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Post by Crazy Tom on Aug 6, 2016 0:50:28 GMT
So I took the plunge and messaged the CODE facebook page, and lo and behold I got into the closed pre-alpha! *hype intensifies* Now I thought I'd be a good little playtester and chronicle my CODE experience for the dev(s) to look at as the game develops. And chronicle I will, in as much detail as is practical. Alright, now let's get on with it. SESSION 1: GETTING MY TOES WET I want to note beforehand that I KNOW THIS IS A VERY EARLY VERSION OF THE GAME AND A LOT OF CONTENT IS MISSING, I'm still going to point out any issues I see, I don't know what the devs have on their to-do and what they might have missed, so for the sake of thoroughness it's all going up here.
Main menu looks ok, has a old school simplicity to it that almost brings to mind CMANO for some reason. This is a good sign since we're aiming for realism and nothing beats CMANO for realism as far as wargaming sims go. Background music cold stand to be set to a lower volume by default, or maybe even exchanged form something a little less intrusive. Might be just me but it's a little annoying to listen to while reading through the infolinks per say (automatic noise level adjustment based on the menu being browsed?). Ok, infolinks, connects are all fine. Bit sparse for detail but it's pre-alpha amirite? Then I hit factions and I hit my first issue with the game: the backstory, or lack thereof. I find out that the Earth is an uninhabitable dustball following something called The Cataclysm, and that the solar system is divided up between five main factions. I find out that Pakistan and India have apparently gotten over the shitload of issues they have with each other IRL and gone on to build skyhooks - at this point I'm wondering what year this happened in that these two nations have working skyhooks. I'm also really wondering what the Cataclysm was. It might be a good idea to insert a History section, detailing per-cataclysm events, the Cataclysm itself, and immediate post cataclysm events in order to groudd players in the lore. Next up: Nippon Prime, oh, good ol' imperialistic space Japan, I'm not sure why but everything about you makes me cringe(and this is not necessarily a bad thing, depending on how you use these guys). Japan's whole government flying on the same rocket however boggles my mind. It's such a terrible idea due to the precise risk of said rocket going up in flames that it really ought to be explained why such a risk was taken. Either that or amend it to something like not the whole government traveling on the one rocket, but several key members, whose deaths caused their positions to go to NP party members who used the opportunity to push their ideological agenda and eventually became the majority party. USTA: Apparently Russia, the USA and China played a role in bringing about the Cataclysm? Now at this point my mind is in full speculation mode, wondering about this Cataclysm. What was it? When did it happen? Is it completely uninhabitable? It should be downright hostile if people through teh best ideas was to go to space, a task so technically challenging and expensive than even the most audacious underground bunker. The best reason for evacuating Earth I've yet encountered was in Seveneves, where some sort of event shatters the moon, causing what is essentially a second Great Bombardment - literally boiling oceans and setting the sky on fire, real fire and brimstone stuff. Ok, so USTA, the implied speed by which three separate superpowers of very distinct social and cultural origins merged is really mind-blowing in a bad way. Needs some explanation. Not much to say about the Iroquois Resurgence, wondering why they picked that name, details pretty scarce otherwise. The Libery Exchange sounds like the cliched evil megacorp. Could use some development int a more complex entity. Next up: the Celestial Bodies. Nothing more to say here than that they need a short description and some history. The rest of the infolinks are locked, so back to the main menu. OK, let's jump into the campaign. Refueling a ship around Luna. Red the briefing, get into eh mission. Camera controls are explained then I'm left hanging. I remember reading that different colors represent different direction for the spacecraft, and I know what I need to do to rendezvous with the allied ships from playing KSP, but I have no idea how to accomplish this in game. Eventually I figure out how to inspect fleet, and I click on that in the hopes that I can take control from there. I click around and set the tanker to extract fuel, then mouse over the to the depot and find that propellant is in fact being moved to my tanker, but I haven't given the go ahead to do this so I'm a bit confused. Oh well, I wait until my tanker's topped off. Now what... I check the orders menu. Try changing orientation? Gives me a white line, white line is not turning any colors despite all my efforts. How do I turn the craft prograde? Where are my manuver nodes? Apoapsis and periapsis? I cry a little and wish I had my KSP safety blanket. WHOA, I check the messages and find that a whole bunch of new messages have shown up while I wasn't looking. Did I click something right? I dunno. Has this thing been running in the background with me not noticing? Huh, ok, scrolling back through the messages, I find how to change my trajectory, still don't see my apoapsis and periapsis, maybe the game doesn't even have those coded yet, whatever, keep reading the backlog. Wooo! I matched orbit! Hmmm.... mmmmm... hmph. This whole slow down speed up to get close to the cargo ship is really annoying, any chance of something like the maneuver nodes from KSP where we could drag it around our projected orbit and line up our burn so we rendezvous with the target with a little less trial and error? Hey! Got the green 'join fleet' thingy. Yay, I'm refueling the cargo ship. Wait, if it takes time to refuel, does that mean stuff on the fleet screen is happening in realtime? Anyhow, mission successful. *confetti falls from the ceiling* I'm calling it quits for today. 
