Founders Chapter 1 Update -- August 17th

Thanks for the patch notes update.

I do have a question. You mention changes to the Drenkend and Phamyst ship. In the founders version I have not seen any of these yet. The only races I have seen so far is the Tywom, Scryve and Mukay. Was this mentioned because this update also effects fleet battles, or are we getting additional content now (Out the SOL system)? Will we every seen content outside of the SOL system before the September 20th release date?

Sorry those notes snuck in from the "full" version of the game.  Those ships aren't different in the chapter one build.

We're about a month from the release of the game.

I've gone through another playthrough with this latest version of the beta.

Here are some comments:

There are still some gravity and temperature errors on some of the moons (see this post).

I don't want to have to yap with the captain every time I want to go to the starbase to offload resources and outfit my starship (and I'm tired of her telling me to keep going to the Tywom's homeworld every time I have to yap with her). I should have a choice of either going to the starbase or yapping with the captain. This would speed up this part of the game tremendously.

There was no indication that I had filled up my cargo bay on the ship. I was collecting resources and had plenty of cargo space left in the lander, but I could not pick up a resource. I had no idea why. I flew back to the ship and then landed again and went to pick up another resource. I could not. It finally dawned on me to check my cargo and it was full. There should be an obvious way to inform me that my cargo is full.

Here's a radical thought: I should be able to double click on an object in a star system and my ship should automatically fly there. It would remove the tediousness of flying the ship within solar systems. I can still fly manually if I want, but there should be an auto-pilot to take me there just like there is an auto-pilot to take me to other star systems.

I found the extra stuff with the Lexites on Elpis very interesting and when returning to talk to the commander (I still don't think I've ever seen her name, by the way) I appreciated the extra tidbit she told me about them.

I'm not 100% certain on this one, but the anti-aliasing seems to exact a huge penalty on performance (I did not seem to have this issue previously, running @4k resolution). I had it set to 8x and then played (but before I started to play I set it to none and it said it would need to restart to take effect, but I didn't restart and just played) and had a lot of slow performance. This was yesterday afternoon. I then came back into the game (effectively the restart that set anti-aliasing to none) today and the performance was much improved. I had not rebooted the laptop - just hibernated and turned it back on.

For space combat in Sol, I'm not certain if the bonus pickups / wormholes should be present. They certainly shouldn't be present in the training missions on Ceres. It's not like our solar system should have a lot of this stuff lying around (if any) and the training mission on Ceres should have no knowledge of any of this. It should just be a plain vanilla combat arena. These other things can appear once we leave Sol (and maybe make it random - sometimes they are there, other times not).

I know that there is a comment about the other Tywom looking just like Wymdoo, but really? There is no way that all humans look the same if you see in the normal visible light spectrum. Our race has two sexes, certainly not all the aliens we meet are just one sex? You can't have a male / female version of those races? You can't do some scaling, palette shifting, etc. on aliens to make them look a little different? Wear different uniforms? I realize that SC2 was limited in that way, but it seems like there is no need to have SC:O limited like this. I wish I would have thought of this earlier, but as we're a month away, there is probably no way to change it now. Sigh. Maybe this can be an improvement post release. It'd be neat for modders to have tools to make Tywom look a little different from one another, for example; maybe this one is a little fatter, that one has lighter skin color, etc. Sure would add to the flavor of the game in a big way. Skinning aliens should be added to the game at some point.

I'm still not a fan of the resource collection aspect of the game since we should have plenty of resources on this planet still. I understand that this is a fundamental aspect of SC2, but it just doesn't seem to fit here. Now if we started the game with the Earth slave shielded and could not access its resources then I'd understand a need to go collect them. Unfortunately, the game is probably too close to release to change it, but I just kind of roll my eyes when the commander tells me we need to go collect them and we used them all up building the space ship (should have no dent in the Earth's resources - our space ship has to be a lot smaller than an aircraft carrier, c'mon). I'd understand it more if it was rare resources, but there should be no need for me to collect common things like aluminum, etc. Technology should be our limiter, not resources. In SC1, Earth's resources were a large part of helping the Alliance.

There is a lot of dialog still not voiced (so it is assumed that this has not been rolled out to the Chapter One beta testers, yet, since it seems to have been rolled out to the closed entire game testers from the notes above).

Overall, I think the game is starting to show a lot of promise. I have not had any crashes so I think it is very stable so kudos there.

It would be really nice to let us go to Alpha Repeculae as part of a Chapter Two beta for this last month to get some more polish on this part of the game that we cannot play. I'm just hoping that the people playing the whole game are provided enough comments to get the game in tip-top shape.

Thanks again for letting us beta test the game!

Matt

"You always have to leave the player the option of making a mistake." - Steve Cole

Applying this concept in a broad sense, I think it would be a bad idea to have a "click on a planet/moon to fly too it" in the solar system.  Flying around the solar systems is a big part of the immersion of Star Control.  If you take that away, players will become bored with the game pretty quickly.  It will turn the exploration side of the game into a series of mouse clicks instead of "flying through and exploring space".  It's a psychological thing, an "in-system" auto-pilot is going to destroy the experience/immersion of "exploration".

You may be right - I think it might more be a function of the fact that we have to continuously thrust in SC:O as opposed to SC2. So I find the continuously thrusting part (keeping the UP key depressed for long periods of time) adds to the tediousness of exploring solar systems and I guess I'm getting tired of holding the UP key down as I'm navigating Sol.

And I'm only exploring one solar system at this point. I can see that after about a dozen of these, I'm going to be looking for another option to fly to an object in a star system.

Also note that I never mentioned removing the capability to travel around manually so this would just be an additional feature for people to use if they decide to use it.

At any rate, thanks for the comment!

Matt

They could make it so the mothership/flagship thrust "holds" unless you tap reverse, which makes it drop off like the ships in Fleet Battles do.  Just on the solar system map, since fights always switch too Fleet Battles where it wouldn't do that.  Or, it actually could still work that way for the mother/flagship even in Fleet Battles if you want, I don't think it would make any noticeable difference too the player in a fight anyway.

I tend to auto pilot to star bases and drive manually most places. Since its faster to get around in hyperspaces you can choose the entry into a solar system on your choice.