List of suggestions to improve Armada 2526

[sgtgriffin]

1. Gurbling gibberish for human speech and aliens alike. How very... boring. Over and over and over... Humans "uhh huh huh" like
some baby gibbering into a cup for sound effects. Make some real syllables please... make it SEEM like a language at least.

2. Reduntant popups (planetary production popup on left bottom), top left warning popup, then a third warning popup when u click the planetary one.... And every time u start and loaad a game, pop up saying ur race... dur. I know that already!

3. The bottom left planetary production popups are a lot of dead space covering the map 99 percent of the time. U can hide them but u need them out for use. You could use the same size tezt and halve the space but reducing the menu size by half and each button size by half.

4. Income Expenses charts, why all the separate pages for two lines of info each? Info that could take one page... again a LOT of dead space.

5. Everything has pictures and most only gives u info when u mouse over. Makes this a VERY inefficient way to pic items for production, etc. Put a name, a price something on these so i dont have to mouse over every thing in the game just to know what it is.

6. Economy, cannot tell how much good or harm building and maintaining trade centers does. Guess it helps but theres no list of info o how much it costs me and how much i get in trade/income from each.

7. Creating a game - Defaults to 200 turns, every time. Really? Do I HAVE to manually change it every time? Make a check box for unlimited turns at least.

8. Custom game - I have to manually reset my customizations EVERY time I start a new game. Turns, map size, density.... none of it is saved from my last customization...

9. Menus - Most menus seem to intentionally make u move across the whole screen to exit them or move on. One will appear top left corner, click it and the next one is bottom right corner. Click it to clear it and the next one is top right corner... etc etc. Escapebrings out a menu but doesn't allow u to remove it when u hit escape again. You have to the manually clocik to get out of that. 999/1000 programs just let you use escape to clear menus and popups etc. Why not here too?

10. Combat - Eh... targetting is auto i suppose, but seems like its impossible to targt one ship and focus fir efficiently... no no they fire all at whatever choice the ai makes and spread themselves so thin, even with what few option are available in attacking.

11. Tech advancement - Happens at such a pace that Im so busy building, building, building all the new stuff that I dont get to do anything else. Even with automation I have to check up on it to make it pick the best stuff. I like building games, but not when its so much so fast that u cant enjoy the last 5 things u built cuz ur people are still spazing out for being "too populated" or having a civilizatin "too big" to take advantage of the latest ships cuz u just learned/traded 5 more techs for better ships...

In short, it is a far distant second to the best turnbased space game out there. And thats ironically a compliment, because no other turnbased has been anywhere NEAR 2nd. I love turn based. I love space. But no one makes ones that are detailed enough in controls yet streamlined and usefriendly enough to be efficient, like Master's of Orion 3 was. I'll keep dreaming for one like it tho. After I uninstall Armada (probably today), ill still be playing Moo3.

[Aurelian]

Moo3.......

[Iceman]

6. Actually, you do. Right-clicking on it gives you cost and upkeep. Hovering over the Trade Mission icon will give you the income you got from it from last turn.

[sgtgriffin]

Well, there are hover overs... but nothing "at a glance". Everything is tediously hidden so that u have to mouse over and click multiple screens etc. Intellectually, it isnt stimulating to see blank icons all the time.

I decided to press further inspite of my doubts. By turn 300, I have all techs researched, almost all my planets fully built. My armada is steadly sweeping thru without any opposition... I played a map 120x120 with 12 races. Half got wiped out early and the rest have either traded me tech or bribed me continually so that I wouldn't wipe them out... Im already done with the game evidently. Battles aren't involving. Just 1 or 2 clicks, even if u do it urself.



Also, dunno if its a glitch but as I was destroying the teyes, they sued for peace during a turn. I altered their terms and everything went grey. Couldn't "close" the menu or select further terms, etc. Only thing I could do was alt f4 to exit that. Happened repeatedly.

Also, the riot icon is so generic - not numerical. But I guess that goes back to my previous comments.

I was told once long ago before I started teaching that a blank white screen on an overhead projector draws eyes like flies and makes everyones mind blank. I.e. always keep something intelligent before their eyes to engage them. This game needs the same. Numbers, content, more information to look at and think on that is relavent.

Anyway, if you can have fun with it -then by all means. But I can tell that for me, this one game of 300 turns is really & regretably the end of the road.