Improvement suggestions and general feedback v1.05

For what it's worth, I have taken the time to write my thoughts on the game. There is a lot of great things going on here! Good work and thanks for making it all it is. Here is my feedback and general improvement potentials, it covers a wide area of things:

minor improvements:
1: move the retreat button to the 1st screen [not a submenu item] - in the heat of battle, do you really want to have to dig it out of a submenu?

2: consider an alternative way to retreat: instead of turning in place, have the ship accelerate and turn, this will make it harder for the enemy to maintain arc on you, meaning you take less damage and it won't take the ship much longer [if at all] to be by the edge of the system.

3: Another action that is missing is simply 'evade'; sometimes I want to the ship to stay in the area but avoid damage by flying away, around the system - this could be another button/toggle.

4: make it possible to select just ONE ship via the serach screen instead of selecting all ships of the same type. this way one can select and control individual scouts and colony ships [alt+click on search?]

5: you should be able to see the build progress of a sub-menu on the higher level menu as a little bar that fills the box. example: the frigate building is constructing a seeker: without even clicking the frigate build button I should see its at 33%.

6: If I recall fighters so that I can jump quicker to the next sector, have them auto-launch again if there is a threat

7: If I issue a move order, and there are targets I can fire upon within range, and auto-attack is on, it would be WONDERFUL if the ships would still fire at possible targets while moving. As currently there is no way to move your ships around in combat to a specific location without forgoing their attack abilities! example: sometimes you want ships to move closser to your capital ship while still firing on [previously selected] target, other times you want the ships to move within range of a repair station and still keep firing etc.

8: There should be a way to tell your ships to just 'attack' and they select their own targets instead of you having to select a target for them if they are currently in move mode [this may be already in the game and I missed it].

AI improvements:
Playing on hard AI, I noticed some basic issues with the computer AI that a human player can exploit to no end. Fixing these shouldn't be too hard and it would greatly improve the AI's performance.

1: the AI completely ignores neutral mines that you capture, and makes zero attempts to capture, steal and claim neutral mines. This not only gives you a significant economic advantage, but it also gives you permanent scouting information on the locations with neutral mines, making any map with neutral mines an easy [borring] win for a human player.

2: when the AI decides to retreat from a system, usually the instant you have a larger force, he will not re-evaluate that decision even if your fleet leaves the system before his is in position to jump back away. This means that you can effectively stave off several AI fleets with just one bigger fleet by moving it between your systems back-and-forth and then send a smaller recon force to mop up the computer's home on other planets/asteroids he is un-attending with his strike force [or witha  jump inhibitor you can then mop up his ships too!]. I've been able to fight  off two computer opponents with a combined fleets twice as big as mine by utilizing this 'failing' in the computer AI, better still, the retreating force can be picked-off by structures while it runs away and you can keep lots of computer ships in this 'run away' mode concurrently. The solution is fairly simple: if the computer starts retreating, have the computer AI re-evaluate his retreat at least once before he actually jumps: is the human player attacking him? Is the human player moving away too? Is there a base of the computer's that is under threat instead? If so, should I split my forces, perhaps retreating only some? When AI-retreating, avoid parking/moving your ships within range of turrets if you can to escape. If the AI could also decide if a planet/structure was almost dead before running that would be great too; soemtimes it just needs to shoot for a few more seconds...

3: when attacking planets, the AI is very predictable in where it moves to attack. the path finding affects both your units, and the computer's units.   There are a few algorithms needed:

* When siege ships enter a planet, have them move around the range of turrets to the 'gap', and bombard from there.
* If there are no turrets around a particular target [structures without protection] have those be the first priority for destruction of the fleet and have the fleet maneuver around the turrets to reach it. Strike squadrons should have their own target priorities: example: enemy hangers being top-priority.
* defending ships [human-assisted AI or computer AI] should always seek to remain within the healing range of repair ships and their own turrets when defending a planet, whenever possible.

Fleet formations:
Auto-join fleet should be off by default as it can lead to critical problems when you have two or more fleets in the same location. A support fleet set to 'hold position' that adds in a capital ship is going to make the capital ship completely useless... suicide-killing it or your fleet. Alternatively, make the 'auto-join' only work if there is at least ONE ship of that same type ALREADY in the fleet. Meaning that if I have a fleet of siege ships, only new siege ships in the gravity well will be added to the fleet.

