Design Feedback

from Stardock Forums

Awesome game!

It's surprisingly intense when someone starts buying your stock, you start buying theirs, and before you know it your in a corporate deathmatch that will have only one survivor.

My overarching design feedback is to look for ways to make the game follow a less scripted path and more reliant on fast-paced strategy. It often feels like there are too many times your locked into your current path and are just "waiting for your steel to come in". The game is at it's best when your predicting/adapting to/exploiting a dynamic market, it's less fun to see how fast everyone can run the same race.

Claims / Maps

It would be nice to be able to abandon/move claims. If you take an AL hex, then AL turns out to be overproduced, there is no way to abandon it and claim another, more important hex. Fixed claims limit the players ability to change strategies mid-game.

It's too critical to get the 100% bonus for building 3 adjacent buildings. Everyone except scientific has a huge incentive to build in a big clump around their base to maximize their adjacency bonus, get instant auto-supply input materials, and repurpose their hexes. On the maps I've played, 80%+ of the map is either unusable or irrelevant empty hexes. Consider having terrain offer production bonuses/penalties (like Wind/Solar) instead of adjacency.

I saw that Soren originally intended to connect buildings by rail, that would be awesome IMO. You would have to chose between collecting moderate nearby resources or trying to defend a sprawling transportation network to reach the most ideal terrain.

Founding your colony is hectic and rife with RNG. If someone lucks into a mixed patch of AL/Iron they can often upgrade to 2 with a commanding lead before everyone else even finishes scanning the map. Someone can found directly next to you and occupy half of the critical hexes surrounding your base. You can only scan revealed hexes, not fogged hexes, so your going to be looking at the same terrain as everyone else in the center of the map - someone is going to win that race and someone is going to have a crippled start because they were 3 seconds too late founding their base. Consider fixed spawns, round-robin scanning rounds or hex drafts with time limits. Something. Anything. Else. 

Resources

There needs to be end-game resource sinks to prevent them from following a fixed, predictable path. Iron, AL, STL and GLS are all critical early then usually crash to $1 after everyone has finished their buildings. CHEM are usually cheaper to buy than produce until long after T5 upgrades. If players build reasonably smart and take advantage of the adjacency bonus, everything is oversupplied by the end-game. At the same time, the Black Market prices become increasingly unattractive as they surpass 50k+. You often find yourself in a steady state game where no amount of strategy can turn a game around and prevent the inevitable. Consider having all of the Hacker Array/Black Market abilities on separate cooldowns and be funded by resources instead of cash:

H20 really cheap? Buy some and dump it on your competition's PWR plant to cause a short.

PWR really cheap? Power surge your opponent's ELX factory.

CHEM really cheap? Poison those pesky FOOD farms giving your opponent all his money.

O2 really cheap? Supercharge your GLS factories for a few ticks.

AL really cheap? Upgrade your FUEL plants to suffer less sabotage damage.

Create a massive 14-way game of rock-paper-scissors. There should always be a way to take advantage of the market to help your position.

Consider resource storage buildings or requiring base upgrades to upgrade storage capacity. A T1 base should only hold a total of 200? resources, then you start getting hit with costs for exceeding your storage capacity.

Resource scarcity should scale with the # of players in the game (if it doesn't already)

Hotkeys

We need 'em. Black Market abilities, Auto Supply On & Off (separate, not a toggle). Camera map locations. Select All <resource> factories. Etc. Etc.

 

I look forward to seeing you guys move towards release!

22,915 views 4 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top

 

Along with your ideas, which are great, we also need the ability to trade resources and buy/trade claims with other corporations.


Mr. A desperately needs Water for his Food production after an EMP took out his pumps

Mr. B is running low on Silicon for Glass after his high producing plants got hit by Dynamite and Mutinies

Mr. A gives Mr. B 100 Silicon and a Tier 1 Mine for 50 Water and a tier 2 pump.


Another idea I had was give power surges at power producing facility the possibility to affect their grid.

Wind Turbine: 70% Chance to spread to 2-3 random buildings - 30% chance to destroy the Turbine

Solar Panel: 50% Chance to spread to 3-5 random buildings - 15% chance to destroy the Solar Panel

Geothermal: 20% Chance to spread to 5-6 random buildings - 5% chance to destroy the Geothermal Plant

Those are just placeholder numbers, but it could be a perk of targeting power plants instead of production buildings. I don't know if targeting a cluster of power facilities should cause all of them to do this, or just the one that was initially targeted.

 

 

Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top


 Consider having all of the Hacker Array/Black Market abilities on separate cooldowns and be funded by resources instead of cash:

H20 really cheap? Buy some and dump it on your competition's PWR plant to cause a short.

PWR really cheap? Power surge your opponent's ELX factory.

CHEM really cheap? Poison those pesky FOOD farms giving your opponent all his money.

O2 really cheap? Supercharge your GLS factories for a few ticks.

AL really cheap? Upgrade your FUEL plants to suffer less sabotage damage.

Create a massive 14-way game of rock-paper-scissors. There should always be a way to take advantage of the market to help your position.

 

I thought of a similar idea, basically needing to use resources in black market instead of money, and I like the way your thinking. I've also thought that buildings should be slightly more expensive to build, but there should be different variations as to what materials to use, some of them being better than others or having slightly different byproducts. Like it doesn't make sense that you can only get fuel from one building.

Ashes of the Singularity II
Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top

Quoting Galahir950, reply 1
Another idea I had was give power surges at power producing facility the possibility to affect their grid.

Wind Turbine: 70% Chance to spread to 2-3 random buildings - 30% chance to destroy the Turbine


Solar Panel: 50% Chance to spread to 3-5 random buildings - 15% chance to destroy the Solar Panel


Geothermal: 20% Chance to spread to 5-6 random buildings - 5% chance to destroy the Geothermal Plant

Those are just placeholder numbers, but it could be a perk of targeting power plants instead of production buildings. I don't know if targeting a cluster of power facilities should cause all of them to do this, or just the one that was initially targeted. 

I like the idea of Black Market abilities having different effects on different buildings. Having efficient counters to a player going all-in on resource X would open up more opportunities for strategy. Dynamite could be devastating to FUEL plants and have a chance to cause damage in adjacent hexes. Mutinies could be more effective on buildings which require a lot of labor (Mines/Quarries) and less effective on more automated buildings like Solar Farms.

Reply #4 from Stardock Forums Top

Quoting jgray5454, reply 3

I like the idea of Black Market abilities having different effects on different buildings. Having efficient counters to a player going all-in on resource X would open up more opportunities for strategy. Dynamite could be devastating to FUEL plants and have a chance to cause damage in adjacent hexes. Mutinies could be more effective on buildings which require a lot of labor (Mines/Quarries) and less effective on more automated buildings like Solar Farms.

EMPs could cause the Electronics factories to lose 50%-100% of the the electronics that are awaiting shipments.

Also, EMPs could be used to bring down blimps, it would project an overlay similar to pirates and, when detonated, would bring down all of the blimps in its radius. I don't know how many resources you would lose though.