balance issues, sound, UI

from Stardock Forums

First off, fantastic game! This game is more complete and fun than most AAA games I've played recently at their official launch (Rome 2, Sim City UGH). Now to comments in bullet form:

 

  • The game is very balanced right now. Yes, there is a rush to offworld trading in resource-rich games, but that's okay. You have to end the game sometime and I think it's fine. All these newbs keep playing on maps with a billion of everything. Of COURSE prices are going to crash late game making off world trading the only viable strategy :)
  • How did Capitalism 2 influence the game? I really liked their robust stock market, where you could buy/sell shares, earn dividends, and debt/equity finance. You would take control of a company after 50% ownership. I realize that's not the point of your game, but I really like this fully built out aspect.  
  • One commenter suggested treating cash as it's own resource, where you would buy/sell bonds and the price was an interest rate. This would take some thinking, but should be "easy" to program and implement compared to many other features. This would add a ton of richness to the game.
  • I LIKE the text-to-speech voice. It's like my own robot personal assistant. LOOK AT ALL THE MONEY!
  • UI improvements are necessary, and I know you'll take care of those, so I won't say much. My top priority would be a mini map with toggles for resource types and players. I want to be able to find all the power generators for player X and EMP them and I want that to take me 3 seconds of in-game time to find it and execute.

Great game! Keep it up!

28,717 views 5 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top

I couldn't agree more on the first point.  The people complaining about offworld trading are the same that play a huge map with 5 players on medium or high resources.  

 

A bond market would be like creating a new resource without messing with all the buildings and existing resource ratios.  Of all requested additions, this seems like the most reasonable that still would add to the game.  I like it a lot.  You can already kinda do this by not paying your debt, but a varying interest rate based on market forces would be cool.  then you could tie the interest rate on debt to the interest rate on bonds. Say interest on debt is always 1.25x interest on bonds.  The more debt in the game, the higher the interest rate, and the more bond holdings, the lower the interest. 

Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top

The bond mechanic would be quite an interesting mechanic, and will propably add quite some to the mind-bending.

 

I also think, that ability to borrow money just out of the blue would really make sense in this game, and to off-set that, the interest rates could be slightly harser + your company value decreases too. I feel like that would bring it even closer to the hard economy board-games which wibe I already sense in this game (the mind-set is the same).

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Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top


My top priority would be a mini map with toggles for resource types and players. I want to be able to find all the power generators for player X and EMP them and I want that to take me 3 seconds of in-game time to find it and execute.

Yes!

When it comes to the ability to borrow money just out of the blue, I've been thinking about this as well and it does feel like it kind of belongs, but I am not sure if the level of complexity wouldn't get too high?

Reply #4 from Stardock Forums Top


First off, fantastic game! This game is more complete and fun than most AAA games I've played recently at their official launch (Rome 2, Sim City UGH).

Thank you very much! It means a lot!

    • How did Capitalism 2 influence the game? I really liked their robust stock market, where you could buy/sell shares, earn dividends, and debt/equity finance. You would take control of a company after 50% ownership. I realize that's not the point of your game, but I really like this fully built out aspect.  
 
I haven't played it. Maybe Soren has?

    • One commenter suggested treating cash as it's own resource, where you would buy/sell bonds and the price was an interest rate. This would take some thinking, but should be "easy" to program and implement compared to many other features. This would add a ton of richness to the game.
That's a cool idea! I'm concerned about adding more complexity to the game right now. I get pretty maxed out when I play multiplayer and I want us to be careful adding new things because we will probably have to take something away to manage the mental workload of the game.

    • I LIKE the text-to-speech voice. It's like my own robot personal assistant. LOOK AT ALL THE MONEY!
Yeah, there seems to be some people on each side of the fence. I want it to stay kinda goofy and cute, but a lot of people are turned off by it because it makes the product feel cheaper or unfinished. (It is unfinished.)

    • UI improvements are necessary, and I know you'll take care of those, so I won't say much. My top priority would be a mini map with toggles for resource types and players. I want to be able to find all the power generators for player X and EMP them and I want that to take me 3 seconds of in-game time to find it and execute.

I completely agree that the game needs a better way to evaluate the game world as a whole and performing those tasks you mentioned are important. I'm not convinced that a conventional minimap is the right tool. It has to either convey so much information that it's just a jumble of icons and colors or will have so many tabs that it's hard to manage and most players won't bother. We don't want to have either of those situations.

Thank you for your feedback!

-Scott-

Reply #5 from Stardock Forums Top

A basic minimap with a colored dot for each player HQ would be fantastic. That's really all I need. It would sure beat panning around trying to locate where I dropped my solar panels or whatever. I would just remember where I put them on the map in general and just click there on the minimap and would waste so much less time panning.