And here are my suggestions to the issues I list:
*(1)* Space civs games have been around about 25 years. Lot of ideas out there: have a reason to explore planets like ruins of ancient civilizations, secret star portals, NPC alien civilizations. Add luxury resources that you can trade with other players that give civilization bonuses. Make me care about whats around me.
*(2)* Reduce the size of the galaxy so players are more in contact with each other. Reduce the costs and times to build things and have the damn game reset every month. Then new players can jump in at the start of the next reset and compete.
*(3)* Automate engineers are just plain get rid of raiding all together. Don't make them out produce mines, at minimum.
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*(5)* Resource and fleet management is a nightmare. This is a serious UI issue. I don't know where my fleets are on the star map while they are in transit. I have to click on the location a fleet is going to get an idea. Just a freaking line or something! And I can't tell my engineers and raiders to return resources to a certain planet? I'm constantly having to shuttle resources back forth in system.
*(3)* You reward micro managing way too much. This game has a very slow pace, yet you reward players that are on 24/7 sending out engineer and raiding ships. I don't have the time and energy to compete with people with compulsive obsessive disorders.
*(4)* There appears to be no tech trees or variations between players. This means everyone is basically doing the same thing, only better or worse. This boils down to there being only one really effective way to play the game. This means fights are basically going to come down to who has the most ships and highest tech and largest alliance.. and thats it. That also means those who have been playing longer are almost guaranteed to win then.
I've been a big fan of 4x games for a long time. You guys put a lot of effort into this game; that is obvious. However, after several days of play, I gave up. I'm going to list my issues, then my suggestions:
*(1)* Game play is repetitive and tedious. All you do is continually send engineers out to gather resources, then brag about it on chat. That is about all everyone does. No one cares about the story line beyond the free resources it gives. Don't kid yourself on this. After several days the quests become infrequent enough not to matter.
*(2)* The galaxy is way too big and filled with nothing interesting. This was the real killer for me and a player in my alliance. When it finally became apparent how long it would take to expand.. anywhere, and how all the stars and systems were basically identically save a couple variations on basic resources, we gave up.
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Alright. I think I did the best I'm gonna do. 66 point victory. I grabbed every treasure except 1 gold coin. My tips are: focus on leveling early, get immunity to poison as soon as possible. Get the hammer to get free XP from the golems, but make sure you get the god killing sword before you finish level 3. Finally, find a safe route to the orb first thing to find out where the traps are. You can always backtrack or switch cave entrances after you know the layout of the map. http://screencast.com/t/DTlTvGrlV
I think the rogue freeze bug is caused by the same reason some fireballs pass into some of the walls. The pathfinding is broken along some of the walls.
I'd love to see this game expanded. Keep all the current concepts and add an overland map and multiple dungeons. Each dungeon would have various difficulties, unique challenges, and a boss with its own timer. There would be a final dungeon with its own super boss. The goal of exploring the normal dungeons is to acquire artifacts that help the fight against this super boss. There would be an overland map timer that would determine the overall time a player has to acquire artifacts. There could be a tavern where heroes could be switched out between dungeon raids.
Great game concept. I love how you make games you can start and finish easily in an hour or shorter. I am so sick of games that are nothing more than repetitive grinding. Nice job.
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