Awesome game!
It's surprisingly intense when someone starts buying your stock, you start buying theirs, and before you know it your in a corporate deathmatch that will have only one survivor.
My overarching design feedback is to look for ways to make the game follow a less scripted path and more reliant on fast-paced strategy. It often feels like there are too many times your locked into your current path and are just "waiting for your steel to come in". The game is at it's best when your predicting/adapting to/exploiting a dynamic market, it's less fun to see how fast everyone can run the same race.
Claims / Maps
It would be nice to be able to abandon/move claims. If you take an AL hex, then AL turns out to be overproduced, there is no way to abandon it and claim another, more important hex. Fixed claims limit the players ability to change strategies mid-game.
It's too critical to get the 100% bonus for building 3 adjacent buildings. Everyone except scientific has a huge incentive to build in a big clump around their base to maximize their adjacency bonus, get instant auto-supply input materials, and repurpose their hexes. On the maps I've played, 80%+ of the map is either unusable or irrelevant empty hexes. Consider having terrain offer production bonuses/penalties (like Wind/Solar) instead of adjacency.
I saw that Soren originally intended to connect buildings by rail, that would be awesome IMO. You would have to chose between collecting moderate nearby resources or trying to defend a sprawling transportation network to reach the most ideal terrain.
Founding your colony is hectic and rife with RNG. If someone lucks into a mixed patch of AL/Iron they can often upgrade to 2 with a commanding lead before everyone else even finishes scanning the map. Someone can found directly next to you and occupy half of the critical hexes surrounding your base. You can only scan revealed hexes, not fogged hexes, so your going to be looking at the same terrain as everyone else in the center of the map - someone is going to win that race and someone is going to have a crippled start because they were 3 seconds too late founding their base. Consider fixed spawns, round-robin scanning rounds or hex drafts with time limits. Something. Anything. Else.
Resources
There needs to be end-game resource sinks to prevent them from following a fixed, predictable path. Iron, AL, STL and GLS are all critical early then usually crash to $1 after everyone has finished their buildings. CHEM are usually cheaper to buy than produce until long after T5 upgrades. If players build reasonably smart and take advantage of the adjacency bonus, everything is oversupplied by the end-game. At the same time, the Black Market prices become increasingly unattractive as they surpass 50k+. You often find yourself in a steady state game where no amount of strategy can turn a game around and prevent the inevitable. Consider having all of the Hacker Array/Black Market abilities on separate cooldowns and be funded by resources instead of cash:
H20 really cheap? Buy some and dump it on your competition's PWR plant to cause a short.
PWR really cheap? Power surge your opponent's ELX factory.
CHEM really cheap? Poison those pesky FOOD farms giving your opponent all his money.
O2 really cheap? Supercharge your GLS factories for a few ticks.
AL really cheap? Upgrade your FUEL plants to suffer less sabotage damage.
Create a massive 14-way game of rock-paper-scissors. There should always be a way to take advantage of the market to help your position.
Consider resource storage buildings or requiring base upgrades to upgrade storage capacity. A T1 base should only hold a total of 200? resources, then you start getting hit with costs for exceeding your storage capacity.
Resource scarcity should scale with the # of players in the game (if it doesn't already)
Hotkeys
We need 'em. Black Market abilities, Auto Supply On & Off (separate, not a toggle). Camera map locations. Select All <resource> factories. Etc. Etc.
I look forward to seeing you guys move towards release!
