I am frustrated with 2.2. Reasons why, and suggested remedies.

[Rybear]

(This is copied from my own thread in General forums, at the suggestions of some folks to put it here were the dev team may get the info.)

I've now played, partially, 3 games of the new system. I'm probably dropping playing this game until I see things come back to fixed. I am FURIOUS that you messed things up this badly.

This details my comments, appreciations, and complaints, with suggested remedies. If this should go somewhere else...well, I started the thread, don't feel a need to respond. I mostly hope this makes it to the product owner so they have input to fix this stuff. (Yes, I'm in agile software dev myself.)

Very high level summary:

• You have made a game that was mostly executive in nature into a complete micromanagement slog-fest.
• Things are so micro-oriented now that I'm genuinely looking for something else to play.
• The complexity you added in 2.2 is not balanced with playability.
• Many of the ideas are good but they needed more polish. I suspect this update had minimal broad playtesting.

SUBJECTS

1. TRADE. Interesting system. Adds a new resource that has some flexibility. Overall I like it.
2. PIRACY. Valid concept, too complex. UI is kludgy, feels like you bolted it on to the side of an existing system. Suggestion: Abstract the antipiracy activities greatly. A system I've seen be successful in the past is to assign ships to antipiracy. They're taken out of the main play and manage themselves. Assigning them and de-assigning them is like changing a policy. You could buy "police ships" the same way you buy construction and science vessels. You pay maintenance on them, but they're just out there, doing their thing. You don't manage where they go. Occasionally you have to add more due to length of trade routes, increased piracy, or ships getting shot down. You could still have pirate bases or fleets that the Navy needs to take care of, but that's not part of trade.
3. SECTORS. You added a ton of micromanagement to planets, then nuked the very effective sector system. I cannot understand how this was successful in playtesting. Managing planets is now a game to itself. Suggestion: Simply restore the old sector system. This will go a long way towards fixing things. Alternate suggestion: permit sector capitals, then a radius of control in jumps that the player can set. Systems which would overlap have a tiebreaker rule, like sector created first or senior governor.
4. SECTOR INSTRUCTIONS. I suspect this is actually a defect. I cannot give instructions to governors that make any sense; only the old 4 categories, no management of pops, construction in sector space, or anything else. Suggestion: clean this up & restore useful abilities.
5. RESOURCE CHAINS. I actually like that there are levels of refinement necessary, and everything isn't just "easy to build". I have always felt that ships were too easy to build to massive fleets, and preferred the idea that battleships should be a Big Deal, not just tons of them everywhere. So, some of this is good. The problem: you've made me micromanage this aspect of the game. Resource levels swinig wildly up and down for no reasons I can tell. Suddenly shifting between +50 income to -25 deficit, or the reverse, without any clear reason to me. I'm sure there is one, but I'm not poring over every planet to figure out what alloy plant just came online that is now draining my volitile motes! Suggestion: Make this easier. Give me some UI that shows me what is draining my "X" resource, what is producing it, and levels of use (in a graph) over time. Alternately, make this simpler overall as this is a ROYAL pain in the ass to manage.
6. PLANETARY MANAGEMENT. You added depth to planets in a way that adds to the game...and changes it to a new game completely. I like the foundations of the new system - planet populations being larger/growing, sector management, limited "special" building spaces being earned with increasing size. Good ideas. Just...a wholly different game when you implement this much of them. Now I'm focused not on my empire and being an executive, I'm a micromanager in the accounting office. Combine this with the sector problems I describe....and the game is almost unplayable. Suggestion: If you're going to keep this level of complexity you have to add something that makes it easy, not just pretty. You're going to have to show me many or all planets at once, let me perform operations right on that screen, and understand the impacts of them. I need to see planets in the context of other planets. You clearly are rewarding specialization of planets in the current design, so I have to make sure the whole design of specializations hangs together. Again, this has become REALLY complex in a way I wasn't looking for. A good UI would make it easier.
   
7. BALANCE OF FORCES. This is actually kind of positive. As I noted a little earlier, I like that it's not so easy to just sit things out, make a fleet of 40 battleships, and start kiling things with a 150K point fleet. Because of alloys and other resources fleets aren't as huge, fights are more balanced (and therefore harder to win) and bases count for more. I do like this. I hope there's a way to keep it without me having to be an accountant at the same time (see other points here).
8. FUNCTION KEYS. I'm sure this is minor, but should be easy to fix. You changed the F[x] hotkeys. Suggestion: make these player configurable in an easy UI. I see there's a textfile to edit. Don't make me think that hard, OK?
9. EVENT LOG. Strange as it sounds sometimes when I'm pressing keys to do things, the game pops me a message of some kind and I inadvertently dismiss it because I was already pressing the ESC key to exit a menu. Sometimes I can guess what it was, sometimes I can't. Suggestion: Couldn't you write a record somewhere and show me an event log of these things so I could at least know what happened?

