Re: first impressions
Posted: Fri Jun 27, 2008 6:29 pm
Hi again,
Could be a bug or maybe it was just two actions happening at the same time but I'm pretty sure that's how it happened. I tried my idea of just sending a scout into the enemy home system to see if I could win that way and it didn't work but maybe the rest of teh game conditions were a bit different than when it happened to me.
In the mean time I have a few more comments.
In the battle screen I noticed that the area under the "active ship" status box doesn't accept mouse clicks. Perhaps this is because the this area is reserved for the "target ship" information box even if there is no target ship selected. This made me think that maybe one other solution to the space taken up by the active and target ship boxes would be to always have this space reserved for it and to make the battle map that much smaller, this way you could also move the options and end turn boxes there as well to get them out of the way. You could also use this for a small overview map of the entire star system showing planet and friendly ship locations. I don't like loosing the screen space but I though it was worth mentioning.
Also as an alternative to group movement how about selecting a number of ships and giving them a waypoint or a grid space to move towards. Then they would just automatically move in that direction until they were given new orders. It would make fleet movement much easier.
I noticed that when I invade a star system I have to put my ships along one edge of the map but when the CPU invades my system they come from all directions. It's more interesting but it seems a bit inconsistent to me. How about letting players place ships along any edge they like rather than just one?
Using the cursor to scroll in the battle map is slow. I know you can use the up/down arrow keys but maybe cursor scrolling could be adjustable or the longer you hold against one edge the faster it scrolls in that direction.
I sometimes find that I accidentally remove a good ship from my fleet when I actually mean to add one in the military screen. perhaps a warning window should come up to confirm that you actually want to delete a ship.
Lastly, have you thought about adding the sun to the system maps? It might make movement more interesting if there was a penalty for getting too close to the suns gravity well. Mind you it might be hard to do given the huge size difference between the sun and the planets.
Thanks.
Could be a bug or maybe it was just two actions happening at the same time but I'm pretty sure that's how it happened. I tried my idea of just sending a scout into the enemy home system to see if I could win that way and it didn't work but maybe the rest of teh game conditions were a bit different than when it happened to me.
In the mean time I have a few more comments.
In the battle screen I noticed that the area under the "active ship" status box doesn't accept mouse clicks. Perhaps this is because the this area is reserved for the "target ship" information box even if there is no target ship selected. This made me think that maybe one other solution to the space taken up by the active and target ship boxes would be to always have this space reserved for it and to make the battle map that much smaller, this way you could also move the options and end turn boxes there as well to get them out of the way. You could also use this for a small overview map of the entire star system showing planet and friendly ship locations. I don't like loosing the screen space but I though it was worth mentioning.
Also as an alternative to group movement how about selecting a number of ships and giving them a waypoint or a grid space to move towards. Then they would just automatically move in that direction until they were given new orders. It would make fleet movement much easier.
I noticed that when I invade a star system I have to put my ships along one edge of the map but when the CPU invades my system they come from all directions. It's more interesting but it seems a bit inconsistent to me. How about letting players place ships along any edge they like rather than just one?
Using the cursor to scroll in the battle map is slow. I know you can use the up/down arrow keys but maybe cursor scrolling could be adjustable or the longer you hold against one edge the faster it scrolls in that direction.
I sometimes find that I accidentally remove a good ship from my fleet when I actually mean to add one in the military screen. perhaps a warning window should come up to confirm that you actually want to delete a ship.
Lastly, have you thought about adding the sun to the system maps? It might make movement more interesting if there was a penalty for getting too close to the suns gravity well. Mind you it might be hard to do given the huge size difference between the sun and the planets.
Thanks.