0016199: Initial feedback blob - DEV Arcen

ID	Project	Category		Date Submitted	Last Update

0016199	Stars Beyond Reach	Suggestion		Apr 15, 2015 11:03 am	Apr 15, 2015 12:04 pm

Reporter	Misery	Assigned To	Chris_McElligottPark
Status	closed	Resolution	duplicate

Summary	0016199: Initial feedback blob
Description	Figured I'd post this here instead of JUST on the forums, if it makes things a little easier, so you can just get to it later on when/if you want to have a look at it. A convenient spot. So, I'm just going to copy/paste directly from the forum topic: Okay, I might go and stick this in mantis as well, since you might not be having time to read it right now; that way if you feel like having a look later, there it is. ...well it makes sense to me, anyway, sort of. cough ....oh, also, if I start to sound negative in here (dunno if I will or not, I have a hard time telling how I'm coming off with what I say), I'm not trying to be insulting or anything. I cant seem to NOT sound negative most of the time, or at least that's what everyone that has to deal with me tends to think. So just keep that in mind when reading this. I'm just negative by default, really. Okay. So, my overall impression of the game so far is that it has a ton of potential. Though, I do see a few specific things that could hold it back a bit.... note that I dont mean the interface with any of the stuff in here... talking gameplay and such only. The interface actually didnt bug me. Now, the first thing that I notice is that the game really is entirely focused on the city building aspect.... it doesnt feel like a 4x game to me whatsoever. In fact, the feel that I get from it is actually closest to Skyward Collapse. In that, your actual goals was to control and deal with all of the stuff that WASNT the cities themselves, but you did this mostly by manipulating those cities. The biggest part of the game was building those, strategizing every single little building, and stuff like that... sure there was alot more to do, but you didnt do it nearly as much. This one feels much the same, except that it seems to JUST be the city-building bit. Which, honestly, is fine by me... the thing with most 4x games to me is that the early game is BORING. Nothing happens, and you're very restricted on how fast you can make anything at all.... it takes forever and is uneventful. In this, even without knowing what I was doing, each turn was very fast, and I felt like I had constant stuff to do, constant ideas and strategies to go with. There's a few problems with that though, but I'll get to that in a bit. The confusing part to me was building positions. At first, I wasnt sure how much those positions were going to matter... the early buildings you have access to dont seem to suggest that positioning is important at all... I'd been a bit concerned that it was going to end up like how the building positions were in the first Valley game, where it didnt actually matter whatsoever, and only mattered that you HAD them. That of course turned out to not be the case whatsoever with this game, but it was still the impression that it gave off. That might be an issue that leads to frustration down the line for new players, as they very abruptly find out how and why the positions of everything matters. Now, this is where I get to the part of the strategizing and tactics that kind of bugs me: It seriously feels ENTIRELY about the positioning. There's no military tactics to deal with, I dont really "engage" with the other civs much, there's not much going on with the map itself... even later on when I was trying to deal with the irritating Skylaxians and their stupid "no, we dont want you to build in that spot" attitude, it STILL felt like a pure city-builder to me. It didnt feel like there was tension/combat or something going on, and what WAS happening in that manner was a bit overly simple. Like, his helipad crashes it's radius into mine... beyond that, it's all out of my control, once the things activate. Put those in position, and that's about the extent of the battle tactics. Yeah, I can aim at targets, but that bit is a bit simple. So that might be an issue. Along that line as well is the map itself. The exploration aspect is in the game... but it kinda feels like it doesnt NEED to be. I played on the default map size (used the quick start), and really, most of the map seems VERY barren. There's different terrain types, but mostly, they just dont seem to matter. Forest, plains, whatever... they were just "tiles" to me, in that they had no buildings on them. And there was alot of them... positioning with buildings mattered only in relation to other buildings. At no point did I have to consider the landscape at all. This might also be an issue in terms of presentation and perception as well, because it ends up really looking kinda blank. Like, I had my city in this plains area, and the thing about each individual biome is that there seems to be JUST the one tile, and nothing else happening in them. No rivers, or maybe a string of hills/mountains, you know, stuff to break up the flatness of the landscape. Usually that's not just a visual thing, but it's also necessary for the strategy/tactics aspect in most 4x games. There were resources to