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Post by qswitched on Aug 6, 2016 22:57:30 GMT
Hm, it seems like you disabled the tutorial right after the camera controls section by hitting 'Disable Help'. For the first level I will go ahead and remove that button so nobody else accidentally hits it. The first level tutorial covers adding burns, refueling, splitting, joining, rendezvousing, and alternative frames of reference.
Also, much of the content/backstory is gradually uncovered throughout the levels via the Recommended Reading.
Regardless, thanks for the feedback! I'll be looking into all of it.
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Post by Crazy Tom on Aug 7, 2016 0:09:53 GMT
SESSION 2: INSERT WITTY NAME HERE OK, False Flag time, reading the briefing aaaaand..... begin. OK, so far so good, intercepted the enemy ship on my first try. Starting combat. Ok, firing now... Ahhhhhhh, the intercept window closed, they're out of range. Man trying to hit their laser was a bad idea, I don't think a single hit landed. And MAN, now I'm in orbit of Jupiter instead of Ganymede. Hooooooo leeeeeee sheeeeeet. Man, I wish I knew that would happen a head of time. Can we only input one trajectory at a time? I was hoping I would be able to set up several burns ahead of time. Wait, I click advance turn and the enemy is back in range... wut. Click full homing again, lets' see what happens. Yay, the rear of the enemy spacecraft has been swisscheesed. Moving on, Predatory Opportunism, and heeeeere. IT. IS. The Cataclysm. So this is some sort of AU Earth, NESR is the USSR and the EAM is China? Hmmmm... runaway greenhouse effect. Might work. Not sure about the series of unfortunate events that led to this point, but I Want to Believe. WHOA whoa whoa, a billion people evacuate into space in the span of a year? I call shenanigans! You'd be hard pressed to move a billion people across the Atlantic within a year even with every country on Earth pitching in. The logistics are just... mind boggling levels of ridiculous. Hmmm, still think this should be available from the start to set the stage. OK, plane change achieved. Launch ALL THE DRONES. No kill like overkill and all that. Wow. That's a lot of drones. Plot intercept. Target coilgun. HOLY CRAP THE SKY IS ON FIRE with tracers. Wow, that was a short battle. Alright, that's it for today.  |
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Post by Crazy Tom on Aug 8, 2016 23:40:00 GMT
SESSION 3: GODS DAMNED RETROGRADE INTERCEPTS So played missions A Small Diversion through to Interamnian Incident, no problems, my one comaint is that the AI is too easy. I'd like it if it maneuvered and used decoys, even retract its radiators when a flak missile strike in imminent. I'm not sure how feasible this is since the whole point of this game is to figure out how spacebattles are likely to pay out, so we don't know how to program the AI. I'd recommend making multiplayer a priority so that tactics and designs can be tested against other players. And then we have Force Projection. Oh. My. God. Setting up a retrograde intercept for a flight of striker missiles is killer, in a bad way. They just. Keep. Passing. The enemy. I can imagine their primitive electronic brains waving at USTA craft as they fly by.  If some sort of automatic retrograde intercept could be created, that would be fantastic. Also, save points. I would really love it if I could save the mission after I matched inclinations, so that I don't have to repeat that step every time I restart - I gave up at this point and just did a prograde intercept. The orbital track of Deimos is also kind of distracting, is there some way to turn off certain orbital tracks? Uranian Cargo Run - recommend moving Multi-stage Trajectories to a point much earlier in the campaign, I've been using them for a while now. Also recommend a series of 'view' buttons, say top/bottom and side according to the plane of the ecliptic of the body you've selected as the frame of reference. It's a small thing that would make setting up trajectories less of a chore. An option to make the Hill Sphere of a body visible would also be useful. Being able to drag a burn along a green trajectory would also be nice, like how you can drag maneuver nodes in KSP, it would make Hoffman Transfers a lot easier. |
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Post by qswitched on Aug 9, 2016 1:06:11 GMT
Hey, great feedback as always! I'll be looking into all of it as well. One quick note just from reading your feedback: Enemy AI starts out very easy and "dumb" and ramps up pretty heavily as the levels go on. From Ceres and beyond, the enemy AI kicks into high gear.
