Posted March 31, 2020
I'd like to start by saying that I'm incredibly impressed with this game so far, and as far as I'm concerned, if the developer decided to stop working on the game right now, I'd still feel that I'd received my money's worth. I love the direction the game is going and the developer's vision (as far as it's been revealed so far). That being said, there are some places where a few minor changes would make the game better for the player without (IMHO) changing the tone or pace of the game any significant amount.
1) There needs to be a way to see where your character is currently located. It's possible to use the trade-net to see which star system you're in, but there is nothing anywhere which shows which planet and/or station you're at without going into space. This can be disorienting, particularly if you've started playing again after being away from the game for a while, or if you're loading an older game, and going into space just to see where you're standing seems a bit excessive.
2) There is currently no way to see which stations you have purchased storage space at. And even if you know which stations allow you to store items, you can't see what items are there without actually going there. It would be nice if there was at least a way to see which stations allow you to store goods. Even if there were no way to see what's there, at least that would give you a starting point to look for something if you've lost track of it (or if your account is mysteriously short, and you realize you must have accidentally left something somewhere after a trade-net purchase). There IS a list in the universe map which shows which which star systems you have beacons at, but it is unreliable. It doesn't seem to show systems that don't have a beacon (although you CAN buy storage space in these systems) and it doesn't always show that you have cargo space available at a system even if there IS a beacon there. And even for the systems that it shows, and tells you there is cargo space available there, it doesn't tell you which station(s) it's at. And if you have items in storage resulting from a trade-net purchase that hasn't been completely collected, then there is stuff in storage despite the fact that you didn't PURCHASE storage there. It's unlikely this is showed in the list at all.
3) Many of the lists were coded as tables, when it would be more effective if they were treated as stacks. Examples are cargo hold inventory, station inventory, drone lists, objective lists, and possibly others. The problem with tables is that when you delete something, it leaves an empty entry, and the next time you add something to the list, it goes into the first available slot. This inevitably leads to fragmentation where information that should be grouped together is now all over the place. Not only is this inconvenient, but it can also lead to very frustrating situations. For example, if you have a small cargo hold and are dumping ore below a certain threshold value, new ore that's added pops in all over the list. This results in the list scrolling randomly (sometimes up, sometimes down) when you're trying to delete items, and THAT inevitably leads to you accidentally - and permanently - jettisoning extremely valuable ore when the list scrolls under your cursor JUST when you shift-click. Using a stack would keep all new items at the bottom so information would remain organized. Probes on your list would be grouped together at the star system you placed them rather than having to hunt and find them in the list. If a stack isn't possible, then compacting the table whenever an entry is removed would serve the same purpose.
4) When buying/selling on the trade-net or moving items to or from storage, there is a place where you can type a number to indicate a specific value. It would be handy if this spot received focus automatically, so you didn't have to click on it to enter a number.
5) It would be nice if there was a way to tone down the inter-house warfare in various systems. With large numbers of ships having combat, it can drag the FPS down horribly. Being able to tone-down the combat (or at least make it so that the actual combat visualizations were culled beyond visual range) would make things easier on the CPU and GPU for some systems.
6) There is currently a way to set the frequency of incursions, although it doesn't actually do much to change how often they happen to me. Even set to "never", I frequently get incursions in my game - most often when I have dealings on the trade-net, but sometimes completely unrelated. I'm not referring to attacks by hostiles because I've drifted too close... I'm referring specifically to the orange bracketed enemies that will chase you indefinitely and have no purpose other than to harass the player endlessly. I'm not sure if this is the result of a bug or if the developer's definition of "never" is just very different from my own - but it would be good if this could be addressed.
7) This may qualify more as a bug than a Quality of Life request - but NPC ships seem able to approach planets much more closely than the player's ship can. This sometimes leads to battles where the player simply cannot get close enough to a combat to participate.
8) on a similar note, placement of transport portals should be a minimum distance from a planet, as on multiple occasions, I've translocated to a star system and inadvertantly appeared INSIDE a planet.
9) Drones which are not currently unloading ore at a station should be available for recall at ANY time that the player is in the star sytem in which they're located. This includes when they're on the way to sell ore (but haven't arrived at the destination yet) or after they've sold ore and are proceeding back to the mining site.
10) On the subject of drones... their manual/automatic status is on a per-drone basis and must be set after they're launched. it would be nice if you could set the drone LAUNCHER to automatic/manual so that once you've decided to launch manual drones in a star system, all drones would be correctly set without having to change them individually. Naturally, you would want to keep the option to change a drone's setting after it's launched; this would just establish which setting would be the "launch default".
