Phase 2 progression is too slow, there's too much waiting before the investment starts generating returns.
I suggest making the cargo drone cheaper but with less capacity. Add an option to send PM to settlements to kickstart their production, and allow retreiving resources before all planets are extracted.
In early phase 2, carbon is the only useful resource to be gained from settlements. I think it would be good to have a cargo ship fetch only carbon and not waste its precious logistical capacity on other resources.
Right now each settlement can only have 1 cargo ship assigned. I think this is an unnecessary restriction. When set to production mode, the settlement should request a cargo ship as soon as it has enough resources for a full shipment.
I suggest change the print cost modifier of engineering to be additive across different upgrades instead of multiplicative. Multiplicative costs means that upgrades actually harm rather than benefit.
Another solution to this problem is to allow removing upgrades, so they at least won't do harm.
Great game! I played until phase 2, but hit a bottleneck with silica production, where I couldn't keep both refiners going on Silica and it made it impossible to scale up my PM/s to a point where I could make cargo probes without leaving the game running for a long time. I'd love some way to meaningfully effect the production in that phase. Thanks for making this!
Phase 2 is essentially skippable, scaling needs adjustment here
Endgame gets a little slow
Phase 1 -> Phase 2 UI changes are a good start, but 2 -> 3 need some adjusting. If I can't use something in the next phase, I shouldn't have access to it
It's not immediately obvious that adding a new (compute/printer/etc) requires it to be printed, so I refreshed a number of times thinking the game didn't register the change before I realized it was going into the print queue.
Those are some great points, thanks for the feedback! Endgame definitely needs some balancing tweaks, I might also still add some different/additional mechanics. And the pioneer probe is not needed in phase 3, I guess that is what you mean that isn't needed anymore?
Gotcha. My current idea is to lock the Von Neumann probe longer, so players have to go through phase 2 and scale up production more. Getting a lot of resources together to finally build the ultimate probe.
For phase 3 I am not sure yet how to make the gameplay a bit more interesting, currently you basically only buy engineering upgrades to win the game. Any ideas what you would find interesting?
Not a bad game, but it seems like there's a bug in the Research tree. Silica Binder Refining seems to have a prerequisite technology that doesn't exist, or isn't on the tech tree yet.
Actually, you are right, it has the additional requirement of having discovered Carbon, but it is not showing it. Carbon only becomes available when you leave your home system and get resources from other systems. My debug jumps unlocks carbon too early. Will fix that is shown as requirement.
I never discovered carbon, I did prestige. Also the research centers, when at lvl5 the upgrade button has text "Upgrade" (as oposed with price before) and is clickable, but does nothing
Congrats for making it through all three modes! Prestige mechanics are not really implemented yet, want to get the basic gameplay right first.
The research center bug is already fixed for the next update, there should be unlimited upgrades now. The carbon discovery is not triggered indeed, it should happen once you scan your first system with carbon, will take a look.
What did you think about the gameplay mechanics in the later stages of the game and the transitions between them?
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Phase 2 progression is too slow, there's too much waiting before the investment starts generating returns.
I suggest making the cargo drone cheaper but with less capacity. Add an option to send PM to settlements to kickstart their production, and allow retreiving resources before all planets are extracted.
In early phase 2, carbon is the only useful resource to be gained from settlements. I think it would be good to have a cargo ship fetch only carbon and not waste its precious logistical capacity on other resources.
Right now each settlement can only have 1 cargo ship assigned. I think this is an unnecessary restriction. When set to production mode, the settlement should request a cargo ship as soon as it has enough resources for a full shipment.
I suggest change the print cost modifier of engineering to be additive across different upgrades instead of multiplicative. Multiplicative costs means that upgrades actually harm rather than benefit.
Another solution to this problem is to allow removing upgrades, so they at least won't do harm.
Agree that the cost scaling is too aggressive, was already considering making it linear. But removing is also an interesting idea!
Great game! I played until phase 2, but hit a bottleneck with silica production, where I couldn't keep both refiners going on Silica and it made it impossible to scale up my PM/s to a point where I could make cargo probes without leaving the game running for a long time. I'd love some way to meaningfully effect the production in that phase. Thanks for making this!
Thanks! The system phase is still very random (besides many other problems), it might help to guarantee a minimum of resources.
Big fan, a few notes:
Those are some great points, thanks for the feedback!
Endgame definitely needs some balancing tweaks, I might also still add some different/additional mechanics. And the pioneer probe is not needed in phase 3, I guess that is what you mean that isn't needed anymore?
Gotcha. My current idea is to lock the Von Neumann probe longer, so players have to go through phase 2 and scale up production more. Getting a lot of resources together to finally build the ultimate probe.
For phase 3 I am not sure yet how to make the gameplay a bit more interesting, currently you basically only buy engineering upgrades to win the game. Any ideas what you would find interesting?
Repeatable researches. This makes use of the compute mechanism, instead of letting the compute sit idle.
Skill points. The player needs to decide where to allocate them, instead of simply buying everything affordable.
i wish i could tell what are the requireaments to print scout/extraction probes, othervise the game seems pretty fun
Thanks for the feedback, I will make the tooltip more helpful in that regard!
Not a bad game, but it seems like there's a bug in the Research tree. Silica Binder Refining seems to have a prerequisite technology that doesn't exist, or isn't on the tech tree yet.
Thanks for playing, was a renaming bug, fixed now!
Full-Alloy synth locked. Although req. met. Can you check?
Seems to work on my side on first look, do you have attributed all CPUs to the research tracks in manufacturing by chance?
Actually, you are right, it has the additional requirement of having discovered Carbon, but it is not showing it. Carbon only becomes available when you leave your home system and get resources from other systems. My debug jumps unlocks carbon too early. Will fix that is shown as requirement.
I never discovered carbon, I did prestige. Also the research centers, when at lvl5 the upgrade button has text "Upgrade" (as oposed with price before) and is clickable, but does nothing
Congrats for making it through all three modes! Prestige mechanics are not really implemented yet, want to get the basic gameplay right first.
The research center bug is already fixed for the next update, there should be unlimited upgrades now. The carbon discovery is not triggered indeed, it should happen once you scan your first system with carbon, will take a look.
What did you think about the gameplay mechanics in the later stages of the game and the transitions between them?