I'm finding it hard to give feedback at such an early stage of the game, so thought I should mention some of the basic points that I feel need to be addressed to pave the way for more constructive feedback. Most of these issues already clearly need attention, but hopefully this can focus the discussion somewhat. Responsiveness. Units should respond smoothly and predictably to commands. I think this is absolutely essential, as ultimately all control of the game comes through unit control, and that needs to feel crisp. I don't know precisely how to achieve this, but at least there are a few bugs to fix with units not moving or attacking when told. Order queueing system. This should be like in SupCom. All queued actions should be clearly visible when pressing shift, including movement orders (with connecting edges), construction orders etc. Then all these orders need to be able to be edited (cancelled or moved). At the moment it can be quite painful to change a long chain of commands. Visibility. Strategic icons need to be simplified a lot. I strongly believe an abstract representation is needed to efficiently capture information, as opposed to just mimicking unit/building appearances. The SupCom icons are a good start, but maybe could be enhanced a bit. Together with this, building icons should remain in the fog of war, just grayed out a bit. Maybe the commander too (a bit like "last seen" in Frozen Synapse). It should be easy to quickly assess all information on a given planet. I'm also waiting for a few of the obvious fixes, like only being able to build metal extractors on designated spots. Without that, it's hard to assess much of the gameplay at all. Hopefully we can also get some of the features neutrino mentioned to do with fast starts, and not having long beginning build orders to start the economy going. Probably there are other fundamental features, that need to come together before we can meaningfully comment on the state of the gameplay, that I've forgotten. Before all, though, I think everything needs to feel very fluid and predictable. It's important to be able to quickly see everything on a given planet, and smoothly place multiple unit orders, without surprising unit behaviour ensuing. Otherwise, it seems that multi-planet gameplay could quickly become a chore.
Re: Hard to give feedback without some core mechanics in pla Yeah I agree with all of this, persistent scouting for the ACU would be good. In fact persistent unit scouting in general would be nice.
Re: Hard to give feedback without some core mechanics in pla I guess the most helpfull feedback at this time are reporting bugs, performance issues and etc. There is no need to give a lot of gameplay feedback
Re: Hard to give feedback without some core mechanics in pla PLEASE. THIS. PA should not really be "fun" ATM in terms of "Oh yay, I killed another bad guy!" It should be fun in terms of "Oh look, I got the moon turn inside out!"
Re: Hard to give feedback without some core mechanics in pla This. Feedback on balance, gameplay and whatnot is in beta. Right now everything is about serious bugs like units flying off into space.
Re: Hard to give feedback without some core mechanics in pla It's more complex than that. At the beta stage, the core mechanics should all be in place and remain relatively unchanged from there onwards, with only "tweaking" remaining to do. The feedback should correspond to a progressive tightening in scope, with vast changes and overhauls at the beginning before eventually only needing small tweaks, etc. At each stage, for the relevant changes to be suggested, there has to be a proper context. Right now, this context consists of a solid foundation of core features to judge further additions and explorations of the development. As an example, Uber said that they need to make the gameplay work on just one planet before getting to multiple planets. We can't do that without proper context. It's exactly at the current stage that we have the malleability to make the core mechanics fit together snugly, not once we hit beta and changes come closer to tweaking. Of course it's important to find bugs, but without some of the mechanics in place a lot of the context is missing for feedback and suggestions. I think it would be misguided to build an engine by first making sure there are no glitches, and only then start modifying it to implement important features. Of course the whole thing can't be done in one leap, but if later modifications come to invalidate the usefulness of previous bug reports and suggestions, it's not ideal. As I said above, it has to be a progressive tightening, requiring some context. Of course, I know most of these basic features are coming. I just wanted to highlight some of the most important ones that'd help in providing better feedback.
Re: Hard to give feedback without some core mechanics in pla Which is something that happens with alarming regularity. If only it were this easy to get into space for real. Roadtrip to the moon anyone?
Re: Hard to give feedback without some core mechanics in pla How experienced are you in developing games? I'd trust that Uber knows what they're doing. Everything you listed is pretty obviously going to be in the final game. Beta does not start for a long time, and even then, who says that the game has to be feature complete by then?