11) The visuals on ground sites are by default rotated 45 degrees. The stations being represented are designed mostly on the cardinal compass points (north, south, east, and west), and the screen scrolling only works on a horizontal or vertical basis (you cannot scroll diagonally). So since the design of the station makes you move due north, south, east, or west to get where your going and the screen will only scroll left, right up, or down, you CANNOT get where you need to go unless you either fight the scrolling mechanism or reset the viewing angle back to zero. Fortunately there is a way to easily do this. Unfortunately, the game overrides it and constantly resets it back whenever you reload or change cells. While I respect that the developer feels that the maps look nice when presented at a 45 degree angle, it is frustrating to constantly have to reset it back to the way that *I* prefer to see the maps. It would be nice if this were an option that could be disabled - but better if the visual orientation were stored as a persistent variable and stored with the save so that any time I enter a map, it is oriented the same as it was when I left the last one, and stays the same unless I choose to change it.
12) I know the ability to sell ammunition has been discussed elsewhere, but I'd like to touch on it a bit here as well. If the ammo with a normal value of 9 could be sold for 1 or 2 and the ammo valued at 18 could be sold for only 3 or 4, it wouldn't affect game balance by any significant amount. I can easily find a damaged margarita shaker (???) that sells for as much as an entire pile of ammunition, but that isn't considered to be economy-breaking. What it WOULD do is allow the player to get rid of excess ammunition which would reduce the number of containers left lying around in combat zones. It's not uncommon for enemies to rush up to attack, and when they die, their drops sometimes overlap. When a drop contains ammo the player cannot carry, it can prevent the player from activating another nearby drop. Allowing the player to get rid of excess ammo would alleviate this. Other possible solutions are allowing the player to discard a drop which contains only uncarryable ammo (via a second button beside the "take all" button), allowing the player to discard ammo at the inventory screen so they can resume collecting ammo from enemy drops (either permanently discarding it or allowing the player to create a new ammo drop at a safe location), or simply relying less on ammunition in loot tables so that ammo is less prevalent and junk which can be dismantled for crafting takes its place. The promised "ammo crafting" will eventually solve the problem except where the player simply is full on ALL ammo types, so even when this feature is added, there will still be a need for another solution... unless dismantled ammo components are stored in infinite storage like other crafting components, which would be ideal.
Worst case scenario - allow the player to sell ammo at a reduced price until ammo crafting makes it into a release, and then remove ammo sales again at that time.
1) There needs to be a way to see where your character is currently located. It's possible to use the trade-net to see which star system you're in, but there is nothing anywhere which shows which planet and/or station you're at without going into space. This can be disorienting, particularly if you've started playing again after being away from the game for a while, or if you're loading an older game, and going into space just to see where you're standing seems a bit excessive.
2) There is currently no way to see which stations you have purchased storage space at. And even if you know which stations allow you to store items, you can't see what items are there without actually going there. It would be nice if there was at least a way to see which stations allow you to store goods. Even if there were no way to see what's there, at least that would give you a starting point to look for something if you've lost track of it (or if your account is mysteriously short, and you realize you must have accidentally left something somewhere after a trade-net purchase). There IS a list in the universe map which shows which which star systems you have beacons at, but it is unreliable. It doesn't seem to show systems that don't have a beacon (although you CAN buy storage space in these systems) and it doesn't always show that you have cargo space available at a system even if there IS a beacon there. And even for the systems that it shows, and tells you there is cargo space available there, it doesn't tell you which station(s) it's at. And if you have items in storage resulting from a trade-net purchase that hasn't been completely collected, then there is stuff in storage despite the fact that you didn't PURCHASE storage there. It's unlikely this is showed in the list at all.
3) Many of the lists were coded as tables, when it would be more effective if they were treated as stacks. Examples are cargo hold inventory, station inventory, drone lists, objective lists, and possibly others. The problem with tables is that when you delete something, it leaves an empty entry, and the next time you add something to the list, it goes into the first available slot. This inevitably leads to fragmentation where information that should be grouped together is now all over the place. Not only is this inconvenient, but it can also lead to very frustrating situations. For example, if you have a small cargo hold and are dumping ore below a certain threshold value, new ore that's added pops in all over the list. This results in the list scrolling randomly (sometimes up, sometimes down) when you're trying to delete items, and THAT inevitably leads to you accidentally - and permanently - jettisoning extremely valuable ore when the list scrolls under your cursor JUST when you shift-click. Using a stack would keep all new items at the bottom so information would remain organized. Probes on your list would be grouped together at the star system you placed them rather than having to hunt and find them in the list. If a stack isn't possible, then compacting the table whenever an entry is removed would serve the same purpose.
