Misc suggestions

Post Reply
Zanotirn
Posts: 20
Joined: Wed Dec 21, 2022 2:02 am

Misc suggestions

Post by Zanotirn »

Hello, I have a number of suggestions, that I think will be more efficiently combined into a single thread

Nations
  • If a supernation merges with another unified federation, while low cohesion leading to regions breaking off is fine, the resulting supernation should retain claims on all regions of the nation it absorbed. IRL if e.g. EU unified with Russia, it would be only logical for EU to get claims on Vladivostok by virtue of including Russia that does even if Vladivostok is not in Europe. High democracy may lead to greater willingness to let people go their own way, but high democracy doesn’t prevent Europe from getting claims on other nations via research. And it shouldn't prevent EU from reconquering Vladivostok if it were e.g. captured by China. In practice, that loss of claims just leads to extra hassle of having to un-merge from the absorbed federation, let it absorb its regions again and re-merge. Which is both annoying and unrealistic.
  • The game needs more direct controls for what nation goes into what federation when both have claims on each other’s capitals. For example, right now if you control Malay Nation in federation with Sri Lanka (awaiting unification), and you try to bring unified Indonesia into the same federation, both Malay Nation and Sri Lanka will move into Indonesia federation regardless of whether you use the policy mission on Malaysia or Indonesia.
  • You should either get a warning when a nation you own is close to the threshold of getting a new CP or that mechanic should just be reworked. It’s both not fun and not realistic to suddenly get your used CP count jump up by 30 points. I understand that CP cost is tied to IPs but in my opinion that connection is less important than having a smooth growth of total CP cost of nation along with GDP, without any sudden jumps. Ideally when a nation gets a new CP, the cost of all CPs should decrease to keep the total cost just above the value below the threshold. It shouldn't be too hard to tie the total cost of CPs to cubic root of GDP instead and break that into as many parts as needed.

Armies & Wars
  • It would help to have a button to recall all of nation’s armies to the home regions (probably on the nation’s army tab), and ideally also a button to have all of nation’s armies move to selected region (the latter can be replaced by shift-combine selection of armies from the sidebar).
  • You should be able to place armies with navies just off the coast of another nation. At the moment the game combines turn-based missions with real-time military assets, but this combination breaks down in handling landed UFOs – you may need a Policy mission to be able to move your armies to the landed UFO, but if you have no nearby regions, you won’t even be able to get your armies to start moving – potentially wasting almost half of the 30 days period waiting for the earliest time that mission could fire. Letting you pre-position your armies off the coast would remove all or most of the waste of time. It should be possible to turn coastal areas into fake regions that are suitable targets for army movement.
  • It would help if the landed UFO’s tooltip stated when exactly it’s going to hatch (can be hard to track when you have 5 landed at once).
  • “Changing political circumstances” should always give you an option to declare war rather than moving armies, so long as you are capable of declaring it. E.g. I declare war on a nation UFO landed in, move my armies there, and they quickly regime-change it before UFO hatches. If another faction had a coup/purge mission going and changes the ownership of the country at this point, cancelling the alliance, my troops will be forced to return home, which is both annoying and unrealistic (If USA is dead set on moving its armies into Lower Guinea, it won’t let minor details like who is in charge there to stand in its way).
  • At the moment if you use policy mission to end war, you often only have the nation the mission was used on to leave war. From both realism and practicality point of view you should have the option of ending the war completely so long as all participants agree to it.

