Some comments I've come across that were oh so true....

from Sins Forums
One of the guys over at Gamers with Jobs posted this on their forums, I "borrowed it" for you all to read, it was a very good assessment of the game as it now stands.
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Mr Crinkle:

Played about 5 hours of it now, enough time for all the tutorials and a complete play through of a medium galaxy game. My thoughts went something like this:

Minute 0-30: This feels overwhelming and complicated.
Minute 31-60: This is really sweet and entertaining.
Minute 61+: This is slow-paced, but still kinda fun.

I've never played Homeworld (I'll pause for the shower of stones), so I can't speak to any similarities there. It's definitely tilted towards strategy rather than small-unit tactics...think Supreme Commander instead of a Starcraft/Warcraft. All of your combat units have researchable special abilities, but everything has an autocast option; you don't have to worry about madly clicking templars to psi-storm those incoming mutalisks. Movement across the galaxy takes a very long time, so intelligent positioning and scattering of your forces is more important than building a giant armada and rolling.

The Good:
-3 dimensional space was handled very well. While you're free to rotate the camera any which way you please, any ships or structures within a planet's gravity well are confined to a circular plane. This is a lot less confusing than having an orbiting cloud of stuff scattered inside a big sphere. The play is completely 2-dimensional, it just doesn't look that way.
-Tech advancement is easy to understand. There are 2 main research trees, both of which are completely visible at all times. In order to access higher levels of tech, you just build more generic research stations around your planets.
-Autocombat does a fair job on its own, provided you go through the slight pain of adjusting your auto-engage range on your orbital bombardment ships. You can do better than the AI if you're willing to micro it a bit, but often it's not worth the hassle to do more than shift-click a bunch of focus-fire commands.
-Graphics are pretty nice for a beta, good explosions, fun camera shakes, and there's a nice sense of epic scale when your doomsday armada arrives in unison to wipe the last enemy colony off the map.
-Perf was rock solid, but I just built this rig about a month ago so I'm ahead of the curve here.

The Bad:
-Top level tech research goes agonizingly slowly. It's truly painful, and none of the techs are really powerful enough to justify this.
-Many technologies are ridiculously high priced for how little benefit they give.
-Ship balance needs tinkering.
-Combat doesn't feel fluid enough. As a consequence of being confined to a plane, your warships just freeze at maximum weapon range and exchange volleys. The only ships that actually buzz around are the teeny little fighters and bombers that your carriers manufacture. Would be nice to see some more ships swooping and diving around.
-They did the scale a bit too well. Ships are absolutely microscopic compared with the planets, and at any viewpoint where you are zoomed out to view a useful amount of space, they all get reduced to little icons. The ship icons are impossible to distinguish, and get buried under a large empire designation icon anyway. Possibly this is a consequence of playing at 1600x1200. I'd rather that they made the ship scale unrealistically large, so I could get an easy visual look at what the makeup of my fleet was.
-Planet development of support structures is kinda clunky. It's often confusing to figure out why you can't build a particular thing at a given time.

This isn't due to ship until Feb, so who knows what changes will come. They've got a good foundation for a game here, but they need to add in that undefineable something to raise the fun factor. Feels a little more like a sparse galaxy simulator than a game right now.


Only thing I really don't agree with is making ships scale unrealistic, I like it as it is now....

6,066 views 13 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top
The scale is perfect. I do agree, and have mentioned it, about the combat were teh ships just sit and exchange pot shots at each other. You do have to remember though that this is still a beta and I am sure this and other things will be adressed.
Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top
To me it sounded like, he was trying beta1..
And he said, there werent enough ships buzzing around. I see my ships go around, like flys around a cow

Yeah the scale is fine as it is, no need to change that
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Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top
hmmm my ships don't move much... must be really thick space...
Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top
Only thing I really don't agree with is making ships scale unrealistic, I like it as it is now

I would suggest creating another icon saying "woo! heres a huge bunch of random ships!!!" when you zoom out to that level just before the picture of the planet takes over.
hmmm my ships don't move much... must be really thick space...

if they AI had slower deceleration both linear and angular, I think this would be a little less obvious of an issue.
While you're free to rotate the camera any which way you please, any ships or structures within a planet's gravity well are confined to a circular plane. This is a lot less confusing than having an orbiting cloud of stuff scattered inside a big sphere. The play is completely 2-dimensional, it just doesn't look that way.

am I the only one who doesnt like the fact that you have to use a HUGE pain in the ass round-a-bout button combo to move your ships in 3-d?
-Top level tech research goes agonizingly slowly. It's truly painful, and none of the techs are really powerful enough to justify this.
-Many technologies are ridiculously high priced for how little benefit they give.

the top level research topics are far more than powerful enough to justify both time and resource cost, I'm mad that I'm hearing this from people   


beyond that I think everything was well put and relevant.
Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top
Gah! another that wants to mess with the scale. Its fine the way it is leave it alone!

If he thought 60 minutes into the game was dull, and boring he obviously was not playing it with pirates enabled. Lets hear him say that 60 minutes in the game with a 30k bounty on his head
Reply #6 from Sins Forums Top
-3 dimensional space was handled very well. While you're free to rotate the camera any which way you please, any ships or structures within a planet's gravity well are confined to a circular plane. This is a lot less confusing than having an orbiting cloud of stuff scattered inside a big sphere. The play is completely 2-dimensional, it just doesn't look that way.


