Impressions of the First Kind

[Shrugging Khan]

Battles have improved, although it still comes down to harassing the enemy to death.

A problem that remains is the constant stream of fatal errors. Where should I send those error logs, anyways?

[Tridus]

Upload them to Mantis, I'd imagine.

[Pepisolo]

Mantising. (This just means that I'm putting some of this feedback onto the Mantis bugracker for ease of access and visibility to the devs). Thanks!

[Shrugging Khan]

Been dicking around a bit more, and one thing that struck me as extremely odd was the acquisition of Hydral technology.

I get two when I do one of these ridiculously easy ice belt (or asteroid belt) missions. Which are unlocked from the start of the game, with no conditions to meet. On these missions, I encounter slow-moving, easily destroyed enemies with no AI to speak of. I just dive straight for the objective, park my ship there, power up either shields or guns (both seem viable) and weather the storm until the tractor beams do their thing - no tactics involved, seriously just using my vanilla flagship to walk right up to the damn thing.

Then I get two new abilities/weapons.
And then I can just repeat the mission straight away.

...in all seriousness, the game could just as well unlock all the abilities from the start. These missions are beyond trivial.


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Also, there seems to be a rather striking lack of information on what the different Fighter Craft are capable off. Some visible and accurate stats in the customisation window would be very nice. Actually, it'd be very nice for all the weapons and abilities!


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Just received the terraforming quest.

...how in the world can a non-spacefaring race evolve on a planet and turn out to be "least-suited" to live on it? I won't question the probabilities of two handfuls of sentient races developing space flight in the same solar system at almost the same time, but what's the logic in not being suited to the environment you come from?

[Professor Paul1290]

Just received the terraforming quest.

...how in the world can a non-spacefaring race evolve on a planet and turn out to be "least-suited" to live on it? I won't question the probabilities of two handfuls of sentient races developing space flight in the same solar system at almost the same time, but what's the logic in not being suited to the environment you come from?

I have no idea what the dev's intended explanation for this is, but I don't think the concept is too far fetched.

There's nothing that really says that the planet's environment was always the way it is at the time the game takes place. Climate changes, ice ages come and go, asteroids hit and mess things up, and so on.
There's also nothing that says the conditions are uniform either. The species could have evolved to sentience in a relatively small portion of the planet, but as their technology advanced they may have been able to colonize the rest of the planet.

In real life, you could even argue that we humans live on a planet that largely isn't "perfectly suited" to us! A lot of the places we live on are too cold, too hot, or too barren of natural food for us to live there more naturally. We expend a significant portion of our resources on things that allow us to live in areas of our planet we wouldn't be able to live on otherwise.

We arguably have room to potentially "terraform" Earth to be more "suitable" to us. We could potentially make deserts and tundras less hostile, develop trees that can process CO2 more efficiently, acquire more farmland, somehow make places like Antarctica more livable to us, and so on and so forth. Sure a lot of these would be freakishly complicated and have a lot of potential positive and negative implications, but you get the idea.

[keith.lamothe]

I don't think the idea is that each race had its origin on the planet they're on.  Eight planets all having the conditions to generate sentient life (of whatever kind), much less all of them approaching spacefaring at anything like the same rate (Hydrals or no Hydrals),  just doesn't fit.

Also: a race coming to be on a desert planet, that would nonetheless thrive better on a terran planet, is one thing.  A race that would normally thrive on a terran planet coming to be on a gas giant is rather another

[Shrugging Khan]

That question was really just me wondering, it's not like this is Hard Sci-Fi.
Besides, now that I've spent a night sleeping and getting back some of my limited imgaination, I guess we can blame everything on the hydrals having condemned these races to live on whatever planets seemed best-suited to keeping them down, while deliberately depriving them of spacefaring technology. Case closed. 'twas the Hydrals!

Anyways, I'd really much rather have some answers about the Fighters/Operations and the Hydral Tech Missions, if anyone can provide some insight.

[PokerChen]

If you really want to think about probabilities of sentient life, it's far more likely for an external race to deposit everyone in the solar system, including the Hydrals, given their technological gap and habitation.

We'd call it the great social experiment.

Now, about the hydral tech missions, I would personally like them to be available sporadically, not integrated into the quest system. The  operations give you improved versions of everyone's ships (at the beginning anyway), so you should be able to look on the ship list onthe solar map and obtain a gist of their stats... customisation window is still on the list, iirc.

[Shrugging Khan]

With the Hydral Tech missions having been reworked, I've come to notice that other missions suffer from the same problem.
I just started a new game, docked with the station in the first fight to boost the first race, then got some creds and an informant. Can you guess what came next?

Did some tech raids. About a dozen. A dozen identical missions, to raid as many technologies as that first race now had - that's rather boring, to be honest, but very effective with seemingly no drawbacks but -10 to my influence. Now, if I don't plan on making friends with a race that starts out hating me, will I have to start every game by doing the same mission ten times over?

Suggestion: Taking some inspiration from AI War (and common sense), I suggest that doing the same mission repeatedly should make it increasingly harder. This additional difficulty might degrade over time.

[keith.lamothe]

Which combat difficulty level are you playing on?

[Shrugging Khan]

Normal.

...yes I know, grumpy old people who've been playing vidya games since the nineties shouldn't play on normal. But these fancy modern games ought to have clever AI ready to outsmart me! I shouldn't need to crank up the artificial difficulty lever! *rant*!

Would increasing the combat difficulty solve the problem, though? After all, the core of the issue is that if I could do it once, I can do it 12 times - if the specific mission doesn't get harder or temporarily locked, there is no strategic reason why I won't just farm it do death if it's my most profitable option. But that's not much fun, gameplay-wise...

[keith.lamothe]

For kicks try the Advanced Start option from the main menu (to get the extra startup options) and pick Misery difficulty level.  Then try your little raids.

I'll bring up your point about "if I can do this once, what's stopping me from doing it over and over again?" with Chris, since he'd be the one making a call on it.

[orzelek]

I agree with Shrugging Khan.. science is a bit broke-ish for player still (aka researching of anything is pain in the ass or it needs to state in nice CAPS that you are intended to do it after 10+ years).
And if reading his post makes you go face-palm - why I didn't do that.. it's not a good design

[Tridus]

Considering what a hassle research can be, I'd really not want to see raiding over nerfed. Sometimes you have really limited options for who you can raid, and not keeping up can gate tech behind prerequisites you can't get any other way. That happened to me.