This reply is to highlight a few issues I've noticed, regarding unintentional behavior, gameplay balance, and spelling/typographical errors, or some proposed functionality to the game, all in no particular order Grab a cup of coffee, this is quite a litany
--- Improvement
First, I'd like to bring up the shipyard. I think there are some bugs in here. But most notably, it's frustrating when playing the third or fourth game, there are several designs leftover from previous games that I will not implement in a game since I am using a different approach. Sometimes ships will become available to me that I have designed earlier that have such and such missiles and armor, but I may be doing a beam/armor approach this time, and clutter my list of available ships. Yet I want them saved to disk in case I need them for another game. Some ideas for added functionality are:
*Saving designs to disk on a per-ship basis, allowing for temporary designs to reside in memory only
*Using classes or tags to categorize ships, and being able to view ships based on tests of said classes or tags
** And if you're feeling froggy, some nice logical operators on those tags like "medium, large, (beams || missiles) && armor, fast"
** ...tag names and what ships have them being left to the player
* For smaller improvements, leaving functional components on for upgrades, since it's easier to yank 30 things from the list at the top if need be than to carefully place them all back just so you can change 3 engines.
* The shipyard, outside of a game, where all techs are available where players can sit and pound out several designs of many generations and a whole line of ships before even starting a game
--- Spelling
In the tech tree, there are several spelling errors here and there. "Admantium" comes to mind, and in the robot report of a tech discovery somewhere along the mass driver line, a few different misspellings of aluminum(or aluminium, depending on localization, I guess).
--- Improvement
In the tech tree and in star port dialogs, where a given string is too long to fit in the designated space, it's more useful to see the last n characters than the first n, where I'm likely to put things like "Mk IV". I once saw, I forget where, a very important piece of information truncated, like a price or construction time.
---Bug
There seems to be a bug in the star port dialog. The "Cancel" button operates identically to the "Okay" button(Frustrating, if you don't want to finalize changes but you forget what you were doing).
---Gameplay balance
There may be a gameplay balance issue in the tech tree. When one finishes "Superior Duranthium", they are awarded with "Duranthium Armor III"<5, 50, 2>, and "Superior Duranthium"<5, 70, 4>. For the low low cost of 20 more, you can get an armor of the same size with 2 more protection. At this point, while the Superior Duranthium is quite a bargain, it's still technically a tradeoff. However, the next generation(Tri-Strontium) presents you with armor of <7, 70, 3>. A typical trade-off of a generational jump... more protection, larger because unrefined, and more expensive. But if you compare it to Superior Duranthium of <5, 70, 4>, one would ask why one would ever use Tri-Strintium. The trend continues all the way through the tri-strontium generation(<7, 70, 3>, <6, 70, 3>, <5, 70, 3>), and the first revision of the Kanvium generation of <6, 80, 4>. The first armor that's actually better in any measurable sense is Kanvium II at <5, 90, 5>, which even then is a trade-off much like that between Duranthium III and Superior Duranthium. I propose Superior Duranthium be changed to <5, (90-110), 3>, at which point it's still more protective and smaller than Duranthium III, just what a small ship needs, so long as you were willing to reach into your deep deep pockets(or wait) to get it, and still offers a valid trade-off with the next two technologies, until it becomes fully obsolete.
--- Bug/Improvement
One time, I designed a ship called Bahamut. It was very very expensive. I had built a couple, and since the design was bad (it had troop modules on it.. I thought I'd do an all-in-one, until I lost the fight and several thousand bc worth of ship along with it), I decided to do a little refinement, and nix the design by overwriting it with the same name(against the good advice of the program). After doing so, by selecting upgrade and saving the design as the same name and opting not to scrap the ones in service, I figured the production of the few that were still in the oven would shunt to the new design, and probably would have if I had left well enough alone, but I wanted to see how much the last two weeks of one would cost to get an idea of how expensive they were. When I did, something went wrong. I forget if it gave me the price of something else or what happened, but I decided to not purchase it, and when the menu came back to the planet's star port, it was set to no project. I went to put it back on the Bahamut and there was no design by that name! I told another planet to build a ship, and it's not on the list. As far as I know, I don't have a design called "Bahamut" anymore. Nothing else compared in the way of price or value, and I ended up getting ripped off. (I suppose I could have redesigned it and set it before I ended the week). I was very very angry at the developers for a few seconds until I realized that it's just a game, and as programming goes, I'm still walking off the ends of arrays myself.
About those troop modules... Is it that the ship has to land to drop off the guys? If I have such an all-in-one ship, it'd be nice if I could get the rest of my ship back in the event of losing a ground fight. Or, maybe with discrimination based on the price of the ship, the equipment of the ship, or some other factor. Better yet, enabled by a technology that branches from "Advanced Troop Mod" or something.
--- Thanks
In closing, sorry to have taken so much of your time. Thank you guys for a great game, and thank you for actually listening to your people.
