Just finished playing 4 or 5 games of multiplayer and thought I'd share my thoughts on what really needs attention. Obviously most of these things are things I'm sure uber is fully aware of, but thought I'd share/discuss them anyway. 1. First and foremost, pathing is absolutely atrocious, i realize this is Alpha so it doesn't reflect poorly on the game for me, but the pathing seriously needs work. Pathing is absolutely critical in this genre. Units need to be responsive and respond how players would expect them to, that is far from the case right now. Units frequently get stuck and refuse to move, the attack move function works very poorly, pathing with a large group of units is a mess, and units keep getting stuck inside of the map. In my opinion this should be first priority. I can't even bring myself to finish a game because by the time I'm at the point where I want to move in on an enemy base I can safely assume at least 3/4 of my army is going to bug out in some way or another. 2. Buildings can be built on top of each other? i assume this is something that is a work in progress, but it kind of kills immersion and ruins the base building aspect of the game when buildings can be build on top of each other. 3. As far as I know uber was planning on having different quanitites of metal in certain areas of the map so that building extractors yields more or less resources based on the land they're built on? Maybe I just misread something, but I think that feature is really needed to add depth tot he game and force players to expand, right now it seems like being defensive with turrets/ships is the way to go while you build your economy. 4. Naval units are too powerful or too hard to destroy. There doesn't seem to be an effective counter to leviathans besides maybe subs, and building naval yards to get subs in an enemies ocean is virtually impossible. Either water needs to be connected so players are all fighting over the same body of water rather than each having their own little pond with super powerful ships, or ships themselves need to be nerfed. Just my thoughts at this point, not complaining, i know how early it is, just wanted to share my thoughts.
We have a "priority" system in place. If you find the bug you're looking for please vote it up on our BugTracker. This will make sure the Devs see the most important bugs and don't have to trawl through forum posts to get it. http://pa.lennardf1989.com/Tracker/ Oh, and "balance" is currently not a high priority.
In the interest of discussion though I do think that planets should be tweaked a little to have more connected oceans. Right now they are more like large inland seas or even just a giant lake rather than an ocean. Some more connectivity between these would make sea units more useful
For Naval issues I have no doubt Uber will generate a new planet for us to use to specifically test for those.
If you were able to look at the history of RTS game development pathing (and desync bugs) is pretty much the biggest issue over the course of any of them. Because we've decided to go with fairly complex planet geometry that's not just a height map (like nearly 100% of other games with real spherical planets) or faked 2d worlds reprojected to look like 3d (like Populous: The Beginning), pathing is actually a good bit more complex than most other games. The fact that you can select a group of units and click on the other side of the planet and have any get there this early in development is a dog damn miracle. Here's some entertaining reading about the development of Starcraft and the issues they had with pathing. They already had an existing RTS engine with working pathing to start with, and they still had serious problems for nearly the entire 2 1/2 years of development. http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/the-sta ... nding-hack The other issues you mentioned are simply because those game features haven't been implemented. We only just got Naval factories to only build on water recently, and that's the easy case.
Yeah I mean considering what you guys are trying to do I understand getting pathing to the point its at was probably very challenging, but I still think its the biggest issue with the game right now. I played age of empires online in beta for a long time and enjoyed the game a lot but the pathing was awful and it never got fixed and became one of the biggest issues with the game at launch. I've been playing RTS forever and I've always felt that smooth and responsive pathing is one of the most significant factors in determing which games become popular and which don't. Granted its really hard to do well, and its much harder when you're working with maps that aren't flat, multiple planets, etc. I really like the concept of this game and based on what I've played so far I think it could be awesome so I just wanted to throw in my 2 cents about some things I think are issues. But yeah, great job so far, it's nice to see a company not afraid to get people involved with the game this early on, and even with the issues it has i'm still enjoying it quite a bit.
Indeed. Naval units will be much more important (and well tested) when water planets are introduced for testing.
what I don't get with the naval units is why they're even in the game currently. There's no way for naval combat on the map we've got access to, so naval should be disabled until the time comes when we can actually use 'em. All I use water for is building up resources currently.
Because with them in the game we've already managed to find 50 bugs concerning them. That's 50 more now that can be fixed before we test naval on Water Planets
Clearly the solution is to allow naval units to be built in orbit and dropped into hostile waters. Also, it would be cool if the engineering sub could build submerged (and therefore partly hidden) buildings.
I guess my point was don't worry about the pathing. Well, that's not quite right. Worry about it, test the crap out of it, and send us screenshots, videos, and descriptions (especially with repro steps if possible) of it going horribly, horribly wrong so we can fix it. If people playing in the alpha complain about specific issues with pathing (and we're doing it constantly at the office too, poor Elitron) we can make sure we fix it all. Just saying the "pathing is absolutely atrocious" doesn't help us make it better and isn't telling us anything we don't know. (Sorry Elitron) That said, I suspect you'll be seeing significant improvements even over the next week... as long as you guys keep letting us know where it breaks.
