Magnumaniac

Join Date 02/2004

+18

v1.0 First impressions

The good, the meh!, and the downright fugly...

A very credible v1.0, and I'm sure that Stardock's notoriously good post-release performance will further enhance the game.

Right now, however, this feels like a game with potentially epic scope that is constrained by it's own mechanics to only be functional in smaller galaxies.

The Good...
Insane is, well, insane - love the potential there
Starbases / constructors - lots of kudos here. Significantly reduced the micro-management associated with this vitally important aspect of the game.
Truly 64-bit and multi-threaded - at last something other than Adobe Lightroom actually uses all 4 cores properly.

The Meh!...
Trade resources taking up a tile - at least they can be destroyed, I suppose.
No global option for disabling building auto-upgrade - unless I am missing something obvious (always a possibility)
Woeful lack of keyboard shortcuts for UI functions - seriously, no "G" for govern planet, or arrow keys to cycle between colonies, for example? Almost every UI function should have a keyboard option. Guess I'll be digging out Auto Hotkey again.
Auto ship design spam - any way to disable / obsolete them all permanently without breaking ideology free ship grants or anomaly finds?

The Fugly...
The production "wheel" and micro-management hell...
No "snap-to" function, or one click for 100% Manu, research, economy (again, I could be missing something)
With everything split 3 ways, planet specialisation is absolutely required. Therefore the global wheel is next to useless and the whole thing is micro-hell. A simple option on the main colony screen for specialisation M/R/E would surely be a vast improvement.

No direct building of tier 2 or later buildings - again micro-hell and woefully inefficient. At least make them worth upgrading to.
Example - 3 tier 1 factories in adjacent tiles... cost 90 to build, provide +105% man, combined maintenace 0.9bc
Upgrade to tier 2... cost 135, provide an additional +15% man (yes, only +5% per building), maintenace up to 1.5bc
So where is that global option for disabling auto-upgrades again please

No production carry-over for planetry improvements? Seems to exist for ships, but not for planetry tiles. Micro-hell again.

Last but not least, Large Empire Penalty - yes, discussed lots elsewhere so no need to add anything more here other than... IT SUCKS!

I'll finish on a positive note, as the above does read mostly negative and that is not what I want to convey. I fully expect Stardock to refine this game into something special, and it already has that just one more turn feeling for me.
So... around 30 hours of play with no CTDs so far. That is pretty good for a v1.0 in this day and age.

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Seilore

Join Date 10/2006

+154

Right now, however, this feels like a game with potentially epic scope that is constrained by it's own mechanics to only be functional in smaller galaxies.

What issues are you seeing? As I too am having issues with larger galaxy sizes such as long first turn (with many races) or as the game goes on 200 + turns the turn time goes up and get's longer as the game goes on around 3-5 minutes per turn? So far only a few have reported this, so it would help to report it too if you are also seeing these things?

Otherwise I'm in agreement with you Stardock has always been very good with support and as time goes on improving their games

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Larsenex

Join Date 04/2009

+212

Greetings and Welcome!

I only play on Excessive and Insane. If you are having issues on this size, make sure you have your page file enabled. Insane maps should have computers with 8 gigs of ram and page file enabled.

The game has always been about micro management. Yes you need to specialize each and every planet to get the maximum out of it. However you can easily play and play well without much specialization if you do not care to do so. Planetary Governors will be in the first major patch and will help relieve the amount of Micro you need to do.

Don't delete those planetary trade resources. Those bonuses you see will STACK and they really add up over the long time! Snugglers, and others are so important that you really want to buy as many as you can so you have them and not he AI. Those bonuses are GLOBAL, they affect your entire empire, 5% for each one!

Auto upgrade for ships or planetary improvements? They do auto for the planets. You just have to build the first primary building and the planet will auto upgrade as each tier is completed.

Once Paul puts in 'Leasing' for the economy upgrading ships via the governor will be easier and far less of a financial hit.

Keep playing! Keep asking questions!

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Some clarification and background needed I think

I'm not seeing system / performance issues (at least not yet - haven't reached 200+ turns) - it is game mechanics I feel are constraining the larger maps.

Background: I have thousands of hours (no exaggeration) of GC1 & 2 play experience, and similar time spent in other 4x games... including Stars! - so I am not averse to micro management, and I really want to specialise as much as is humanly possible. I just don't want to have to go into a second screen per colony and attempt to drag a pointer to the single pixel on the screen that gives a true 100% man / res / econ. That gets old really quick!

I see the benefit of some of the trade resources - not all though, and I'm not giving up prime colony real estate for a dubious benefit

Planetary building upgrades are currently poorly balanced for reward against cost - I want to globally switch off auto upgrades (again rather than having to go into the separate non-hotkeyed govern screen for every planet).

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