Matrix Games Forums

ORIGINAL: randal7

Because this game takes a fairly long time to load, and because once it is loaded it starts playing (i.e. it's not paused), I cannot start the game and walk away; I have to sit and wait for it to load. When the game finishes loading, it would be nice if it paused automatically.

Try v1.0.5.6
load times have been massively improved. so have save times, and savegame file size as well.

ORIGINAL: taltamir

ORIGINAL: randal7

Because this game takes a fairly long time to load, and because once it is loaded it starts playing (i.e. it's not paused), I cannot start the game and walk away; I have to sit and wait for it to load. When the game finishes loading, it would be nice if it paused automatically.

Try v1.0.5.6
load times have been massively improved. so have save times, and savegame file size as well.

Absolutely. However, it still takes 30-45 seconds and that's long enough that I'd like to be able to go do something else real quick rather than sit and look at the galaxy spinning. This is not a big deal, but it seems like it would be really easy to fix.

ORIGINAL: randal7

Absolutely. However, it still takes 30-45 seconds and that's long enough that I'd like to be able to go do something else real quick rather than sit and look at the galaxy spinning. This is not a big deal, but it seems like it would be really easy to fix.

I quess it depends on your system. I used to get around 1 - 1.5 minutes to load and save games. Now it's down to around 10 seconds!

Yes, around 10 - 15 seconds here, much quicker than the only other game I play right now, Bad Company 2 which takes a minute or more.

ORIGINAL: Igard

ORIGINAL: randal7

Absolutely. However, it still takes 30-45 seconds and that's long enough that I'd like to be able to go do something else real quick rather than sit and look at the galaxy spinning. This is not a big deal, but it seems like it would be really easy to fix.

I quess it depends on your system. I used to get around 1 - 1.5 minutes to load and save games. Now it's down to around 10 seconds!

same here. I actually timed it, one of my saves was taking 1 minute 21 seconds on my spindle drive... or 1 minute 18 on my SSD (I was hoping the my SSD will improve load times, but it didn't)
Now, I haven't kept said save (it was from a very early version... but now most saves are ~10 secondish compared to over a minute.
Galaxy size is still a major factor... try a galaxy one size smaller... I just god used to playing 250 star galaxies with earlier versions (only size at which I had acceptable save time), now I can play a "normal" sized (I think thats 700 stars, don't remember, whichever is marked as normal)

Please can you allow map control, or at least zooming, while a 'show me first' request comes up to build something. The given galaxy view isn't all that helpful if you're just starting out and don't know where the planet is.

EDIT: Actually, better yet, a passive system for all suggestions would be a much nicer interface. The 'stop what you're doing and agree or disagree to this thing I'm suggesting right now' attitude kills the immersion and the option to reconsider is not provided. I propose an extension to the message view that logs all recommendations and allows you to agree to them later (with the onus on you to determine if they are still sensible) once you've had time to mull it over. Add the option to disable suggestion message boxes and you've got yourself a system that works better but still allows people to play in a 'classic' manner.

EDIT2: Alternatively, deferred suggestions could be added as a stack on the left, where the 'stop spying on us' messages appear.

[:)]
First of all: [&o]
Nice work.

If I had my druthers...
(1) I agree with Engerya's #12, some way of knowing the extent of my holdings so I know where to position reserves and stuff like that.
(2) I am not sure that this is doable, but I am playing Star Wars style games. It would be nice to be able to 'shoot down' scouts/exploration ships BEFORE they can report back to a major power. If this were against a human player (head to head games), I know that this would be impossible, but against AI...
(3) Fighters! Good ole fashion cheap planetary point defense fighters. I know you have heard me ask for this before.

Ih and I like this idea too:
EDIT: Actually, better yet, a passive system for all suggestions would be a much nicer interface. The 'stop what you're doing and agree or disagree to this thing I'm suggesting right now' attitude kills the immersion and the option to reconsider is not provided. I propose an extension to the message view that logs all recommendations and allows you to agree to them later (with the onus on you to determine if they are still sensible) once you've had time to mull it over. Add the option to disable suggestion message boxes and you've got yourself a system that works better but still allows people to play in a 'classic' manner.

I am enjoying the game.

My top ten wishes:

1: Be able to start as a pirate faction.

2: New Components, Shields and such.

3: New Ship figures.

4: More agressive pirates.

5: More advanced AI, using all the features of the game, and having the feeling of playing against human players.

6: More empires and more systems.

7: Enchanced diplomacy. (Space Empires system would be great)

8: New races, more troop figures.

9: Fighter class ships, Carriers and bombers.

10: Black Market, Special components available for high prices.

Would like ability to turn off space creatures and to make them rare. Even on "few" they are way too common imo.

And another request:

Ability to define more ship roles through modding.

