I've got quite a few issues listed here with the UI, the economy, and buildings. Probably not all of them (or even many of them) will be a priority but I wish to record them at least, even if Uber decide not to act on them right now. Here's the core problem with the current resource starting setup in PA: You can't afford to go factory first. If you do this you will crash economically. This introduces quite a bit of needless time where nobody can afford to do anything except build power plants. Fundamentally, the player only really acquires choice in the early game about what they do once they can afford to build and operate a factory- and of course, if you want to go early aggressive, you will need several. On this note, the tier 1 resource buildings are much too weak. They cost much more than SupCom's variants, and they're also much larger so you have to spend more time walking around etc to place them, and the Commander's range is much shorter in comparison, but it feels like they don't actually produce any more. Again, the core symptom of this problem is that the player's only real choice at the start of the game is to mass economy buildings. This is going to be a crippling problem if the mass extractor output is not bumped up significantly (or cost significantly reduced) before limiting mexes to metal spots is implemented, because nobody will be able to operate more than about three factories before 20 minutes into the game. Plus, of course, you don't know how much energy or time a building or factory unit costs. (Also, the text stating your total mass and energy is way too small). On that subject, don't forget mex snapping, I remember not having this in SupCom beta and boy, you don't want that. In addition, the metal spots could really use being much more visible- the SupCom always-visible icon worked fine in this respect. When deploying in PA I have no idea where the mass spots are. Sometimes I even zoom in really closely and can't see where. Speaking of which, those green circles really need to be flat on the planet. Having them kinda float above it a bit just makes it difficult to know where exactly the legal starts are, because they're legal from one angle but not from another. In addition, we come to engineers. Even if you have all resources, the engineers take far too long to construct mass extractors/power plants, and the assisting AI is quite unreliable- the assisters will often simply do nothing even if they are in range or fail to path to a place where they could help. This, of course, is compounded by the non-grid buildings. Not having a grid for buildings seems nice; but I can immediately see why most other RTSes have one. The fact is that in PA if I place two buildings I have no idea if, or what, units can get between them unless they are quite a long way apart. The units in PA seem to have quite a few pathing problems in general so having roughshod bases really hurts here, with strange building angles and surprising places that look like they should get through but can't. In Starcraft 2 then I always leave a 2-space gap between buildings and I always know that my Thor can fit through. Another issue is the fact that you can't drag buildings. Usually in SupCom I would just drag a massive line of T1 powerplants and assign some engineers to assist, and then forget about making T1 power ever again. This is especially a problem for walls, which pretty much must have building dragging to be useful (ain't nobody got time for dat). And, of course, queueing. For some reason the building interface feels really laggy, but I expect there's already a bug for that. The principle issues here are that there's no infinite repeat button for factories, queued orders (including construction) should be shown all the time and holding shift should only highlight them- plus, of course, the queued orders should be modifiable. I'm sorry, but there are some things SupCom did well, and the queued order UI was unparalleled and fantastic. Just do that. I also have on my list that some of the scouting and intel stuff is broken. You can't see where you've been, and a planet is both circular and huge, so there's a lot of ground to cover and you keep going in circles. In addition, I find that units don't seem to want to target units they can see on radar, you don't get to see buildings you have scouted but no longer have vision on, and not knowing the radar range or weapons range of the static defences is also problematic, especially the Lobber. I built a couple in my base but it turns out they actually couldn't reach the opponent's base. Waste of a pretty large investment. Finally, the chat windows in both lobby and in-game are way too small. The lobby UI design especially doesn't work. I have a 1080p screen and the lobby seems to be compressed to about 640x480 in total. For example, there's really no reason why I could not view all armies at once. Plus, for more than four player games, the text saying "Army X" is going to dominate the screen instead of being able to fit on player slots- that stuff can just go on the side or be removed completely. Anyway, I realize not every item on this list is triaged for "Now" rather than "Later", but I wanted to write them all down before I forget.
