First Impression Notes
Posted: Tue Sep 01, 2015 3:51 am
I'm going to dump all my gameplay-related observations from my time playing the game here, so it's likely to be edited and expanded as time goes on, so here we go.
- The basic UI elements took a couple minutes for me to get used to, mainly as there's no 'ok' or 'cancel' buttons. There were a couple times where I fumbled around trying to figure out how to get out of some screens until I remembered 'dude, use the x'. One place where this trips me up the most is in planet management; the UIs of many other games hardwire players into finding those familiar buttons and it can be a bit disruptive to not have them.
- That planetary report panel is pretty handy. It's been helpful in seeing how things are coming along on a turn-by-turn basis.
- Ship design's decent. I understand there's a rudimentary colour-coding system as is, although it bugged me at first before I noticed how ships actually do have slots that can only hold certain things. I think colouring each slot box on the left-hand side would make it more clear, plus adding similar little boxes to the ship overlay itself for drag-and-droppers.
- I would very much appreciate having available research be sortable/organizable by tech group as opposed to length, and an option to hide what you've already finished. A tree would be great too; I know, it's probably been asked already and they're a pain to make, but the visual is helpful.
- While having some data close at hand via the ingame links such as planet environment types is nice, I think collecting the majority of that info into a separate ingame encyclopedia might make more sense from an organization standpoint. When I wanted to read up on a minor race on one of my planets, having to use the teeny-tiny 'back' arrow in the UI was a bit annoying.
- Point-blank nuke missile spam is OP. Compared to early-game laser boats, missile-spam destroyers are ridiculously strong, much like how laser cannons early on in MOO2 did squat, while nuclear missile spam (with two ammo) easily one-shotted everything when fired at PB.