Extended Edition iOS Beta Test and Feedback!

The game has definitely improved with added features and polish, but I do find myself in the same situation as the previous version of the game; lack of longevity. I know the following list may not be something you wish to include and that is fine. I just wanted to throw it out there.

What I really liked..
- Love the capital ship battles now. Both the frequency and intensity of the fights between larger vessels.

- Point defense seems to have been improved and is more effective against fighters and missiles.

- Polish to existing graphical assets and addition of new assets.

What I'd really like to see added or changed..
- Endless exploration (Endless mode) where you see how far you can get. I feel attached to my fleets and when the game comes to an abrupt end, it feels like all I can do is raise my score by wandering the last sector. (Not sure if this was added but I know in previous versions there was a total or 3 sectors?)

- Removal of the random Scraps / Upgrade currency at the start. Knowing I can get close to 2000 Scraps in Hard vs the 600-800 I normally get frustrates me into rerolling until I receive a larger sum. It takes a great deal of time to earn currency at the start of the game so rerolling is faster in my opinion. I believe a fixed amount or more balanced ratio would do.

- The ability to purchase more ship slots and field a fleet of more than 3 ships. I can't really justify buying the smaller class ships with lower hull when a carrier or battleship equivalent is available. Perhaps have a Logistics mechanic that shows different values for each ship type. Fielding many smaller ships or a few large ones would still be fair with this system. Ex. a single Carrier may cost 20 Logistics while a small vessel would only take up 3-4.

- Ways to upgrade your ships without taking up weapon slots, this includes Shields as well. The upgrade tree can upgrade Hull, Shields, Engines, Attack Speed of Main / PDS weapons and any other stats that works. These upgrades would be extremely expensive. This mechanic would really go well with the Endless mode and produce some really epic scale battles where your smaller, elite fleet battles against massive amounts of enemies.

- Missions where you stay and defend against overwhelming odds for a number of waves. In the end you receive a reward for completing it.

I need to revise my earlier comment: The game IS TOO HARD. I could easily beat it on Hard before but now I can't on Normal. At the very least consider making 4 difficulty levels with another between the current Easy & Normal (call Normal Hard & Hard Insane) or I think users will give you low app store ratings for being too hard.

Long version: With the BSE Armada as my main ship and 2 BSE Liberators as wingmen I'm barely surviving on galaxy 3 on normal. Example 1: I entered very close to 1 enemy ship (3rd galaxy) and it destroyed a BSE Liberator with 3 fully upgraded shield generators before my 3 ships and 10 fighters could finish that single enemy ship. Example 2: My fleet finally fought its way to a space station but it had 2 enemy ships in it when I entered. The 2 enemies destroyed the space station before my fleet could stop them. The stations need to be stronger if they can't survive against 2 enemies with 3 very upgraded, high level ships fighting with them.

Shields seem less useful than before. I shred through enemy shields so fast the blue lines just vanish - even with specifically choosing weapons and upgrading them for maximum hull damage. On my side, extra shields from generators only slightly improve ship durability since enemies use so many "ignore shields" weapons that my hulls are usually almost gone by the time my shields are failing. One solution to this would be hull upgrades which seems sorely missing from the game.

The quickness with which ships can get destroyed and the slowness with which they can move removes any formation strategy. Regardless of where you put the ships, a enemy can enter on the "weak side" of the formation and destroy a ship before you have any chance of moving other ships in the path of the endless rocket volleys and absorb damage for the wingman ship. And I mean a BSE Liberators wingman - I can't even imagine playing this game with the starter ships on Normal. This makes ship survival mostly about where the enemies and your ships appear on the map.

Grinding for resources takes too long on Normal. And this is if you stay near a station for free repairs. Since the only way to survive away from a station on Normal is to have about as strong a fleet as the game currently allows. You end up slowly building up just to move on. On one hand this can add to the difficulty but it makes it less a pick up and play game. I'm currently 6 hours into a single game on Normal as a poor random placement has taken out a BSE Liberator 3X and it's like well there goes 15K of scrap and more upgrades than I want to think about...

Resources for missions are too low. You can often get more resources for killing enemies on a random star than completing a mission. It seems silly to get 10-20X the resources just getting to the star where you are starting the mission than the mission itself.

Bugs and other things:

I bought nuke on Normal galaxy 1 that with fully upgraded speed goes 50. Same game I bought nuke on Normal galaxy 3 that with fully upgraded speed goes 150.

The bars for Hull & Shields in the ship display are meaningless. A) the never change (for example if the hull was damaged) B) the max is on some unknown number (for example hull seems to be set at 3000 and it just shows what amount of 3000 your current ship has...) so why even have them there?

All weapons should display ALL stats. Is the rocket cannon faster than the nuke cannon? You can't tell because the rocket cannon doesn't have a speed listed.

Is the accuracy for the gatling really 1%? That seems unlikely - if not what does 1 even mean?

I declined an escort mission early in a game because I wasn't strong enough for it yet. But the escort ship still showed up after I said no and there was no way to go back later and accept that mission later.

