So I would mirror your initial thoughts on the game. It is a lot to take in, and for the most part, the designers have done a first rate job of making a lot of things intuitive and easy to manipulate. There is a learning curve you need to sacrifice a few games as you learn.
I think some things are beyond a learning curve and need to be tweaked. The shuttle dropping off people to explore a derelict is one of those. I don't know how many times I drop someone off at an airlock and right click to move them and woosh, there goes my shuttle. Then I spend some time telling it to dock again. That interface needs to be smoother.
Soon you will encounter the logistics of supplies and creating better building blocks. This is a major stop-game situation for me. There are some items that you must have high-tech materials to build, and if you run out of those, you cannot proceed. The machines that make these high-tech materials require those high-tech materials to build them, so it is a catch-22. i cannot build a machine that makes widgets because it takes a widget to build it. Now, if you could recover widgets from derelicts, or trade from trade ships, it would be OK, but you can't. What they need to do is make sure you can build a machine that makes widgets without requiring a widget to build it. This is a natural thing in a lot of these empire building games. If I need dragon eggs, I need to build a dragon nest, which requires a dragon egg, so I can't build it and I can never get dragon eggs. So the dragon nest should NOT require a dragon egg to build it.
I would like it if I could rotate the map so i can see my ship and building areas from different angles.
For the most part, the game is very good about telling you about something if you hover your mouse over it. For most things this is great, but for a lot of other things, I need more information. What i think this game needs is a "space haven wiki" if you hover over something, it has a pop-up that tells you what it is, if you click on the pop-up it opens a browser window and takes you to the space haven wiki on that topic. If the wiki were player-editable, then we could all build on the pages, giving hints, helping each other out.
A good example is something you touched on - comfort. When it tells you about comfort, you should be able to click on the link to take you to the wiki, which should have a lot of information on how comfort works, tricks to help it (walls, building in a modular fashion to use the vacuum of space to block sound, etc.) As it is, we just don't have any information about how far away, how much insulation, how much sound before crew become upset, etc.
So i've played about 15 games since getting the game, each time I get a little farther before I realize I've done something that cannot be fixed. I have never gotten to a point where I could build a cannon on my ship. Just can't get there, requires too much tech. My last game, my ship was huge, modular, 2 hyperspace drives, but I ran out of high tech and couldn't build the machine to make it, so I am dead in the water.
Many things in the game that kill you slowly can't be fixed in time, you have to load a previous game and start saving yourself earlier. Starvation is a good example. I had plenty of grow modules, but it turned out I had run out of water. No ship to trade with, no asteroid to mine, I was dead. Once I ran out of hyperspace fuel. Sat in a system for 20 days hoping a trade ship would pop in with some. Never happened. New game! I mean, what else can you do? Maybe the game needs an emergency transmitter to summon a trade ship???
Some high tech items are so costly for such a little return. Do I really need a whole console to turn the shield generator on? This should be combined with the weapons console. Do i need a costly console to run the scanner? This should be combined with the navigation console.
I've also run into some strange buggy behavior. Sometimes I will have a single crew member starving. They just don't eat. Everyone else is eating. This guy is dancing to the jukebox but slowly starving next to the kitchen table where his crew mates are having a lovely meal. Can't figure that out....I think it is a bug.