Right now we have Escort, Frigate, Destroyer, Cruiser, Capital Ship, etc.

I'd like the abiilty through modding to define such as:

-Corvette
-Sloop
-Frigate
-Destoyer
-Light Cruiser
-Heavy Cruiser
-Battle Cruiser
-Battleship
-Monitor

You get the point. I want to be able to have more than 1 design for a ship type and not have it get totally over-ridden by the auto-build/and refit stuff. AS it stands now, I can design 3 different 'Escort' vessels, but when being retrofitted, the game always retrofits to the newest design, unless I go into the shiplist and pick out escorts of 1 type only and manually set their retrofit target.

What I want is the ability to define those 2 escorts down further as either Corvette or Sloop, so when I update, they stick to what I designed them as, not just the newest escort type. Say my corvette design is an up close knife-fighter while my Sloop is a heavy torpedo ship. I want to be able to keep those types in place when I upgrade, and not have my corvette retrofit to a sloop type because the sloop type is the newer of the two.

Hi, please can you add an option to make the zoom buttons next to the map also pan to my current selection. Currently it zooms from the centre of the screen, but 99% of the time that's just a blank space when you're zooming in. Currently the 100% button is kinda useless, but if I could select something and hit the zoom setting it would be very much more useful.

edit: Actually, having a further option where the keybaord versions would zoom in to the current mouse position would also be great. You could then use the HOME/END keys really efficiently to browse around your empire without even having to click.

ORIGINAL: jalapen0

Would like ability to turn off space creatures and to make them rare. Even on "few" they are way too common imo.

This, with a bullet.

ORIGINAL: Shark7

And another request:

Ability to define more ship roles through modding.

Also, to incluee additional ship images to go along with the extra ship roles.

Moons can become confusing because of their naming. Could the first two letters be the first two letters of the system? Or even better, first two letters of each word for multiple name systems, or first letter then next consonant for single name systems.

Eg. Moon XY123 in the Sol system would be SL123

ORIGINAL: Das123

Moons can become confusing because of their naming. Could the first two letters be the first two letters of the system? Or even better, first two letters of each word for multiple name systems, or first letter then next consonant for single name systems.

Eg. Moon XY123 in the Sol system would be SL123

How about the name of the planet followed by a small letter? this is what I have seen as the standard elsewhere and it works well.

So if the third planet of system Biovac has three moons then the planet will be called Biovac III, and the moons be called Biovac IIIa, Biovac IIIb, and Biovac IIIc (with a being the moon closest to it, and c the moon furthest away)

taltamir,

I like your moon naming routine. What do current astronomer use? I am believe they give them individual names, at least in our solar system. Maybe the smaller ones around Saturn or Jupiter have numbers.

FoM

Jupiters moons are named either after Jupiter or Zeus's lovers/friends (Io, Callisto) or are given a roman numeral (Jupiter XIII). Saturns moons are given names from all sorts of mythologies and some are even given the same name but spelled differently. Neptune's moons have a trend towards aquatic names. Uranus has it's moons named after characters from the works of William Shakespeare and Alexander Pope.

I don't believe we've discovered any moons around exoplanets (planets in other star systems). So their naming convention remains undetermined.

Ok, here are my suggestions (did not have time to read the whole thread, so i am unaware if anyone else had already suggested some of these):

1. ETA display for ships:
- when assigning movement order
- when a moving ship is selected - display ETA on ship info screen
- do not crowd the map with ETA's, but it would be NICE to see ETA near my mouse pointer, if it hangs over a moving ship.

2. Course display for ships:
- display a ships course with an animated line on the map.
- not to crowd the map with this, make options: display for selected ship, display for mouseover ship, display for all ships, display for military ships

3. Ship icons are to be reworked.. Situation: an enemy system with a base, several mining stations and multiple private ships and my single warship in the system. When I zoom out, I cannot see any signs of my ship presence in the system - the ships icon just gets overwhelmed by enemy units icons. Also I cannot always even say, if there is a star, or it all happens in deep space. A SOLUTION would be to change overlay with zooming range. Personally I suggest to arrange special smaller presence marks circulary around stars when zoomed far out. So that i will alway know who's actually there, in this pill of unit icons.

4. Not all icons are perfectly readable from distance. Consider this.

5. Add special notification. Say if I send a ship somewhere far away with Ctrl+RMB, then a pop-up will tell me, when the ship arrives there. A very valuable notification feature actually. Watching for all the zoo manually makes me crazy when I plan 3-4 simultaneous operations in different regions of space.

6. Make it possible to select several ships from Ship List.. also there is a small galaxy map in the upper-right corner, so, make a greater use of it: if i select, say Troop Transports as the ships type, make it possible to select all Troop Transports in a region by dragging a rough mousebox over this map. This is also valuable for military ships..

