Just finishing my first game on normal, some thoughts.

[Mathyas]

Hi everyone, just stumbled across this game recently. So far, it has a lot of things about it I like, and it feels very reminiscent of MoO2, which is awesome. Below are my list of pros, cons, and suggestions. A big thanks to the devs, which I understand are just a two man team. Awesome work so far.

Pros:
Simplified colony and transport management (how transports auto-trade). I love the colony management and transport system. In some 4x games, once your empire hits a certain size it is way too grindy. Having to go through every colony you have every time a new colony upgrade is researched to put the new awesome upgrade ahead of the less important things currently selected per colony is exhausting. Not having to assign transports to specific routes and being able to recall as many as you need to anywhere in your system is also awesome!

Unique weapon techs (techs in general):
A few games just have techs like +20% beam damage and such for all weapon upgrades. It is really nice to have unique weapons in the tech tree. Also some unique empire improvements to add spice to the game.

The current colony system is awesome. It is streamlined but still requires you to tailor your buildings to the specific planet and population. It is truly brilliant and one of the best I have seen in a 4x.

I love the random indigenous populations scattered around the galaxy.

Mixed reviews:

Combat: I love the nostalgia of the turned based combat and animations, but it is a huge disadvantage to go second. Maybe use an initiative system based on ship speed with some engine upgrade techs? I read on here about using an initiative system in blocks on this forum, and I like that idea quite a bit.

Cons:
Way too much spamming of transports and ground armor units needed in the game. I keep having to go into my colonies and spam out more transports over and over again. It's boring to keep having to do that. Ditto with the level of combat Walker spam and coordination needed to sustain a long endgame war. I think tech to increase individual transport and ground armor efficiency while also increasing their individual costs would keep their respective costs the same but reduce the repetition of having to build hundreds of them would be a nice way to go. Then have a way to upgrade all older models in one pass would be preferred over having to refit individual transports and armors. It could be a building project available and sharable across multiple systems for the transports. For the armors, maybe a project to upgrade all armors stationed or in orbit in the system. Costs would be scaled for the quantity needing to be upgraded.

Edit: after further thought, needing to refit transports, even in bulk, is unnecessary and leads to other issues such as "I'll just use the low tier ones as troop transports" and the fact that the old ones are already made and doing their job. Better to just have more techs to increase transport efficiency. The real issue is that my empire has around 1500 trade routes and that means I have spammed out 200+ transports. Too much time every turn is spent spamming out yet more transports and hunting down all the ones made last turn to send to the trading pool. I think reducing transport spam would make ground armor spam much less painful.

Some suggestions and random thoughts:

I would really like to see random events such as space monster attacks and A.I. rebellions.

Perhaps a few special leaders with different traits available? Not a lot, but maybe 3-5 per empire.

A.I. seems to need some tuning to be more efficient in it's colony development. For example, I was conquering the gremaks and kept finding colonies of theirs with poor minerals and multiple mines.

Also, missiles, torpedoes, and fighters seem too weak currently. Weapons with limited uses, which can also be shot down, should do far more damage than they currently do, and the fighters seem underwhelming damage wise as well. Would be really cool to have techs increasing fighter/missile/torpedo range, speed, and survivability would be a great addition as well. Things like short range teleporting missiles and cloaking missiles (giving a %evasion chance) would really shore up this category of weapons.

Overall, I really like this game and am excited to see what it will end up becoming!

[sven]

Edit: after further thought, needing to refit transports, even in bulk, is unnecessary and leads to other issues such as "I'll just use the low tier ones as troop transports" and the fact that the old ones are already made and doing their job. Better to just have more techs to increase transport efficiency. The real issue is that my empire has around 1500 trade routes and that means I have spammed out 200+ transports. Too much time every turn is spent spamming out yet more transports and hunting down all the ones made last turn to send to the trading pool. I think reducing transport spam would make ground armor spam much less painful.

Thanks for all your careful feedback Mathyas. This suggestion, in particular, seems to me to have a lot of promise. As the player's empire expands, mechanics that were interesting in the early game often become tedious in the late game. But, I'm always on the lookout for places where we can counter that trend with tech-unlocked abilities, and a few more transport efficiency boosts could certainly be called for. And that this is a gameplay improvement that could be implemented with very little extra coding or art assets makes it particularly attractive

[Chasm]

Even a repeat build option in production que would help. Set a world to product transports and forget about it.

[SilasOfBorg]

I had this same gripe. Turning on "auto-send transports to pool" took care of it.

[Mathyas]

I had this same gripe. Turning on "auto-send transports to pool" took care of it.

My god, this is an option!?!

Another Idea I think might be cool: let military transports (assault cruisers, w/e each race is calling them) build replacement ground armor at like 1 per 10? turns or so. They would cost the empire the normal amount of metal and I suppose you can have a toggle to make them stop if need be. Would cut down on ground armor manual spam and needing to micro transports to and from the front lines. Thematically, the military transports could be considered mobile control centers and production facilities which are close enough to allow their tanks or whatnot to be remotely controlled and produced locally. This both bypasses the question of where extra soldiers are coming from and makes sense, because if your military has the tech to do this, why wouldn't it?

Edit: perhaps move the mobile control/production version of the assault cruiser to something more along the lines of a battleship (or at least somewhat more expensive than it is currently) in terms of cost, but keep it's current offensive firepower for balance reasons? Might also want to put in an extra tech to reach it, something along the lines of "Military grade production protocols" or whatnot?

Edit: after further thought, needing to refit transports, even in bulk, is unnecessary and leads to other issues such as "I'll just use the low tier ones as troop transports" and the fact that the old ones are already made and doing their job. Better to just have more techs to increase transport efficiency. The real issue is that my empire has around 1500 trade routes and that means I have spammed out 200+ transports. Too much time every turn is spent spamming out yet more transports and hunting down all the ones made last turn to send to the trading pool. I think reducing transport spam would make ground armor spam much less painful.

Thanks for all your careful feedback Mathyas. This suggestion, in particular, seems to me to have a lot of promise. As the player's empire expands, mechanics that were interesting in the early game often become tedious in the late game. But, I'm always on the lookout for places where we can counter that trend with tech-unlocked abilities, and a few more transport efficiency boosts could certainly be called for. And that this is a gameplay improvement that could be implemented with very little extra coding or art assets makes it particularly attractive

Your welcome! I really like your game, hope it does well =)

Edit 2: about how to handle the self producing military transports, this idea occured: Take the standard military transport, remove a system slot and add a construction module slot for perhaps 300ish? This would do 2 things: first justify the ability to produce new ground armors, and second, it nerfs the combat ability of military transports a bit, so players are less inclined to just spam fleets of 20 military transports and not much else ship-wise. At late game, when you want to be dropping like 40 combat walkers on a planet it could be annoying/an issue to need to have such large fleets of military transports during the actual combat, so maybe a tech to allow them to carry 2 walkers buried in the tech tree a bit?