My thoughts so far.

Okay that's far I'd say I'm about a third of the way through my first campaign on easy and I've unlocked about 40% of the tech and ships so I think I have a pretty good grasp of the game so far and what's working and what's not. first I'd like to say that y'all have done an excellent job building a classic style RTS and I very much appreciate the hard work and I understand that there is the intention to include additional content including ships and stations and maybe even more weapons down the road. while I agree that stamping out all the bugs is priority number one I think there are few things that need to either be changed or added in the next patch or two that would have a significant positive effect on gameplay
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 I will start however with a couple of bugs that I've noticed. first the ships seem to clip through other ships in space stations when passing over them. if memory serves in harbinger this was not an issue that's what either pass over or under each other and honestly I never got close enough to a space station to drive through it it simply wasn't necessary

.  second I have noticed the enemy ships and stations continue to fire after they explode up until the point that the explosion dissipates. this is very annoying and is cost me a couple of stations.

Okay with the bug report out of the way we can go on to those things that are working good. the system itself is very simple in the classic Westwood RTS Style and to anybody with experience in these older games you pretty quickly figure out the ins-and-outs of everything. the scope of the game is smaller then it's older counterparts but this actually works in it's favor because it keeps things manageable and the pace stays fast without turning into a rolling horde Fest.
 for the most part the weapons and ships are adequate to the game needs and the resource system is very simple and easy to keep up with. the fleetwide upgrade system for weapons is also a vast Improvement over the individual gun upgrade system used in harbinger and makes upgrading the weapons viable something that was not necessarily true in harbinger. the research system is simple and I like having the option to spend upgrade tokens to advance  research.
Okay now to the things that aren't working quite so well. first off the space stations. the ones available to the player are small underpowered when compared to hostile stations and not really beneficial Beyond functioning as a light alarm system for approaching enemy fleets. Once you've unlocked the three turret  station sorry still haven't got all the names memorized there's no point in unlocking the other two. Militarily they serve no practical purpose. you almost never recall your ships from the front line so you don't really need the jump station and the other one has no redeeming qualities compared to the one that you unlock first. it has less weapons bless health and less Shields then the 3 turret station. there is no single specification where it is superior and therefore for the player it is a waste of resources to unlock it much less build it. the station is redundant and needs to be revamped into something practical that serves a purpose such as a Cruiserweight battle station with additional Point defense turrets and Hangers since there are no stations that have both turrets and Hangers available to the player.
 second the boarding system. I was very pleased to see the option to utilize Marines to capture targets however the system as it functions now is not complete or very intuitive to use. the Lack of the ability to regenerate or replace lost Marines after combat or boarding actions renders the system very clunky to utilize. In its current state a ship or space station is only reasonably capable of conducting a single boarding action before it's Marine complement is render too small to be viable for offencive action. this makes the boarding system more of a novelty rather than a fully functional Tactical and strategic option. In order for this feature to be used and enjoyed to its fullest extent and method for replenishing Marines must be added to the game otherwise it will remain a feature with great promise that was never fully realized.
 third the repair system. Currently while it is possible to repair any ship or station completely the method with which these repairs are conducted is both inflexible and severely limited because of the use of the additional resource of upgrade tokens to repair ships when tokens are not used to build ships or stations. what this means is that it is quite often more cost-effective to scuttle the heavily damaged ship or station and replace it with a brand new one rather than use the repair feature to fix it. there is the additional problem that the only way around not spending upgrade tokens to fix things by bringing the damaged vessel back to your battle station is hampered buy both the extreme time it takes to conduct significant repairs and the fact that this option is not available for space stations. I would suggest two options that can either be implemented together or as and either or function of one or the other. first remove all upgrade tokens from repair cost. if you don't have to spend them to build the ship upgraded weapons included then you shouldn't have to spend them to fix it. that's just basic logic. second some form of mobile repair be it repair drones or a repair Cannon that fits in a turn slot or defense slot should be added to provide space stations with the same repair option as Starships. here again with only the most basic attention paid by the player it is very simple to render the current repair system unnecessary through new construction and selling of heavily damaged stations and ships and to some extent not only is this cheaper then repair but you technically get your new units at a discount. with the simple changes this would restore the system to actual viability and make it more attractive for all repairs as opposed to just light damage.
Fourth the researchable support ships. the three researchable support ships currently in game are for the most part unnecessary. because of the nature of the game and the rate at which you are normally able to accomplish research none of the ships are going to be a priority and will likely only become available to you during the late late game for each mission. at that point in the mission they no longer serve a purpose as you will have reached a point where you are economically secure and Firepower alone will be your primary concern. I suggest that this be fixed by implementing one of the two following suggestions. First make these ships unlockable items as opposed to researchable items. the pro of this is that once unlocked the benefits are always available to the player once he decides to build ship. the con of this is that it does not actually improve the usefulness of these vessels which in my opinion is marginal at best. Each ship is essentially and Novelty vessel and will never form the backbone of any battlefleet in their current configurations. it may Simply Be The Players money is better spent on the higher-end carriers and battleships. the second option is to replace the vessels with researchable modules that fit and either a turret slot or Point defense slot. the pro of this is that it makes your ships more customizable and allows you to assign these abilities 2 much more durable ship hulls. the con  is that  as research options  they will likely remain  very late game  but  at least  there will be  an impetus  to utilize  said  upgrade modules  which will have far more utility  then the current ships that are available from the research.
Fifth and finally weapons ranges. In harbinger one of the things that set the various types of weapons apart was the fact that some weapons were short ranged some weapons were medium ranged and some weapons were long-ranged. in Siege all of the weapons essentially have the same range. this removes the attractiveness of a whole host of weapons including the particle cannons and the missiles Beyond there bomber application. while I realize that the Maps are smaller then those of harbinger I don't believe this justifies dumbing down the different weapons ranges to a single unified figure. it would be nice to actually have a reason to mount Cannon or missiles because their reach was significantly more favorable then lasers and other available weapons. While the unified range doesn't necessarily detract from gameplay it does render a significant number of the available turret weapons superfluous at every stage of the game. it would be nice if you were actually weighing other factors besides raw damage when deciding what to purchase for your ships and stations. without this you quickly find that only one or two weapons are worth researching upgrading and using in the game.
 once again I would like to say that I am enjoying this game and that I think it's a fairly good job has been done on it so far. I simply see places where these minor changes could have a profound effect on gameplay thereby rendering the game even more enjoyable.

