I'm worried this is already a beta build - a few thoughts.

Don't get me wrong, there is an epic strategy game in the making here, but here are a few dire problems I'd like to point out.

Unit selection is broken. I find myself battling with the interface all the way from selecting individual units to directing masses of units and switching planets. Precise selection/direction of units especially on these spherical maps is crucial. I'm basing my core expectations on the Supcom interface. This should have been the starting point for any major beta build. Mechanics should be fleshed out, interface as well-beta is the testing of such mechanics and how they go together, but in the case of PA, what mechanics? What interface?

I notice there are various systems in place, but they do not work together in any meaningful way. Yes, Totala and its spiritual successor were always about tiered spamming of units and the acquisition/holding of crucial resource points in order to do so. Here, resource acquisition is too plentiful in the early game and the teams too scattered across a generous world. Couple this with excellent anti-land defensive platforms, and it becomes meaningless to build large land based armies. Just spam those air units and go for the big guns and big orbital toys. Thus progression is severely accelerated from surface to orbital warfare, rendering the meat of the game dissapointing.

For a game still heavily under development, there is nothing show-stopping here-except for the beta designator. I worry because this is still clearly an Alpha.

The rest is to be expected even in a near-finished game; the game runs sluggish even on monster rigs, but optimisation is the last step of development so no qualms there. Also network code needs some work. This is particularly relevant since we can't have local network games and everything relies on external servers. Convenient? Yes; but I am yet to play a game where it doesn't turn into a pause-start-pause slideshow 5 mins into a match.

As for suggestions, I'm sure you guys have thought of everything ten times over, and others have brought this stuff up before, but here are mine.

*Limited game modes - Let us play on flat worlds. Let us focus on land, air and sea only. Let us customise and limit our custom games in various ways.

*Make more use of spherical maps - let us drill through them. Imagine a superweapon that allows you to transport an army smack bang through the core of a world directly into an enemy base. Maybe it also allows us to destabilise the core of a normal planet, blowing it up from within.

*Atmosphere- Those world's with liquid on the surface, let us boil those oceans away and cripple enemy naval aspirations by inducing changes in the atmosphere. Let us make it rain so areas flood and land based armies become bogged down. Let us induce electromagnetic storms rendering airforces, orbital weapons and long range sensors useless. Let us interact with the system star in some way, beyond just harvesting solar energy.

*Make nukes and orbital platforms extremely expensive, so that we have reason to toy with the aforementioned mechanics. Better yet as mentioned before let us customise unit availability and resource expenses, so we can balance games the way we want. Maybe some like grand-strategic cross-planetary warfare, maybe others like a more focused game on a unique world. Either way the micromanagement stays constant, and at the moment the interface does not make large games as enjoyable as smaller ones-yet large games is all we have.

*I lost my commander early in a game, and it meant nothing. It changed nothing. Make the commander more meaningful, let us customise him as we could in supcom.

*Graphic style is nice and clean, but I still find myself searching for units. Once again it comes down to interface. Also I notice many units are of similar size. In this kind of game scaling helps with differentiation. Make units differ in size more significantly because coupled with the lack of a unit cap and spherical maps things just tend to blend together-no I do not need, or wear glasses.

Sorry about the long post, but that's my two cents. I hope something there is meaningful in some way.

this is not your AAA type demo beta ... this is beta by the true sense of the word made by an indydeveloper without a big publisher behind it ... this is still ungoing developement
with further content to be implemented, balanced and optimised

" this is still clearly an Alpha."
no it´s not, most corecontent is already implemented and working it simply needs optimisation and bugfixing
which beta is all about ...
alpha before was pure bughunting

and please use the searchfunction next time
threads like this have been reopened for the bajilionst time now
there are various threads to most of your suggestions and complains

as stated by Uber. this game is meant to be a platform to make greater games from. this is only the first of many sphere based rts's. what they are doing right now with this game is figuring out the problems and basic challenges of sphere based maps so truly GREAT interstellar game-play can truly be focused on in later games.

if your looking for a AAA game try call of duty ghost, all the mechanics from 1999 now with even PRETTIER graphics (the formula for all publisher games). if you want innovation this is what we have. indie developers and those who support them.

I see you're fairly new to the forums, and welcome.

I recommend that you do some searching around on the forums. All of your suggestions have been discussed before. Much of which is confirmed as will be in game or won't be in game.

Normally with these types of posts I reply to all suggestions.

This time, I'm tired, so I won't.

