[Opinion about the game and suggestions]

BTW: Explorable planets will almost certainly not make it into the game.

 

Yea I sorta figured, since that would be like another game in itself...

 

I understand how hypothetical the implementation would be, don't worry, I can imagine that you already have a lot on your plate ^^

 

Anyway, thanks for your very extensive answer to my suggestions, it's nice knowing how much the gameplay will evolve from it's current state.

[Opinion about the game and suggestions]

If the planets were more than just backdrops, that would be great as well.

I thought that the impossibility of landing on the planet is not made by accident. It's pretty ridiculous, if a relatively small spacecraft dictates its will to the whole planet. Seemed to me that, for whatever reasons, the conditions of life on planets have changed dramatically, so that all beings were forced to escape into space.

Maybe it would be wiser to leave it as "feature" and not try to make exaggerated control of the whole planet (think about this again). We will have space stations, mining bases and the incredible spaceships... whether you need something else?

IMHO :-\

 

I understand what you're trying to say, but I didn't mean it like you would govern the planet's population, more like you'd build some mines on the largest mineral deposits and you'd get a small but steady stream of resources from that, or maybe another type of resource like research points from building laboratories... I don't know, many things could be done by stations instead of planetary installations, but I though that would be the best way to have inexhaustible minerals, plus it would add something to defend, etc...

 

Or maybe one planet could be like your seat of power and you could build a colony on it and slowly build it up with the resources you bring back home and get bonuses from it, I'm just throwing ideas here. Heck I don't know how moddable the game will be, but this could be a mod too.

[Opinion about the game and suggestions]

Hi, I enjoyed playing the 0.3 demo and I'd like to share with you the post that I made on another forum about my impressions. I know now that some of the features I'm suggesting are already planned, but here's the post anyway :

 

I'm kind of enthusiastic about this game, I think it has a lot of potential if improved upon, but right now my most pressing concern is the way various materials are treated, as straight tier upgrades from the previous ones. It goes Iron -> Titanium -> Naonite -> Trinium -> Abattium -> Urgium -> Xanion -> Ogonite -> Avorion, that's 9 steps during which the same gameplay repeats, you have to travel to a higher level area, kill friendly ships (?), steal their weapons/mining lasers, and then mine the higher tier of metal, to build a stronger ship to kill stronger NPCs.

Granted, you can probably burn a few steps, but that seems to be the general path laid out for you. I think that as far as upgrades go, 9 tiers is at least 4 too many.

 

Also, the way ships work means that you're far better off flying a huge monolithic brick than a detailed ship, because each block has it's own HP, and if it breaks, everything attached to it breaks free (premade ships are vastly inferior because of that). So far you can't sell metals or guns, but I hope this will get added to the next version.

 

What I'd like to see : the ability to build our own stations, some way to research, build and/or buy guns/mining lasers, more modules (like better hyperspace drives, shields, maybe tractor beams and more types of guns)...

 

If the planets were more than just backdrops, that would be great as well. I'm guessing there are some technical limitations to what would be possible, but even if it was just an abstracted menu where you manage planetary installations and the ownership grants you some sort of income, that would already be great. Maybe this could be done by building a special kind of space station (and you would have to destroy it in order to take over the planet).

 

Instead of infinite storage, I would also like it if we had a cargo hold block to include in our ship designs (and to stations). This way, trading and stations would take more importance. We can also imagine long-distance travel gates that would have to be built by players with large amounts of resources, so as to link rich core sectors and fringe areas. In general, I think that asteroid mining shouldn't be the best way to get resources, only the most easily accessible. Planetary installations should provide the bulk of resources, otherwise on older, more populated servers, there would be a risk of resource depletion.

 

Since I made this post, I played a lot more and I quickly realized that asteroid mining isn't the best way to get resources (shipyard destruction is), but that's the same issue for populated servers, even if I can imagine that there are a lot of core sectors with avorion to loot, at some point it will all be gone.

 

The resource progression tiers aren't bothering me as much as they did previously, but I'd still like to see more variety in the use of different resources for different purposes (and maybe also having to process minerals in order to use them, like for instance mining iron and processing it into useable steel).

 

Something else that would be cool, would be the ability to build/buy more of a specific type of turret, once you have the schematics. This way you wouldn't be stuck when you lost your last weapon turret, losing a very good weapon wouldn't be as punishing as it is right now, and you also wouldn't have to use mismatching turrets.

I would, however, be eternally grateful if there was a way to get rid of turrets, right now the clutter is really annoying, and scrolling down that list gets more and more tedious as I loot more and more weapons.

 

Anyway, thanks for making this game, I think it could go very far, and I hope to see newer versions soon =)