Roadmap questions, suggestions

[Gessie]

Hey all,

Old fan of DW1 here. I've been trying out DW2 for about 30 hours and am considering purchasing it myself (latest stable version; 1.2.2.0 IIRC). However, the current state of DW2's UX is unacceptable to me, especially since I have early-stage MS now, and would like to know if this will be fixed in the near future.

I'm aware that the devs are working on balance and pathfinding via this roadmap post, though it omits what I consider to be the most salient core gameplay problems:

1. I find myself manually redesigning ships and stations after each tech advance, every few in-game months early on, even at Very Low research speed, which is an obnoxious amount of repetitive work. I'm not interested in automatic designs. So,
   (A) are there any plans for racial techs to be properly evaluated by the Upgrade button and "Latest" component filters (and perhaps relabeled "Best")?
   (B) what about a user-friendly, well-sorted and grouped component placement GUI instead of the text spam list we have now? Merely (graphically) grouping by type and sorting lowtech to hightech would be an enormous improvement, one which I desperately need due to my handicap and designer playstyle.
2. Automatic retrofit took months on stations despite their blueprints being set to automatic retrofit in the Design screen (I also tried automatic hull upgrading, checked the "Designs which upgrade to this" list to make sure and marked the old designs as obsolete). Ships auto-retrofitted just fine so these settings don't appear to be the issue. Is this a known bug with with a planned fix? Is there a workaround? I've gotten into a war which required me to manually retrofit over 60 mining stations that weren't retrofitting, which is nuts. Edit: Solved! Check my next post below.
3. Are there plans to include a "Disallow research theft" option, since I find myself constantly micromanaging my spies ad nauseum? Is there a way to competently automate tech stealing by choosing preferred techs, perhaps those halfway down the list of queued research? I'm aware that some improvement can be accomplished via minimum success percentage rates and % of counterintelligence for the automation - that's not controllable enough on high difficulty in my opinion.

This may seem like a negative post but other than the above I really love the game, much like the first - I wouldn't ask if not for my handicap. After the problems get fixed I'd happily play it hundreds of hours, though at 70 bucks for a small-time beta game I have to be cautious.

In hindsight this might be a pretty good feature request list, so I hope the devs take notice. With that in mind, a few small suggestions:

• Have combat ships automatically pick up (very) nearby corpses and organic debris. They're already there and can automatically offload the loot when refueling - freighters can take care of dissemination. Edit: Solved! Reason explained by Erik below.
• Like in DW1, sending an invasion fleet to assimilate single-colony allies is still outrageously economically overpowered (almost doubling income early on). I suggest slowing ground battle speed and allowing spaceships to provide direct fire support from orbit (far more than the passive attack strength bonus, and not just pre-emptive bombardment), making colony conquest possible only after defeating the enemy's combat ships. Alternatively, every empire could start with a Capitol Defense Space Station which is powerful relative to early tech, built as a facility from the ground if another colony is made the capitol, preventing this cheese opportunity altogether.
• Sorry to nitpick but in the modern vernacular, DW2's "races" are correctly named "species". "Race" refers to a sub-group of a species born from a common ancestor. That's not a political belief, but rather a taxonomic standard.

Edit: Removed a bunch of stuff for simplicity as there's no answer yet, and made this mostly about my handicap/UX.

[Omnius]

I know that AI stands for Artificial Ignorance but I've found the AI does a decent job of designing ships though we can design better ones. Perhaps you should consider limiting yourself to designing the big important ships after multiple components have had time to improve. Any game like this is going to be very labor intensive when you consider trying to design your own ships. You can automate your spy activities as well, remember the AI's are limited to their own programming faults as well as you. I just bought the game and am enjoying a trial run automating everything as the Human race just to remember my experience with the original DW. I'm actually winning on normal level and have made very few decisions other than to put large research projects on accelerated research burning up excess cash building up. I'm just racing along at 8x speed and enjoying watching the computer play for me although there were some times I cringed at the AI declaring war on a big neighbor inviting an attack from another one that for a while reduced me to second place.

Relax and enjoy the game and don't be afraid to automate or use preset ship designs. It's way too late in the game process for the developers to do any kind of major revamp like what you're asking for so don't be dismayed that you're not getting any responses. Be thankful the radical fanboys aren't jumping down your throat.

[Jorgen_CAB]

1. I rarely update all of my designs every time I research something, especially for the civilian ships it can be highly disruptive to your logistics to do so. I usually wait until I develop some rather important technology that definitely make my civilian fleet better. That at least make the upgrade process less taxing in general. I probably do the similar thing with my military fleets as well, I only upgrade them when there are an important technology breakthrough.

For military ships in general you might not want to put on a new shiny weapon system even if it is better than the old, the increase in cost due to new resources might not be worth while. Sometimes it is better to wait until at least one upgrade is researched and then you change. Sometimes the cost of new components and hulls can dramatically increase the cost of the ships in a way it is not worth it.

2. I think the reason why it take a while for stations to upgrade is the way that multithreading works in the game, it will sometimes take a few months for all stations to start upgrading, but they will upgrade eventually on their own. maybe thing could be tweaked, but I don't think it is important if it will in any way impact game performance. If that is the case I rather wait a few weeks for stations to start upgrading.

3. I also sometimes find the spy thing to be bothersome, to be honest I don't like the spy system that much at all. In most game I just leave it on auto and ignore it almost all the time. I might interfere occasionally if I want something special done, but not very often.


I also think that any ship will pick up debris and stuff in space after combat. It depends if they are remaining in the area or not. Automatic fleets definitely do this if they are in the location of the debris.