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Post by Crazy Tom on Aug 9, 2016 18:14:37 GMT
SESSION 4: CERES BABY! So my first suggestion is orders: I'm not sure if the game has provisions for this, but I would like to be able to set up certain behaviors for my ships before a combat encounter. I'd like the ship to retract its radiators before missiles reach detonation range for starters - basically, it takes a few seconds for the radiators to retract, so the ship should automatically retract them a few seconds before it expects the enemy to get into range. Automatic decoy launching could also be good against missiles.
I would also like the ship orientation system to allow me to more easily set the ship's orientation prior to combat. Something like selecting an enemy fleet and telling my ships to face it head on (calculate this with regards to the trajectory of the enemy?). Actually, here's an idea for a future expansion: formations. I'd like to be able to create custom formation for my ships to maintain. Essentially I'd like to specify certain points in 3D space and have my ships take up those points - say I wanted to put my Laser Frigate directly in front of my Escort Carrier to shelter it and have the two Orbital Defense Craft take up position ahead and to the sides.
Another thing I would like to see is heat sinks: water is a great heat sink for example and I would like to be able to chill my propellant ahead of time and use them as a heat sink during combat so that I can retract my radiators. I would also like to be able to close a single radiator at a time rather than in pairs - for example so that I can keep the radiators on the far side of the ship from the enemy working while the one facing the enemy is safely retracted.
And once more, the retrograde intercept. I'm trying to shoot down the enemy's drone fleets with nuclear missiles, and I've manged it once, but it's annoying to set up - I don't think the intercept auto-command is built with collisions in mind, so having the option to set collision or fly-by courses would be great when it comes to missiles and drones (drone kamikazes?).
Manual sizing for the fleet, ship, and systems boxes on the left side of the screen could also be good. I have empty space in the fleet and ship boxes that I would like to enlarge so I can see more of each ship's systems at a glance instead of scrolling - scrolling is really annoying during a combat encounter when you want to do something quick.
I would also like to be able to set how far apart flak and nuclear missiles travel. I might wish for example to seed a cloud of cheaper flak missiles with nuclear missiles, so that the enemy wastes PD fire on the flak missiles (or vice versa) rather than have the flak missiles race ahead of the nuclear missiles.
By chance, I managed two fly-by's with one of my missile fleets and the second fly-by had an incredibly slow intercept of a now-lone USTA escort carrier, fly-by in 40 minutes. The carrier however is continuing to launch decoys and will soon run out even through they'll be useless by the time my missiles are in range. Might want to tweak the AI to account for that. AI collision should also be tweaked - with another fleet closing on it, it jinked right into the dead hulk of the laser frigate floating next to it, and went spinning head over heels and knocking itself completely out of action. I guess RADM Pavel Sullivan got a little flustered there at the end. Oddly, despite the Laser Frigate showing up as a Derelict on my map, the Escort Carrier just seemed to disappear despite looking pretty intact in the battle view.
Fun Fact: I also managed to knock out the engines on both of the ODC's which caused them to crash into Ceres.
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Post by qswitched on Aug 9, 2016 19:24:15 GMT
Thanks, toma! The issue with only one of the ships showing up as a derelict sounds like a bug, I'll look into that. Beyond that, fantastic feedback, once again, it will be going into the todos.
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Post by Crazy Tom on Aug 9, 2016 23:18:45 GMT
SESSION 5: ROCKET SCIENCE ENGINEERING PART 1 OK, so I've unlocked the shipbuilding module and *whistles* it's a doozie.
My first and immediate thought is 'Boy, this really needs a step by step tutorial'. Pick some sort of basic ship and walk the player through its construction, it would help tremendously.