Thanks for the feedback! I will try to improve it with time and add some new items.

Some notes:

[*] The ships clip into each other due to the drawing order of sprites. I did not have time to create my own drawing order for the game engine, so when the ships are pieced together from many pieces, and the turrets are on their own layer, they clip when they are on top of each other.
[*] Units firing when exploding is up for interpretation. I think even in this real world a big naval ship carrier or such can keep shooting even if it's about to explode to pieces.
[*] "Harvester" - units can harvest resources from nearby exploding ships. I think this is what you mean with the station that costs a lot but seems to be weaker. Granted I could have tried to get a better explanation somewhere but I only have it in the help menu now.
[*] I have added BSE Marineclone to make replenishing marines possible.

Thanks again for the feedback!

I agree that the human stations are lacking. The jump one is useless and the second one is generally useless. In a few rare cases you can start building the harvester station when a battle starts and it will suck up enough scrap and RPs to make it worthwhile. But this is pretty rare since it costs 1200 more scrap than the basic station with the same stats mostly.


I kind of like the limited marines. You have to consider that a successful takeover by a Cloudsave or whatever can kill a 10,000 cost enemy ship AND give YOU a 10k ship also. This is a pretty big swing and not one that you should reasonably expect to do over and over again with the same ship, right?
If you want to replentish, sell the ship and remake it. You will lose about 8k in the process but still come out pretty far ahead. You can also use the MarineCloner which is new, but it takes forever to do anything (10 min for 60 dudes), and it will slow down your fleet and probably get killed. But it's an option.


