My Feedback to Devs

The community tested higher health units, and confirmed my formerly theoretical drawbacks to it:
1) The units just, walk right into bases. Defenses can't kill them fast enough to prevent them from walking past the defense, even if the defense is too strong to kill.
2) The fields get too cluttered. A hundred units take 2 minutes of fighting to kill, and a hundred units take 30 seconds to fabricate. 6 minutes later, there are 900 units still, EVEN THOUGH they are constantly dying. Another 2 minutes, there will be 1200 units, all still in combat, not going down in numbers but actually still going up.

They actually did try a mild health buff btw, uber did. To structures and tanks. Because old structures were brittle popcorn as well even if a tank or dox got to it, and old tanks were as brittle as bots. Honestly, tanks could use 30% more, and structures are fine while t2 structures actually could use 30-50% less health.

Well, uber has already stated that the transparent gel water is going to stay, and they are resisting switching back to the old liquid lava.

For the health buff to work, units need to take proportionately longer to build as well.... As for defences, they can be rebalanced as well.... However I don't think that's the style uber are going for.

Great suggestions! Hopefully Devs are taking notes somewhere. How is their activity on this site? I feel like I've seen very little activity from them.

Obviously if units had higher health they would have slower build times. It would need some balance tweaking about overall I think it would be a positive change to the game. Shifts the game into more tactical and less twitch based.

Don't worry, they read lots of it. I wouldn't call it "little activity" either by the way. This week:

• jables, 16 posts
• sorian, 16 posts
  
• jorgenpt, 9 posts
  
• bgolus, 6 posts
• masterdigital, 2 posts
• mkrater, 1 post

And they have more game stuff to build apart from posting on the forum, eh?

I wanted to add Navel needs A LOT of work. Navel units just sort of float around lifeless on the water. Where are the wakes behind the ships? Where is the rippling water when shots are fired? Why are there so few units? No underwater units? Why are the ships so small? Lots of room for improvement here.

I want to see this!

Ships used to be huge, just a couple patches ago, but they killed pathing.

It would definitely be awesome to have waves and ripples, I think those are the kinds of little things missing from the game in general.

But I guess details should really be made last, like icing.

Waves could even be particle effects.

The problem with calling it "icing" is one, it never ends up getting added and two, artists are a completely different team then the programmers. It normally doesn't interfere with game design to get these little things added.

Also, plenty of other games have large navel units without "pathing issues". Sounds like lazy programming to me.

Show me an rts with multiple simultaneous spherical battlefields including navy and with less pathing issues... I'm sure the devs would be interested in their solution...

"It never gets added", many people used to say the same thing about offline mode, and the unit cannon.

The developers that work on this game work VERY slow. Slower than any other indie team I've ever seen. I got the game like 6-8 months ago, can't remember exact date, but it was a long time ago. I came back to it thinking bugs would be fixed and there would be new features. Literally the only new feature is the unit cannon and the game crashes worst than before for me. I don't have a lot of faith in these devs i'll be honest.

In 6 months we've had:

- New custom map support, and editor enhancements.

- unit canon (not a small feature)

- ranked 1 v 1 play and matchmaking

- subs (currently in pte)

- offline play support (!)

- many more mod hooks.

- significant AI improvements

- near 2x improvement in SIM performance (watch video from star. of clan wars and compare to games last week).

Edit forgot a big one: they also changed the nav system from a 2d mapped approach to a full 3d implementation (seriously big change). This now means any terrain can be pathed (eg there is a map called conundrums crossing, that features tunnels at the poles. Units can go through or over the tunnels, and as there is a hole in the roof in the middle even shoot at each other- it's very powerful).

I think the thing to remember is unlike other indie teams, uber built pa from scratch. I mean even star citizen is using an off the shelf engine. many of the things they are working on are under the hood so not as visible as 'ooo new ship!' However this engine has the potential to do stuff never seen before.

There have also been many significant fixes for Mac and linux. Remember we're talking a small team here (half their staff had to go after human resources failed) so frankly I think they've done really well.

As for crashing, I've not had pa crash on me in a long while. Have you posted on the support forum about this? If not please upload a Dxdiag and some details of what's happening. Uber are quite good at squashing crash bugs if it's related to the game (need to find a reproducible situation though first).

