In order to avoid a tl;dr effect, I'll try to be as concise and up to the point as possible

The game shows a lot of promise and is something that I'd like to invest my time in. I mean, I'm very capricious in this regard, and get quickly bored with games, if they don't have something that I value design-wise. This is definitely not the case here - I liked the game immediately the moment I started it.

My most immediate impression of the game is that it feels like MoO on steroids. This is definitely a good thing in my book - I liked the streamlined attractiveness of MoO, without having to span my attention over too many things at any given moment. Although there are many things done right in this game, I feel that pinpointing some more troublesome issues instead, would prove more useful to the devs at this stage of development. So, let's get started:

1. UI transparency and visual clutter
This is something that feels like it needs more work at the moment. Whenever you click on a star system, bring up planet management screen, ship management screen etc. - the star map remains completely visible (if only a bit dimmed) in the background. This makes the UI feel cluttered, when you have difficult time discerning foreground vs background element groups and therefore become confused. More dimming of the background, or even full opacity for UI windows(like with planet structure images - Factory etc. or window borders) would be appropriate, I presume.

2. Lack of mouse-drag movement for the star map
Right now you have to either use control arrows on the keyboard or move the cursor to the screen edge or hold the middle-mouse button to move the viewport around the starmap. This feels counterintuitive a bit, with many 4X games having this feature by default. It can either be a LMB hold-and-drag style, or RMB click style -whatever you like.

3. Ship movement mechanic
Right now you have to select your fleet, click "Move" button, then select your destination and click LMB. Again, simply selecting your fleet and clicking RMB on a desitnation would be more intuitive in most cases. I can only assume, that you plan in advance to port SiS to tablets - then translating this control flow to touch-based design would make a lot of sense.

4. Ship selection on ship fleet screen
Right now you have to use RMB to select/deselect individual ships within the group. However, the same RMB also acts as screen dismissal/back to starmap button throughout the game. Again, feels a bit like interface inconsistency, that can lead to confusion. My recommendation would be to use LMB for ship selection/deselection instead.

5. RMB for closing current overlay
This elaborates the issue with the previous example. Having RMB used throughout the game with window closing function makes it unintuitive for any other use - you always expect it to do a default closing action, unless you have been told that it can do something else as well. I'd recommend, to overload this button with different functions instead, when nothing is selected - like using it to get an info on something (planet/ship etc.). Thus, RMB for context info, fleet movement etc. What to do with windows closing you ask? Well, you already have some "X" widgets in the UI for this, and it would be also nice to be able to close any screen the same way you opened it, for exampe: you click with LMB to select a star system/planet etc. and then you click LMB on the same space object again to have the UI overlay closed. Even more, with a star map, you might click LMB on any empty space on the map, to have the overlay closed.

6. Lore text and object descriptions
This needs further proofreading and style correction. I remember reading the description of "Improvement Slots" feature, that said "The number of improvements that can be built on a planet is a function of ..." Something is a function of something? Well, that might be easily understood by programmers/math people, but some more casual gamers might have their eyebrows raised

7. Planet Stats
When you click on a planet, you get a lot of info about it, like its type, size, zones etc. However, the text is quite difficult to comprehend quickly without any additional visual clues. My suggestion would be to try and use different text color (or some other cue) to provide the info on the most important "quick" stats - Type, Size, Temperature. And it would be even better, if the game provided context-colored font based on your Race preferences. For example, if this planet type/temperature are perfectly suitable for your colonists - make the text green. If not - red and so on. It would be a lot more easy to quickly grasp whether a planet poses an interest to your Empire or not, without having to skim through the full description.

Well, that's all for now, but more suggestions coming soon. Hope this helps!

luciderous wrote:Well, that's all for now, but more suggestions coming soon. Hope this helps!

It does! I'm not going to respond in detail atm -- but, you're reiterating some key points that seem to be an issue for many of the intial testers (among other things, I appear to be the only strategy gamer who doesn't regularly use a drag-pan semantic.)

And your points about RMB inconsistency are something Jim and I have talked a lot about -- improving those conventions are one of the things we wanted to get done for the start of beta, but didn't.

The in-game text is also all slated for more editing. However, I feel like I have something of a justifiable excuse for the improvement slot description -- the whole strategic resource model is something that's slated to get some serious editing during beta, so the efficiency formula for understaffed improvements, in particular, is something that I'm still actively thinking through. Um, if you or anyone else has feedback on the details of just how you think those formulas ought to work, I'd love to hear it

luciderous wrote:1. UI transparency and visual clutter
This is something that feels like it needs more work at the moment. Whenever you click on a star system, bring up planet management screen, ship management screen etc. - the star map remains completely visible (if only a bit dimmed) in the background. This makes the UI feel cluttered, when you have difficult time discerning foreground vs background element groups and therefore become confused. More dimming of the background, or even full opacity for UI windows(like with planet structure images - Factory etc. or window borders) would be appropriate, I presume.

To a certain extent, I think this transparency is important to the look of the UI, but I agree that there are older UI elements in which it causes too much clutter. As we go through the UI and update the individual elements, I am keeping this in mind. Most newer UI elements (like the encounter dialog) have multiple transparent background layers that keep the feel of transparency but reduce the impact of elements in the background on the readability of text and graphics in the foreground.

Arioch wrote:Most newer UI elements (like the encounter dialog) have multiple transparent background layers that keep the feel of transparency but reduce the impact of elements in the background on the readability of text and graphics in the foreground.

Yes, that really does the trick! This screen is definitely a lot more readable that some other parts of the UI.