Do a search. It's all been discussed before.

Watch today's live stream, it answers your questions

Alright thanks for the replies guys.

Go make a thread about "discuss your suggestions and play experiences" so that newcomers to this forum have place to voice their thoughts. I'm sure that you constantly being condescending to new people isn't a very good advertisement for this community anyway, so you would be doing everyone a favor.

That is actually a really good idea.

Telling people to abide by the forum rules is condescending?

I guess we have different dictionaries.

That comment aside, his suggestion to have a 'newbie first-impression repository' thread is a good idea and will save a lot of headache and repetition.

We did have that sticky confirmed features list on the forums and people would still post questions asking about stuff that's in the confirmed features list.

I had decided to make a massive FAQ thread with sources and whatnot, but decided there wouldn't be much point because people ignore that stuff.

I dunno. Maybe I should make it anyways.

Eh. Why not.

I'll get started on that.

The reason I say it's condescending is because you often write these posts and (to me) you give off a vibe that's like: "oh god, these suggestions again? why don't you people search the forum to see that you have nothing to contribute?" When they're just newcomers that want to talk about the game and share their experiences. And I know it's very tiresome to continuously hear the same type of suggestions, but you can't exactly blame newcomers, since they haven't had the chance yet to absorb the forum culture. Anyway, it's just an idea.

In his defence, I don't think he is suggesting the bit in bold, he is actually saying that if people searched, they could find the relevant thread the points were raised in and add to that, rather than clog up the thread list with repetitive topics.

-The interface is still alpha basically. They haven't changed it since they first got it working. Thanks for noticing the obvious. To use it as a complaint however, it has to not be intentional and confirmed to be changed later. So, basically, you noticed it sucks, and we noticed it before you, and the devs noticed it first, but it isn't permanent anyway.

-The second post is balance. I wouldn't agree with you that it is eco, besides that t2 could be reduced 15% possibly more in metal rate. I would say that they need to nerf/diversify orbital units and air units and really all units. But, ZaphodX is one of the better players in the beta, and he nearly always uses land armies. Those things aren't just brushed aside late game, if you build them constantly you can make 100 every 45 seconds and have amassed thousands within 15 minutes of gameplay. They die just as easily if you can find a way to fire on them in your favor as far as range or flank goes.

-AAA title betas aren't betas. They are "promotional sales" period, where the game is COMPLETELY done and they make a build of it where they removed 80% of levels and weapons to show it off and build hype for release day sales push. This is an actual beta, where the features aren't finished yet intentionally, because the player testing helps iron it out and creates suggestions on what would be better way to do certain things. AAA titles don't even tell the public they are in the middle of making a game at this point of development.

-The game does need optimization. One of the most common references to this, is the dev confirmation that they have not implemented "model instancing" and instead render each individual model for every unit atm. That multiplies the weight each unit has on performance. Nonetheless, ZaphodX streamed a 40 player game the other day. A 40 player game was possible to play beginning to end, yes with poor simulation speed at the end, but impressive nonetheless.

-The game will be fully customizable. I am sure someone will think of a way of adding flat maps, limiting what units are allowed in a game,.

-The other ideas are also interesting for a mod, but you know how complicated the game is to play on multiple planets without adding weather storms and such? I do think the game could use maybe 1 or 2 more superweapon type attacks though.

-Hopefully by what they said recently, they might make orbital travel and such cheaper and lower tier level, but they should definitely be lowering accessibility and utility of superpowered orbital and air. They are already trying to make bombers do single bomb runs instead of constant firing on ground so they do less dps.

-Lastly, they are considering scale possibly, but the game functions at it's current scale and a complete change of scale might be a lot of work while some scaling might be possible who knows? Units are similarly sized but generally I can tell what everything is with icons from afar or without icons on a low scale 2 planet with reasonable zoom.

Your post was constructive opinion of a new player at least, which is important. Agreeing with you, this game IS a pain to play, and removing the difficulty should be one of Uber's benchmarks for if the game is ready to release or not. Really, it's the most important, as players will either stay or leave depending on how many or how servere the bugs are in their first few games.

HOWEVER, one should not be concerned because they want to add lots of UI information and formations for units like area and line-drawning ones, and they want to add area commands, and make commands their own entity, make the order queue probably visually editable in the corner somewhere, add multiwindow support possibly with a setting for minimap by default, add more units, add more roles, balance the unit interactions, balance the in-game economy, add tons of cool stuff, add tons of ways for unit travel, redo the camera to fluidly zoom between and around planets and celestial views, add modding support like modloader and moddatabase and modhooks (has modhooks already), amongst other things...

