Always with the personal touch. Thanks for taking the time to address my comments so directly and thoroughly. I'll try to make my inline replies as helpful as possible.
Few notes:
1. Not sure what I can do about this, honestly; if you aren't enjoying the missions, then that's kind of... well, that's a big part of the game. You aren't locked in for another 20 turns, because if you actually win faster than that you're all set.
I should clarify that I jumped in, as a wet-behind-the-ears player, and felt that I wasn't being effective in the very first battle. I figured maybe it was because I was piloting a prototype ship with basic weapons and maybe I wasn't supposed to be overpowered yet. I wanted to withdraw, but was told that I couldn't do it for another 20 turns. It's not that I don't find the battle fun in concept, I just thought: "Ah, this is supposed to be a bit of a slog to show me the basics, but I can't just drop my burrito and split?"
I'll give combat another go tonight with a more open mind and a bit more persistence, and give more thoughtful analysis if one is warranted.
2. This has been discussed some before, but basically if turns are any longer, then you wind up not being able to make adjustments to your plans often enough. Doing a long strafing run would be an incredibly bad idea so frequently that I can't see allowing the interface to do that, because making it seem like that is possible and thus a good idea just leads new players up the garden path. For the few times it is actually relevant, really it's just click, press A, press A, if you're strafing. And with that, you get a chance to correct for incoming fire, etc.
I understand what you're saying here, and I will try the battle again with that in mind. Strafing isn't necessarily something that I would do, either, and I get the sense that you don't want the game to lower itself to where that sort of autopilot is desirable: you want there always to be a variety of interesting options to choose from.
I suppose I am a bit used to being able to string multiple moves together in turn-based games. I can plot several moves ahead for units in Space Rangers, Civilization, Frozen Synapse, Fallout 1 + 2, Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel... and all of these provide a method to interrupt a chain of moves in progress, though I may have to wait for the "current turn" to end. I understand that shoehorning in a Frozen Synapse-style detailed turn plotter is beyond thought at this point in the development, but it is a norm that I'm accustomed to.
3. This has been something we've experienced in AI War, where when ranges are too long, there is no meaning to position. This is working as intended, and you don't really get longer-ranged stuff as things progress. Being able to shoot from way far away where you are safe... well, it's not really a game, then.
I absolutely agree with this, by the way. It was an observation, though, that ranges feel a bit... stubby. At first. I still assume that range becomes more relevant later as you're able to upgrade your weapons, but maybe range, range never changes? I am pretty sure I can get past this feeling, though, over time.
4. Good point on shot hits needing a better animation. There is currently one, but it's very small. I did it that way when it was in the realtime mode because otherwise things would get too obscured to see. Here you can't do anything during the playback anyway, so making it look cool is more relevant. And having popups for damage done to ships last turn is on my list. In terms of ships getting progressively more damaged, anything larger than a certain small size gets progressively more cracked and has these glowing ember-ridden spots in the hull, etc.
Cool, and I would have expected flair-type-stuff to get addressed sooner or later. It is already one of your slicker-looking games from the ground up.
5. Yep, the panning thing is going to be addressed very soon.
Cool beans. I figure some of the sense of constraint that I experienced will be helped by this.
Solar Map:
1. Do you not read the tooltips when you hover over things? All the stuff on the sidebar has tooltips, for instance. The left-click functionality bringing up extra info is something I have been meaning to do, thanks for the reminder. But everything is explained in some detail when you hover over anything icon-wise. It no longer has the great gouts of ugly text because those were very hard to read when they stacked up. So now you do have to learn icons to some extent, yes, but just putting your mouse cursor over it gives you tons of details that were not there before, as well as reminding you.
Yes, I do read them (I am lazy, in that I don't have a lot of time to build a large foundation to play the basics of the game. But I am not that lazy!). The icons themselves are very nicely styled in theme with the game, but they just take some getting used to. This is not a problem you need to repair per se, just an impression a new user is likely to have: what is this stuff?
The side icons can still be more informative. They can stand out from one another in terms of things like severity, perhaps a glyph indicating the faction that's affected, and so forth. For example, a huge environmental disaster can literally stick out a bit to the left, a "head" taller than smaller potatoes, like "Ambassador Pees His Pantaloons." I can also see that they are different colors, but haven't yet figured out what the colors mean. If they describe just different aspects of a society, that still doesn't quite tell me how important they are relative to my purposes as a many-headed space dragon. At the moment, they are a long list of things that has to be studied really carefully relative to each other so I can make a judgement, and after a few tasks, there quite a lot of them. It represents a lot of work on my end, without a lot of guidance, because early in the game, I'm just figuring out who I want to do nice things for. Who needs me the most? Who has the most to give me back for my good deeds, or penalize me for my bad deeds?
