Comments - Cironian

Can you mail me the broken save at info@snipefish.de please? I'd like to take a look at what exactly went wrong there.

Not on a conscious level at least. I've read the first few, but that's been quite a few years ago.

You can configure many of those in the options. They are mandatory when the game can not proceed without your input, for example when you are getting attacked and have to choose whether to fight or flee.

Trust me, if setting it at 1$ would sell a million copies, I'd do that right away. But I tried some 50% off sales during beta and on an average sale day the game didn't quite sell twice as many copies there. More, sure, but not enough, especially since most of the additional sales seemed to come from the extra marketing impact of the sale.

There you go: 1.00 is released on Desura too!

The 1.00 is now uploaded here at Desura. It just needs a staffer to hit the OK button.

I haven't found much time to work on the game lately. There's still a few balance changes I'd like to add, as well as fixing a few oddities on the tech side. I'd like the next update to be the 1.00 release, or something very close to that. No ETA though.

The main unit balance doesn't work with DD being able to travel between planets: At that tech level the CLs are filling a carrier role: With bad firepower/cost ratio by themselves, but needed to get your actual combat units to where they should go. Just think of your Destroyers as really, really big fighters. Basically, your fleet should have as few CLs and as many DDs and FFs as possible to get the most bang for your buck.

Sorry, I don't have the money to buy any new graphics. (And the game hasnt't sold nearly enough copies to fund it off that, which was my original idea for the beta)

Here's some free back story: The warp drive in this game becomes both slower and much less efficient when far away from an anchoring gravity well like the Sun. That's also the idea behind the roughly spiral shaped trajectory your ships take. To travel between systems in less than decades you need a different drive system. Like the one the Alien Mothership has. ;-)

The trick to the Mars mission is to figure out how to efficiently kill a Starbase, which is more about your weapon choice than number of ships.

Here's a big hint: You have one class of weapons which has mostly awesome stats, were it not for that terrible accuracy and trouble getting through shields... and a Starbase can neither dodge your shots nor use shields. Though I'll see about putting that an an in-game hint soon.

Fighters and Corvettes exists mostly for story reasons as a reasonable ground launched ship for the first battle.

Some sort of highlighting of modules that fit your design in the ship designer is a good idea.

I am currently uploading it, after which it will have to be approved. There were two big problems with the initial 0.90 release, which required a 0.90a and 0.90b before they were completely fixed. That's why I didn't have time to upload it here yet.

If you want a new release the moment it's out, you can always use the Connect feature up in the menu bar to get an account at my own site.

I agree that training up quality units should be rewarded, and while you can win the game by throwing units at the enemy it is a lot easier if you build up experienced crews and officers, as those skill bonuses can stack up to impressive heights.

Real carriers are not on my to-do list. The "fighter" role is supposed to be filled by specialized Frigate and Destroyer designs, as they can achieve a much higher thrust/mass ratio than the Warp capable ships. The only difference is that they are significantly bigger than actual fighters and start the battle launched. The Cruisers act as carriers for those smaller ships in this model, in that they transport them from battle to battle.

Glad you're enjoying the game so far!

That would require me to move the weapons to the sides of the ships, adapt the control scheme for sideways firing and most importantly change the battle AI around to handle all of that.

That's a lot of work, so that won't be happening.

Actually, moving planets are a new feature in the current 0.81 release. Check the bottom of the campaign setup box (where you choose your name and difficulty level). There, you can find a checkbox to enable planet movement.

Adding multi-solar system campaigns would be a lot of effort, both on a technical and on a game design/balancing level. Yes, it would be cool, but due to the development time needed it's unlikely.

No random map generator, though the planet layout can be modded. One way replayablity is provided is through different diplomatic setups with your funding nations, which change some of your priorities for the rest of the game.

You can design your own ships, with a ton of options. You also have to make choices regarding your bases as it would ruin your economy to just build every possible building in every location.

You can try almost all of those things in the demo, which provides approximately the first two hours of the main campaign, plus a scenario which shows off some features from the later game stages.

Just tried it, starts fine for me. Have you tried contacting Desura support for this problem? I can't really give much help about the Desura client itself.

In the meantime, you can still play the game by downloading the standalone EXE installer. It should be under "purchased downloads" on the right of the main game page.

The "scripted battles" are 3 fights at the very beginning of the game that serve as a combat tutorial. Apart from that, battles simply happen by one side attacking the other.

Update: Fixed the cause of the slowdown now. The fix will be in the next release.

Bug fixed for 0.31a. Note to everyone: Until the fixed version is out, make sure not to run completely out of ships. Having 0 ships, even for a day, breaks the score calculation. I'll see about getting the fix out as quick as possible.

In 0.31? Could you mail me a save where that still happens to info@snipefish.de please? I thought I had fixed all cases of this for 0.31, but I might have missed something.

Just ran the third battle 10 times with autoresolve. That got me 6 wins and 4 losses, even with the autoresolve AI wasting a few of its missiles on the small scouts. With some smarts, you should end up with even better odds than that.

That said, due to the random nature of hit rolls, you can just get a very unlucky streak, even if you do the right thing.

Do you mean the 3 scripted initial battles or the first "real" attack after that? What difficulty are you on?

The third tutorial battle has gotten a bit harder (and might be scaled down a bit in the next release), but it should still be doable. Remember that the quicksave button before any battle is your friend!

In 0.31, you get a message after researching the battlecruiser telling you that most of the endgame events are not implemented yet. I'm guessing you were still on 0.30 or you missed the message? Both things you mentioned are related to that. Once you have driven the aliens back to Eris, you are basically done for now.

Personnel management scores whether you issue promotions to officers of that nationality. It should be easy enough to get an acceptable score there once you have enough recruits. It might be a little harder in the early game if you have very few people (I might have to add special handling for that), but the other scores should compensate it for a while.

Apart from that, yeah, if you are losing significant ground, that won't help your popularity. So don't do that. ;-)

Which of the score categories do you have problems with in particular?

Not yet.

Just select something else to build in that location, that cancels the existing production order. Or wait until it's done and then, if it's a building, demolish it immediately. There is no financial benefit to leaving a production slot blank, so I don't see why you would need a dedicated cancel function.

Fighters and Corvettes will become obsolete in 0.31 for all but the earliest game stages, but a build queue is still on my todo list for a later version.

Multiselect would also be nice to have, but for now I have my plate full with missing gameplay features alone. But I'll see if I can squeeze it in the next time I'm fiddling with the fleet navigator anyway.

Planets and moons are static, because otherwise you'd end up with extended times when some locations become unreachable. So I'd have to do lots and lots of testing on what that does to the game balance at various points in the game, and also make the AI understand temporarily unreachable locations. So that's unlikely to happen.

I will probably add some kind of tutorial message to the early game explaining a few things about how colonies work.