Patch Wishlist

Starships does what it was designed for well, and I'm thoroughly enjoying the game. After playing several games, I've got a short wishlist which I think would enhance the game tremendously. Nothing on this list would change the focus of the game or change what type of game it is - I like having a good light strategy game I can play through in a few hours.

1. Mod support: if nothing else is ever done with the game, I would be happy if mod support is opened up. Allowing us to tweak the game would create much greater replayability over the long run.
2. Custom ship names: Sid said that he wanted us to have a connection and investment into our ships, well, allow us to name our ships whatever we want! I'm a little puzzled why this wasn't included given the design goals laid out in the preview videos.
3. Beam lasers: I know from a purely technical point of view we wouldn't even see the lasers as they were fired, but right now they look just like another version of the cannon. Making the lasers look like beams would differentiate them and make them feel more, well, laser-like.
4. Mission ship selection: I love the missions where we're only allowed to use our flag ship, but why not take it a step further and allow us to choose which of our ships we would take into battle? This would also give us an opportunity to challenge ourselves in the late game when we are face-rolling the AI on Impossible. We could choose to go up against the enemy armada with just one or two ships as a challenge. The missions aren't as fun when you know the only way you could lose them is if you have a stroke in the middle of your turn.
5. More classes: Seriously. I want a fleet of carriers. And what about dreadnoughts? Super-dreadnoughts? Frigates? Sloops? Heavy Cruisers?
6. Classes that make sense: Having classes tied only to ship HP doesn't allow us to truly customize the feel of our ships, as more HP is pretty much always a good thing. What if you let us customize the requirements for each class?
7. "Surprise" missions: Why not include a few missions where we cannot see the enemy fleet makeup? Another way to increase challenge.
8. Mercenary ships: when you conquer the Marauder and Pirate homeworlds, you get a buttload of population, but there's no other real benefit. Why not allow us to recruit some of their ships into our navy?
9. Medals of Valor: the rank system is nice in that it gives you a minor sense of progression, but what about getting medals of valor or some other bonus we can award ships that do something incredibly heroic? Like my flagship which managed to single-handedly take out a marauder battleship, cruiser, and a fleet of 5 fighters when the rest of my fleet had been annihilated.
10. Ironman mode: give us a mode which we can toggle to make our ships actually die when we fight. This alone would create much more tense games. Having this mode would not negate the design considerations put into the regular game, but give those who want more of a challenge the option. Even if just the flagship couldn't die but all other ships could would be a good option.
11. Auto-capitulation option: right now Epic map size is the only size you can play where you or the AI can lose your homeworld and keep playing - why not make it an option we can toggle for any map size?
12. Customizable victory options: let us choose more than just all victory types or one specific type, rather a range. Also, the AI should be limited to the same victory types as the human player.
13. Kill/shot cam options: let us turn off the shot camera and the kill camera, as this can seriously slow down the game later when each side has 8 or more ships.

In short, I just want to be able to immerse myself a little more and really feel like a fleet admiral.

Agree/disagree? Comments? Additions?

 

Great list!!

 

I just want it to keep my My2K username and password, like it promises. (Gen1 ipad)

And sometimes it says password accepted but it doesn't connect with My2k.

 

Good list. I would add that as the game progresses, the death animations for opponents' ships should decrease. At the end of a game I kind of dread the battles, because there's quite a bit of dead time watching enemy ships explode. It's fun for the first few, but it starts to get in the way after awhile.

In the spirit of ship classes, it would be cool if your early choices in the ship build opened some options and closed others. For example, the second fighter added might close off cannons, but open up better armor, creating a carrier class. This would add some customization instead of just maxing out all numbers in every domain.

Overall, a solid core game with plenty of room to grow if firaxis chooses to do so. I've had a lot of fun so far.

 

Oh yeah, I forgot about the weapon/kill cams...good one, I added it to the list.

Doing a run through right now with torpedoes + Dual Command...insanely powerful, but firing a dozen torpedoes takes waaaay too long.

 

Rename planets, and fleets and individual ships. Until they do something to extend the gameplay, I thin I have reached the limit of what SM's Starships has to offer me.

 

If anything, I would like longer games. Especially population victory seems too easy to get, wonder victory also isn't that hard. For a tech victory I really have to hold back, otherwise I will get population victory too soon usually.

 

Yeah, the wonder victory seems a little bit too easy to achieve when compared to the others victory types. Perhaps the population victory is the same; I'm about to try it in my current game since I just wiped-out a neighbor who started a war with me and I have a few food-focused planets in my empire.

Domination: you simply have to work for it.

