Suggest - Features and Improvements

[Greymoran]

There is currently no way to select which kind of colonists you want to embark onto a transport ship. Failing to click "defend" or "attack" simply causes you to automatically lose the battle; players should not be able to move fleets that are engaged in combat and if a player fails to click "defend" or "attack," the player should be dumped to the battle screen anyways.

[Arioch]

There is currently no way to select which kind of colonists you want to embark onto a transport ship.

We definitely need to improve the population transport UI, but there is currently a workaround that lets you choose what kind of colonist to transport: from the planet information screen, shift-left-click on the population icon of the colonist type you would like to move, and you will be put into the transport UI to select a destination.

Failing to click "defend" or "attack" simply causes you to automatically lose the battle; players should not be able to move fleets that are engaged in combat and if a player fails to click "defend" or "attack," the player should be dumped to the battle screen anyways.

Failure to manually fight a battle causes it to be resolved automatically; this does not inherentlycause you to lose, but since the auto-AI doesn't attempt to retreat, you will probably be defeated if you are outnumbered.

We plan to include a notification that warns the player when he attempts to end the turn when there are still unresolved actions.

[Dinkelsen]

[...] I think a UI more like Freelancer's ship outfit screen (where selecting a slot to fill on the left-list automatically populates the right list with all possible options) is probably a cleaner way of handling things.

I just wanted to suggest exactly this feature. It would make designing ships that much easier.

Other things I thought might help:

- Information about a weapon's range in the ship design screen. The damage is already listed.
- Refit a ship to an updated class feature would be cool. So when there are scientific breakthroughs I do not have to refit every single ship to the new tech. Especially if I have a lot of small ships. Maybe a "refit all present ships to their latest class" option could be nice. That way we could refit more ships per turn.
These points have already been discussed but I like them so much that I will still write them down.
- A fleet feature, but I think that has already been discussed.
- Selecting different colonist types for transport (has already been discusssed, too)

[ceridian]

ship designer option - Some of the other ideas that have been posted are great, but another one would be adding filter options to the list of components. might take care of the issue with to many components in the list in the easiest to implement way.

fleet formation - Being about to specify the formation of your ships before a fight might be a useful addition.

other than that everything else i can think of the change has already been said.

[icekatze]

hi hi

I recently played through another game and I came across a couple of oddities that I'm curious about. First off, I was trying out the newly functional torpedoes with the Yoral, and I noticed that when I put missiles and torpedoes on the same ship, firing a torpedo would reduce the number of missiles I had available to fire. Intuitively, I feel like this shouldn't happen. If torpedoes and missiles are interchangeable, why use different launchers? It also feels like it is a waste of firepower to put both missiles and torpedoes on a single ship, especially since they tend to split apart and get engaged by point defenses separately.

The second oddity I noticed was a system held by Gremak Marauders, who were apparently keeping a planet that was held by a Human population. When I selected the option to attack the planet, the Marauders engaged me in space combat, but once I defeated them, I found that I could not invade the planet. I'm not sure if they were two different factions, but I would still think that if you attack a planet and it is defended by a separate faction, you should be able to invade the planet regardless.

[sven]

I recently played through another game and I came across a couple of oddities that I'm curious about. First off, I was trying out the newly functional torpedoes with the Yoral, and I noticed that when I put missiles and torpedoes on the same ship, firing a torpedo would reduce the number of missiles I had available to fire. Intuitively, I feel like this shouldn't happen. If torpedoes and missiles are interchangeable, why use different launchers? It also feels like it is a waste of firepower to put both missiles and torpedoes on a single ship, especially since they tend to split apart and get engaged by point defenses separately.

Yes, I agree. The "shared munitions" concept made more sense when missiles were the only weapon type in the game that used ammunition. Tracking remaining munitions by weapon type, rather than pooling all ammunition together, is a change I think we need to make. That said, it's a (relatively) minor issue, and a somewhat complicated one to fix, as the "extra munitions" system in the ship design screen will need to change from a generic +ammo boost to something else.

The second oddity I noticed was a system held by Gremak Marauders, who were apparently keeping a planet that was held by a Human population. When I selected the option to attack the planet, the Marauders engaged me in space combat, but once I defeated them, I found that I could not invade the planet. I'm not sure if they were two different factions, but I would still think that if you attack a planet and it is defended by a separate faction, you should be able to invade the planet regardless.

Sounds like a bug. Would you upload the game?

[rattle]

I've not read through the seven pages but there's a few things that come to mind so excuse me if these were discussed before.

Ship designer

• Filtering the list on the right by what module slot is selected on the left
• Drop down menu to cycle through templates

Colony screen

• Smaller build list
• Build queues
• Refit => Drop down menu to pick from a template or edit on the fly (I quite like that)

Weapons

• Laser weapons outshine the other early weapons because of Rapid Fire, IMO.
• PD Lasers gain no Rapid Fire.
• Disruptors seem much like Neutron Blasters to me, considering there's a neutron weapon.
• Carriers that have four fighter slots should get four ground assault teams, or not?