Instead of just 3 attack modes: gravity well, local and hold position; which I find useless if not frustrating [hold requires intense micro-management to use effectily]; I'd rather see different attack modes: aggressive, normal, evasive.

Aggressive means you hunt enemy ships you are best at defeating: even if this means moving through or into other enemy ships range, Normal means you attack ships in the gravity well, but you also try and stay away from enemy ships - especially those with an advantage over you. Evasive means you attack ships you are good at, but if any ship is good at killing you attacks you, or if you are within range of a stronger force: you run away.

Another thread talked about retreat as auto-cast, I think this is an essential addition that would greatly reduce micro-managing battles. At the moment I have to watch the display and any time I see a ship that is under attack I click "retreat" as soon as the shields are down, the AI can surely do that for me. Vasari might want to get a slight tweak to their auto-cast retreat to be something like 'hull at 90%' and Advent might want to retreat at 'shileds at 10%' - would need playtesting to set exact % accuratly.

Ship movements:
battles are very static, ships line up and just slug at each other. To make them more exciting, realistic (?), and tactical, consider changing the physics so that ships can't drop to zero speed in an instant [deceleration rates equal [or less] to acceleration rates]. Ships would fire on targets within their arc and if they have a specified target, they would make passes to fire at it. And fire at other targets while manuvering; if possible.

A toggle mode can then be created to switch between three modes of speed: "Erratic maneuvers', 'Normal', 'Static'. Where Erratic maneuver ships will maintain maximum speed at all times and just turn to get targets in arc, 'Normal' ships will slow if they want to maintain arc on a target and speed up if they need to chase a target and 'Static' ships will only move if they have no more targets, and attempt to stop again whenever possible - resorting to turning in place when possible. Alternatively: hard-code these modes into the different ships instead of allowing a user to change them; at the moment all the ships seem to behave according the the mode of 'static' where most ships should be of the 'erratic' or 'normal' type - so I find this strange, except the strike craft which look like they are behaving as 'erratic' but because they can turn so quickly they don't really need to switch targets. Ships also seem to be able to stop so quickly no matter how fast they were going, this is neither realistic [in physics terms] nor much fun to watch.

This would open up many new strategy avenues such as getting an enemy out-side of his weapons arc [chasing his rear] and the strategic advantages created by turning rates, speeds, acceleration and weapons-arc.

If this mod is implemented there are other new tactical changes that can be made such as projectiles [missiles, pulses] have a limited endurance - if your missile is chasing the enemy and doesn't hit him in time, it depletes; pulses could loose damage over time. To compensate for the negative of endurace, these weapons can have higher damage output.

Another change can be to give faster moving ships a slight modifier to their to hit chances, both when firing and when being fired at. This could be a factor of speed/100. So a ship traveling at 400 has a -4% chance to hit and a -4% chance of being hit. This same ship firing at a target moving at 500 would have -4% for its own speed and -5% for the target's speed = a -9% chance to hit. Fighters in this model would get less basic hit modification because their speed would account for up to 27% of it. Presumably the fighter's own speed would not affect its to-hit chance when firing at its target [though the target's speed still would].

Racial differences: minor:
1. Make similar hull ships between the different races have speed and turning differences. The Advent could have higher speeds/acl and less turning, the vasari higher turning and less speed/acl.

2. Add (more) research relating to ship speeds, acceleration and turning abilities.

3. have some ships/races jump at faster/slower rates.

Racial differences: major:
1. It's a shame that all the races are actually quite similar in mechanics, only the details change and some of the technology. Personally I loved the dramatic differences in feeling that one got when playing star-craft. It would have been possible to mix up the systems to a far greater extent that currently employed. One of the races could have had ships built by their capital ships & the research structures could also be ingrained in the capital ship[s] [think mother-ships]. More specifically though: Each empire should have had a far greater difference in their building types and ship types. example: maybe one of the races doesn't have strike craft but instead it has flak ships and detonators [against structures]. One of the races could have ships that are half the size and cost of the other - while another has ships that are double the cost and size. Another unique ship ot just one race could be boarding parties [for capturing ships]; defending crew has a chance to (auto)'scuttle' before capture. The vasari could salvage their enemy ships for cash while the advent increase their 'fleet size' via their mind control abilities instead of 'fleet purcahses' [obtained by mind controlling enemy crews or enlisting populations] - whereas the vassari fleet size could be dirrectly tied to their mineral output etc.

I hope that some of my feedback has been of use and interest,

With kind,

Sebastian.