A couple of game enhancement suggestions.

1. MORE JUMPLANE / WORMHOLE SPECIALS. Things that could add mid or late-game interest is the ability to scan for "hidden" wormholes or jumplanes, where they require hyperdrive 2 or 3 to traverse. Sudden changes to geography in the game could make it interesting.
2. MID/LATE GAME SCIENCE SHIP OPPORTUNITIES. Similar to the above, perhaps have some events which can only be detected with new sensors, developed generically at tech 3-4-5. Possibly adapt the Curator labs for this purpose. This could permit a new round of discovery, or other uses for science ships. This might give the game more of a "final frontier" flavor.
3. IMPROVE CARRIERS. Lots of workshop ideas have been done here: you should adopt some of them. Make carriers and fighters more useful as standoff weapons, and antimissile weapons.

I think that's enough for now.

Best wishes with the game. I'm hoping to see good things in the future...I just will probably stop logging hours on it shortly.

Rybear.

(After some addtional comments from the original thread, I'd added this.)

Wow. I did not realize what I was starting with that post. Genuinely, just trying to get feedback to the dev team about a game I liked, and now don't like as much.

Why? Because they changed the thing I liked about it. I acknowledge it is different, I just don't like the difference.

My analogy is this:
The ice cream shop had my favorite flavor of ice cream, Cookie Dough. I enjoyed eating it. Sometimes with hot fudge, sometimes not.
The ice cream shop decided to change the recipe.
They used to use chocolate chip cookie dough and now they have changed to chocolate-mint dough.
There's some texture similarity to what I was eating before, and I do like it. Just not as much.
When I want ice cream, I don't usually want this. I really liked what they served before and I'm sad they stopped making it the way I liked it.

I do not expect that we will have the same favorite flavor of ice cream. No amount of talking will change our tastes.

I'll respond to a few things said on the thread. Most of this is opinion - and everyone has one, and we know what that means.

1. CLICK FEST. Someone pointed this out, and I think it hits the mark very well. There are WAY TOO MANY CLICKS to accomplish a thing. In commercial software we do studies on this all the time. How usable is <X> feature? What do people have to do all the time, and how do we make that easier? There is so much clicking to manage planets, etc, that it gets in the way of playing the game. This feels like a major update that was rushed out for some reason.
2. "WHAT'S WRONG WITH MICRO? I LIKE MICRO!" Good. Enjoy the micro! I'm glad the game is more playable for you and more fun. I'm not being sarcastic, I'm glad you like the thing you like. In my case, I don't have a ton of hours to play games. This game offered me a fun strategic RTS experience with interesting challenges and "just the right amount" of micro. Now, too much, and it feels like work. I really think that some good UI work would solve this, but I'll have to wait for it, if I get it at all.
3. SECTOR GOVERNORS. If I didn't have to have 25+ governors, sure, that would work. That's what I'm asking for. Give me back the old sector style. Maybe add some depth to the kinds of instructions you can give them. I really would be happy with just the old style and offloading all the micro to them. I can still micro a few planets at a time for whatever reason I want, which I did previously. I will absolutely give that a shot and see if it solves my personal flavor-preference-problem.
4. DASHBOARD. Someone pointed this out and I really love the idea. It would align with the "executive" concept. I've done some dashboard designs for businessess and the concept is "management of the exception", in this case meaning "(1) Show me everything in a simple format. (2) Highlight cleanly what is going well and poorly. (3) Enable me to drill into the details of any area that I want, so that I may solve problems or exploit advantages". Applying this to a full planet list - not limited to within a sector (especially when I have 60 sectors!) would probably help a lot.

Last, an appreciation.
Several of you have chimed in agreeing with my summary of "I want to be an executive, not an accountant".
Thank you!
I was wondering if it was just me, and I'm glad to know it's not.

Enjoy your gaming,
Rybear.

 

[Bl0wf1sh]

I would like to add onto this with some additional thoughts, from my own playthroughs so far in 2.2:

