Suggest - Features and Improvements

[bjg]

By looking at any but Humanity transport you can tell if it's loaded or not. Would be nice if you make the same distinctions for the Humanity one.

Update: now I see the difference, but maybe it needs to be easier to pick (specially if there are many ships in the fleet and icons are small).

[enpi]

Just an idea: how about a battle arena, where you can test out ship designs against each other? I can remember Space Empires had this and I always used it to test the combat effectiveness of new blueprints. you could put up the known ship types of other races and your own empire against each other and duke it out in a simulated space battle arena. Very fun and helpful for ship design.

Recently I was able to play a little bit again SiS and I have to say - I like the improvements. For example the explanation what buildings like factory produce per turn or what the population needs for food etc.

The only thing is that I, as a typical male, prefer NOT the narrative, eg whole time consuming sentences to explain things (which I consider more a female way to process data), but a short and visually clear list.

One thing I was missing were the data for tanks in the production list. I hope they will be in soon.

[sven]

Just an idea: how about a battle arena, where you can test out ship designs against each other? I can remember Space Empires had this and I always used it to test the combat effectiveness of new blueprints. you could put up the known ship types of other races and your own empire against each other and duke it out in a simulated space battle arena. Very fun and helpful for ship design.

A "tactical combat sim" was actually a feature that was part of my initial design for SiS. Though as the design evolved, it dropped off my various TODO lists. That said, the core game systems are setup in such a way that adding a feature like this would fairly straightforward. And so it is the kind of thing we might be able to get to in an expansion.

[enpi]

Just an idea: how about a battle arena, where you can test out ship designs against each other? I can remember Space Empires had this and I always used it to test the combat effectiveness of new blueprints. you could put up the known ship types of other races and your own empire against each other and duke it out in a simulated space battle arena. Very fun and helpful for ship design.

A "tactical combat sim" was actually a feature that was part of my initial design for SiS. Though as the design evolved, it dropped off my various TODO lists. That said, the core game systems are setup in such a way that adding a feature like this would fairly straightforward. And so it is the kind of thing we might be able to get to in an expansion.

Fine. This would be a great feature. In Space Empires I used it also very often just to conduct a quick random ship-ship skirmish if I had not the time to play the strategic part of the game.

[SirDamnALot]

Sorry if this is old news or already covered somewhere:

An idea about making the races have even more personality.
In most 4X games, there a certain actions that trigger world/galaxy wide reactions.
For example start throwing nukes in Civ or the use of Bioweapons in MoO gives you funny looks from everyone.

The twist: Have triggers for different actions, but let the reaction vary from race to race!
Nuking an colony from orbit ? Genocide a captured/indigen population ?
- Some see it as a disgusting crime
- others just as the collateral of warfare
- humans (that hive of scum and villiany ) think you are finally on the right track! (nuke from orbit, it's the only way to be sure!)

Of course, nobody likes it if you do it to them, but even then the negative reaction could be accentuated by their stance on the topic.
(yeah you are a jerk, but honestly, we would have done it too...)

The player would need some feedback that his actions resulted in certain drops/gains in reputation.
Old school like MoO: races leave a message on your answering machine that they find you cool/deplorable.
Thats okay'ish, but would be silly if that kind of feedback happens every time and from everyone.
(ToDo: De-populate Riegel 4. "Done!" *next turn* You have 5 new Messages. "aww man...")
I like how the newer games (like Civ) directly spell out what the AI considers pro/cons with you.
e.g.:
Pro: 30+ years trade treaty; never harmed us; we agree on your type of government, etc
Con: what you did to the colony on Riegel 4, shame on you!
(Which isn't even immersion breaking. If your civilisations are in contact, you know what they say about you. Just watch their TV )

[Arioch]

We definitely do plan to integrate racial personalities into the diplomacy system. The Gremak and Phidi should not react the same way to your aggressive actions toward a third party.

