Initial Impression

I have SCO working now and plan to spend a lot of time playing it this weekend. A few things I immediately notice are...

The ships are still moving too fast. To paraphrase SVC because I don't remember the exact words, “space combat is not like a dogfight between WWII fighters, it is like dogfight between B17 bombers”. In a real-time arcade game like Subspace or Star Control the speed is deceptive. You might think it is slow, but things still happen very fast at during the “battle pass” stage of an approach. Setup a “whipping post”, a static target (a rotating turret that shoots at you would be perfect). Find a good speed balance by coasting past the turret on “strafing” passes where you avoid the turret's gun as you strafe past shooting it from out of it's firing arc. This will really help you to find a good balance of speed and turn rate. You'll immediately see how fast you are currently blasting past the turret... too fast to effectively strafe it or aim well. Right now, it feels like luck when you actually hit the enemy because the battle pass stage (approach, battle pass, separation) is happening so quickly.

The arena can be a lot bigger than this, especially an arena with a planet at the center creating a strong gravity well. Remember, the slow ship “controls the center” and the faster ship “has the initiative”. The slower ship cannot “own the center” with a powerful gravity well there, the planet “owns the center”. A powerful gravity well also changes all the rules on the relationship of speed between the ships. The gravity well becomes the dominant aspect of that, slowing the faster ship at times, speeding up the slower one, etc. It throws everything off and makes the relative speeds of the ships almost irrelevant. A powerful gravity well also forces the players to “flow with the current” of the gravity rather than maneuvering and flying as they would like too. A powerful gravity well is something that needs to be optional, that players only use when they want to play in a “race track”.

I get that you want a planet on the map most of the time because that makes sense in SCO were combat often happens in a solar system. But a solar system is a big place, just because you are in a solar system does not mean that you are within the gravity well of a planet. So I would suggest that you have three different ways of representing planets in the SM arena. A small version, a medium version, and a large version. SCO may be a 2D game, but you can still imagine that the 3^rd dimension exists and the planet is far away “beneath you”. So the small planet (off in the distance in the 3^rd dimension) has no gravity, the medium planet has slight gravity (like in SC2) and the large planet is actually more like a black hole that creates a race track. This last planet would be like a fight taking place at the planet, “in orbit”.

The ring of asteroids around the arena seems really strange, the “Interdiction Bubble” makes a lot more sense and the hyperspace extending as far as you can see feels more right and will make a lot more sense to the players. And, finally, SCO has no idea that I have a gamepad connected to my computer.