• PIRACY
  • There needs to be some other, less micro-managey way to do this. With worm holes and gates, it can become impossible to patrol routes, as fleets will take the shortest route...
  • One thing I can think of is to give starbases a "control radius" with piracy reduction not just where the base is built, but in adjacent systems as well... could be based on starbase size (size N = gives (100% - X * 100%/N) piracy reduction in N-1 neighboring systems. So size 2 gives 50%, size 3 gives 66% in neighboring system. This would also encourage building a sufficiently dense starbase network.
• SECTORS
  • OMG. I had one playthrough where I ended up with 20+ sectors, many with only 1 or 2 planets in them. Add to that the fact that as empire sprawl increases, governors start costing 1000s of energy credits, I ended up not bothering anymore with them.
  • Allow us to create our own sectors - give a limit to sector size (which could increase over time) to avoid one-sector empires. Each sector needs to have at least one inhabited planet/habitat/ring world, of course.
  • Display sector benefits in planet view so we can plan buildings better.
• PLANETARY MANAGEMENT / RESOURCE CHAINS
  • I would actually combine this somewhat, as it is quite interconnected. While i like that there are resource chains now which makes economic management a bit better, they are hard to manage, due to the fact that workers jump around automatically. Several things could improve this:
    • Workers do not jump jobs automatically: If I build any higher-level job building (research, admin) or a mine, my energy workers leave their post and go there. This is unrealistic (e.g., tech worker becomes instant researcher?!), and often tanks my energy production unnecessarily. Instead, pops should stay in their job unless I demolish the building. Only new pops would go to new jobs.
    • Better job priority management per planet: If I have an energy planet, I would want to fill the mining slots eventually, but my pops should first go to the energy jobs. Same for other types of planets... The current priority system is micro-managey in that I have to go back and increase priority again (if I can remember that I did this in the first place). Instead, within each tier, it would be better if we can rearrange job priority. New pops would then always go to the highest-level, highest-priority job available. Additionally, we could click on a pop to re-assign it to the current highest-priority job in its tier, or to manually push it into another job.
    • Maintenance/amenities only when necessary: Maintenance/Amenities should be employed when they become necessary, or when there is no other open job for the new pop. Currently, if I have 5 open maintenance (machine empire), my tech workers leave their jobs to go there, which is a little crazy.
    • Giving this level of control would stabilize the economy, and allow to specialize planets better.
  • Another item is unemployment and housing management. Currently I only get alerts when I am over somewhere or when I have empty building slots, and even then I need to scroll through the whole sidebar, which has become much too long. Someone suggested a more "executive" approach and I agree:
    • Have an economy dashboard that shows the below lists (clicking flips between which list is expanded):
      • Employment levels: Show planets that have unemployment, and then planets that have 0, 1, 2 open jobs - those are the ones where I need to start building something, or control population. Clicking takes me to the planet view.
      • Housing levels: Show planets that are over their housing level, and then planets that have 0, 1, 2 open housing slots - those are the ones where I need to build more housing, or start controlling population.
      • Maintenance levels: Show planets that are at negative maintenance and those that have 0, 1, 2 open maintenance slots. Also show open positions in general for these planets, so we can see whether there is a problem or not
      • Stability & crime/deviance: List of planets with stability and crime/deviance levels, together with number of available and filled jobs that improve those values
      • Empty slots & upgrades: Show a list of planets with the columns # empty slots, admin upgrade (y/n), # other building upgrades, # available districts, # blockers.
    • List only sectors in the sidebar, with icons representing issues: employment red/yellow, housing red/yellow, maintenance red/yellow
  • Finally, resource chains:
    • There is a problem at some point in the game where for example I simply cannot produce more red crystals/energy due to lack of districts to produce them in. Additionally, the space stations provide such a low amount of resources now compared to planets (5-15%), it is almost not worth building them.
    • I would suggest to have an advanced tech (so far I have not found it, maybe it exists) that allows energy/crystal production outside of districts. There are several options (those buildings need to provide 1-2 jobs as well):
      • Matter Replicator (existed in previous version): planet-unique, replicate matter for a relatively small amount of energy (e = m * c ^ 2 after all) - maybe 20 energy producing 50 red crystals. Needs to be expensive, for example 2,000 red crystals and 100 rare crystals
      • Antimatter Generator: Planet-unique, at a cost of 2,000 red crystals and 100 dark matter for example - produces maybe 100 energy per month
      • Food Replicator: planet-unique, replicate food for a relatively small amount of energy, for example 2,000 red crystals and 100 rare gas to build, ratio of 20 energy to 50 food
    • Alternatively or additionally, non-habitable planets could have a possible project to increase resource production, with a low chance of getting a rare resource produce as well. For example, if it is a planet producing red crystals, add a "deep core mining" project that can be executed by a science ship at a cost of say, 200 alloys and a duration of 1-2 years. Chance to double resource production, with a small chance (~ 5%) to produce one of he rare elements, including a very low chance of living metal for example (0.5%). For energy-producing non-habitable planets, same for a "energy field survey" with a chance to double resource production, and a low chance for some rare resources. Maybe also add a "solar energy mine" project for stars that could triple resource production with a constructor with a chance to fail.
    • Also make the rare resource buildings upgradeable. Currently only produces 2 resource for 1 job, taking up a whole building slot...
    • All of these can, and should, be locked behind appropriate mid-game techs, and may only be applicable to certain planet types (deep core mining for rocky planets, energy field survey for gaseous planets).

Well, this turned out a bit lengthy... I hope the devs read this in the end.