I'll have to take another look at this when I'm able to play again, because as I recall, this is how it currently works: This is also in addition to the way eyes tend to "expect" tooltips, they want to see the tooltip near the mouse cursor, and it means additional "work" to hold the mouse in place, and move your eyes to the bottom left of the screen. So to judge which side icon needs my attention the most, my eyeballs are playing the role of a tennis ball going back and forth over the screen.
2. Oops, already addressed that in #1.
A few questions of my own:
1. Are you an AI War player? I can't recall any more.
2. Do you like turn-based games like XCom or anything else?
3. Do you like Paradox titles?
1. Yes, I play AI War, very casually and at a rate of about an hour a week. I'm a huge fan of the game, but I am nowhere near the level of many of the heavy players around here. I get my fun by trying to understand the game intuitively, learning from my own mistakes, pushing perceived advantages and trying to overcome failed strategies. I don't mind getting wiped out if I really mess up, but I expect to understand why. I don't pursue Ultimate Winning Strategies or engage in deep discussions on fleet composition.
2. Big fan of TBS games. New X-Com I am not very interested in, but Xenonauts I am really looking forward to and I wish they'd release it already. Played original Fallout 4 times, enjoyed Civ 4, GalCiv, Advance Wars, Space Rangers. This is perhaps telling: I really liked Frozen Synapse but gave it up because I just wasn't enjoying the multiplayer versus and didn't have time to fiddle with every last particular command for each turn, whereas all my opponents seemed to have perfectly intricate master planning skills.
3. I haven't played many Paradox titles, but this is partly because they have a bit of a spotty record. But also because I just have moderate tastes and like to play other games: my strategy needs are well-taken-care of by other publishers in general, and strat titles are only a part of what I play.
More broadly, I'm curious why you wanted to basically abdicate control of the battle and just watch it play out on autopilot. That's kind of what setting up a big strafing run would represent. As opposed to being in there and making all the various decisions yourself, and choosing when to use which gun or which ability, etc. I know this is not really the way you were framing your comments, but that's how I read them in terms of net effect. Is there something else that you were really trying to get at? You mentioned repetitiveness, but it's fairly true of any game that involves shooting stuff that there is a back and forth of moving around and shooting things repeatedly and gradually moving towards an objective. What about this particular system did you object to, if you can articulate it?
I think I didn't make myself clear, and as I sort of indicated, these were notes that I typed up just before heading off to work. I don't necessarily desire autopilot, but if there are repetitive things that I have to do in a battle, I think that after a bit, I might want to be able to have a pre-set plan that doesn't require repetitive fiddling.
Granted, it's wayyy too early for me to judge whether this observation is even relevant for TLF, but it was something that I sensed in the first battle: that I'd be reusing tactics a lot.
To give an example I gave before in some thread somewhere, here's some of the progression that occurs in Star Control II:
1. You start out with a pretty rickety ship that can barely defend itself.
2. You work to build up that ship, and get better in battles. You also get other ships with their own advantages and disadvantages, that you can use in battles. You get two things: a sense of progression, and variety.
3. Your ship eventually is built up to the point where it transcends the battle. Battles with even the biggest, baddest enemies are over in seconds with hardly a thought on your part. By this time, however, you are up to your neck in other, larger diplomatic issues.
So the progression for SCII combat is: Desperation -> Competence -> Even Footing -> Dominance -> Transcendence (where victory is all but inevitable)
I don't know if the above is something you have planned for TLF's battles (or if it can even be planned), but if I find that a set number of tactics in a battle tends to work, even just having better weapons/stronger enemies is going to top out pretty quickly in terms of fun value. At that point I will either desire to have those battles trivialized, or be able to handwave some the finer points away to some sort of automation (turrets, a flotilla of partner ships, etc).
Please understand: it's not really my intent to try to convince you "oh okay things are perfectly fine as they are," because that would really serve no point. You're one guy. I can't do that to everyone who might feel the same way as you. So I'm trying to explain things in terms of my intent, and places where I don't understand your reasoning, so that hopefully you can reframe your comments in a way that might be actionable for me. Or maybe, as you noted, you aren't in the target audience. But I try to use that cop-out (on my side) as little as possible, because then I wind up just kind of throwing in the towel prematurely, if that makes sense.
No problem. I think one of the major challenges of any game design is trying to figure out your audience, while they are trying to figure out you. The more complex or ambitious the game, the harder this is. TLF certainly looks like a game that I want to like, but I realize that if I'm a weird fringe case, that I can't have it all my way. I'm fine with that. I don't want to push for shaping the game in a way that pleases me if it turns off a larger audience, so like I say before, if a comment just sounds like something you don't see as part of the scope of the game, please feel free to ignore the comment. No hurt feelings on this end.
I'm just a dude saying, "This is how I feel right now, and I better say it while I can make a difference" Cherry pick what's useful, blow off the rest, at the end of the day, you still got a fan here!