Sector Siege needs improvement

My ideas to the improvement:
-In the menu (when you hit the esc button in the game) it must to show the major information about the actual battle (who is the enemy, how many waves are coming, difficulty - the informations, that we can see before the battle at the starmap)
-The fighters of the enemy mustn't come tailward... (This is a bug)
-We must able to shift the modules of the big ships in the build menu (like in Harbinger)
-The minimap must indicate the anomalys such as black hole
-beautiful design to the big blowings (nuke, plasma-eclipse)

Good idea bout the menu. If you come back to a game a day later, you might not remember what exactly you were doing. It should not exactly be all that difficult to figure out though, nor does it really make all that much difference in the middle of a game. It is more important to look at your research and figure out what your genius strategy was, so you can continue properly.

However, in some cases it will "save" as I am picking my troops! So I load the campaign later and am greeted by a pick-troops menu, with zero clue as to what kind of mission I am playing!

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Don't understand fighters coming tailward. Fighter movement has always seemed very natural to me.

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Shuffling modules around was nice for harbinger although minor. In this game there is pretty limited impact to moving modules around. I don't see it as worth doing.

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Anomolies added to minimap would be handy. I havent used the minimap for a while because you cannot relocate it. Thus, if you starting in the bottom right corner where the minimap is (I forgot), then its a big pain to deal with. Being able to tap-hold to move it would be valuable.

Sometimes, when the enemy fighters appears on the horizon, I see first their ass, so come backward, and when they want to fire, they turn around (this is already normal)

Yes, it would be better to be able to move AND RESIZE the minimap (also on mobile)

more minimap functionality would be nice especially the tap move since the Squadron and Auto Select buttons are underneath the map location.

the fighters is not a bug the fighters use Newtonian movement models so it's perfectly normal for them to proceed in tail first.

Hi all.

I could use some help. I have spent some time thinking about the progression, especially the ideas of permanently unlocking research and perhaps upgrades to turrets too. While I was thinking about it more and more, it seems to me that it is very hard to solve this with the suggested methods.

Like joe said, this system was built to be like classical RTS games, where you do have to research and upgrade better weapons in maps, get better units with time by building certain buildings etc. It's like Starcraft, Warcraft etc. It's built on the same principle.

The whole game difficulty is balanced on this principle. It is also balanced on how fast the player can research and upgrade.

I feel there are big problems even if I do allow the player to unlock a few techs in a campaign. I feel new players would then ask:

"Why does not all of my researched techs stay unlocked to next sector?"

My idea with this system was to try to create different strategies, where the player can choose which 2 or 3 research trees to focus on during a game, and try to win a sector using those trees. The idea was never that the player would unlock all research trees during one sector play. I realize the player might not have to try anything different once a good combination is found, but trying to balance that is extremely difficult.

Moving the research tree to star map could result in a solution, but it is such a huge task and would require a complete re-balancing of the game, that it is not a viable option. The upgrade menu should then be moved as well.

Perhaps giving some opportunities to unlock a few research items permanently would be better, but how many players do you think would understand this, and not be asking:

"Why does not all of my researched techs stay unlocked to next sector?"

And:

"Why does not all of my turret item upgrades stay upgraded to next sector?"

I will try to think of ways to enhance progression, but if you have ideas that would not require a complete re-balancing of the game, let me hear it!

1.  First idea would be to rebalance the temporary upgrades.  

Consider that for 400XP you get 3 ships, fully equipped.  One is always the 3 turret tough/fast one worth about 8000 scrap, and the 2 smaller are worth about 8000 combined.    So 16k worth of scrap AND instantly built for 400XP, vs 2000 scrap for 200XP?    Sign me up!    Granted, you don't get quite what you want, but still...its a lot of value.   It probably needs to be slightly increased to 500XP.

50 RPs does not have much effect on the game and at 200 XP is way overpriced.   Having a few tiers of this to give 100,200,400 RPs at the cost of 100,200,400 XP seems reasonable.   This would allow people to start with more advanced tech, at a price.   You can use the same button even... clickable up to 3 times with increasing rewards/costs.

Similarly, 2000 Scrap is not very much to work with for what? 200 XP?    
Having 3 tiers of bonus cash would be an idea as per above.   I'd say 75XP/150/300 for 2000/4000/8000 scrap?

The smaller ships reinforcements are a bit pricey at 300XP.  Considering their value is less than half of the bigger reinforcements, I'd drop their price to 250XP.


2) Secondly, you can have permanent upgrades that give minor bonuses to your gameplay.
Example, for say 1000XP you could unlock Quartermaster, which adds +2 dudes to your starting lineup.  Thats 2 extra pilots, marines, whatever.

Just about any variable could be done in this way:   Procurement Expert for +500 starting Scrap.   Brainiac for +5 RPs starting.   Even stuff like 2000XP Master Tactician for 5% speed boost.  WeaponMaster for 5% more damage.   Lots of obvious possibilities.


3) Moar Tech.   I have an entire long wall of text based on pretty conservative ideas for ways to implement lots of unlockable weapons, some usable early (tractor beam), some unlock new tech trees.


