Ship design screen feedback

Spaceport issue-
Let me check NONE or somehow clear it so I'm not in the process of building a ship.

Ship Design-
Niggling issue here, but the engines are so small on the model, yet they take up a huge amount of space. It doesn't seem reasonable.

Colony pods... As it stands right now I think it's impossible to reproduce the standard colony ship in the design screen due to how big the pods are.

Structural doodads... Can we rotate the direction the doodads face? Also, on the sides of the ship (i.e the "wing" point) the doodads face different ways when placed on the right or the left side. For example if I put a fin on one side that points to the back of the ship, the other one will point towards the front.

Also, can there be some sort of indicator for how many doodads I can add? I went nuts this morning adding spikes and fins and such to a ship design. I have no idea how close I was to the polygon limit (or if I was even beyond it).

Engines... I second the idea of "One per ship" with the rest used as decorative doodads to make the ship look "cool"

One small issue with the spaceport. On planets it is now possible to queue up things to be dealt. I recon a queue for building spaceships would be good as well

I have a question once you begin building ships, if you decide not to build anything, how do you clear the building que.

It looks good. I noticed that after I built my first ship and launched it, The planet still had the shield icon like a ship was still in orbit. Also, in the ship design window once a piece was added, I could not remove it. I had to delete the ship and start over.

Lastly, it is difficult to tell when you have a ship in orbit. Followed by a question, will it be possible to refit existing ships with new techs like better engines, weapons and armor?

Thanks,

.JG.

I'll add my feedback on the ship design screen also. I've only played GalCiv 1 briefly.

It all seemed intuitive and easy to understand, apart from a few things:

1) Some items you click the 'place' button and some you click on the actual model, wasn't clear why the difference.

2) Some items have insufficient descriptions to work out what they do like "Support system" or "Colony pod".

3) The remove button doesn't do anything, which is confusing, instead you have to drag parts off.

Judo...
1. You can not clear the ship building queue right now, it's one of the issues I raised in my previous post in the thread
2. If you're still seeing the shield icon there may still be a ship in orbit. Currently you can't see the ships in orbit, you just have to click on each square, click launch. If you go through all the squares it should clear the shield icon
3. In the design window, if you want to remove a piece of structure, click on it from the 3d pane and it should detatch, then click on some empty space next to the ship (but not on a hard-point) To remove a component, click on it in the component list and drag it off the screen and click. Currently though if you have too much on the ship, the component list doesn't scroll.
4. You can refit ships at any point by selecting the ship on the galactic map and clicking the "Upgrade" button in the main information panel on the UI. It will take you to the ship design window where you can add and subtract parts.


Stealth -

1. Place vs Click... You can actually place any component on just about any hard point on the ship (the red dots). Some items will try to automatically place themselves on an appropriate hard point if you tell it to. Some items don't have an auto fit place yet

2. Poor Descriptions... Most of the objects in the game have no descriptions yet. This is something they'll address in a later beta phase. For right now the focus is on ironing out the hardware compatability bugs and some of the more glaring errors.

Hope that helps,
-Z

I know how to bring up the ship upgrade window, but do I do the upgrade by hitting save, or would that save the changes to the definition of that type of ship? Context-sensitive tooltips on the Save button will fix that issue before retail, but maybe if that's the way it works, the button should change to Upgrade if this is how that screen was brought up.

Yes, Colony Ships are a pain. The design can't be upgraded since they're seriously over capacity. Not only that, but since multiple pods gives no benefit, I can always design a cheaper colony ship turn one by throwing a single colony pod, multiple engines, and multiple life support systems on a cargo hull, and wind up with a ship 4 times faster, 3 times the range, and just as effective, except for a lack of hit points. In fact, I usually throw a sensor package in there, because with that design, I'm better off exploring with my colony ships than taking the time to build better scouts.

As for multiple engines/life support systems, I think that allowing multiple units is important to ship differentiation. How else can you improve the range/speed of your typical ship while technology improves but still allow for scout/survey ships to be designed to emphasize range and/or speed? Allowing only one of each results in too much sameness and a lack of specialization. Balance the different levels of equipment so that to get the same benefit as a higher tech unit from a lower tech unit, you take up more space, cost more, or preferably both. I know, we're not in play balancing yet, just speaking out against what I see as a suggestion with a negative impact.

The only real bug I've noticed with the ship design screen is that the window displaying the current ship stats can wind up with several copies of the ship stats in it, which you'll notice as you start scrolling that window. I'm not sure about the window updating the stats, I know I've seen it not update the stats, but I thought I had seen it update once.

I'm just going to touch on the "Colony Module" issues right now, since it's been of much discussion in the office the last month.

There are several Catch 22's that we keep running into concerning larger ship components that the player needs (Troop Mod and Colony Mod, to be specific).

The golden rule here is that the pre-made ships will need to contain parts that the user has access to at the start of the game.