Research

• Organizing the list in separate trees would be lovely.
• I was really fond of the randomized tree in the old Master of Orion and the way research and colony management worked in that game especially

[Mezmorki]

Hello all

Still downloading + installing - but I have one feature request that has to do with the beta forums. Has there been thought to having a beta sub-forum for "bugs + technical" issues and another for "gameplay + feature requests" and another for "UI + graphics" and so on .... There are a lot of big long threads and would be simpler to track things if each item was it's own thread in an appropriate sub-forum. The devs/moderators can add a [TAG] to the start of the thread name for whether the issue is FIXED, WIP, DISCUSS, etc ...

Just a thought

[sven]

Hello all

Still downloading + installing - but I have one feature request that has to do with the beta forums. Has there been thought to having a beta sub-forum for "bugs + technical" issues and another for "gameplay + feature requests" and another for "UI + graphics" and so on .... There are a lot of big long threads and would be simpler to track things if each item was it's own thread in an appropriate sub-forum. The devs/moderators can add a [TAG] to the start of the thread name for whether the issue is FIXED, WIP, DISCUSS, etc ...

Just a thought

The beta tester group is still pretty small -- but, I do think we're going to need to get increasingly orginized as time goes on. Right now, the history is large as it is because we've had a couple enthusiastic conversations inside a small group of people. Topics have a way of drifting from technical issues to design ideas and back again. Like, um, the current discussions about colony ships on the bug report forums. I should really move those into a sub-thread, at this point

That said, the boards are probably overdue for a bit of curation. Perhaps a librarian thread with some links to highlights that might be relevant for new people trying to get up to speed on notable past discussions -- I'd probably include links to mharmless's 'Humanity is Fun' and 'Small Ships in the Late Game' , along with gryfalcon's 'Distributed Production' .

[luciderous]

That said, the boards are probably overdue for a bit of curation.

Given the overall volume of comments in this fledgling community, I don't feel there is any pressing need for desperate changes . In my opinion, the problem at the moment is not with forum organization per se (sub-divisions, tags etc.), but with the lack of clear understanding by testers what improvement suggestions have already been accepted/rejected by the developers as a result of relevant discussions and when these will be implemented if ever. My immediate suggestion instead, would be to provide another highly specific sticky locked thread with short discussion/decision summaries and implementation ETA. It can be in form of FAQ or a kind of implementation timeline - anything that makes sense to you, as a developer. Something like "SiS design FAQ" or "Accepted improvement suggestions" or whatever. This will help both newcomers and veterans keep an eye on everything that has been already discussed without the need to read each and every painfully long debate topic from start if they don't feel like it.

[Arioch]

My immediate suggestion instead, would be to provide another highly specific sticky locked thread with short discussion/decision summaries and implementation ETA. It can be in form of FAQ or a kind of implementation timeline - anything that makes sense to you, as a developer. Something like "SiS design FAQ" or "Accepted improvement suggestions" or whatever. This will help both newcomers and veterans keep an eye on everything that has been already discussed without the need to read each and every painfully long debate topic from start if they don't feel like it.

I think that would require a lot of documentation work that I doubt we really have time for. I don't know of any other developers, even AAA ones, that put that much effort into managing suggestion feedback. I suspect that even if such a list existed, a large percentage of the time people would post comments before reading it or without realizing that it exists. Also, we change our minds about things, so a design idea isn't fully "accepted" until it's actually put into the game. We welcome and encourage suggestions, but the design process is not by committee.

[sven]

I think that would require a lot of documentation work that I doubt we really have time for. I don't know of any other developers, even AAA ones, that put that much effort into managing suggestion feedback. I suspect that even if such a list existed, a large percentage of the time people would post comments before reading it or without realizing that it exists. Also, we change our minds about things, so a design idea isn't fully "accepted" until it's actually put into the game. We welcome and encourage suggestions, but the design process is not by committee.

Well..... this is all true, but there's certainly a couple recurring questions that are easy enough to answer. Like the "strategic map zoom" and "planetary production queue" -- both of which we see a lot. I suspect we'll see a few more as time goes on. A couple simple FAQs might actually save time for everyone involved -- us included.

[Gyrfalcon]

I'm wondering why the research for laser includes the defense laser, but I have to research PD Coilgun separately. I think I'd actually suggest making Laser and Defense Laser separate projects, but make them add up to about the same cost.

[Gyrfalcon]

When a planet completes a construction project, the notification tells me what it will build next. It would be nice if the notification for research would do the same: Our researchers have discovered Lasers and will work on Advanced Metallurgy next or choose next research project.

[Arioch]

When a planet completes a construction project, the notification tells me what it will build next. It would be nice if the notification for research would do the same: Our researchers have discovered Lasers and will work on Advanced Metallurgy next or choose next research project.

We plan to eventually remove the "feature" in which the AI chooses projects for you (or, at least, make it so this is not the default behavior). It leads to too many situations in which you research something that you didn't want to just because you missed a notification.