I agreed at first that repair should not cost RPs. However, you ARE repairing remotely and doing so pretty quickly, so I can kind of see their point. I think limiting repairs to friendly nodes could work, or just reducing the cost...which they DID just recently by 20%.


Yes the unlockable ships are terrible unfortunately. I had suggested that Vision unlock a BSE Sauron huge vision big station, and speed unlock a large 40 speed, 4 gun, 8 PD turbo ship. You need something that makes sense lategame which is the only time you would get them. I'd change the Visio to Unlockable as it could be really fun to play with early game. Ditto with the current fast ship.


Weapon ranges are tricky. There used to be more variety but they were nerfed. Simply put, this game cannot allow huge varience in ranges. The long range weapon would always win. With even a weak 1k range gun, one could plink away at stations indefinitely and kill them with zero risk. Massed firepower from a fleet of 6-10 medium ships even would wipe out enemies as they approach.
Every weapon in the game currently with shorter range SUCKS. No experienced player anywhere I would bet ever rushes Vulcans, Flak Cannons, or pumps Projectile Cannons. Even missiles range has been nerfed such that it is not a great option.

Unlike Harbinger, the game can be won or lost by a single decisive victory. It is not a series of hundreds of battles like an RPG. Early on, the Unknown had a orange ball gun that did big damage at like 1k range. It would literally blow away your early ships before they could even see what was shooting at them! It had to get nerfed because of its immense power.

Thanks for the feedback! I will try to improve it with time and add some new items.

Some notes:

[*] The ships clip into each other due to the drawing order of sprites. I did not have time to create my own drawing order for the game engine, so when the ships are pieced together from many pieces, and the turrets are on their own layer, they clip when they are on top of each other.
[*]Units firing when exploding is up for interpretation. I think even in this real world a big naval ship carrier or such can keep shooting even if it's about to explode to pieces.
[*]"Harvester" - units can harvest resources from nearby exploding ships. I think this is what you mean with the station that costs a lot but seems to be weaker. Granted I could have tried to get a better explanation somewhere but I only have it in the help menu now.
[*]I have added BSE Marineclone to make replenishing marines possible.

Thanks again for the feedback!

[*]

 on the drawing order it seems like the solution would be to have the program draw each individual ship then that ships turrets then the next ship and then the next ships turds and so the layers wouldn't intersect in the render calls. as far as the late firing goes when an expanding cloud of vapor and debris is still hurling missiles lasers and projectiles at my ships its firing well after the vessel is dead. cool tips of some kind might help with understanding what the Harvester station and is and the Marine clone ship especially considering that you sometimes use Whimsical names for these things but it's nice to know they're actually there and have a purpose. it might also be useful to consider adding the Marine replacement ability to the Starbase repair beam as a secondary means of replacing Marines. repairing space stations probably should include a limited slow self-repair simply because the space station is going to have more of an ability to self repair than a spaceship it wouldn't necessarily need to be anything fast. but it would go a long way towards dealing with some of the headaches especially those points where you upgrade the whole strength but then you have to turn around and spend money to get the upgraded hollow-points. considering that space stations generally have to be more self-reliant they can't exactly put into port I think this is probably something that should at least be considered. as far as limiting the number of Marines I disagree with doing that purely because this is not a singular engagement taking place over the space of a few hours but it is instead a sector Invasion which I would considered to be scaled so that minutes equal hours or days or weeks therefore it's logical to assume that additional replacement Marines would become available overtime and not unreasonable to assume that you would be able to distribute them amongst those ships conducting boarding operations are fending off boarding operations. the pace of the game means that if replacement takes a considerable amount of time the ability becomes far less useful and remains a novelty. the speed of replacement should scale with the pace of combat. so is not to interrupt the immersion in the experience. overall I think that many of these abilities that you have tied up in specific ships and stations would have better fit the game if they had been modular like the weapons instead. Available station and ship resources simply aren't large enough to support specialized one off single ability space frames. the end result is that the vast majority of players we'll go for the real fire power over the specialist ships and me personally I have yet to actually be able to work through the entire research tree to get to the specialist ships before I've pushed the Hostile forces over the resource Tipping Point to where they're no longer capable of meaningful offencive action. this means by the time I'm actually in Striking Distance research wise of any of these specialist ships the enemy's resistance is already collapsing and I simply don't need them to win. making them unlockable I think if they're not going to be made into modular components is probably the only way the players are going to be able to use them early enough in the game for them to serve their intended purpose. on a side note is there any way you guys could fix the harbinger class ship? I mean we all know the things based on a colonial Battlestar. it's got the hangar Bays but it needs the heavy weapons and point defenses to go with it. that ship should be on par with the seeds battleship and it's not. it's not nearly Tough Enough and not nearly heavily enough armed I'm just saying.