4) When buying/selling on the trade-net or moving items to or from storage, there is a place where you can type a number to indicate a specific value. It would be handy if this spot received focus automatically, so you didn't have to click on it to enter a number.
5) It would be nice if there was a way to tone down the inter-house warfare in various systems. With large numbers of ships having combat, it can drag the FPS down horribly. Being able to tone-down the combat (or at least make it so that the actual combat visualizations were culled beyond visual range) would make things easier on the CPU and GPU for some systems.
6) There is currently a way to set the frequency of incursions, although it doesn't actually do much to change how often they happen to me. Even set to "never", I frequently get incursions in my game - most often when I have dealings on the trade-net, but sometimes completely unrelated. I'm not referring to attacks by hostiles because I've drifted too close... I'm referring specifically to the orange bracketed enemies that will chase you indefinitely and have no purpose other than to harass the player endlessly. I'm not sure if this is the result of a bug or if the developer's definition of "never" is just very different from my own - but it would be good if this could be addressed.
7) This may qualify more as a bug than a Quality of Life request - but NPC ships seem able to approach planets much more closely than the player's ship can. This sometimes leads to battles where the player simply cannot get close enough to a combat to participate.
8) on a similar note, placement of transport portals should be a minimum distance from a planet, as on multiple occasions, I've translocated to a star system and inadvertantly appeared INSIDE a planet.
9) Drones which are not currently unloading ore at a station should be available for recall at ANY time that the player is in the star sytem in which they're located. This includes when they're on the way to sell ore (but haven't arrived at the destination yet) or after they've sold ore and are proceeding back to the mining site.
10) On the subject of drones... their manual/automatic status is on a per-drone basis and must be set after they're launched. it would be nice if you could set the drone LAUNCHER to automatic/manual so that once you've decided to launch manual drones in a star system, all drones would be correctly set without having to change them individually. Naturally, you would want to keep the option to change a drone's setting after it's launched; this would just establish which setting would be the "launch default".
11) The visuals on ground sites are by default rotated 45 degrees. The stations being represented are designed mostly on the cardinal compass points (north, south, east, and west), and the screen scrolling only works on a horizontal or vertical basis (you cannot scroll diagonally). So since the design of the station makes you move due north, south, east, or west to get where your going and the screen will only scroll left, right up, or down, you CANNOT get where you need to go unless you either fight the scrolling mechanism or reset the viewing angle back to zero. Fortunately there is a way to easily do this. Unfortunately, the game overrides it and constantly resets it back whenever you reload or change cells. While I respect that the developer feels that the maps look nice when presented at a 45 degree angle, it is frustrating to constantly have to reset it back to the way that *I* prefer to see the maps. It would be nice if this were an option that could be disabled - but better if the visual orientation were stored as a persistent variable and stored with the save so that any time I enter a map, it is oriented the same as it was when I left the last one, and stays the same unless I choose to change it.
12) I know the ability to sell ammunition has been discussed elsewhere, but I'd like to touch on it a bit here as well. If the ammo with a normal value of 9 could be sold for 1 or 2 and the ammo valued at 18 could be sold for only 3 or 4, it wouldn't affect game balance by any significant amount. I can easily find a damaged margarita shaker (???) that sells for as much as an entire pile of ammunition, but that isn't considered to be economy-breaking. What it WOULD do is allow the player to get rid of excess ammunition which would reduce the number of containers left lying around in combat zones. It's not uncommon for enemies to rush up to attack, and when they die, their drops sometimes overlap. When a drop contains ammo the player cannot carry, it can prevent the player from activating another nearby drop. Allowing the player to get rid of excess ammo would alleviate this. Other possible solutions are allowing the player to discard a drop which contains only uncarryable ammo (via a second button beside the "take all" button), allowing the player to discard ammo at the inventory screen so they can resume collecting ammo from enemy drops (either permanently discarding it or allowing the player to create a new ammo drop at a safe location), or simply relying less on ammunition in loot tables so that ammo is less prevalent and junk which can be dismantled for crafting takes its place. The promised "ammo crafting" will eventually solve the problem except where the player simply is full on ALL ammo types, so even when this feature is added, there will still be a need for another solution... unless dismantled ammo components are stored in infinite storage like other crafting components, which would be ideal.
Worst case scenario - allow the player to sell ammo at a reduced price until ammo crafting makes it into a release, and then remove ammo sales again at that time.
Post edited March 31, 2020 by Toccatta