But in playing this game we are in space, not a body of water! Space is 3D and Ironclad should bring the 3-dimensional combat back from Homeworld. Units get stuck when grouped up in large numbers... and shouldn't! We're orbiting planets, so there should be plenty of open space for movement!

-Autocombat does a fair job on its own, provided you go through the slight pain of adjusting your auto-engage range on your orbital bombardment ships. You can do better than the AI if you're willing to micro it a bit, but often it's not worth the hassle to do more than shift-click a bunch of focus-fire commands.


Grouping is your friend. If you have a main offensive that only requires one battlegroup, put each role into a different group, with an overarching group for control en masse. (I.E. Planet sieging ships into 1, main offensive ships - frigates, bombers - into 2, flak frigates and fighters into 3, colony ships into 4, all into 5)

-Combat doesn't feel fluid enough. As a consequence of being confined to a plane, your warships just freeze at maximum weapon range and exchange volleys. The only ships that actually buzz around are the teeny little fighters and bombers that your carriers manufacture. Would be nice to see some more ships swooping and diving around.


I'm only in half-agreement here. While ships do need more movement (evasive actions), it should be more scrambling-like maneuvers than just having the ships diving into each other. You have to remember scale when talking about space combat. The ranges at which ships in space would be facing off are very great distances, so only small movements are needed to dodge incoming fire. On top of the engagement range, most ships in this game, excluding the fighters and bombers, of course, are extremely large in human standards. A battleship could potentially reach a kilometer in length, if not more... that's a lot of bulk to move when you have shields and armor plating to take hits for you.

-They did the scale a bit too well. Ships are absolutely microscopic compared with the planets, and at any viewpoint where you are zoomed out to view a useful amount of space, they all get reduced to little icons. The ship icons are impossible to distinguish, and get buried under a large empire designation icon anyway. Possibly this is a consequence of playing at 1600x1200. I'd rather that they made the ship scale unrealistically large, so I could get an easy visual look at what the makeup of my fleet was.


The scale as it is is fine. I run at 1680x1050 and I have no trouble distinguishing my units (other than having not yet memorized the icons) until the moment before the planet and gravity well becomes the planet icon when viewing the interplanetary routes. Again, grouping is your friend, as it will highlight the ships and allow you to see where each group is at.

So maybe I'm a little biased from actually playing the Homeworld series... so sue me.   
Reply #7 from Sins Forums Top
Lets hear him say that 60 minutes in the game with a 30k bounty on his head

well, to be frank I want to be able to place a bounty on my own head. sometimes the AI goes all comatose, and its impossible to get a challenge out of anything, regardless of how much I piss off the AI
30K bounties are hardly enough to warrant my attention
Units get stuck when grouped up in large numbers... and shouldn't! We're orbiting planets, so there should be plenty of open space for movement!

yeah, its not just an aesthetic or gameplay thing, the ships are constantly getting caught up on one another and COMPLETELY ruining my battle strategies.

The only ships that actually buzz around are the teeny little fighters and bombers that your carriers manufacture. Would be nice to see some more ships swooping and diving around.

one of my favorite strategies is to have my cobalts and kods rush the enemy formation, the result is that they spray out a ton of bullets really quickly and turn around the enemy before he can react, the result being that I both distract the units and deal a nice burst of damage

just do some microing, its useful.
Reply #8 from Sins Forums Top
some of those concerns are definitely going to be addressed. several people have commented that some of the high-level research doesn't seem worth the $$$$.

i have to say though: he's incorrect - there is 3d movement in the game which can be accessed by holding down the ~ key to adjust the height you want to move to (maybe this should go in the advanced tutorial). I believe the interface is functionally identical to Homeworld apart from using a different key.

Reply #9 from Sins Forums Top
I also like the scale as it is, so please don't change that, ship combat isn't bad, the cap ships don't seem to move around much in combat, but its ok, but generally I do agree to some of what he says, not all, as for the high research, not really done much testing of that, the lack of crystals seem to be the main issue, but maybe some of the topics could be tweaked, if there is agreement, but I do like sins, it has a lot going for it, and to be honest with you, I don't mind the lack of 3D combat, I always thought moving in HW was a bit tricky at times, in sins this is simplified, and I like it this way
Reply #10 from Sins Forums Top
well, to be frank I want to be able to place a bounty on my own head. sometimes the AI goes all comatose, and its impossible to get a challenge out of anything, regardless of how much I piss off the AI


AI or otherwise, that might actually be an interesting tactic to bait someone into attacking you...
Reply #11 from Sins Forums Top


Only thing I really don't agree with is making ships scale unrealistic, I like it as it is now....




I agree. In fact I would like a little more size tweaking like we talked about in the other threads.

Reply #12 from Sins Forums Top



Only thing I really don't agree with is making ships scale unrealistic, I like it as it is now....




I agree. In fact I would like a little more size tweaking like we talked about in the other threads.




same here...
Reply #13 from Sins Forums Top


i have to say though: he's incorrect - there is 3d movement in the game which can be accessed by holding down the ~ key to adjust the height you want to move to (maybe this should go in the advanced tutorial).


I wholeheartedly agree and hope it comes to pass. The 3D element is the one area of the game I simply have not fully figured out yet. Moreover special focus needs to be given on fleet maneuvers and positioning. Because getting all my ships to show up at the same time when I launch an attach and getting different waves to arrive at precise intervals in specific formation locations has proved impossible for me at present.

The fleet management system needs to be completely put through its paces in the tutorial. All aspects of it should have at three educational points developed for the tutorial. They can be based on single ship, task force and armada level controls.