I'm not sure what you mean about invading single-colony allies early in the game. In general I always have the AI start at Tl 1 with starting (or better) where I start at pre warp. That will automatically "fix" this issue and give you a much more challenging game, this is much better than increasing the difficulty of the game. I don't think I have ever found a single colony friendly AI opponent at any point in the game. I also find it gamey to attack someone I'm friendly with to start with as I don't consider the game to be a competition so you can just decide not to abuse this part of the game in my opinion if it ever happen to you. Not saying that the developers should consider your suggestion or anything, they are definitely valid concerns, I just don't find it very important personally.

I definitely agree that "races" is the wrong word, it should be "species".

[Erik Rutins]

Hi Gessie,

I'm aware that the devs are working on balance and pathfinding via this roadmap post, though it omits what I consider to be the most salient core gameplay problems:

1. I find myself manually redesigning ships and stations after each tech advance, every few in-game months early on, even at Very Low research speed, which is an obnoxious amount of repetitive work. I'm not interested in automatic designs. So,
   (A) are there any plans for racial techs to be properly evaluated by the Upgrade button and "Latest" component filters (and perhaps relabeled "Best")?

Yes, we've been making improvements to all areas of the game including recently adding more auto-design policies for each faction. The auto-design/design UI will get more attention going forward.

(B) what about a user-friendly, well-sorted and grouped component placement GUI instead of the text spam list we have now? Merely (graphically) grouping by type and sorting lowtech to hightech would be an enormous improvement, one which I desperately need due to my handicap and designer playstyle.

I'm sure we will make improvements here over time as well, but I can't promise an exact date for these.

[*]Automatic retrofit took months on stations despite their blueprints being set to automatic retrofit in the Design screen (I also tried automatic hull upgrading, checked the "Designs which upgrade to this" list to make sure and marked the old designs as obsolete). Ships auto-retrofitted just fine so these settings don't appear to be the issue. Is this a known bug with with a planned fix? Is there a workaround? I've gotten into a war which required me to manually retrofit over 60 mining stations that weren't retrofitting, which is nuts.[/quote]

I'm not entirely clear on the issue here. Retrofitting consumes resources and takes a station offline for a while, so it tends to be something that especialy for civilian ships and non-military stations, is only prioritized when there's nothing else going on and the tetrofit is significant enough to really matter. In the case of requiring a manual retrofit for 60 mining stations, I'm guessing they were busy enough that they did not have time to fit in the retrofit. How significant was the design change?

[*]Are there plans to include a "Disallow research theft" option, since I find myself constantly micromanaging my spies ad nauseum? Is there a way to competently automate tech stealing by choosing preferred techs, perhaps those halfway down the list of queued research? I'm aware that some improvement can be accomplished via minimum success percentage rates and % of counterintelligence for the automation - that's not controllable enough on high difficulty in my opinion.[/list]

There are plans to provide more policy guidance for automation of spies.

• Have combat ships automatically pick up (very) nearby corpses and organic debris. They're already there and can automatically offload the loot when refueling - freighters can take care of dissemination.

They will sometimes do that, when they don't have other pressing priorities, but we discourage too much of that as it would create other issues with them not prioritizing their main jobs as combat ships in various situations.

[*]Like in DW1, sending an invasion fleet to assimilate single-colony allies is still outrageously economically overpowered (almost doubling income early on). I suggest slowing ground battle speed and allowing spaceships to provide direct fire support from orbit (far more than the passive attack strength bonus, and not just pre-emptive bombardment), making colony conquest possible only after defeating the enemy's combat ships. Alternatively, every empire could start with a Capitol Defense Space Station which is powerful relative to early tech, built as a facility from the ground if another colony is made the capitol, preventing this cheese opportunity altogether.

If you control space around a planet, you currently get a +25% Space Control bonus to your strength in the ground combat. The attacker does not get this bonus if the defender has any ships/stations still in orbit. Taking over independents is indeed valuable, though invasions and assimilation are relatively more costly and time-consuming than in DW1.

[*]Sorry to nitpick but in the modern vernacular, DW2's "races" are correctly named "species". "Race" refers to a sub-group of a species born from a common ancestor. That's not a political belief, but rather a taxonomic standard.[/list]

Sure, I agree that would be more correct and we may change that, it's just a carryover from DW1 and any number of earlier games in the genre in terms of how that term is used.

Regards,

- Erik

[Gessie]

Thanks for the replies! I'll keep your tips in mind when I purchase the game, Omnius and Jorgen_CAB.

I'm sure we will make improvements here over time as well, but I can't promise an exact date for these.

Awesome, that answers my post. I'll check back periodically for when the update hits.

I'm not entirely clear on the issue here. Retrofitting consumes resources and takes a station offline for a while, so it tends to be something that especialy for civilian ships and non-military stations, is only prioritized when there's nothing else going on and the tetrofit is significant enough to really matter. In the case of requiring a manual retrofit for 60 mining stations, I'm guessing they were busy enough that they did not have time to fit in the retrofit. How significant was the design change?

My friend (who owns the game) may have solved this one: Turns out the issue was 8x speed, which causes an automation backlog of sorts. He reports that 4x or lower speeds solves the automation issues for him and sharply reduces the AI's idling times. Hopefully this tip can help other players too.

Oh, and resources weren't the issue since I was playing on "Hard" mode as a trial run, while the change was something minor like changing Basic Crew Quarters to regular Crew Quarters - I'm the OCD type in that regard.

Edit: For completeness' sake - I caved and bought the game with DLCs on the Steam summer sale. Fantastic game.