1. Don't really care, doesn't really enhance gameplay. The editor is still very buggy and limited (can't remove metal points already placed by the editor for example)

2. Yep, one new unit. Given that it's a pretty cool one. Why isn't in the galactic war though?

3. Don't care, I never played games ranked or that competitively. Doesn't really enhance game play.

4. Why would anyone ever want offline support? Waste of resources and time. Again, not a direct game play addition.

5. Doesn't count as they are not out yet.

6. Mod hooks.. still not a base game enhancement. I rarely enjoy mods because the quality lacks or they are waay to over the top or unbalanced.

7. A legitimately needed improvement, I really don't notice a difference though.

8. This is probably the only thing I really noticed and did make a large impact on game play. Kodus for coming up with one solid feature in the last 6 months.

Things I'd much rather have seen ANY of the following:

1. Galactic War balancing. Game is either ridiculous easy playing against the majority of maps with one commander or a real challenge on three of the faction maps. Why aren't there hand built systems and scenarios? Why do I always ONLY play against one commander at a time?

2. More units and advanced tech. Have Navel and Orbital units more developed with additional units.

3. A second faction with asymmetrical design with actually different units that function in a unique way.

4. Commander customization with weapons or modules similar to Supreme Commander games.

5. Super units.

6. Tech trees (Maybe Galactic War online)

7. Actually unquie and interesting planets that isn't like the snorefest we have now. mountains, rivers, canyons, marshes, alien worlds. Look at Grey Goo's level design and art for example, simply brilliant.

8. Art improvements. Better effects on weapons, water that doesn't look like ice you float around on. Geysers, lava improvements, coral, land features.

This is the first time I have honestly been disappointed with an Indie team and I buy a LOT of indie games and support a lot of indie developers. Except for this game, all of them I can stop playing, and pick up months later to find some really interesting new content. I bought this game to show my support hoping it would really have some great features to show for down the road. So far I haven't seen much. And yes, it's buggy. It's the first game I've ever had to completely turn SLI off just to play the game. It's the first game that's ever crashed and took out my whole computer so I have to turn it off. It's also one of the first games where all the textures disappear when playing and I have to restart the game completely to fix.

gray goo is garbage, don't ever bring it up again

You have obviously not used the editor completely if you think it can't remove or place metal points.

Besides even if it for some reason couldn't... you can set the metal slider to 0 Before generating it.

Introversion Software's Prison Architect has been in alpha since September 25 of 2012. PA's development has been pretty damn quick on the other hand and a ton of new features have been add since launch.

also keep in mind that even with all those new features and improvements they had a failed kickerstarter and had to layoff some devs yet there isn't any sorry guys we are out of money bla bla they are still working hard on it and getting great things out, I have every intention to come back to this game with full effort to train and become top teir again, hopefully I can make some friends and train with them or train them up for team games as the community ontop of this game have made some of my best evenings and I look forward to seeing and being part of more of it also ps the pro am tourny is amazing and I look forward to it happening more

Ah now I'm seeing why your disappointed... Your into single player which admittedly is the weakest area of this game. they haven't updated this as they've been focusing on multiplayer. they are planning more work on single player during Feb and march though, along with single player save capabilities so looks like the focus is going to be more on stuff you'll be interested in.

As for sli problems, that's actually an issue with nvida divers and sli support. Remember as I mentioned most other games (even big projects) use existing direct x based engines. PA is using a custom open gl based engine they've made from scratch. this allows for much better cross compatibility with mac and Linux, but at the expense of support for exotic graphics card configurations like sli (btw in and crossfire you can't even start the game). Not sure what can be done about it though until amd and nvidia get around to fixing their open gl drivers- if this was a massive title they probably would, but for an indie rts game? It certainly won't be priority.

Why would anyone want offline support?.... WASTE OF TIME?....

That was one of the most requested and controversial subjects on this game, the fact is the majority of players really really wanted offline....!

That's a pretty fire acessment I mostly play for single player. I am not big on rts games that are based on APM or twitch based. I play Company of Heroes 2 competitively for a game more based on strategy and tactics. I am pretty disappointed in the lack of single player improvements.

Save feature isn't a big deal to me. I can normally win a map in an hour and can pause if needed and return later. Game auto saves between levels anyway.

I'd rather see galactic war rebalanced With some Ned additions.