7. Make it possible to filter ships by their class, not only role, in the Ships List. Say Military -> Cruisers... and even further -> Particular_Design. This feature in composition with feature 6 will greatly ease selecting.

8. Make it possible to create nav-points. Say I create a nav-point in certain coordinates and then I just select any ship, right-click on it and say go to the waypoint. Same valid for fleets. Huge strategic command improvement.

9. Planets are circling around stars.. but the galaxy is still? If calculations amount will not be too high, make i possible for the galaxy to swirl. Diffirent stars have different speeds, same as planets. Although, I realize, this is just something very experimental.. but logical. Game mechanics will change dramatically and I am not sure if it will become better in terms of gameplay.

10. Add the following control feature: if I click an enemy planet/ship with RMB, i get the menu, where i can select what to do with the planet/ship. Say, attack, board, colonize, send troops.. and then choose between manual and automatic ships assignment for these missions.

11. Why can't i control privates? The Galactopedia says that I can be a warship captain, but why can't I be a trader? Or a passenger transporter? Maybe I can have not just a single ship, but found my own company? With wars raging here and there, it could be quite interesting. But it involves implementing market and price-lists and all the stuf that comes with it. It can be very interesting.

12. Finally, what this game really lacks is the mission creator. For all things a player needs to arrange it would be nice to create some kind of mission editor where a player can create a mission and assign ships to it. Because individual ships controlling is exhausting when it gets to a certain scale.
Even fleets cannot lighen this burden (opposite thing - because of automation, fleets are even harder to control than individual ships or numbered unautomated ship groups... fleets come with constant annoying stupid messages of sending a fleet of 2 troop carriers into extremely militarized enemy capital to capture one of his major planets. I did not try 1.0.5.6 yet, I really hope you have fixed it).
So a mission editor would help to create a virtual mission (which exists independently of anything) and consists of a sequence of actions to be taken by the ships assigned. Say it can look like this:

MISSION NAME: Attack on Nabuu
CURRENTLY ASSIGNED: Fleet_1, Ship_AAA
- Refuel
- Gather at NAV_POINT_121
- Attack anyone in system XXXXX

or

MISSION NAME: Attack run
CURRENTLY ASSIGNED: Fleet_1, Ships built in SpaceYard NNN

- Go to NAV_POINT_EPSILON
- Attack system XXXXX
- Report: 'phase 1 complete', ships_alive_list
- Go to system YYYYY
- Refuel
- Attack all Gas_Mining_Station at sytem ZZZZZ
- Report: 'phase 2 complete', ships_alive_list
- Return
- Refuel
- Report: 'mission mission_name complete', ships_alive_list

well, you've got it.


13. PLEASE MAKE MULTIPLAYER!!! with a save-game feature... Think of that: with time you can even setup your own servers which will be capable of hosting even bigger galaxies (because no calculations are to be done from the client's side) and even multiple galaxies, with connections or jumpgates or travel through void between them... but surely players must have an ability for LAN play. Definetely, multiplayer is what many really good 4x-alike games miss. Everyone will tell you this.

14. Please make moon names more recognizable (at least optionally). This is not cool to see something like 'You Moon GX332 was captured' when I do not even know where this moon is... so i have to click on this and go to see, what happened.. i mean, i cannot get a clear picture from the message title.

15. Make selected items look like selected on the map while zoomed out. Now it is not always clear where they are.. the faint purple (pink) circle does not work.

16. Make selection box visible whle zoomed out. Because selection box is nor visible, neither works fine when i zoom out full.

This is all I can think of right now. Thank you.

ORIGINAL: Fishers of Men

taltamir,

I like your moon naming routine. What do current astronomer use? I am believe they give them individual names, at least in our solar system. Maybe the smaller ones around Saturn or Jupiter have numbers.

FoM

Generally speaking, astronomers have been unable to observe actual planets in other systems, only their suns. They have VERY recently managed to confirm a few super massive planets in VERY close orbits to a sun based on the wobble their gravity causes the their sun.
Even the closest star system to us, alpha centauri, remains a mystery. We can only tell that it has three suns. 2 about the size of our sun in a tight orbit around each other, and one dwarf sun in a wide orbit around those two.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_Centauri
Planets, however, remain unknown...
I have seen on discovery that the vast majority of stars are actually double stars, followed by triple stars, followed finally with single stars like ours being a small minority.

Taltamir, check this out. It's a very recent article about the first observation of a an exoplanet around it's star.

http://www.astronomynow.com/news/n1006/11exo/

I recall reading in the last year that they have discovered a few small exoplanets. I think the smallest was about 4x the size of the Earth. That's pretty small for these kinds of reading. It is amazing stuff.