Technology: you'll need to sacrifice a lot of other technologies if you focus on grinding out just three of them to 6.

Population: rapidly expand and conquer a neighbor or two, then turtle-up and crank out food to build more cities. Perhaps all other yields can eventually be sold for credits to acquire more food. (I haven't tried this yet.)

Wonder: this one can just easily fall into your lap. I won my first game (though, it was only on Moderate difficulty) by accident and was quite surprised. Wonders are amazing in this game and are usually worth every production, so even though you're sacrificing improvements (which aren't a lot once improvements become very expensive too) it's still usually worth it as long as you don't have fledgling planets to beef-up. If you conquer a neighbor, your production really shoots up and you can spam them. You just need enough cities that can build wonders.

Perhaps wonder cost needs to scale as the game progresses or the number of them required for victory increases as turns go by. Probably increasing the cost would be a better route so a wonder victory doesn't always require a huge empire, plus "seven wonders..." has a nice ring to it.

- - - - - -

I think in my next game I'm just going to enable domination only. It's a tactical space combat game afterall, I don't want any cheesy surprise victories by turtling. Plus, it'll lengthen the game nicely. AI's usually get absorbed into bigger ones if they're losing anyway, so perhaps it'll create a nice final clash at the end between the two titans of the galaxy.

 

I think a big part of what makes the wonder victory so easy is all wonders count towards the victory, not just the wonders you built yourself. So, while you may have only built 2-3 wonders yourself, as you conquer your neighbors, you will gain their wonders too. Controlling 7 wonders will often be the first thing you reach, before you get the population condition or the domination condition. And if you are playing with auto-capitulation, you will get the enemy wonders even faster since you will get all them at once when you take the enemy homeworld. Like you, I've often won the game prematurely because of this. I've also lost a couple games when I was actually winning because one AI conquered another AI homeworld and instantly gained their entire territory which contained enough wonders for them to hit the 7 wonder limit first.

As I mentioned before, I think the wonder victory is designed to prevent the boredom that often comes from having to still play a civ game past the point when you know you are going to win. In Starships, wonders are very potent, so if you have 7 of them, you are pretty much guaranteed to win the game.

 

Yeah that would be nice but it seems like this small a project wouldn't get mod support. Also since it's more of a tablet game that part of the market would be left out.

I like the animations but since I could still see the current animation for cannons, I think lasers should be a single instantaneous beam that get's thicker with more lasers.

The classes have no function, but I would like more and better classification. Four speed is not 'Fast'. That feels pretty average to me since it turns red at 3, so 5 should be the lowest that gets called fast. Also add 'stealth' if it has more stealth than armor and shields combined, and call it a carrier if it has more fighters that cannons and lasers combined.

I'd say have all your planets get an extra defender in the form of a marauder/pirate ship.

Another way to do that would be, at higher difficulties, to scale the cost to repair a ship with the total cost of all components and not just the base cost of the ship. So at the highest level, repairing a ship that has been destroyed is the same cost as rebuilding it from scratch.

Since it is (I assume) a bug that it doesn't affect the AI I'd hope they would fix that.

Okay here's mine:
If you have warp gates all the way from your location to another planet more than one jump away you should be able to click on a far away planet and go there rather than needing to click on each planet along the way one at a time.

Missiles and fighters:
The way it is now, if a ship has eight fighters they release them one at a time for eight turns and it costs 4400 energy.
However if you have eight ships with one fighter each then you get eight fighters in one turn and it costs 1600 energy.
There is no reason not to spread them out among all your ships.
Same with missiles. Having many in the air at the same time is better than firing one at a time. Arming every ship with one costs 800 energy and you can create a wall of missiles leaving them little room to maneuver. Putting them all one one ships costs 3600 energy and takes eight turns to fire them all.
Again, the cheaper way is clearly better.

I'm just going to mention missiles because all the same things could apply to either just with fighters costing more.

Here's some ways to fix this:

Missile and fighter cost based on how many there are in the fleet rather than on an individual ship:
So adding the first one costs 100 , and the second one, put on ANY ship costs and 200 as so on. So the cost adds up the same no matter how they are distributed, so the best option costs as much as the lesser option.

Front load the cost:
Have the FIRST missile on a ship cost 800 energy, and after that 350 for each extra missile on the same ship, or do the scale backwards so the first is 800 and the last is 100.

Front load the weight:
Have the first one you add weigh the same as having 8 would now and have the ones after that add no weight. However I haven't found weight to be a big factor in making ships. Engines aren't too expensive so you can still have ships be plenty fast with just a few upgrades.

