I'm noticing something weird now. When I come out of some missions, occasionally I end up with no ship on the map and no ability to move. Clicking on planets doesn't do anything in that case, I need to unpause the game briefly. Things tick for a second and then my ship reappears and I can act.
I haven't figured out how to reliably reproduce it, but it's happened three times this morning.
Yeah, I found that and fixed that in the new one. Didn't see your report before it, but it's fixed now.
I see the same. This is intended, though - I think.
I don't know...it was just changed few releases ago to make it harder. why making it almost trivial, now?
I caused it.
It needs to be trival cause for new players there is already plenty of things to learn. With the old model you could get game over in 60 seconds on normal. The game will have pplenty of time to get hard. No need to scare away players on the first battle.
Bingo. I was getting increasingly antsy about how complex the first mission was getting, and then chemical_art came along and basically confirmed what I'd already been worried about. Sometimes the expert players lead you up the garden path if you let them.
While mostly I kid, expert players are not good guides for knowing how to ramp in a new players. And for that matter DEVELOPERS are the worst people of all for that sort of thing, which is why I ask you guys.
The only real people who can give feedback on how it will be for new people is the people coming in new at the time, which is why I like to do the staggered collections of first impressions.
In the past we had people going "well the first battle was simple, but I expect it will get more interesting." Since then the AI and so on has been improved, so it's more interesting anyhow. But also that first statement is a lot better than "oh god I can't even understand this, run away." Frankly I have that reaction with a lot of games, too. There's kind of this sweet spot between "come on, I'm not a child" and "why don't you ease me into this?" that we always try to hit. It's really hard to hit, but I think we're much better in the ballpark now.
Please don't take me wrong with anyone who disagrees -- I'm not saying your opinion is invalid. I'm just saying that at the very start, not scaring away players is more important than whether or not a mission is particularly difficult. Hope that makes sense.