Councillors
  • It would help to see your councilor’s gross stat value even if it’s over 25. Right now if you’re trying to figure out if it’s sufficiently over 25 for you to be able to remove org with bonus to that stat, you have to check their orgs and engage in some arithmetic (yes, the UI says what the unmodified value is, but you also need to know the total bonus from orgs to see if you can remove any).
  • It would help to make turned councilors’ mission reports visually distinct, like of different color, so you can immediately see if you should care about that public campaign failing.
  • It would help to have some screen show at a glance exactly how much research bonus you have in each field and from which sources (e.g. to quickly see which orbital labs you need the most or which orgs you can use). Same goes for bonuses you get from Earth interface orbit modules, so you can quickly see if you are under the cap for any.
  • It seems like criminal councilors should be capable of doing purge missions since it fits thematically, but at the moment the only few orgs that grant Purge require government and thus are unusable by criminals

Other
  • The game needs either a setting for instant camera switch from space to Earth or a setting to always load/start in Earth mode. As it is you are going to be watching Earth for much more time than the solar system, but any game load means waiting for camera to move towards Earth first.
  • The loose packet event (or at least its frequency) is unrealistic as elementary fail-safe engineering would dictate that the packets are not aimed at the station, but rather at an empty space next to it to which a receiver device can extend (not too difficult since almost all potential sources/targets are roughly in the same plane and no package should arrive perpendicular to it). In fact there would be a backup or two for moving the receiver out of the way in case the main method fails. In case the location receiving the packet is on a surface, any sane person would build the receiver sufficiently far from the main complex to be safe from mv2. Plus it doesn't seem realistic that point defenses that can hit a missile performing evasive maneuvers could fail to hit a non-accelerating object (particularly when its trajectory is known well in advance, considering how deadly Sir Isaac Newton is in space). In case something went very wrong on multiple levels and you start getting damaging loose packets every few months as it happens in game, you can bet that a faction would start a project on fixing it very soon. I.e. if the event absolutely has to stay in the game at all, it would need a project to drastically reduce its frequency - at the current rate it’s just annoying.
  • Ground base defense modules should be capable of using their main lasers to shoot down incoming nukes, even if it means firing out of their turn and skipping next one. Even the biggest shipborne lasers can shoot down missiles and so can Earth-based static defenses. So there should be no reason why a single nuke would be able to hit a base protected by multiple lasers (that, and exploiting the “attacker gets a free shot” mechanic by making the first shot a nuke is cheesy)
  • It’s rather unintuitive that multiple projects are gated behind megafauna necropsy, since most players won’t let megafauna even form on their territory (and often anywhere on Earth). In fact it’s very easy to miss the whole fact that getting maximum protection from aliens means letting one megafauna go off in your territory.
  • The project name “Apparatchiks” doesn’t actually correspond to what it does. The word doesn’t mean “sleeper agent”, “spy” or anything of the sort. It just means a career bureaucrat, usually not exactly a stealthy figure.
frostyplanet
Posts: 25
Joined: Wed Dec 21, 2022 3:26 pm

Re: Misc suggestions

Post by frostyplanet »

Some additional suggestion I'd like to attach:

Space:

1. It will be better to explain in the text that what weapon tech can be install for Layered Defence / BattleStation. I took me a hard time to search for the right tech and understant the difference between caliber and Light/Medium/Heavy

2. It will be better to let user choose what weapon to be installed on the Layered Defance/ Battle Station individually . It seams L1 plasma will always replace L3 coil, but after upgrade to plasma instead of coil, station will loose the denial ability, enemy ships will always make a direct run. Battle station itself are more likely to be destory.

3. Space battle manual control are unfriendly compared to Homeworld series.
The way camera direction and focus can be improved.
I always lost track of enemy ship once they excape to the upper / bottom plane. It's hard to setup a persuit cause aligned to enemy movement.
When ship enter battle with wall formation. It's hard to pull them closer, not without extensive practice.

In space battle, alien ship have high manuverbility, the target will need to be adjust frequently. Sometimes weapon cannot fire and I don't know the reason. Control seams not very responsive to me.

Does nose weapon in the right angel ?
Does weapon in cooldown time? Better show the time in the screen.
I'm sorry my computer have a small 12' screen. I think the bottom center window blocks view, can be smaller move to bottom left, or merged with weapon windown. the weapon control seems more important to me.

I have just reach the point to prepare war with alien, maybe after I practice more space battle I will sum up more on that topic.
Post Reply