My second was 'these existing ship classes really need descriptions'. Unless you made stuff up arbitrarily, you probably have an idea of what each of the default classes are meant to do, a short description would do wonders for the player here.
Honestly, there's a lot that I want out of this part of the game, and I'll probably keep adding to that list as I play, but for starters:
- The radiator listings could use an overhaul. Just telling me the mass doesn't say much about how much energy they can dissipate. Some system that allows the player how much heat a radiator can dissipate would be great.
- The shipbuilding interface can be cumbersome, which is a huge detriment to iterative design. I would recommend borrowing a page from KSP and instead of using drop-down menus for the different types of components (ie: tanks, power, crew, etc.), replace the ship module listing with a selection of available modules for that module type. I spent way too long looking for the long and skinny single panel radiators.
-Ditch the Mass and Cost pie charts altogether, maybe have them as toggle-able windows, but for me they don't add anything in the ship design stage and they take up valuable screen real estate better used for other things.
-I like the top-down automatic orientation of the rocket under design, but I want to be able to place modules around other modules - for example I would like to be able to surround a crew compartment with water tanks.
-The automatic structural space-frame generator can be incredibly annoying at times. I'm trying to stick a nuclear gyro-jet launcher on the side of a skinny spacecraft and it's creating a huge bulge all around the rocket instead of just grabbing it on the one side.
-There was some sort of bug where the view just lost track of the images of the parts. I saw the background and the green corners of the parts when selected bu not the parts themselves. Had to reload.
-Rather than selecting a system, then having to remove it and selecting another from the list, could each system have a drop down selection instead of a title? Say I picked a radiator, from then on when I click its title I get a menu of all the radiators that I can select from and that radiator will be instantly switch out for my selection. It would make iterating faster. Replace button does this. Tell new player in tutorial.
-Needs center of mass and center of thrust indicators.
-Needs ability to rotate part placement around vertical axis. I want to put a laser on one side and a radiator on the opposite side. Rotation option does this.
-Needs ability to rotate parts, period. I would like to sick a nuclear gyro-jet under the 300 MW laser so that the gyro-jet faces sideways and the laser faces upward. Can't do that right now. Gyro-jet insists that it too deserves to face upwards.
-Would like support for side pointing engines. Not a huge priority, but I'd like to see how it handles.
-Would like to be able to rotate components 360 degrees rather than 180 (ie: 180 to -180).
-Would like an option to create sloped glacis plates/conical hats for spacecraft. In fact, I'd like overall more control over the armor. I'd like to be able to make armor thicker in one direction, or to create multiple armor bands. I'd lie to try creating armored 'citadels' around critical systems.
Also, the game keeps crashing... I'm not sure what the issue is but suddenly the window just closes for no apparent rhyme or reason. I just did it again, I was in ship design when I clicked edit module and it just closed.
In other news, could the campaign mission be added to sandbox mode? It would save the time needed to set up our own scenarios and I'd like to see how some of my designs would have fared in those missions.
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Post by qswitched on Aug 10, 2016 2:12:58 GMT
Hey, toma, thanks for the feedback, and great suggestions!
Can you locate any crash logs that may have been dumped out and PM them to me? They should be located in ~/Users/[Username]/AppData/Roaming/CDE and ~[Username]/Application Support/CDE on Mac. Thanks again!
Also, about the side facing engines, are you referring to Vernier Thrusters? Because you can achieve this by moving engines to the sides of your rocket. Sloping armor more effectively can be achieved by adding Spacers as well.
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Post by qswitched on Aug 11, 2016 2:27:44 GMT
Thanks for sending me the crash logs. FYI, there is a small update to the build (which should auto-download) which fixes the crashes and some of the smaller bugs.
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Post by Crazy Tom on Aug 14, 2016 2:03:07 GMT
SESSION 5: NO KILL LIKE OVERKILL! Yep, I saw the update, I think something went weird however because all my custom designs suddenly lost their radiators. The 360 degree part rotation is very appreciated however. OK, today's mission is Vesta Overkill, and it's taking quite some time for me to beat it - probably because I keep trying custom ship designs. So some issues: - When launching missiles in a large fleet, on their way out of the launcher, the missile can strike allied ships and blow them up.
