Played again recently, great game!
Posted: Tue Oct 11, 2016 4:42 am
Hi all,
I downloaded and played this game last maybe 2 or 3 years ago, I just did again, amazing game, amazing art/sound! Also I noticed a lot of improvements in balance, it's much more fun now.
I thought I'd provide my thoughts/feedback insofar as it might be helpful.
1. Currently winning at combat seems to be a matter of spamming the ship with the most buffed stats, as has been mentioned apparently elsewhere on the forum there's no "rock/paper/scissors" aspect to it, or more specifically, there's no counterplay to a player spamming the same ship. It looks like there's some talk of fighters, this would be good as it could penalize too much reliance on capital ships due to overkill.
2. The organic line of ships are cool, but they still seem slightly underpowered, if you invest in the tech/production to build them then your empire will be at a disadvantage militarily, it would be nice if there were some way to offset this. I noticed there's a solar web ship part for the organic hull/laser combination, I found the description of how it works confusing, does this mean that each ship in the fleet gains attack related to the size of the fleet? If so, then this could make fleets of organic ships stronger, but why not generalize to other organic-type hulls and non-laser weapons?
3. I feel like in relation to military strength, tech is frequently too strong. For example, in the early game, the player has the "destroyer" ship design available, with stats 6/12 for 78PP. However for 48 research points you can unlock the robotic hull, and get a ship with stats 9/31 for 109PP. One metric to measure value would be to multiply attack x defense and divide by cost, but this metric the robotic is about 60% more resource efficient than the destroyer, so there's almost no conceivable situation in the game where building a destroyer would be a good idea. Some other examples of this exist. An observation that can be made about this is that due to the combat model, when two fleets have the same stats, the fleet with fewer, stronger ships is currently stronger. Therefore I think there's no reason for tech to provide such massive gains in efficiency, if the previously mentioned robotic ship were 400 PP it would still be worth researching that tech.
4. Following the previous vein, in Free Orion weapons are expensive, armor is cheap. I'm not sure, but it's possible that if armor and weapons cost the same per point then it would help fix the previous dynamic. Also, it's generally not worth it to make small corvette/fighter type ships, because again weapons being so expensive vs. cheap armor, if you're going to buy the weapon, why not load up on cheap armor to protect it? And because armor is so cheap, this means that the only limit on the amount is slots on the hull, making unlocking new hulls very strong as in the example in the previous point. I think it's possible that models where a point of armor = a point of damage in PP might open up more interesting types of play.
5. As the game goes to the 150-or-so turn mark, empire management can become taxing, this is true I think of all 4x-style games. The feature allowing the user to rally outpost/colony ships is huge, without it it was impossible to remember where your colonies were supposed to go. Idk if this is very difficult to add, but more features like this would be great, for example, what if when you clicked on a planet you wanted to colonize, you could select the species you want and it would cue a colony ship at the nearest planet with a shipyard with that species? Or what if you could cue "create outpost base/colonize gas giant/build gas giant generator", or cue a basic shipyard and an orbital drydock immediately after? Depending on how the code is structured I realize that these might be difficult but any of these or similar things would be great.
6. Would it be possible to allow the computer to concede earlier after it's in a clearly unwinnable position? Some games I've clearly "won", but will have to micromanage empire/invasions etc. for another 200 turns or so to get the victory. This isn't really a big deal, though, and probably would be better if options were better to cue actions and require less turn-based micromanagement.
Anyways these are my thoughts after playing pretty intensely all weekend and loving it. Thank for making this!
EDIT: There's one more thing I forgot to mention
7. I think that stealth/detection has a lot of potential, but I'm not a huge fan of how it's currently implemented as a global mechanic, i.e., currently if one empire wants to invade another empire's planet but is behind on detection, there's nothing they can do but wait 10 or 20 turns to get a higher detection level. For a different approach, what if there were stealth ship components and detector ship components that "stacked"--i.e., a ship with a large number of detector modules would have more detection than one with fewer modules? Idk, there's probably more to think through here it terms of design but I feel it's more interesting than the global effect as it is now.
