Matrix Games Forums

I played my first game with the NASA sandbox mode as I want to wait on the soviet animations and Russian recordings before playing that side.
Let me first say well done on your recent work. The game continues to get better and is quite enjoyable even in its current state.

Despite being sandbox mode I was trying to get to the moon by '75 and unlike my last game, I did at least manage to get a few Saturn V launches
off the ground. Considering I was on the easiest setting, it still seems very hard to accomplish all of the goals by '75 even with me skipping a
few of the rocket programs.


Alas, here is my feedback and bugs:

1. I wish there was an indicator when a program has been completed so I can see at a glance my progress etc.

2. It would be nice if there was a "attempted/completed" indicator on the individual missions within a program to help keep track of your
progress and failure rate. It can get complicated later in the game to keep track of where you are in a program and might be interesting to
see your failure rate for individual missions.

3. Is the "problem screen" a placeholder? Currently it has so much text with random numbers etc. and quite distracting during the mission.
A simple "acknowledge" with a mission description would be better.

4. During the Gemini Duration II "orbit segment" it displays the splashdown animation incorrectly.

5. On a program like Gemini how do I determine when to close it and move on? There seems to be tons of missions that are not required or provide
little benefit and I really don't know the right time to move onto Apollo. I love the freedom of choice but not sure if I am making a mistake.

6. The launch graphic for the Apollo orbital flight "C" shows the Saturn V despite having selected and used the Saturn IB.

Employee management was a little better and I enjoy the changes to research and gaining experience from missions. The new system seems perfect
for the flight controllers and SET.

Astronauts however were a pain in the butt. They start with low skills and training up is rather slow. Even the astronauts I flew constantly
never got really high in skill. Along with adding a "number of flights" indicator to the astronaut information, I think they need to gain
experience much faster after flying actual missions. I lost my best six pilots over the course of the Gemini program and that really sets you
back considering how hard they are to replace.

Can you not use the official NASA and Soviet space emblems?

Given they a governmental I cannot imagine they would care.

like the numbers on the staff proficiency.

In NASA sandbox lots of screens still refer to the GSA eg across the bottom of the Mission control monitor.

Like the emphasis on training.

All in all plays well.

The observatory seems to have vanished from the space complex is this intentional?

Hello redcoat,

Thanks for the feedback. See my answers below:

ORIGINAL: redcoat22
I played my first game with the NASA sandbox mode as I want to wait on the soviet animations and Russian recordings before playing that side.
Let me first say well done on your recent work. The game continues to get better and is quite enjoyable even in its current state.

Thanks! Hopefully the animations will be coming soon! I could drop everything else and work on them so that they are available sooner, but then other areas of the development will suffer, so I need to keep a balance [:)]

ORIGINAL: redcoat22
Despite being sandbox mode I was trying to get to the moon by '75 and unlike my last game, I did at least manage to get a few Saturn V launches
off the ground. Considering I was on the easiest setting, it still seems very hard to accomplish all of the goals by '75 even with me skipping a
few of the rocket programs.

That's fine. What were your biggest problems? Lack of funds? Lack of skills in personnel? Let me know so that we can tweak the scripts.

ORIGINAL: redcoat22
1. I wish there was an indicator when a program has been completed so I can see at a glance my progress etc.

See my answer to question 5.

ORIGINAL: redcoat22
2. It would be nice if there was a "attempted/completed" indicator on the individual missions within a program to help keep track of your
progress and failure rate. It can get complicated later in the game to keep track of where you are in a program and might be interesting to
see your failure rate for individual missions.

This can be done.

ORIGINAL: redcoat22
3. Is the "problem screen" a placeholder? Currently it has so much text with random numbers etc. and quite distracting during the mission.
A simple "acknowledge" with a mission description would be better.

It's a placeholder, yes. The numbers are there because we want things to be as transparent as possible and you can report bugs if you see anything weird.

ORIGINAL: redcoat22
4. During the Gemini Duration II "orbit segment" it displays the splashdown animation incorrectly.

I will take a look into that.

ORIGINAL: redcoat22
5. On a program like Gemini how do I determine when to close it and move on? There seems to be tons of missions that are not required or provide
little benefit and I really don't know the right time to move onto Apollo. I love the freedom of choice but not sure if I am making a mistake.

Gemini is a program to gain experience in critical areas such as rendezvous, docking, EVA, duration, etc. When do you close it is up to you, really. The idea behind Gemini is that you can get experience in all those areas by running relatively inexpensive missions so that, when you jump into Apollo, you can skip all that stuff and aim for the Moon. If you don't gain docking experience in Gemini, you'll suffer penalizations in Apollo. Notice that you can still gain, for example, docking experience with Apollo, but it's more expensive. Although you might want to do it to increase the reliability of your Apollo CSM... As you can see, there's not a clear-cut answer, so that's where the interesting decisions lie!

Notice that this pretty much mirrors what happened in real-life: Gemini ran until all the skills were mastered. Notice, for example, that all the EVAs except for the one in the last Gemini mission (Gemini XII) were unsuccessful. NASA could have ended Gemini sooner and gain the remaining EVA experience in Apollo, but that would have been a lot more expensive.

ORIGINAL: redcoat22
6. The launch graphic for the Apollo orbital flight "C" shows the Saturn V despite having selected and used the Saturn IB.

I will take a look into that.

