Arioch wrote:We're working on diplomacy now, which will be in a build before long. We don't plan to do espionage for the initial release.
ok, thanks for the info. Diplomacy is quite a must.
I dont like SD2 that much, but one of the better elements of this game is the diplomatic suggestion tolerance rule. If you have played it, you surely know what I mean. Each suggestion costs a number. A race can suggest only this or that until a certain tolerance number is surpassed. This tolerance number is dependent of how much the AI race likes you. This means in the beginning when they dont like you and their tolerance number is low you can only suggest small things like small trades (low number) but later in the game when they like you more and you have proven to them as good neighbour, you can exchange a higher number like tech + ressources in one single exchange. Thats a quite nice system and feels "realistic".
Recently I fired up another sis game and I was astonished how it improved. Cudos for this. Especially the combat is really, really good. IMO it has the same quality like MOO2 (or even surpasses it in some instances). But what the game is still lacking is the strategic game. It feels not very polished.
-Myriards of tooltips are missing or confusing. (eg: how many metal do a ship per turn need? sometimes the tooltip says my colonizer needs 12 and next turn he needs 15 or so. Thats confusing. Additionally the planet dont produce the ship anymore and it is "delayed". I cannot count the turns I was cursing and spent the whole production on research only in order to recover this damned metal stockpile. You should exactly tell the user how many metal each ship uses per turn in ordern not to be delayed, not only the sum. Or alternatively if a ship is ordered the game should subtract the whole amount of metal in the beginning of its built and not each turn. And if you dont have enough metal to build the ship, a warning should appear. That should do it. As it is now, I dont like it.
-still alot of game subsystems, techs and ship modules are not explained well. How much production do 1 Mio population contribute? And how much ressources do a mine on a rich planet generate in comparision to a poor planet? A certain green tech (cannot remember the name) raises the population cap on a planet by +1. What does this mean? 1 Million? I could not detect this information anywhere but those questions are important for my colonization decisions.
-the planet description is a little bit chaotic.Please put the crunch numbers together, easy readable and/or with little icons or so.
-the tech tree (chaotic collection of hyperlinks?) as it is now is awful (sorry to say), at least compared to other 4x games (and I am sure players on steam will compare this) The main problem is that although the user can click on the "leads to" links to plan several tiers ahead, he usually has no chance to remember which tech will lead to what. The game supports maybe older people with alzheimer by providing some memory training but thats it.
Ok, enough complaint. There is still an excellent game behind it and I am sure many of my gripes will be corrected till the game is released, but if you go EA I recommend not to do it with the game as it is now.
