

I now have outposts and security goons. I do not know how to combine them.

Edit: I also have 77 kBs of Error logs. Where should I send them?
These constant supposedly fatal errors also prevent me from playing for more than 5 minutes at a time.

[Hyfrydle]

Just had two assassination attempts and an attack by the AFA, I have to agree that these battles are not fun and take a really long time to complete. The assassination shield and armour values seem to be really high which doesn't help.

Maybe the ability to call on some help from the players federation allies might make these a bit more interesting.