- The 10 minute minimum interval is really terrible for fly-by intercepts. I have a squadron of beam drones trying to intercept a squadron of enemy stinger drones before they hit my not-at-all armored ship. The problem is that I line up a manual intercept, click ten minutes, and find that the enemy has made a small course adjustment to avoid my intercept and my drones by on by without me being able to re-adjust their course. Some sort of automatic fly-by intercept would be really great(I assume that making smaller time increments would only lead to the computer making a small adjustment each time, leading to a sort of infuriating Zeno's Paradox type thing, maybe as stopgap create smaller increments and limit the AI from too many maneuvers per period of time?)
- WTF are shooting stars for? I've been trying them in sandbox, and they're like mini gun pods, so at first I assume they were some sort of defensive mini-drone - but when I try to launch them and send them out ahead of my fleet they disappear when I go to strategic view, and when I try to launch them as the enemy fleet is closing, they take too long to launch and do nothing? Am I misunderstanding something?
When I launch drones and missiles, I usually launch all and then hit 'Back' so I don't have to wait. Unfortunately even when I click rejoin original fleet, if a missile or drone was not launched at the moment I click back, they will separate into another fleet. Would recommend the default being to stay in the original fleet, and the split to be manual (I like to keep a squadron of beam drones in my fleet to deal with those pesky Stingers). A reminder of what the split/merge selector on the launcher icon does.
Suggestions and Ideas:
- Shooting Range: A specialized version of the Sandbox, where you can lay out a weapon and a slab of armor and shoot it to see what happens. Would allow for faster iterative design without requiring more work in explaining to the player how armor thickness, spacing, and composition affect each other. Right now armor design is very confusing, for me at lest, too many options and not enough idea of what they all mean.
- Truss Module: I'd like it if I could design my own trusses and put them on the ship. Things like putting maneuvering engines further from the center of mass so they exert more torque, etc.
That's it for today, maybe tomorrow I'll take a crack at Vesta with the default fleet. edit: One more thing I just remembered: - Kessler Syndrome: The Infolinks list how much orbital population all of the system's bodies have, but we never see any of it. With the amount of missiles, munitions and debris being generated each battle, I feel like we would see rapid onset Kessler Syndrome in at least planetary orbits. This could have a big impact on the types of weapons we use. I feel like collateral damage is a very important consideration in space, where people's lives depend on a functional, robust infrastructure. After all, it's not worth much to capture an enemy help body if you're stranded tehre with no delta-v left in your tanks because all of the stations are Swiss cheese.
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Post by qswitched on Aug 16, 2016 0:31:32 GMT
Hm, whenever the enemy evades an intercept, it should 'stop the clock' so that ten minute intervals are subdivided further. Might be a bug if this is not happening, I'll look into it.
Shooting stars are more or less an experiment on making defense drones without delta-v, but they weren't very effective in combat. I left them in, for anyone to experiment with though.
On Kessler Syndrome, this is a concern, and so most celestial bodies would have "cleanup crews" for sweeping up all the debris from combat after the fact to keep the orbits clean. At the very least, dangerous orbits would be tagged and marked whenever a combat does occur for civilian freighters to avoid.
Thanks for the rest of the feedback, again, all good stuff!
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aiyel
Junior Member
Posts: 83 
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Post by aiyel on Aug 16, 2016 18:05:20 GMT
Okay, I have NO idea how you succeeded on Ceres. I can't get anything like a workable intercept worth my missiles against the enemy drones. We seriously need better tools for plotting maneuvers, and the game desperately needs to have an option for high- speed intercepts with the intercept tool that doesn't try to cancel out all the vectors first.
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Post by Crazy Tom on Aug 16, 2016 23:59:37 GMT
Okay, I have NO idea how you succeeded on Ceres. I can't get anything like a workable intercept worth my missiles against the enemy drones. We seriously need better tools for plotting maneuvers, and the game desperately needs to have an option for high- speed intercepts with the intercept tool that doesn't try to cancel out all the vectors first. Missiles vs drones is tricky, you basically have to use nuclear missiles and detonate them manually as they fly by. It's frustrating to set up through, I've had the issue where the enemy drones change course a little and bypass my missiles entirely. |
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aiyel
Junior Member
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Post by aiyel on Aug 17, 2016 0:39:02 GMT
Seems like missiles need mechjeb .
I can't get them to intercept drones short of my ships at all. The one time I did they spent all their dV getting there and had none left for the engagement.
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