[SirDamnALot]

me again

Is it possible to give a colony a tag or "subtitle" ? I'd like to earmark my colonies as "mining", "farming", "science" etc.
So when the build advisor pops up and asks for new orders, I don't have the "who are you again?" feeling when deciding on the next build item.

In a pinch, just renaming the colony would do =)

Cheers!

[sven]

In a pinch, just renaming the colony would do =)

Hrm, yes, that's a smaller feature that's been lurking on my TODO lists for a while. I may be able to get it into today or tomorrow's patch

[Doomed]

I have a couple of minor UI suggestions.

When we select a star system it would be nice to have the planet name displayed on each planet on the bottom of the screen

When we select a ship in the battle screen it would be handy to see the ship name displayed along with its picture in the bottom bar. I often have multiple types of destroyer etc so it would be handy to be able to see which one was which without having to click and bring up the full ship description.

I'd like a notification when the enemy has finished their turn in combat.

[SirDamnALot]

When we select a ship in the battle screen it would be handy to see the ship name displayed along with its picture in the bottom bar. I often have multiple types of destroyer etc so it would be handy to be able to see which one was which without having to click and bring up the full ship description.

I'd like a notification when the enemy has finished their turn in combat.

My guess is that the whole tactical UI gets another design pass, as it looks quite different (and more "raw") then the rest of the game UI.

Edit (Not to post again):

A little visual feedback from the game when it loads something i.e. a hourglass courser or something appropriate with the theme
(spinning planet? walking Ashdar in remembrance of the old windows dinosaur courser? ).
Especially on loading a savegame, I am not sure if I hit the right spot (click the checkmark? doubleclick the name?)
so I click generously around until the galaxy map is there.
Similiar, is clicking on refit or ship designer. It is only a short delay on my system, but long enough to think "didn't I click right?".
So some indication that the game understood me and is working on it would be nice =)

[SirDamnALot]

Do you collect game data for balancing analysis?
Like, sample every 20 turns the collective output of science/industry/food/etc of your run and report it back to the server,
to get a baseline what people achieve ?
Many games do this via achievements and many more hooks in the code.
As I understood, you want to do the progress diagrams that show the rise/fall of a players empire that 4X games sometimes do on victory/lose.
If you would collect this data (and some more, like getting key technologies, win or loss (more realistically: abort) of game),
then you should know what a healthy/winner progression of the values would look like.
In reverse, your race advisor could pop up from time to time to let you know if you are behind this expected curve.
Nudging you to step up your science or industry output. (like a dynamic tutorial, best if a menu toggle)

And an idea from crazy town, for when you are totally out of things to do, bottom of the todo list (even below the "six week vacation on bahamas").
We all know voice acting is out of the question. But if you could still make the engine call dummy sound files (zero byte size) at the right moments (advisor pop ups, diplomatic pop ups). Then modders could replace the dummies with something fitting.
I mean, if someone can qoute-mine Captain Picard to make him sing, then the good captian can totally inform me of a iron shortage or science breakthrough
And as this would be a modders doing, you have no responsibility about any legal issues that may arrise.
(it is for personal & private use if I mod my game to hell and back)

[sven]

Do you collect game data for balancing analysis?
Like, sample every 20 turns the collective output of science/industry/food/etc of your run and report it back to the server,
to get a baseline what people achieve ?
Many games do this via achievements and many more hooks in the code.

Not yet, but I'd like to.

As I understood, you want to do the progress diagrams that show the rise/fall of a players empire that 4X games sometimes do on victory/lose.
If you would collect this data (and some more, like getting key technologies, win or loss (more realistically: abort) of game),
then you should know what a healthy/winner progression of the values would look like.
In reverse, your race advisor could pop up from time to time to let you know if you are behind this expected curve.
Nudging you to step up your science or industry output. (like a dynamic tutorial, best if a menu toggle)

Anno 2070 has a feature sortof like this one, where you can see your time to victory on any map ranked against that of all players. (That basically makes it a high-score table shared between the whole world. And that's the kind of feature I'd consider, if there's demand for it.)

