Sector Siege needs improvement

I'm big fan of Harbinger and bought Sector Siege immediately after release but right now game totally disappointment me.

Played about 6 hours and I am bored... reasons below:


1. Unlocking system needs to be rebuild!
It was reason of Harbinger's success and now I don't feel need of unlocking at all! After one weapon pack only stations seem to be needed.
- There should be tech-tree, check EventHorizon you can learn about how to create nice tech-tree. So at the beginning we should have only a few choices of small ships and weak weapons.


2. Unlocked weapons should be available from beginning (without research)
In most games I didn't research weapons because it takes to much time and the usefulness of successive weapons is different.
- Weapons should be available from beginning and maybe super weapons should need different weapons slot size?

3. Boarding module refilling
I propose new techs "main station crew transport" and "main station size". After creating ship with boarding module from station should leave people and first tech is connected with time needed to full fill crew and second is max crew number in station. Another thing is that boarding module should be capable of sending crew between allies ships or maybe new module like "marines transporter" for transport people between station and ship?

4. Save ship and station configurations between games
5. Support modules like additional shield, stronger hull, booster, planetoid miner, jammer,...?

I think this game can be great like Harbinger but needs rethink some of things, right now I worth about 3/4 stars for me.

We will try to do some improvements with time, gotta smash some bugs first!

I am sure they will add more stuff to be unlocked. As a beta tester, I have already given them a huge list of potential options, new ships, stations, weapons, modules, etc. They have to prioritize polish, balance, stability, and bugs for release schedule first.


They cannot allow unlocked weapons to be available at the beginning. I mean, that would just be stupid. What would be the POINT of a research tree anyways? Weapons are balanced on how long they take to come online. Same as ANY RTS such as command and conquer, etc.


Refilling marines would be nice, but hardly a major issue.

Templates would also be nice to have, though it is not exactly all that hard to fill a ship's 12 or so slots and hit SAVE.

I'm unsure if I should say that, given in most cases these are some NDA agreements, but I signed nothing with BugByte, so I don't feel like I cannot say it.
Feel free to remove this post if you feel like it is too critical about what you are doing. It is my personal opinion you are free to disagree with or completely ignore.

I've been given alpha/beta state games to test. At first, I was pretty excited about it, because I had a lot to say about the Harbinger, and things I wish were improved in it. Some of these little things were stopping it from becoming a absolutely brilliant game. Now, I had a chance to take part of it and tell Developers all of that stuff. Mind you, I was helping them for free, only because I wanted to help them make a better game, and therefore sell more and prosper.
Most companies hire professional QA studios (if they don't have their own) to get that kind of feedback.

Problem is, they don't want to listen. The upgrade system from Harbinger was broken. Some of the weapons had cheap upgrades that gave some weapons 100% more damage modifiers, while some were expensive and changed close to nothing. Before you pick up your pitchfork saying "I don't know shit", a side note: I'm a regular Path of Exile player (around 4k hours on the clock), and believe me I know my ways in modifiers, calculations and optimization.

The same upgrade system in Sector Siege was even more broken in alpha state. I've written in length what are its problems, and how to fix them. To this day, very little has been done to solve any of these problems. Instead, ever next built I was sent contained some minor changes, leaving most of the problem untouched.

Because of that I can't quite say that I think BugByte will fix Sector Siege. Which is a very sad thing, because I had much hope in BugByte.

Lets hope Space Heaven turns out better. Best of luck.

@Perq. Honestly, we listened to you and did our best to make changes we could.

Your problem seems to be that your vision of how things should be did not fully materialize. But here's the thing, if you want that then you should develop your own game and do all of that yourself.

We do all the work. All the blood, sweat and tears are ours. They are our sacrifice. That gives us the right to say how things should be in the end, and we try to make the best decisions possible when all things are considered, trying to keep our players happy.

All this "not listening to players" is simply very untrue. There was one person giving me most feedback during the time I was developing Sector Siege, and that is joe1512. There are a bunch of changes I implemented based on his feedback. During our whole career we have listened to our players and made new content additions based on that.

If I remember correctly once I had the game in a very early state you played it too, and it was balanced to shit. Your suggestion was to create a spreadsheet of all turrets and hangars and balance them. So I did that, I listened to you. I then balanced the game based on feedback gotten from joe1512 because there weren't many others giving me feedback.

You'll do whatever you seem best for the game. It's your game, as you said, and I can only try to convince you to make some changes. If you don't think they fit, you're free to ignore them. And I fully respect that.

But then again - what is the point of me providing my feedback if it doesn't change all that much? There isn't anything for me, in the end. The matter of fact is, providing a well formated, constructive and thought out feedback takes time and effort.
So, if I'm not going to make any changes into the game, why should I spend my free time essentially working for free?

But Perq, if you are not a game developer there are so many things you do not know.

Many do not even think about what kind of feat it is to get a game like Sector Siege running on mobile devices. The limitations of the devices are very strict, many devices choke at the slightest. When you are sending me feedback on how to make the game better balanced, I'm looking at the profiler tool trying to figure out how to get the game working at all.

At first, the game was able to handle about 8 ships and 10 fighters in total before lesser mobile devices would give up. Through ridiculous effort I found ways to optimize, and I pushed those limits a lot higher. There wouldn't have been a real-time strategy game with 8 ships and 10 fighters in total.

How about 100s of different devices, screens with aspect ratios from 4:3 to 21:9. Creating a user interface to support all of these, both PC and mobile. I just can't describe the amount of work needed solely for this issue, it is something you have to experience for yourself.

If you send us feedback, and we focus on other things. It's because of all of the above, it's because we deem there are things more important to implement to bring the game to the market at all. It's because we have decided that these things are the best improvements we can make all things considered.

Because of all of the above it really frustrates me that you would come and write things like "they don't listen". It frustrates me because if I could show you the effort needed, if you could experience it here with us, you would understand why we choose to ignore some requests.

So why are you even asking for gameplay feedback if you are too busy with optimization and technical stuff? That is quite frankly waste of time for both parties.

I explained above why some requests get ignored. I did not say all of them do. When we ask for feedback, it's like throwing out a big fish net and gathering as much feedback as we can.

After this when we have the feedback pool we choose what we deem to be the most fruitful all things considered.

I believe BugByte does a great job of listening to feedback. However, I've seen a lot of dumb suggestions in the past for Harbinger. There is a lot of stuff that is not very feasible either.
Even things that I think sound reasonable, do not get implemented because as the Dev, they have a different perspective.

Example: The PD Bolter SUUUCKS. I thought...hey... lets give it a 0.5 sec fire rate and let it be a machine-gun type PD. Instead of the single shot/burst that all the other guns have, this one spams bullets like crazy. Way more overall firepower relative to PD laser. It would be much better against slow and big targets, but worse against faster and smaller targets. It would be different and useful.

While I have not heard specific response to this, I would imagine that it might not be feasible from a performance point of view. I figured..hey...the Vulcan cannon exists and fires fast right? But it is pretty rare because it kind of sucks. But having dozens of ships with multiple PD rapid fire weapons might be a problem. Maybe not, but I don't personally know.

Thus, I don't gripe and moan when one of my ideas are "ignored". They cannot reply to every single request and it might not be feasible. Or just not add all that much to the game. Or too much work, even though it seems trivial. Or cause balance issues. And so forth...


I did not really care for their implementation of the MarineCloner. I wanted the cloner to clone and auto-transfer marines to other ships when it gets close. But I could see the counter-arguments to doing it that way. Things I had not even thought of.
I am hoping they buff the ship so it is more useful as a standalone ship since its bonus is relatively minor. But I can see their point.