oh and quick edit if you do make Marines far more available then the AI at least it normal and legendary levels needs to make much more aggressive use of it. right now it seems like only reinforcement fleets not those built-in sector ever have access to Marine transports and really these transports are only effective at boarding stations because the stations right now lack the point defense to effectively shoot them down most ships especially if they're running away can gun down Marine transports with ease.

Starfox, you have GOT to work on your paragraphing and sentence structure. You've heard the term "wall of text"? Capitalization of letters is also helpful at the beginning of a sentence.

I mean, if you are going to spend so much time writing down your thoughts, at least format them so that they are readable. Right? You've got a lot of good commentary and I suspect you are verbose in other areas too. Thus, it just makes sense to take a little more time to ensure your response is legible.

I will not tell you to "read a grammar book" as you seem plenty intelligent already. You simply have to SLOOOW DOWNNN a bit like I had to force myself to do. Then work on rereading your replies before posting, and attempt to eliminate shortcuts.


AI marines are only used as part of reinforcements, either warp nodes or regular, and never built per se. They show up plenty as is for my tastes. :-)

My apologies for problems reading the post I'm working from a phone and it's not agreeing with the Forum so I'm having problems getting things like punctuation and proper breaks in paragraphs in

OMG, you are trying to write that from a phone!?! You are much more brave and dedicated than me!! :-)

Ok I have finished my first campaign and have the following observations.

1. The scale of the game doesn't match the research system. The current research system is in broad terms the size of a full size big battle RTS. The game is currently a faster paced sskirmish rts and the raw number of options to research means the bulk of the tree is waisted and left unused. I discussed a few solutions for this in another thread an so won't repeat them here except to say that increasing the scale of the combat would go a long way to fixing this.

2. The available weapons are too generic. By this I mean that the lack of diversity in range means that players will simply grab the biggest gun they can easily get and max it out and the bulldoze the enemy starbase. Granted the small maps and limited number of units available don't lend lend themselves to a wide variety of more specialized weapons but it feels like a waisted opportunity both to add more character and encourage more use of the research tree more completely. A wider variety of ranges open up a wider range of tactics and can be balanced with things like less effectiveness on shields or hull.

3. Fighter squadrons are too small. Add back the squad size upgrade from harbinger.

4. Marine reinforcement is too slow. I suggest increasing the speed on the marine clone and adding the same field to the starbase.


5. Repair is too expensive in the form of rps. Simple and obvious fix.

6. Player stations need put on par with enemy stations. Staions should have a limited self repair and other bonuses if they aren't going to be as powerful as the others races.

1. Keep in mind that you are not expected to get the entire tree in a typical game. You will generally only grab one main gun (orb) and possibly a fighter type such as misslers or gatlings, along with a few other boosts. You can move to photon torps or other more advanced guns if time allows, but typically it will not.
I don't see a problem with this.