Plotting comparative power curves is more sophisticated, though, my hunch is that if we're doing our jobs right as designers, the proper point of comparison to know how well you're doing (or not) shouldn't be an average playthrough, it should be your power relative to that of the other factions in your galaxy. One of my core goals when designing the "event deck" and other related elements is to make different games require different strategies -- particularly if you're playing on the "hard" difficulty. If there's a simple curve for industry/science tradeoffs that's optimal in all games, then I think that's a sign that the balance is off. I think harvesting this kind of data *would* be very helpful for balancing the game, but, of all the ways we could use it, in-game comparisons of your performance relative to a global average isn't high on my list

And an idea from crazy town, for when you are totally out of things to do, bottom of the todo list (even below the "six week vacation on bahamas").
We all know voice acting is out of the question. But if you could still make the engine call dummy sound files (zero byte size) at the right moments (advisor pop ups, diplomatic pop ups). Then modders could replace the dummies with something fitting.
I mean, if someone can qoute-mine Captain Picard to make him sing, then the good captian can totally inform me of a iron shortage or science breakthrough
And as this would be a modders doing, you have no responsibility about any legal issues that may arrise.
(it is for personal & private use if I mod my game to hell and back)

The FMOD sound library hooks that we're currently using for the in-game music are actually all exposed in Lua, and completly controllable with a little script hacking. So, you wouldn't actually need 0-byte stubs to make a mod of this sort -- you'd just need to be willing to venture boldly into your Lua State subdirectory, and start adding some extra hooks in the appropriate places.

Modder support is another feature that I'd like to invest more time in, particularly after the game has released. Right now, there's a short HTML page outlining how to get setup with basic modding, but, clearly, while many core game features are still in active development, starting in on a mod right now is probably premature

[SirDamnALot]

Oh, I did not had a highscore feature in mind at all, but this could be an easy side effect for the data harvesting.
It would also be quite the task to mine the data for usefull conclusions, given the plethora of variables (galaxy size,difficulty, race, other races, etc), but the use is definetly there. E.g. in Mass Effect and Dragon Age, Bioware monitors the players veeery precisly in their in-game behaviour.
Every decision and dialog option is noted and probably alot of combat data too.

So basically, the whole game data & logic is in LUA script ? Legend of Grimrock did that too. You can do really crazy things at runtime, because the whole data model is accessible. The devs showed off a little as they released the editor

[sven]

So basically, the whole game data & logic is in LUA script ? Legend of Grimrock did that too. You can do really crazy things at runtime, because the whole data model is accessible. The devs showed off a little as they released the editor

Yup, all the game state data is controlled / specified in Lua. And the engine is designed for live-coding, so I do almost all my work while the game is running -- watching behaviors change in-game change as I update the scripts. The SiS Lua 5.2 engine has some eccentricities in terms of script parsing and file load conventions -- but at core it's a pretty common approach. A fair amount of iOS / Android development is done this way as well.

[SirDamnALot]

Yesterday I attacked a fleet over a planet and wiped out the defenders. but the combat did not stop.
Turns out the planet had some missile defenses, but they where depleted.
So with the planet defenses useless, my fleet hugged the planet and beam bombard it until the defenses slowly where destroyed.
Took several turns of nothing really happening.
Would it be possible to check:
- If planetary defenses can't fire anymore
- AND attacker has ability for ground attack
- (AND has ammo in case of missiles as sole weapon capable of ground attack)
Then end the battle and call it a win?

Quirks I encountered:
- The enemy fleet was vastly outnumbering mine, but of pitifull tech. Quite early in the fight, some cruisers of the enemy retreated.
(Maybe run out of ammo and considered too valuable?)
- The bulk of the enemy fleet, destroyers, still kept fighting even with depleted missiles.
- as I slowly grinded down the planet, I thought I could speed up the progress with the autocombat button. But instead my escort ships and bigger retreated! Leaving one light cruiser to pound the planet that couldn't fire missiles anymore. Damn cowards
- is there a certain logic which weapon hardpoint fires first? I got the feeling that sometimes the weaponslist go bottom up, not top down.