...Which seems like along list to do, but they did develop the engine itself from essentially nothing within a short time, and made that engine loadable and playable, and made the first pass unit models and such, and have sharpened the performance of this game to completely remove terminated simulations and orbital travel bugs and such. The running engine and coherent UI interface in itself is worth something in terms of potential since it makes flexible things only minecraft does otherwise.

I keep seeing similar sentiments on this forum and it just strikes me as deliberately distorting reality. Starcraft II didn't even have a beta period that was like you described. The new Command and Conquer was canceled partly because of alpha feedback. The typical approach to beta is a mostly feature complete product that can benefit from "stress testing" (in terms of number of people testing, which tends to expose bugs, balance problems, server problems and so on). Uber can call the current state of the game the beta period, but that's not the traditional usage, so you should at least admit that you are trying to redefine the term instead of implying some bad things about AAA titles.

I meant to say and fixed it to where it says betas.

Also, the sad thing, is betas are only stress test if anything. Then, how many games do you see on release bomb under stress anyway and/or have bugs? Would you then rate them 0/10 because the only purpose of their beta was stress test and catching bugs and they STILL failed just doing that?

Because if I am not mistaken, IGN will rate them 10/10 for it... at least they would if that game happens to be named GTA5...

You don't always need stress testing if you have good QA and the ability to patch post release. (release itself functions as a stress test) Of course there are many AAA titles that demonstrate some basic level of contempt for the audience because the developers care only about money, and of course they will take advantage of any marketing opportunities a beta presents. But the key phrase that you used is that the PA beta is an "actual beta", which is simply not true historically and not true compared to recent other RTS games. And more importantly, I take it that you are trying to defend PA from accusations that it's in an awful state for a beta, but the way to address those concerns is to acknowledge that the state of PA is more typical of an alpha build, but that the release date is subject to change and that Uber is taking a different approach with more transparency and more listening to community feedback and so on. You don't have to try and redefine words.

It is typical of an alpha build for most modern games, it is typical of a beta build for most games of it's type (minecraft/kerbal), and it is a stupid ****ing argument considering they defined alpha and beta before the opened alpha.

They specifically said, alpha was to iron out bugs that came with every released gameplay mechanic, beta was to iron out bugs with all the mechanics interacting with each other. Right now its true save for a hindsight they missed, which is technically the point of beta to catch issues like this, so all it says is that the beta did it's job.

It really is the responsibility of the tester to know what they are testing and the forethought behind it. Really, all it says when people call this game "prealpha" and "alpha like", is that they didn't read into this before blindly buying like it was a retail game. When the devs tell you they added all the mechanics and would like it to be played to list the bugs as they finish adding the things that will use all those mechanics, it helps to list those many many issues, and it does not help to call the game "prealpha" and question all the problems like "wut are teh devz, retarded?"

Well, yes, thats the actual definition of BETA. Software FULLY implemented, feature complete.
Done. Finished. Anything less than that is ALPHA stage.

Then the software begins the stabilization phase which can take months to complete in order to acquire gold status and be released.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_release_life_cycle#Beta

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_complete

So, AAA titles betas are actual betas.
If you want to call beta to a 'work in progress' build because its very useful for your development cycle, that's fine, but that is not beta, that is alpha.

It is known that adding a SINGLE feature, can break a complex piece of software even if its a minor one. Once that happen, the testing cycle requires to begin all over again. That's why its so important to get ALL features inside the beta version.

As I understand, PA has missing features at the moment.

And that is why some people become disappointed at the beta stage, because what it basically means is: this is the actual game, that's it, now its time for bugfixing and performance and we're done.

I'm not saying uber says that, in fact the told the complete opposite, that a lot of stuff is going to be added to the game and the update process will continue beyond the release date, which is good news for everyone.

Maybe using the term beta wasn't a good idea for the community.

Yes. It can take months to completely stabilize a piece of software. That is why so many things patch after release. Which technically defeats your purpose of it taking months to aquire gold status and be released. By your standards, you too agree with me that GTA5 released in "piece of ****" status, as far as "stability" goes.

Beta is a word. What you are saying, is that CoD Ghosts had a beta that they called "CoD Modern Warfare 3", and that Kerbal Space Program has a beta that isn't considered beta, and that Minecraft is still in alpha even though it released...

What I am saying, is **** definitions and **** the police. Fair enough?