Switch the affects of tech upgrades and adding the system:
As it is now missiles get more damage from technology and more shots from adding to the ship. Reverse that so more missile systems on a ship increases the damage and increased technology gives you more shots. They'd probably still have to reduce missile power because now even a missiles with no tech upgrades does plenty of damage so increasing that might not be necessary. Or have more systems increase the blast radius rather than damage.
Fighters get really good with tech upgrades. With their base level they're pretty much just a distraction and you still need your ships to do real damage. If the tech upgrades and adding systems is switched then one fighter from every ship would just give you lots of cannon fodder. One dedicated carrier would give you a good fighter, and tech upgrades would let you carry more fighters.

 

Oh yea, Multiplayer.

 

The AI needs to use more stealth. One stealth module isn't very helpful because the detection range is as big as firing range anyway, but two or more get very effective fast. As it is now I don't bother with sensors unless I have a discount for them or I get a mission with limited visibility because the AI doesn't use stealth enough. But stealth can be very effective if you're no prepared for it. I've gone heavy stealth had had goo fun with it but was quite scared when the AI showed up with sensors. So the AI should use stealth more to require us to have some sensors.

Also, regarding how (over) powerful fighters are, I think scanners and stealth modules should be possible for the random modules they get. Stealth fighters would be fun, but not especially powerful due to needing more than one module to use effectively and stealth and sensors don't add to hitpoints.

 

Some usability would be nice.

1. Smooth scrolling with the arrow keys.

2. Hotkeys

3. A minimap

 

I'm on the fence about this, tbh. The game is not balanced in any sense of the word right now, which would make multiplayer a mess. While I think the concept of this game would be great in multiplayer, re-balancing everything to make multiplayer work well may take a lot of the fun out of the singleplayer.

I don't know... it's a fine line to walk.

 

It's unbalanced right from the start thanks to the my2K thing that lets you have stuff in Beyond Earth, like increased resources and the ability to have 2 affinities at the same time. Seriously, if Player A picks Harmony and Player B Picks Harmony+Purity/Supremacy, then there's a serious unbalance before the game even began.

 

Yeah, although I was primarily thinking of the different ship loadouts - there are loadouts which are definitely far superior to the other options.

 

Yeah, there's that too.

Also, there's probably a lot depending on chance to really make it work, like all the random bonuses (Sochua's two random free techs, Supremacy's random Wonder) that can either be really beneficial or completely useless.

 

That's true.

 

After playing a number of games, here's my wish list of fixes/changes:

1) Let us choose 2 or 3 victory conditions like we can in the Civ games. It's annoying having the only choices be all or just one.

2) Let us choose whether capturing a homeworld auto-captures all of that player's worlds. It's one way for Epic sized maps & the other way for all other maps; I'd like to be able to choose irrespective of map size.

3) Make an option to turn off or shorten combat animations. I was playing an epic sized domination only game. By the end both myself and the one remaining AI had large, tough fleets, by the end of capturing the last 8 or so planets and having to watch those animations over and over, I was soooo tired of them.

4) Make a "rewards" screen in BE or Starships that shows the rewards available in BE & their unlock status, like the rewards screen in/for Starships.

5) Make lasers look like beam weapons, please. I know they'd really be invisible, but at least make them look like a solid color, instantaneous beam, not some type of projectile.

6) Make a way to customize fighter equipment.

7) Make torpedoes easier to hit and/or harder to avoid. As it is I never equip them as they were too hard to hit with and I don't think I've ever been damaged by any, once I figured out how they worked.

8) Alter the population victory so its possible to achieve a domination victory before a population victory when playing with all victory conditions. As it is, its only possible on Epic size and you'd have to be going out of your way to avoid capturing non-homeworld planets.

9) Ability to zoom out a lot farther on the main map with all the planets. On large maps I have to do way more scrolling than I like to move around and look at my planets.

10) Make it easier to switch between planets and between the add cities and add improvements screens. A "next" button on those screens to go to the next planet would help a lot.

11) When a bunch of planets are joined by warp gates, let me just choose the destination for my fleet and have it go directly there instead of having to move from planet to planet to planet, etc.

I think most of those should be fairly simple changes/fixes which would make the game a lot more enjoyable. As it is, I've enjoyed playing it & feel I've certainly got more than $15 worth of entertainment out of it. I'm now having fun seeing how the BE stuff I unlocked changes that game. Playing with pioneers, electromagnetic sensor, cryotome, heading directly for the field research knowledge virtue, and then building lots of explorers and trying to dig up all the artifacts has resulted in a much different game than usual.

-Matt

 

A minor update has been pushed but I can find no notes on what was changed or fixed. I started another thread where I will update any changes I find in game play.