1. We only want the Colony Modules and the Troop Modules to be placed on Medium, Large, and Huge hulls.  This is a scale issue...having a Colony Mod holding thousands of people would look pretty silly on the side of a fighter....

2. But we want the player to be limited to placing peices on the given component sizes alone.  We dont want to abstractly say "Well, you may have the space to put a colony module on that tiny hull, but we don't want Colony Mods on tiny or small ships, so you can't do it."

3. We want the player to only have access to the tiny, small, and medium sized hulls at the game's start, with the player unlocking larger hulls through technology.  Since the "Golden Rule" says that we can only make ships with the components we have on hand, at the very least we need to be able to fit a colony module on a medium hull.

The problem we have right now is that (IIRC) only one colomy module can fit on a Medium Hull, which ends up looking goofy, leading us to...

4. We want the Human Colony Ship to look similar to how it did in the 1st game, meaning you need about 6 colony modules to pull off the necessary look.

There's actually two problems there at the moment.  One, as stated above, since we can only use med sized hulls we can only put 1 (or 2) Colony Mods on the ship, and thus can't replicate that look.

So it's basically a juggling act, where the numbers will have to be tweaked and massaged to get a balanced game.

I personally wouldnt mind the abstract "Just don't show the colony and troop mods in the availale component lists if the Hull is too Small", but I know purests will find this unacceptable.

Can you guys think of a happy medium that we may have overlooked? 

Easy,


Add a colony pod looking structural component so that 5 of those pods on the starting colony ship are just 'bling'

This should be done for all components so that users can create a cool looking ship with 'bling' matching real components.

This allows medium sized colony ships, but put a population limit per pod so that these produce small colonies which take years to develop. Once you develop larger hulls you can make your 6 pod colony ship.


Paul.

That sounds good to me. It might be a little confusing for the player if the bling pods look like real pods - "Why can't I create a six-pod ship like I'm given at the start of the game?" - but making the bling pods noticably different, by size or some other thing, could help with that.

Solitair, I was thinking of a convoluted solution that would have the same effect. I can't think of a downside to your idea, which is better than mine in every way. I think you've come up with an excellent solution. The biggest way this would alter the game the way it is now is that either the cost of the basic colony ship would be reduced, or the cost of a single colony pod would be increased.

Hmmm... limit the population to 5M per real pod, and then scale the initial colony output according to how many real pods went into its construction, with a reasonable upper limit to avoid abuse, maybe coding it so that if the number of real pods excedes the limit, it uses the excess to make additional initial colonies that can be torn down later.

If the initial colony doesn't scale, there won't be much point in using multiple colony pods, as you can get the larger population there, but you can't feed them. Or maybe just say that any initial colony has stores of food sufficient for X weeks of support for the number of people that landed in that colony ship, and you have that long to establish other food supplies. I like that better, avoids potentially abusable supercolonies, and is probably easier to code. Just have the colony have X amount of food that will only be used to satisfy a shortfall of food that would reduce the population, and the food goes bad (X=0) after Y weeks, where X (and possibly Y) depend on the number of colony pods used. Hmmm... That might even be useful to drop multiple pods on a colony ship then don't fill it completely with people, if they're going to an unusually harsh environment and will need the stores to last them till they get set up (say, a class 0 or 1 planet where they're going to have to teraform just to build a farm).

Hmmm... Do that and a colony doesn't have to provide any food production, it's just a place to do a low level of manufacturing and research until you get real factories, farms, and labs built, and then you tear it down to better use the space.

To recap, Solitair's idea good, with "interesting" implications towards multiple-pod colony ships.

Making the bling pods look different would ruin the effect. Just make it easy to tell in the design window what is a real pod and what is a bling pod. Since we've already got modules that look identically, we're going to need tooltip help or more in order to tell which modules are which anyway.

Structural doodads... Can we rotate the direction the doodads face? Also, on the sides of the ship (i.e the "wing" point) the doodads face different ways when placed on the right or the left side. For example if I put a fin on one side that points to the back of the ship, the other one will point towards the front.

I haven't had any trouble with things pointing different directions like that... if you are, it could be that the hull you tried it on had the hardpoint's "front" set to the wrong direction...

If you're referring to the big claw-like doodads, there are two different ones. One points one direction, and the other points the opposite (though which direction they point on a given hardpoint seems inconsistent--to "stack" claws you need to use both kinds because attatcking a claw onto the edge of the same kind will yield one pointing the opposite direction).

Also, am I the only oen having severe problems with ship design after updating to last night's builds? It worked fine in the initial beta build, but after updating it seems that parts randomly disappear from the ship when you attempt to click outside the ship preview window (to pick a different part, change tabs, save the design, etc). I also can't stack doodads anymore, as trying to place one on another results in the cursor picking up the one that was already on the ship...