Extended Edition Android Beta Test and Feedback!

First, I've really been enjoying the game and have played enough to unlock everything and beat the game on every difficulty. The back to back replays have left me thinking a lot about the progression through the campaign, how we unlock new ships and how we scale up our fleets for each play through.

So our current system you start your first match in a small ship and try beating the campaign. Level up, unlock the next ship, replay the campaign in a slightly larger ship. Each play through is slightly easier until your ready to bump up the difficulty. Once a new hull is unlocked there's never any reason to choose an earlier hull except for the choice to trade guns for fighter bays.

The very limited number of ship slots means that any smaller ship we buy will sold soon to make room for a larger ship, but we're only getting back a small portion of the value. The cost of selling heavily encourages players to hoard scrap until they can buy the best hulls available. Add to that it's not much more expensive to buy a larger ship and there's no reason to ever buy a small one.


I suggest an alternative with the potential to create much greater fleet diversity and more longevity to the campaign.


First, add the ability to transfer command to another ship in your fleet, and/or the ability to trade/upgrade a ship. This will mean that instead of starting over for larger ships you can earn them slowly within the same campaign, adding longevity to the upgrade processes, and encourages players to use a wider variety of hulls

Second, Makes ships available from Star bases only, randomized, and of limited availability. Larger ships will be rare and only available in the later game.

Third, Start the player *without* a ship. Instead give a 2-5K budget and let the player choose his first starting ship from the starting Starbase. Anything not spent on the hull can go into upgrades. You can start larger, but less equipped.

Fourth, Significantly raise the cost larger ship hulls. Currently we pay roughly 1000 scrap for each weapon or fighter hard point on a ship. The result is that there's never a time when it's more effective to buy a 1-2 hard point hull for 1-2K when for just a little more we can buy a much better ship. If each additional hardpoint doubled the cost of the hull people would *still* buy the Cruisers and battleship, proving they are worth the cost in the long run. The difference is that if a Destroyer costs twice as much as a strike craft.. people might actually buy a strike craft so they have something to use while they save up that extra 10K scrap.

Fifth, Raise the max ships up to 5. We've talked about making it hard to get big ships, and giving lots of reasons to use small ones, but we still need a way to use all those sweet weapons we find. Small ships only have 1-2 weapon slots. There's a legitimate concern of "What about people who get 5 Carrier Cruisers!?". Keep in mind that we might never even *see* 5 Cruisers for sale during our entire playthrough, and it's very possible that even if we saw them, there's literally not enough scrap in the game to buy all 5.

More likely what we'll see is a player with one cruiser as the command ship with 3-4 strike ships in a box formation around it. Compared to 3 Carrier Cruisers (my usual loadout today) the total firepower is similar. The chief advantage of using several smaller ships is more health, and less panic when you're about to lose a ship. I see those as improvements over the current state of "Oh crap, those missiles were meant for me!"-"puff"-"game over".