4) I do like the idea of permanent saving of captured UNMODIFIED ships/stations for the campaign duration. :-) Adds a nice gacha feel, even though I doubt its all that powerful. What would be powerful if you were able to mod them and cherry pick advanced guns, then perma-save. That would be too strong. Thus, you would disable saving an alien vessel if you modify it. Or disallow mods (seems worse).

Indeed Joe.

You have some very good ideas. But there was originally 5-6 unlockable ships, 4 complete tech trees filled with turrets and hangars, and 3 stations. This was not enough to give a feel of progression for some players, I don't see how adding more stuff in there is going to solve this particular problem. Problem being that many seem to not feel enough of a sense of progression.

I can and probably will add more stuff in there, but I feel it is not going to solve this complaint.

I had an idea spring to mind about having the Commander level up. It would essentially be a veterancy system, and it would work by giving bonuses to all units according to which rank or level the Commander is (The player). Unlocking a certain research item permanently for one campaign could perhaps be in there as well. So you would get some hull/shield/engine/ bonuses to your units and be able to pick a research item to unlock.

My idea feels a bit lame though. It's just more of the same bonuses to the same stuff research gives bonuses to. Still thinking about it, have to think about how much work it takes to implement and if it would be worth the work. Might just end up creating new tech, ships and stations.

The idea is that the permanent bonuses would be a lot more expensive. Quartermaster, Procurement Expert, etc. Each would cost 1000+ XP and you would not expect to get them all anytime in the near future. It would give a slower progression than currently. You could have levels of each one, say three tiers of Quartermaster giving +1 or +2 dudes each.


You COULD split XP into permanent XP for leveling up the commander, and Credits or whatever that could be spent. First of all, this helps "retain" XP progress and seperates it from spendable credits. Certain upgrades would only be unlocked at a certain Commander level. In particular the permanent upgrades above. Also, any particularly advanced weapons tech trees such as Gauss Gun, Death Ray, MegaPlasma. Certain ships could be unlocked at medium commander levels such as the Visio, Harvester, TurboSpeed one, etc (and get rid of them out of the researchables and replace with a plain +10% extra level). Those ships would be cool to play with early game.

I probably would not provide much in the way of passive bonuses to the commander level though. Maybe one small bonus per rank up perhaps. I prefer the unlockable permanent-upgrade approach a bit more. Gobbles more XP.


Keep in mind that there are only 4 weapons tech trees right now. They are not very easy to mix and match, so 4 major paths to victory more or less. You can try to splash to get gatling PDs for example but in general it is not worthwhile.
If you added another 20 or so researchable items, especially if they are not necessarily locked one-behind-the-other or of different sizes, then there are exponentially more combinations to try out.
Especially as I tried to create items that were more specialized, moreso than general purpose.

The problem with the research especially at higher difficulty levels is that it takes so long you can afford the time to play around. Also the weapons are either really usefully or not so much. I just finished my first campaign and can say that my weapons progression went like this orbs first then all the tier 1 buffs then missiles and the missile bombers then all the tier 2 buffs the if I was still fighting photons and tier 3. Tried other stuff an it was just not worth the time to get out.

In an RTS people only research what they need to win each battle. Right now the research system looks bloated because its a full size system in a skirmish scale game. I like the idea of moving both the upgrade and research to the star map as it fits the current scale of the game better. If you did do this I would not allow the research to persist beyond each individual campaign or skirmish. That would just make the game too easy after a while. This is a huge amount of work though and might be better implemented in a sequel.

Alternately you could increase the number of ships and stations for more epic battles where specialist ships and stations have a place. Say triple the ships stations and resource accumulation would do it without stressing the processor as that's about year 2000 levels of render calls on a quad core processor. Even as much as 5 times the ships and stations shouldn't cause lag even with huge numbers of fighters considering the power of modern smart phones and computers. Bigger battles mean longer missions and the option to use things like flak ships for fleet defense or marine strike fleets to capture ships or clusters of stations.

As far as persistent bonuses I think the simplest would be boost the number of men you had to assign before each mission. Either as unlockable popcap increases or one use buyanles like the renforcments. Here again it would be best if these things did not persist beyond the current campaign or skirmish as they could be game breaking otherwise. But it would reflect your ability to field more personal as your war effort progresses. Leveling up these units could also work making each engineer or scientists more effective and providing a bigger bonus.

Personally I'm not sure its a since of accomplishment that's missing so much as a story and a bit more variety in mission type. When you take out a race there's no cut scene or real nugget of lore and it has absolutely no effect on the campaign. Right now its essentially 25 identical missions and all you get at the end is a small block of text. You might want to consider adding in some rewards for reaching certain milestones in the campaign. Something to break up the grind.

@starfox1701.

Actually the game unit limits are pretty much capped, when lesser mobile devices needs to be taken into account. I spent a lot of time optimizing the game too, it's very surprising how little even those mid range mobile devices can handle. This game also has a lot of things affecting the need for processing power, like every turret being their own individual entity with own scanning, every unit having to scan for other units around (fog of war), the fog of war itself is tied to every unit, movement AI for all units. The list goes on.

PC and high-end mobile devices could handle a lot more of course.