2. Kind of agreed. However there are only so many things you can change. As stated already, cannot really vary ranges very well in this type of game. I have a big pile of suggested modules which are more specific purpose. The idea being that one can relatively quickly research a given thing and use it to counter a particular tactic. Right now it is tough to do that because many items are on top of the research list. Stuff like Visio, etc are literally unusable realistically.


3. They needed to keep the squads small for resource purposes. Allowing 5 fighters or 3-4 bombers per bay would double the units onscreen and cause performance issues. They are pretty well balanced as is.

4. Agreed but like I've said, I don't see that marines SHOULD be an easily renewable resource considering their potential power.

5. Agreed. But he already reduced the cost by 20% and there should be SOME kind of penalty for being able to repair in the middle of space in 10 seconds or so. You simply should be using repair less often and using the battlestation repair bay for slower fixes. Having a space station with this capability would help too.

6. DONE! Download new version. :-)

1. Keep in mind that you are not expected to get the entire tree in a typical game.  You will generally only grab one main gun (orb) and possibly a fighter type such as misslers or gatlings, along with a few other boosts.   You can move to photon torps or other more advanced guns if time allows, but typically it will not.
I don't see a problem with this.

2. Kind of agreed.  However there are only so many things you can change.  As stated already, cannot really vary ranges very well in this type of game.   I have a big pile of suggested modules which are more specific purpose.  The idea being that one can relatively quickly research a given thing and use it to counter a particular tactic.    Right now it is tough to do that because many items are on top of the research list.   Stuff like Visio, etc are literally unusable realistically.


3. They needed to keep the squads small for resource purposes.  Allowing 5 fighters or 3-4 bombers per bay would double the units onscreen and cause performance issues.  They are pretty well balanced as is.

4. Agreed but like I've said, I don't see that marines SHOULD be an easily renewable resource considering their potential power.

5. Agreed.  But he already reduced the cost by 20% and there should be SOME kind of penalty for being able to repair in the middle of space in 10 seconds or so.    You simply should be using repair less often and using the battlestation repair bay for slower fixes.   Having a space station with this capability would help too.

6. DONE!   Download new version. :-)

1.that's kinda the core of the complaint. Why are they locked behind research if you can't realisticly use them?  As the problems driving the performance limits are a bit more complex than I first thought its not likely that the game will see any significant increase in battle size which is sad because I'd love to be able to build some big fleets with specialised ships. I think the game would be more enjoyable and have significantly more replayablity if systems where more complementary as opposed to chose your BFG and run with it.Also you should actually need to get through the bulk of the tree to overpower a tier 5 enemy.  That kind of thing is a staple trope of RTS games.

2. I disagree Harbinger did this and did it well even when you account for the different performance of racial variants.  It makes since to use it hear too. Besides if you tech up the right gun fast enough you can already snipe targets its just not as easy. What I'm talking about is having the guns allow for the option of a more layered gun battery. This would at least make the other weapons viable options even if the power gamers never availed themselves of that option.

3. Maybe but I'm constantly seeing my squadrons outnumbered and overwhelmed by enemy fighter support. If we can't increase the numbers then boosting individuals toughness and speed could also work. Like the stations our fights are just constantly outclassed in-game.

4. I'm not saying that it should be push a button get them back in 10 seconds fast. But realistically I should be able to use the boarding options nor often then once every 20 minutes without buying a new ship. Id say double the current replenishment rate and twerk from there plus add that ability to the starbase. Or add a research or upgrade option to improve the rate.

5. I see your point. Personally I don't like the current option at all I think its too fast to the point of being somewhat disruptive and that's why is ruinously expensive to use. Its also not realistic in the least. I'd personally be in favor of ruling out the current system entirely in favor of just letting stations do the work at a increased rate to the starbase current speed.  Having a repair ship or mountable gun option would also be preferable to the expensive magic button you can never really afford to use. Hell if be ok with doubling the repair time on the button just to get rid of using the rps.

6. Can't its not live yet.