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budhiw
09-04-2011, 11:05 PM
Hello there,

after having a lot of fun with your game I would love to give you my feedback on it and encourage others to do the same.

My point of view is based on one completed game with 225 stars and normal difficulty.
I have received all but 4 achievements (finish on ... x2 explore 15ß stars and destroy 25 star bases) and played mostly cannon shield with a later switch to drone cloak, that I mixed in.

Based on the demo I bought this game and spend my first few hours flying around the outer stars only doing the first 2 green quests given to me, but attempting all purple as I feared I'd lose them if not doing them in time, only later realising that they pop up again if you didn't finish/attempt them.

I gathered all tech possible by doing missions and birding, again not knowing that you could just blow the station up for the tech inside and got way further than required for the mission .
It was in this phase that I tried all items available to me and chose guns to get the closest to Ur-Quan-Master as possible (a childhood memory).

My progression from this point was quite fast.
By spending all accumulated levels my cannons and shields gained a mayor boost, so I soon found myself without any challenge in the outer rim having explored ~2/3 of it.
I went on doing my main storyline quests and went into the inner core getting an influx of tech and ship models to test, refreshing my slowly fading enthusiasm for the game.
I went to all stars in the core and got all tech before going on with the story, reaching lvl 100 before the vacation (trying to be spoiler free here) probably overleveling a bit.

I continued on and got to chapter 4, with a fast change of focus.
The change itself was fine, but the execution put me off.

The star combat and building was fine, but I missed the impact. I could not see a difference with 1 system to having all (maybe give an overview of the ships in your armada would help make this more visible without too much effort).

The final battle was ok.
I expected something like this, although I would like to give 2 ideas here to play around with.

1. maybe make the last battle harder for bigger ships by providing the player a bullet layout to dodge while fighting (see old 2d bullet hell game)
2. give a star wars / independence reference (1 small ship doing it solo)

maybe build 2. in as an Easter egg?

All in all it was a great game and I will start it up again, to beat the missing achievements ( although I will set the galaxy to small) and once an update is available to see what was done.

Thanks for the good time and I hope to see more from you guys,

budhi

Sylenall
09-04-2011, 11:41 PM
You realize big ships don't "dodge"... right? So anything even remotely bullet hell would be a terrible idea.

SpectralShade
09-05-2011, 03:08 AM
You realize big ships don't "dodge"... right? So anything even remotely bullet hell would be a terrible idea.

Correction: Huge ships don't dodge. But with upgraded engines and an engine booster I sure as hell could dodge with my "Big bus" :D

My "Hammerhead" or "Sunspot" never got too agile, though, and don't get me started on the lumbering pieces of molass that were the other huge ships... :p

necrodoom
09-05-2011, 03:16 AM
hammerhead works just fine with dodging. slap an internal engine (or what ever the highest engine is) and it feels like you are controlling a large ship. then again, with 3000 shield, full heavy armor and 1000 hull, dodging isnt really a concern.

SpectralShade
09-05-2011, 03:29 AM
hammerhead works just fine with dodging. slap an internal engine (or what ever the highest engine is) and it feels like you are controlling a large ship. then again, with 3000 shield, full heavy armor and 1000 hull, dodging isnt really a concern.

I think it was called inertial engine. I had rank 8 in engine and slapped on an engine booster on all my ships in a utility slot to boot just to be sure I could 'move'.

The hammerhead was decent at this state, but not something I would try dodging with in a bullethell game :P

necrodoom
09-05-2011, 03:45 AM
I think it was called inertial engine. I had rank 8 in engine and slapped on an engine booster on all my ships in a utility slot to boot just to be sure I could 'move'.

The hammerhead was decent at this state, but not something I would try dodging with in a bullethell game :P

if dodging in the middle of a mine field isnt bullethell, i dont know what bullethell is then.

SpectralShade
09-05-2011, 07:59 AM
if dodging in the middle of a mine field isnt bullethell, i dont know what bullethell is then.

Bullethell the bullets usually have a fixed path after they have been released (even if in some cases they are released in the direction you were at when they were released), they don't home in on you like a guided missile so you can actually dodge between them while pursuing forward.

Minefields in SPAZ are just unavoidable "oh crap" moments when you see the incomming fleet of mines headed towards you and make you wonder if you are able to turn around and run away fast enough.

budhiw
09-05-2011, 08:37 AM
Ok it seems that there was a minor sidestep from my idea here.

I did not want the bigger ships to be able to dodge all bullets (or any).

That was the whole point :-P

SpectralShade
09-05-2011, 09:32 AM
well the small ships are pretty agile with a proper engine in them already :)

blorf
09-07-2011, 11:48 PM
hi budhiw,

Thanks for writing this all down, and we at MinMax agree with your assessment. We need to do another tuning pass, and soon. There was a very large tuning shift right before release, but not enough time to test the interactions between changes. Specialists turned out to make the endgame too easy because their stats become so high vs research that you are fighting against. Mines got too strong, Ion Cannons went in last second and were more than a tad devastating.

Long story short though. I think that if you check back in early October, we should have a really nice gameplay balancing patch in that should make your next playthru much more exciting.