Suggest - Features and Improvements

[sven]

For example, if the AI has a world under its control that is mineral Rich versus all its others which are Normal or Poor, it would realize, 'hey, this place is good for making metal compared to my other worlds, I'll apply a mining-world template here', which could be as simple as two mines and a farm.

This is, actually, almost exactly what it's currently doing. I think it still needs some sort of "soft cheating" to get it around situations where it doesn't happen to hit worlds that fit it's food or mining templates, and, the templates themselves probably need some tweaking.

But, basically, this is the approach I'm taking. The AI develops each world based mostly on what it looks like that world is good at, rather than trying to solve the much harder problem of balancing local production potential against other high-level strategic considerations.

[halftea]

Maybe add code where you can use Colony Ships to add to planetary population instead of just being able to create new colonies. Useful if you capture colony ships of a different race that are still running around late in the game and you want to add to an existing biosphere. Right now it seems they can only be used to populate empty planets.

[sven]

Maybe add code where you can use Colony Ships to add to planetary population instead of just being able to create new colonies. Useful if you capture colony ships of a different race that are still running around late in the game and you want to add to an existing biosphere. Right now it seems they can only be used to populate empty planets.

This feature does already exist, in a sense. You can "disembark" the colonists from a colony ship, much like you can with a standard transport. In fact, functionally, colony ships are basically just transports that 1) can't carry trade goods and 2) always start with a unit of population embarked.

However, while transports do show embark / disembark on-hover icons, in addition to the embark/disembark button in their ship status panes, the colony ships don't have those same on-hover icons. In an earlier build, they did, but I think we decided that while including the ability was a good thing, advertising it too aggressively was likely to be confusing for new players -- as a colony ship without any colonists is a sort of inherently confusing object. Right now, we haven't figured out a good strategy for warning / advising players that certain colony ships are *empty*, and, thus, unable to be used for their nominal purpose without embarking colonists first.

[halftea]

I just saw that on the detailed ship status pane and it works as advertised. I feel silly now as that is the first time I've tried it from that part of the game.

That said, I agree that empty colony ships might be a tad confusing. I frankly hadn't tried disembarking from the details pane, just using the icons from the fleet or the popup for colonization. Maybe a icon showing embark/disembark on a fleet pane - kind of like how transports will annotate them. A slight snippet in the ship description itself about the futility of empty colony ships or something might also clue in a new player.

[Gyrfalcon]

I'd like it if, when a research item is complete, the link would show me the completed tech to remind me of what has been completed.

ETA: Although that could wait until the tech tree gets put in.

[Arioch]

I'd like it if, when a research item is complete, the link would show me the completed tech to remind me of what has been completed.

The notification box at the bottom of the main screen shows in the first line of text what you just completed.

[evil713]

to be honest sometimes I cannot remember what I last researched and go back to that message in order to find out, it would be nice if there was an easy way to know what the last research was while inside the research screen.

[sven]

I'd like it if, when a research item is complete, the link would show me the completed tech to remind me of what has been completed.

to be honest sometimes I cannot remember what I last researched and go back to that message in order to find out, it would be nice if there was an easy way to know what the last research was while inside the research screen.

Well, adding a link is easy. Should be working on dev (r14366). Though, I agree with Gyrfalcon and others -- for the research pane to really play well, we're going to need to do more to polish to the overall UI.

[Resheven]

I feel the Gremak should have a dedicated hardpoint for distortion fields on their ships. The Orthin get them for their capacitors and siege weapons, and I don't see distortion fields as being substantially better than capacitors.

As it stands, giving up a vital shield slot for a gimmicky "not cloaking device" is a tall order. Gremak ships are already nothing special when compared to other races (in terms of weapon hardpoints), yes they have an "extra" missile hardpoint, but so do the Yoral.

As these devices have not been properly implemented yet, I am unable to gauge their effectiveness, but gleaning what I can from their description, they sound pretty weak with the insistence that they aren't proper cloaking devices. If they actually do reduce the rate of enemy accuracy, that can easily be circumvented with the accuracy mod afforded to all weapons. Again, just not worth giving up a shield for.

So, sell me on this devs; Why should we use these?

[Zaskow]

Greetings!