get, sure, but they are very few and far between. even when I zoomed far out, after having explored a large area, there couldnt have been more than 10 or so of them on the screen at once (half of which were taken by the AI already). And those are the only non-building tiles that actually matter. So it makes for this static "flat" perception to it. You know how gamers are... graphics, graphics, graphics. In this case, it's not a matter of the art... it's a matter of not enough stuff in a given area. A part of the screen or game zone with nothing really happening or breaking it up is a part that just LOOKS dull. Even if the bits that do have the stuff (the cities) are utterly fascinating. Those I think are the biggest problems with the game right now actually; that landscape and the way it's laid out and how the player interacts with it... I personally think it could be quite a problem. I can already see reviewers harping on about it annoyingly. Because.... that's what they do. The lack of units makes for an interesting game mechanic, but the perception it gives off is not units being replaced by some new interesting concept; it gives a perception of them simply being REMOVED. As in, "dumbed down". That, obviously, is not what's ACTUALLY happening here. But I think it's what it's going to LOOK like, and you know how people are about initial impressions and such. Now that all being said, the game to me so far is bloody hypnotic. As I'd said, there was always something to DO. I didnt have any moments of "well I dont know what to do right now". Even when I was skipping turns, I wasnt skipping them because I didnt know what to do with them; I was skipping them for an actual REASON, whatever that happened to be. Tactical skips, really. Which... just doesnt happen in other 4x games. So, to me, you've got the "one more turn" aspect nailed down here, except that it's there even right from the start (I cant say that about Civ and such.... just, ugh, BORING early games, aside from having scouts explore, and even that is done very slowly....). Now, I didnt get around to the diplomacy stuff.... this part seems VERY slow to get going. I was 170 turns in when everything had gone to hell too far for me to fix it, and in all that time, I hadnt had ANY interactions of any sort with the other races. Aside from the Skylaxians shooting me for no reason (and those guys are supposed to be honorable and all!). The linguistic thing seems very slow to get going, and even then, I just couldnt think of any reason to start with that part of the game. My focus was on the building; I hadnt yet had a reason for anything else yet. As I didnt get into the "end game" though, or even past a midway point (by my current perception anyway), I dont know how that might change later. But for now, I've not had to do anything with it. Tech tree and those things seem easy enough to use; the tech tree seems fairly obvious in terms of which things do what, and I had an easy sense of what I felt I wanted to go after and why. The social upgrade screen though... that one wasnt doing it for me. Alot of the things in there seemed kinda unimportant, or didnt have any real "impact" to them. Particularly as many of them just didnt seem applicable when they appeared. But I need to experiment with them more... but that's my initial impressions of them. Visually, buildings can get kinda cluttered, too. I had some trouble looking for specific ones among the mess. Overall, the art is pretty good, at least it seems so to me. The buildings for the other races all were pretty cool, even if I hadnt the foggiest idea what I was looking at. It'll also help alot to have tooltips and such expanded, as just like with TLF I got the constant "not enough details!" feeling from dealing with the various statistics and such. Though not nearly to the degree that TLF had that issue. But it's still there. It is easy enough to figure out what every individual building is for though. Oh, also, the balance of the social level system, in particular, how much EXP is needed to level up, seems to fall completely apart far enough in. I was getting a level up nearly every single turn near the end (when like 70% of the city wasnt even functioning properly!). That definitely doesnt sound right. Though I do remember you said you hadnt tested the balance of the later content in a single game yet. Uhhhh.... I think that's about everything. At least for now. A bit rambly, but... gotta be specific as always, or it'll just bug me. Wether or not it's helpful, I dunno, but there it is! And of course if anyone disagrees with me on any of it, be sure to say so, I'm interested to see how the game is doing for the rest of you. So, yeah... overall, I'm having a good time with it. It is doing quite well at this point. But I definitely can spot some glaring flaws. More experimenting to come!
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Date Modified	Username	Field	Change
Apr 15, 2015 11:03 am	Misery	New Issue
Apr 15, 2015 12:04 pm	Chris_McElligottPark	Note Added: 0039996
Apr 15, 2015 12:04 pm	Chris_McElligottPark	Status	new => closed
Apr 15, 2015 12:04 pm	Chris_McElligottPark	Assigned To	=> Chris_McElligottPark
Apr 15, 2015 12:04 pm	Chris_McElligottPark	Resolution	open => duplicate