ORIGINAL: redcoat22
Astronauts however were a pain in the butt. They start with low skills and training up is rather slow. Even the astronauts I flew constantly
never got really high in skill. Along with adding a "number of flights" indicator to the astronaut information, I think they need to gain
experience much faster after flying actual missions. I lost my best six pilots over the course of the Gemini program and that really sets you
back considering how hard they are to replace.

OK, we'll tweak that.

ORIGINAL: redcoat22
Can you not use the official NASA and Soviet space emblems?

Given they a governmental I cannot imagine they would care.

Actually, they do! See the second paragraph of this link.

Cheers,

Thanks for the feedback gifty!

ORIGINAL: gifty

like the numbers on the staff proficiency.

In NASA sandbox lots of screens still refer to the GSA eg across the bottom of the Mission control monitor.

Like the emphasis on training.

All in all plays well.

The observatory seems to have vanished from the space complex is this intentional?

Yes, for the moment the observatory won't be part of the NASA and the Soviet space complexes.

Cheers,

GSA flag on the Moon when in sandbox for NASA.

Flag the closed programs with "Goals Completed" so we don't accidentally reopen something.

I loaded up 7.1.7 and started testing for "a few minutes" using the Normal Nasa sandbox. I looked and 4 hours had passed !!
I must say that the "fun" factor is here and I love that the scientists and mission controllers start at lower skill levels and you have to train them up---that adds a lot to your planning and is great.
Things that I noticed:
** GSA logo (instead of NASA) is at bottom of screen when watching a mission from MC.
** Starting astronaut skill levels too low. In addition, I found that with astronauts it seemed to auto pick them based on leadership but then missions would fail because their other skills were too low. If possible, maybe you could highlight the skills needed for the crew position when picking the astronaut (like you do for Econ, GNC, etc). For example Commander needs leadership, Pilot needs piloting, for a long duration both need higher fitness levels.
**Scientist and Mission Control is almost perfect. Only issue is that it is not clear what skill set Flight Directors need. I bump up their Mission (the bottom) skills way up yet it shows their skills as low when picked as a Flight Director. I couldn't figure out what skills are needed to improve to make someone a good Flight Director.
** Only other issue that I noticed was that I would have a mission fail repeatedly and could not figure out why. For example, no matter what I did the Gemini docking 2 ships in orbit mission would always fail in the same spot with the 1st ship even though the Titan Rocket and Gemini capsule were researched to 90% and the pilots had leadership and piloting in the 80s.

Those were the only issues that I saw and I plan to play as the Soviets this weekend. It is obvious how much work has been put in since the Beta launch and in my opinion, the game is 100 times better now. When released it was pretty and fun for a bit but there was little to no strategy. Now there is and it improves the game immensely.

One extra thing that I would like added eventually is to have Astronaut "crews" like they had in Baris where instead of picking individual astronauts for missions, I pick crew 1 or 2. You would also have to form and train the crews before they could fly a mission and the individuals might not like each other which would lower morale.

Keep up the great work !!

Hello Jim,

Good to hear you're enjoying the game!

ORIGINAL: Jim Power
** GSA logo (instead of NASA) is at bottom of screen when watching a mission from MC.

Indeed, I have requested the new assets to Boris, our UI artist. We'll fix this for the next patch.

ORIGINAL: Jim Power
** Starting astronaut skill levels too low. In addition, I found that with astronauts it seemed to auto pick them based on leadership but then missions would fail because their other skills were too low. If possible, maybe you could highlight the skills needed for the crew position when picking the astronaut (like you do for Econ, GNC, etc). For example Commander needs leadership, Pilot needs piloting, for a long duration both need higher fitness levels.

Yes, at the moment the auto-assign algorithm picks the crews based on their Leadership alone. We'll fix this in a future update.

ORIGINAL: Jim Power
**Scientist and Mission Control is almost perfect. Only issue is that it is not clear what skill set Flight Directors need. I bump up their Mission (the bottom) skills way up yet it shows their skills as low when picked as a Flight Director. I couldn't figure out what skills are needed to improve to make someone a good Flight Director.

A Flight Director is just an average of all the five main skills, since he needs to knowledgeable in all areas.

ORIGINAL: Jim Power
** Only other issue that I noticed was that I would have a mission fail repeatedly and could not figure out why. For example, no matter what I did the Gemini docking 2 ships in orbit mission would always fail in the same spot with the 1st ship even though the Titan Rocket and Gemini capsule were researched to 90% and the pilots had leadership and piloting in the 80s.

Not sure about this one. If you think there's something 'suspicious' about this, please attach a savefile and I'll investigate.

ORIGINAL: Jim Power
One extra thing that I would like added eventually is to have Astronaut "crews" like they had in Baris where instead of picking individual astronauts for missions, I pick crew 1 or 2. You would also have to form and train the crews before they could fly a mission and the individuals might not like each other which would lower morale.

Yes, this was suggested at some point. We'll add to the list, but I cannot promise this feature. The problem is that it breaks many of the assumptions from the current system so, for example, you'll need to schedule your missions in advance and not on the same season that you plan to launch them, as you do at the moment. Either that, or we need to come up with a 'crew' system, and then you just assign crews to a mission instead of individual astronauts for each position. We'll give it some thought. It's an interesting idea, but we'd rather focus on the missing gameplay elements at the moment.

Cheers,