Feedback after a few weeks away.
First off, I like to thank the Devs for making so many quality of life improvements since I last played. The UI is much cleaner, looks much better, and information is easier to ascertain. The changes during the scanning phase seem like a nice compromise.The graphics are improving, too.
I played roughly 10 games over the weekend, FFA skirmishes with 7AI.
- Scientific: With the new information display combined with the delay due to shipment, the colony can have a net resource (e.g. food) gain over time, yet have a short term shortage causing debt accumulation, that doesn't get shown next to the resource on the UI. Not sure if there's an easy way to show both?
- Thanks for fixing the resource shipping for scientific.
- Seemed that a majority of matches a Robotic AI ran away with upgrading colony size getting to level 5 while everyone else was under 3. Likely attributable to not needing glass to grow, nor needing life support. Probably a bit much since robotic is so streamlined for colony growth with respect to production; iron--> steel, aluminum, power.
- Putting all the upgrade buildings other than off world launch to level 2 is interesting. I think the hacker array is nice to have access too that early, and creates an interesting strategy promoting specialization. At the same time, it adds to the feeling that colony size 3 and 4 are a bit filler-ish. However, I foresee issues since, in my opinion, the hacker array is easily the best "win" building. The off-world just costs so so much and is vulnerable dynamite. Easier to just throw down some hacker arrays and manipulate shortages in the price of goods/glass and sell the production for huge profit. Safer too. The progression winning via hacker array is smoother to level 4 with earlier access, but its still not practical until you have enough claims to outright abuse having 2 of them and sufficient specialization in something to offset the cost.