Unit spam, the great killer of all finely balanced strategy games. (I know it’s not balanced yet, but I wish you good luck with that, cliffski!)
mission 3, failed due to too many fighters, added 3 units of my own, beat it next try with 22% losses :)
EDIT - OK, beat 4 with the same loadout, but 5 is where I can upgrade this to an actual balance problem rather than me “getting” the game wrong.
3 units of fighters, the rest is spammed frigates. All my ships turn red, and I notice that while I’m FAR from spending all my cash, I ran out of pilots. OK, no problem. I deploy everything in the top side to attack groups piecemeal, and start. Again, no thought whatsoever to formations, orders, whatever. Just press go.
I beat the mission with less than 40% losses, and get SIXTEEN THOUSAND honor. Granted, it’s Normal, but that can’t be right.
I’ll second the suggestion to change the options screen toggles; I’m not clear what counts as “on” and “off” (I think they’re defaulted to on).
Also, what about an option to “invert” the mouse wheel zoom?
The game is easy on the lowest difficulty, but higher difficulties should be more of a challenge, plus the incentvie is to play with a smaller fleet to maximise honor.
Some people are ge uinely stuck on mission 1 unable to beat it on normal, so it does depend how used you are to this style of game.
This is where the challenge stuff comes in though, if you think you have an unbeatable fleet, issue it as a challenge to All. I’m sure someone will come up with the antidote to it :D
Plus of course the game is not finally balanced by a long stretch, expect a of data tweaks once all the Ui issues and crash issues are gone
The game crashes when I hit the Fight button on my work computer. But I’m having a good time just designing ships, looking at all the parts. Do you want the crash data, cliffski?
Did you go to Options, turn off Menu Battles, and restart?
Thanks, Hugin, that worked.
Anyway, speaking of crashes, my copy crashes randomly halfway through all battles. (Not when I hit “Fight”, and I have Menu Battles turned off.)
Can’t play this until I get home, but I think it’s weird that a lot of people on the RPS comments section have been complaining that the game won’t have replayability beyond beating all the difficulties and casual PBEM stuff. Am I the only one who feels that not every game needs to be very replayable, or even slightly replayable? I think it’s good that we get a mix of both in the industry, but not every game has to be Starcraft or Chess. I think it’s okay for some games to be Psychonauts or Shadow of the Colossus.
Some people are getting mid-game crashes, and that seems to be sound-engine related. I’m going to spend most of tomorrow fixing that (hopefully) but bizarrely some people have fixed this (or rather worked around it) by turning master volume to zero under options.
Tower defense seems kind of stupidly not replayable on paper, but people can’t get enough. This one sounds like it will be in between since you’ll be able to download a lot of different fleets to try your hand against, but there doesn’t appear to be a real meta game to keep interest in the long term? Might be something cliffski can introduce since he says he wants to support it for a while.
I’m finding Cliffski’s reactions to bugs and work arounds fascinating. It’s this little game he’s created from painstaking scratch, and now it’s become this amoeba-like tentacled thing that some solutions work on, some don’t, the inner workings becoming so oozed over he can’t pin point where it’s coming from. I’ve never coded beyond a basic C++ class in college, so maybe that’s a normal process, but it’s cool to read.
ps. I think I want to buy this!
Hey, has anyone who bought this and owns a Mac tried it in VMWare?
I’d love to check it out, but I don’t wanna set up Boot Camp – if it doesn’t run inside VMWare Fusion, I will probably end up waiting for the full-fledged Mac port.
On the other hand, if it does run in VMWare I will probably end up buying it twice to have licenses for both platforms.
finished the Normal campaign. I’ll write more about it tomorrow, but one thing I’ll say is that the last mission hints that Cliff views the game to play the opposite of what it does. It’s a small map, relatively restricted, and there’s only 4 groups of fighters, with a quite a few cruisers. Now the problem is that, at least in Normal, numbers win. Every time. I had 3 groups of a dedicated Interceptor fighter, and the rest was my destructofrigate. I stomped it first try. Conversely, in the previous two missions, the sheer number of fighters presented a lot more problems for me. I tried cruisers with one defensive laser and a ton of torps and other heavy duty weapons, and the problem there was that they’d get stuck focussing all their weapons on one tiny fighter while its big brother was kicking my teeth in. I ended up winning by separating my fighters into two types, a dogfighter and a bomber. That, plus destructofrig, plus a couple big cruisers for show, took care of things.
Don’t get me wrong though. It’s been YEARS since I managed enough interest in a game to debug it like this. I loooove what you’re trying to do, Cliff, and hope for great great things from this game. It just needs work, but that’s why it’s beta.
EDIT: last thing. To prove this, I just went back and tried the same setup on the last mission in expert. I had 85% losses, but still won first try.
Gnite all
Bought the game today, and I’ve had chronic crashes (to desktop).
Examples:
Just loaded the game, quit midway through the tutorial dialog boxes. Reloaded it, and just pressed “fight”. CTD.
Loaded the game again, deploy, fight, CTD. I’m not seeing the “loading screen at all”.
I tried changing resolution and sound off, still CTD. Eventually pressed Hard mode, and then I got into the battle. I pressed easy mode again, and it ran fine.
Emptied out my fleet deployment, and pressed the + button to design new ship and it crashes. Does this repeatedly.
Will report some more - as I find them repeatably.
I’m on a Dell Inspiron 1520 laptop - Core 2 Duo 2.00GHz, 2GB Ram, NVidia 8600GT.
I’ll be buying this the moment the official release hits the street. You have my word on it.
Interesting…bought this early this afternoon and it was working fine. Got a pop up to update Avast antivirus to the latest version. Did the update and now I’m getting a error 41 when I start up the game.
Again, for folks getting a crash when they hit the “Fight” button, try going into Options, turning off Menu Battle, restart the program, and see if it’s better.
Yeah, I’m getting the Error 41 when I try to load it now as well. Game launches momentarily then immediately crashes.
Yep, getting that too. Reinstalling and restarting didn’t help :(