eviator

Well even if it gets countered in the next patch, I had fun figuring it out. Cheers!

Look back through the forums and see the many threads saying normal is too hard. Gives me trouble from time to time if I don't execute well. Either way the AI doesn't have a strategy for this rush yet, so success above normal varies depending upon how much the AI is cheating.

Well regardless of whether you are a godlike player or a vocal minority player, everyone can benefit from a better UI, so let's give them a nice list of our UI "needs work" issues and see if they can do it. It doesn't hurt to ask. I'm in the process of compiling a huge list now. For example, the shipyard screen, you might as well scrap it and start from scratch with the issues I'm putting together :P

You all knew this was coming. Decent execution against the normal AI on one of the new 1v1 maps. Enjoy! [video]https://youtu.be/o4aGmu5sl98[/video]

[quote who="Mystikmind" reply="39" id="3609211"] So really it is not about it being a bad game, it is about 'time'? Time which can be very difficult to get much of it for a whole bunch of people, so time is a precious thing to waste fiddling about with unnecessary inefficiencies in the UI? [/quote] Yeah, I've never considered this a bad game. The gameplay uses a good recipe. Thinking back to all my negative posts, nearly all are UI gripes, not so much

[quote who="naselus" reply="34" id="3609115"] Or me, apparently. I love how eviator can make a post saying the UI is crap, SD are ignoring problems so they can milk more money from DLC, and that he's sick of this and will walk if it's not sorted out PDQ, and Frogboy 'loves' that,... [/quote] Yeah, I probably deserved more push-back than I got. I could have used a more productive tone. A personality flaw I'm continually trying to improve. That said, I

I'm specifically avoiding comparisons to SupCom so that I can evaluate this game on its own merits. Looking at the 100,000 foot view, I think the overall design of the game is in a good state. I'm generally happy with the units, the research, the global ability system, the economy, the region system, armies, and victory conditions. It seems to me that all of the base game elements are in (except one) for the release product. Here are things I think need work by release. I know much of

neilkaz, this only addresses your Precursor anomaly concern, but I think you might be happy to know that Paul specifically mentioned in the most recent dev stream that the power and abundance of those will need to be toned way down. Expect a patch on that soon.

Frogboy I appreciate the response. I hope I have made it clear that the UI concerns in my OP are just the tip top of the iceberg, just the things that I remembered from my most recent game. To me these things hint at a larger UI design issue that I personally don't think can be patched here and there to fix. The UI was built in pieces as new gameplay mechanics were added, and it feels like patchwork in many places. I'm recommending a complete overhaul, which would hopefully address al

It sounds to me, using comparisons to GC2, that you folks are cool with the idea that the game may continue to have many UI moles until we've gone through a few expansion cycles, which means years. Is that so? Sure I guess I can wait until 2018 to enjoy playing a 2015 game.

Mormegil that does help, thanks. I'm looking forward to the progress you all can make on this. And if I am still around when this comes to fruition I guess I'll write up another long list of UI moles for you to whack, since that seems how this is going to go.

The whack-a-mole analogy is a good one. That is exactly what is happening here. The UI was designed in bits and pieces by coders, not UI designers, and it shows. There isn't a cohesive UI design. Need a new capability? Add a new window, some hover tool tips, and a button. If they designed the UI from scratch, with the help of UI design experts, they could truly make the game shine. But they really can't do that because the game still doesn't have all the gameplay elements they wan

[quote who="Frogboy" reply="14" id="3608006"] One of our big upcoming focuses is going to be not just on meta unit targeting but regular unit targeting in general. For exmaple, the Cronus should stay back and fire but inevitably gets drawn into battle at closer ranges which we don't want it to do. We have to disect the AI logic to see why it thinks that's a good idea. That's the nice thing about early access. We can do with unit AI stuff BEFO

I'm pretty sure you did not read the post. Changing the title would help, I guess.

This is a rant. Been with you since beta 1 offering feedback. You released with a bunch of missing gameplay features and have been playing catchup. You are catching up, I will give you that. But you are catching up to pre-release promises. Still no star base governors. Still requesting the most expensive constructor. Still no invasion visualization. Meanwhile you are working hard on DLC and expansions, i.e. the cha-ching, while neglecting some core UI issues. For example: Why

There is a terrain exposed gameplay setting that does this. I prefer exposed as well.

It is surprising that some get early access to the early access patches. Personally, as an elite founder, I am fine waiting for the actual patch releases, because that probably means less crashes. We founders got what was advertised to us. Now we are in the Early Access phase and we are not getting special treatment, which was never promised. So all is fair. It seems to me that the handful of folks who currently have 0.70 essentially have access to an internal build. Companies frequen

Do you expect the AI to make use of the 0.70 changes like the new global abilities? When do you hope the AI will start to use air units?

[quote who="quadrium" reply="7" id="3605909"] ... I'm probably not going to share some of my actual ideas and concepts about large-scale RTS UI design and game mechanics (as I had intended at first). [/quote] So UI design is totally still up in the air. What they have now is fill-in, supposedly. I urge you to post your ideas about that. As for game mechanics, unless you have literally nothing better to do, you might consider just posting your ideas as

[quote who="quadrium" reply="3" id="3605812"] Thanks. What would be interesting to hear however, is where, in your opinion, the proposals made are suboptimal/improvable. Where would they be unintuitive, or show undesired behaviour? [/quote] I fully understand what you are asking for. The following is in no way a critique of you or your idea, more the game development process, so please understand I mean absolutely no offense. I think your ideas are great, but I

I read the whole thing. Many good points and ideas here. I am fearful that the devs are running out of time, that the army mechanics are close to as good as they are going to get by release, that they are going to have to revisit them in 1.1 through 1.5, and really those will just be tweaks. I hope I'm wrong because armies are a core concept of this game and need to be very solid at release or gamers/reviewers are going to call the mechanic a bust. That could set back the concept for a lo

I learned from FPS games that the biggest downside to DLC maps is that it SPLITS THE COMMUNITY! That's not good for multiplayer especially at release. Both of your current ideas do this. I seem to recall the map editor was planned for DLC. You could do that, assuming you can make it ready by release or soon after. You'll want a way to share maps so friends could play the maps they create, though I suspect steam workshop support is a little ambitious to try to get done by relea

[quote who="ASADDF" reply="51" id="3605456"] let me know if the maps worked. thx [/quote] They worked. Pretty darn huge, with a lot of space between regions. It seems this is intended for 3v3 games, with 3 radioactive nodes per player. Most of the terrain looks to be for team separation and funneling fights to the center, with not much for terrain advantage. Open maps are the rage right now, but some objective-based terrain variety would be welcome, IMHO.</

I hope this thread opens a can of worms, in a good way! To be honest, there is a lot more strategic depth in the current game than people realize, and the plans you've already outlined deepens it more. I think many people are confusing "playstyle" with "strategic depth". Sure, we cannot sit in

Are you sure your other factories were not also waiting for logistics to spit out more units?