Again, thanks for making the game
I downloaded and played this game last maybe 2 or 3 years ago, I just did again, amazing game, amazing art/sound! Also I noticed a lot of improvements in balance, it's much more fun now.
I thought I'd provide my thoughts/feedback insofar as it might be helpful.
1. Currently winning at combat seems to be a matter of spamming the ship with the most buffed stats, as has been mentioned apparently elsewhere on the forum there's no "rock/paper/scissors" aspect to it, or more specifically, there's no counterplay to a player spamming the same ship. It looks like there's some talk of fighters, this would be good as it could penalize too much reliance on capital ships due to overkill.
2. The organic line of ships are cool, but they still seem slightly underpowered, if you invest in the tech/production to build them then your empire will be at a disadvantage militarily, it would be nice if there were some way to offset this. I noticed there's a solar web ship part for the organic hull/laser combination, I found the description of how it works confusing, does this mean that each ship in the fleet gains attack related to the size of the fleet? If so, then this could make fleets of organic ships stronger, but why not generalize to other organic-type hulls and non-laser weapons?
3. I feel like in relation to military strength, tech is frequently too strong. For example, in the early game, the player has the "destroyer" ship design available, with stats 6/12 for 78PP. However for 48 research points you can unlock the robotic hull, and get a ship with stats 9/31 for 109PP. One metric to measure value would be to multiply attack x defense and divide by cost, but this metric the robotic is about 60% more resource efficient than the destroyer, so there's almost no conceivable situation in the game where building a destroyer would be a good idea. Some other examples of this exist. An observation that can be made about this is that due to the combat model, when two fleets have the same stats, the fleet with fewer, stronger ships is currently stronger. Therefore I think there's no reason for tech to provide such massive gains in efficiency, if the previously mentioned robotic ship were 400 PP it would still be worth researching that tech.
4. Following the previous vein, in Free Orion weapons are expensive, armor is cheap. I'm not sure, but it's possible that if armor and weapons cost the same per point then it would help fix the previous dynamic. Also, it's generally not worth it to make small corvette/fighter type ships, because again weapons being so expensive vs. cheap armor, if you're going to buy the weapon, why not load up on cheap armor to protect it? And because armor is so cheap, this means that the only limit on the amount is slots on the hull, making unlocking new hulls very strong as in the example in the previous point. I think it's possible that models where a point of armor = a point of damage in PP might open up more interesting types of play.
5. As the game goes to the 150-or-so turn mark, empire management can become taxing, this is true I think of all 4x-style games. The feature allowing the user to rally outpost/colony ships is huge, without it it was impossible to remember where your colonies were supposed to go. Idk if this is very difficult to add, but more features like this would be great, for example, what if when you clicked on a planet you wanted to colonize, you could select the species you want and it would cue a colony ship at the nearest planet with a shipyard with that species? Or what if you could cue "create outpost base/colonize gas giant/build gas giant generator", or cue a basic shipyard and an orbital drydock immediately after? Depending on how the code is structured I realize that these might be difficult but any of these or similar things would be great.
6. Would it be possible to allow the computer to concede earlier after it's in a clearly unwinnable position? Some games I've clearly "won", but will have to micromanage empire/invasions etc. for another 200 turns or so to get the victory. This isn't really a big deal, though, and probably would be better if options were better to cue actions and require less turn-based micromanagement.
Anyways these are my thoughts after playing pretty intensely all weekend and loving it. Thank for making this!
EDIT: There's one more thing I forgot to mention
7. I think that stealth/detection has a lot of potential, but I'm not a huge fan of how it's currently implemented as a global mechanic, i.e., currently if one empire wants to invade another empire's planet but is behind on detection, there's nothing they can do but wait 10 or 20 turns to get a higher detection level. For a different approach, what if there were stealth ship components and detector ship components that "stacked"--i.e., a ship with a large number of detector modules would have more detection than one with fewer modules? Idk, there's probably more to think through here it terms of design but I feel it's more interesting than the global effect as it is now.
Again, thanks for making the game