There needs to be a way to tell a ship to rejoin formation. Once you tell a ship to go off on it's own it is stuck in that mode until you warp to another star.

The fixed weapon mounts (blue) should display a firing arc in the ship display.

The reinforcement ships screen should display the number of fixed, rotating, and fighter slots they have.

You should be able to trade upgrades for scrap and scrap for upgrades at space stations.

Space stations should automatically repair you (assuming no enemies present). It's not like someone would ever NOT want to get their ships repaired for free - so save users a bunch of unnecessary tapping on the ship, then the repair link, then yes - for each ship. A single, your ships are repaired dialog box will do.

Repairing ships for scrap out in space should also repair shields - otherwise it just slows the game down as shields slowly regen.

Pinch to zoom acts a little funny as you approach the edge of a star's sector.

If the container is ALWAYS a trap it loses some of the point (I'm 20/20 so far).

Finally there needs to be something to spend your scrap on once you get 3 very upgraded strong ships. Perhaps a 4th ship slot or a few really powerful weapons that are really expensive. I'm not really sure of the best way to handle this but it's a bit frustrating to have 18,000 scrap with nothing to spend it on but be barely surviving each combat because the enemy keeps getting stronger each level and you have already maxed everything out. I suppose being able to trade scrap for upgrades could help with this as the curve on those is so high its near impossible to completely max out all upgrades on everything.

Another idea would be to have teleport of escape pods that fit in the fixed (blue) slots but cost more scrap as this would allow the trade off of scrap cost verses losing the more valuable rotating (red) slot.

I forgot to say that carriers have a strong advantage right now vs gun only ships (for users) as the fighters/drones act as an effective missile screen (sometimes shooting down missiles but often just "taking one for the team") that will otherwise destroy your hull.

Also the game is MUCH IMPROVED over the old version. So glad the kickstarter has allowed you to move this project forward. I think the end result will be AWESOME.

I have encountered another glitch on a Trolgar start, where it did not appear to generate all of the asteroid bases for me to destroy. I had visited and cleared every sector in the starting map, and the objective list still showed 3 Trolgar bases left to kill, so it was impossible to finish that mission.

I will chime in with everybody else that hull or speed upgrades would be terrific and help with the current difficulty, as well as adding more fun strategic choices.

I got a chance to encounter some more of the new weapons:

Tesla cannon - very cool! I like rapid-firing laser cannons.

Photon torpedo - Awesome, possibly too strong? I didn't have it for very long, but it shoots fast and homes in and penetrates shields, and I didn't think it was being hit by point defense either. I might prefer it to shoot slower.

Vulcan cannon - Really fun to use. Paired nicely with the teleporter to jump close and shred enemy ships!

I liked it a lot, everything about it was great the new ships are awesome, I love the new map environments, the only thing that would of been nice is when your ship is getting damaged there are red line that show up, that's fine I just think if you put a red outline around the ships in the fleet when they are getting damaged, and maybe do that for the enemy ships as well.

Is it intentional that all the unknown stations stay in the final sector? Pretty much impossible to fight 5+ death rays. This was on hard.

From a fine commander.

1) some bugs in mission - kills don't count if made too fast.
2) mercenaries need to be part of formation - they die too fast otherwise.
3) ship movement - please let them turn in-place - high turning radius on small maps = hard to navigate.
4) please increase size of maps - hard to use speed advantage.
5) endgame is too "bursty" - no time to do anything to salvage situation. amount of shield/armor is burned through in 2-3 seconds. The only defence is fighters as cannon fodder.
6) carriers are overpowered. especially considering bursty endgame - there is no way a non-carrier can compete in survivability AND dps since similar level assault ships replace fighter pod with 2 extra PD slots - they need at least 1 extra capital slot and 2 extra PD slot.
7) also non-carriers have an disadvantage in resources - all weapons have to be replaced on map 3-4, so beginner weapons should be recycled wasting half of the resources. but fighters are useable up till the very end, and should not be recycled.
8) please refactor progression - let's allow extra ships while you still play current game, based on your achievements, not some end of game score.
9) bug: if you spent hours playing, did not die and just quit, you don't get the exp for progression.
10) UI bug: every system I keep checking "cargo" so I don't miss any containers with weapons- would be nice to have some popup "container in space"

Finally finished an easy modem game all the way to the end. 3 carriers with lots of plasma bombers was the strategy that finally got me there. Not to mention some lucky Mega-plasma cannon pickups. While rare, I felt the mega plasma cannon doing 200 hull, 600 shields damage to be incredibly strong, perhaps too much so. They can't be stopped by any defense except fighters getting in the way, and an enemy ship might be able to kill one of mine so fast I can't do anything to prevent it, because the cannons fire so quickly. I might suggest toning down either the fire rate or the hull damage a bit.

I have a repeatable bug/exploit for you: if I go to the sector map and "wait" for one turn, and I notice enemies are flying into my sector, there is a small delay before the game brings me out of the sector map screen due to approaching enemies, during which time the hyperspace button is present and I can jump. If I do this, I go to the target sector and escape the enemies, but enemy indicators (for off-screen enemies) are still present on the map I jump to, even if it is empty.