Small UI suggestion. Is it possible to make simple upgrade of some components (Armor, Reactors at least) in ship-design by right-click?

[Arioch]

The ship designer is in need of a UI revamp, but that's one of the things we'll keep in mind.

As these devices have not been properly implemented yet, I am unable to gauge their effectiveness, but gleaning what I can from their description, they sound pretty weak with the insistence that they aren't proper cloaking devices. If they actually do reduce the rate of enemy accuracy, that can easily be circumvented with the accuracy mod afforded to all weapons. Again, just not worth giving up a shield for.

So, sell me on this devs; Why should we use these?

Sorry that I didn't respond to this earlier. As you mention, the race-specific devices haven't really been properly implemented, and so there isn't any good reason to use them at the moment. When it is properly implemented, the distortion field should either a) compete favorably with other system slot choices, or b) have its own built-in slot.

[Eledore]

I would suggest: Borderless Full Screen.

Why? my story;
So, after having played a full day behind the pc. I was thinking 'it doesn't have lots of controls, might even use a controller'.
With SiS now on steam greenlight, so why not test that out.
Went downstairs grabbed my steam controller and Steam Link and tried starting the game.

Froze, Froze, Froze.
Managed to get it working properly by running it non-fullscreen,
every-time i went fullscreen the cursor just froze unable to move with the controller.
Moving the mouse worked, but steam controler just refused to work.
Have had this with a few other games. Fallout3, Xenonauts. using windowed mode OR borderless fullscreen works perfect. (BFF preferred of-course)

Full Controller support isn't something to try for.
But this is a turn based game, so it can easily be played with a controller.
Heck i played it for a hour like that. And i had no problems with it. (besides dry eyes from trying to read text on 1080 at 4 yards away)
[/story]

Besides my Story i think more people would like a borderless fullscreen option.
3cents

[sven]

Managed to get it working properly by running it non-fullscreen,
every-time i went fullscreen the cursor just froze unable to move with the controller.
Moving the mouse worked, but steam controler just refused to work.

Interesting. Particularly because I believed (up until this moment, at least) that what we're calling "fullscreen" in our options pane actually is a borderless fullscreen mode (we don't turn off your other monitors, as most true fullscreen games would, but instead just pop up a window without a border that's sized to cover the whole screen.

My first hunch would be that the issue actually has something to do with cursor capturing, which is enabled by default in "fullscreen" mode, but, disabled in windowed mode. And that's a feature that may well be interacting oddly with the steam controller.

Would you try going into Options, disabling the setting "edge panning / fullscreen cursor capture", and then testing to see if the controller works in fullscreen mode?

edit: if this actually what's going wrong, it's probably worth separating the "edge panning" and "fullscreen cursor capture" options -- that would be a simple change, and i think it would let you use the edge-panning feature with your steamlink setup.

[NullVoid]

I was playing with the Yoral and had a 12+ ship fleet with several different types, but they were split between two types: missile-toting attackers in the back and PD-toting screeners in the front. The enemy was a Marauder planetary defense lugging torpedoes like they were going out of style, so it took several rounds of firing missiles with the folks in the back and moving around the screeners in the front to finally take out the enemy. The ships weren't split evenly across class types so double-clicking to select similar ships doesn't help; I had to reselect the groups every round.

So, my request is RTS-style saved selection hotkeys, like shift+1 to memorize group 1, and afterwards pressing 1 will reselect these ships. Making groups persistent across battles is probably way more complicated than reasonable, but even having to redefine groups every battle is much better than doing it every round.

[NullVoid]

So, I've been playing on a touchscreen device (an Acer Aspire R11, if anybody cares), and I would like to ask for a little bit of change in the UI. There are two different scrollbars in the game; the one that can be seen in the production screen with a variable-sized handle and the one from the technology screen that has a fixed-sized round handle. For those of us that have no scroll wheel, we have to grab the handle with the mouse and drag it down, a procedure that is especially awkward on a touchscreen. If we had up and down arrows at the edges of the scroll bar (or better yet, have clicking on the track above or below the handle scroll half a page or so up or down), selecting technologies and production would be A LOT easier. The small targets and the required shift key are also limitations on playing touchscreen-only, but these are harder to change and aren't nearly as annoying.