Ayup all.
I'm very much enjoying TLF; it's another 'high concept' game that Arcen are developing a healthy reputation for developing. Nice work, gents and gals.
Clearly TLF is a complicated beast and without a well-crafted Wiki the only way to find out what's in the game is to get stuck in and let the confusion begin.
That's okay, it's a good kind of confusion. I do have a couple of observations and they largely hinge around multipliers: some being too weak and others being too strong.
Firstly, RCI. (Residential / Commercial / Industrial? That's a SimCity holdover isn't it? Not sure it applies to this game directly but I suppose the concept is similar.) Unless I'm mistaken, and the chances of that are rather high, the RCI modifiers appear to be minimally impactful upon a planet's capacity to develop. If a race has a planet suitability factor of >1 then the RCI values seem to be only one step away from being meaningless, which in turn has a direct impact on the worth of the various missions available that influence RCI; why bother doing them if there are other missions that net equal or greater credits /and/ have an impactful side effect? If the RCI values were percentages that were directly applied to a characteristic would they not gain some relevance? At the moment I turn RCI display off and ignore the RCI missions because they really don't seem to be worth worrying about.
Secondly, power bonuses. Here we go from minimally impactful multipliers to crazy multipliers that rapidly get out of hand. Accepting that I don't have a great understanding of the maths behind things like Science power, observations seem to indicate that after a race has started to accumulate science multipliers through tech and buildings their Science power grows at an extraordinary rate. For example, the Skylaxians in one of my games now have a Science rating of 28,000 whereas every other race has between 3 and 250. When other races come into contact with the Skylaxians it's like the Pakled making first contact with the Culture, and that massive gap in technological capacity sprang up in less than ten years. The same sort of thing happens with Ground force power with some of the other races. As I said, I don't know what the maths is behind values like these but I suggest that a pretty heavy form of diminishing returns function needs to be applied.
That having all been said, I do appreciate the asymmetry that this game presents us with, but the above to examples do stand out as being outliers even within the aforementioned accepted context.
Good job, team!
(It's been a while since I last visited these forums, not since the earlier days of AI War where I was able to contribute a not insignificant amount of gfx and ideas; I still get a warm and fuzzy feeling inside when I see stuff I a came up with being shown on some of the official screenshots -- when playing with friends they're now pretty bored of me saying "I drew that / that was my idea" every nine minutes -- with my greatest claim to internal Arcen fame being the Riot starship concept and gfx. Remember the early 'discussions' about adding in modularity? Ah, thems were the days...)
