0.3.0.0 Feedback

Most of the feedback stuff from the 0.2.9.0 thread has already been read and considered so i’ll try to add some new points. Figured we should have a new thread for the actual alpha release anyways!

General stuff:

  • In warp, holding forward can actually slow your warp acceleration down at times. This is very annoying and counter-intuitive, but mainly occurs during high warp acceleration while moving away from a planet.

  • You can deselect all targets and then fire to force fire turrets, but in the bomber i was getting annoyed at the auto aimed ballistic cannon missing shots i’d hit, and untargetting a fighter means no Target indicators to shoot at so it’s not a perfect solution. I suppose in the future we’ll be able to pick our loadout and not use autofiring guns at all if thats what we want, so maybe not a big deal.

  • I still wish we had a manual gimbal/turret option to increase the amount of gameplay for capships, right now getting kills with them feels way too easy, just fly near, lock and press the fire button. I’d like some extra gameplay on capships, and having to aim something would be a good way to do that.

  • Cap ship fights involve a lot of high velocity “momentum management” and its good that you cant just warp to someone travelling at 2km/s and instantly be matched speed, you should need to warp ahead of them and compensate for it. I like that warp goes back to the speed you were already at.

  • Autowarp: autowarp is a problem, i got into a capship battle with coach and i was flying in reverse near autowarp, he was chasing me and couldn’t stop autowarping during our fight, while i was unbothered because i wasnt at the correct warp angle. You can just overshoot on purpose and turn this on the other player but at that point it’s just a game of defeating the autowarp nuisance more than the other player.

Combat/convergence suggestion:

I feel like you can kill people way too quickly if you get near/behind them. Even if you dont overcharge weapons, a brief ballistic burst will near instakill an interceptor, and with overcharge the kill is essentially instant. But at the same time, because your guns arent in dead center of the ship and don’t converge, sometimes an extended fight can occur where you’re not doing much damage without the player understanding why.

To help with this, I think we could use higher hull hp/lower damage, but i also would like to see fixed forward weapon convergence. Kind of a contradiction, but the idea would just be that the weapons don’t “autoaim” towards a target, but always converge at point directly in line with the player’s cockpit/reticle, at a distance of the currently selected target. basically, wing mounted weapons fire inwards ever so slightly to prevent that weird situation when you’re shooting at a ship and your bullets miss by surrounding the target by passing by on all sides. It’s not hard to implement, the basic function is just getting the offset distance between the weapon and cockpit, defining a point ahead in line of the cockpit based on the distance of the current target selection, and rotating the weapon inward a fraction of a degree towards that point. To prevent weird edge cases then just clamp the maximum rotation so the guns arent visibly aiming inward at extreme close range, like below 300 meters.

Most importantly, player agency is preserved completely with this system, there’s no feeling of autoaim, as the bullets never converge towards the target on the x/y axises you use to aim, just in perfect line with your ship. We never had convergence control to begin with so automatic convergence managament is a feature that most players wouldnt notice but would allow a much more reliable feeling of delivering damage while dogfighting without taking away that feel of being directly responsible for a hit or miss.

Shitty illustration: https://i.imgur.com/mL7fdOs.png

6 Likes

Oho. My expectations must be quite managed because I’m nearly always surprised by the amount of content in these big patches.

First of all great work! Everything seems to work and nothing is really broken in a way that makes its intend unrecognisable.

I somewhat was not surprised but attacking stations and bases is really hard when defenders are around. What I see though is much potential for teamplay, tactics and learning. There are a lot of different approaches to attacking a station and many don’t work.
The hardest part is to arrive at the station, have enough time to identify the module that needs to be attacked, and not get killed before being able to deliver reasonable damage. I did not really feel like the damage that was needed to destroy modules was so high. Each turret took a few torpedoes, which sounds reasonable for a big battle. And a capital can chew trough modules really fast, like in seconds. But with the limited situational awareness it is only a matter of time until the healthbar suddenly disappears and your back at home-base.
Hit and Run Tactics can work but only for modules easily accessible.
Fights at lower speeds are much more deadly and approaching a station at slow speed requires heavy “space” superiority" in order to not take too many losses. I find these dynamics very interesting!

Balancing is quite hardcore at the moment. Without Repair or Carriers it hits quite hard. The attacker always has quite the handicap due to travel times.
Honestly I find most balancing at an alright place. Well done with guessing I guess, Flavien. For instance money earned seems to be at an alright place compared to the objectives completed. Money earned trough other ways also seems reasonable.
Now, is it balanced for the ammount of players that have been on the server … that’s another question. Just lowering module health will not make completing objectives much easier, just less time consuming I would guess … which is actually quite what is needed to test the game loop. Critics Idea of scaling Module health with players might actually work.

I really like how Station Turrets now give some form of Purpose to the insides of Stations. Small Attack craft can hide inside and scout out Modules to destroy.

Resupply crates are fun! Scanning is fun!

Thanks for the many many bug fixes. All of them are appreciated. Also, directional lighting! Yay.

Bugs:

  • Direct Control Mode is broken. Ship keeps spinning when moving and then stopping the mouse. After some getting used to it was actually playable to some extend, but quite a lot harder to control.

  • Warp manual Override seems to accelerate/decelerate at a “fixed” amount. It also seems to have priority over the automatic acceleration/deceleration. Resulting in situations where override is less effective in what you try to do than just letting it “go”.
    This may also be the reason for some weird throttle behaviour out of work.

  • New warp doesn’t seem to work with Next /Last Setting speed setting.

  • Carriers can’t seem to spawn anywhere. And when you try to spawn them “Spawn Location is not available” appears. It still removes the funds from my account. :frowning: Lost 8000.

Stuff that’s still not there:

  • Situational awareness is still the biggest problem for me in game. Attacks can come from every angle and only the Interceptor allows for quick glances in all directions to make sure one is not jumped. Any other ship is heavily handicapped in this 3D world.
4 Likes

I’d add that interceptor battles get really missile spammy to the point where you cease thinking and just deploy countermeasures every 10 or so seconds. Either missiles need to be made less persistent or chaff more effective or at least an AI change so they try to conserve their missiles a bit.

2 Likes

Hey guys! I have been an Alpha backer for this project and been following this game way back when it was Quest for Earth. I just got the chance to sit down and download the launcher for the Alpha build and I’ve already ran into a problem… It shows a green loading bar for a couple seconds and then an error message that states “.NET installation failed” and then promptly closes. Please help as I’ve been looking forward to trying this out for a LONG time.

Also, I’m not sure if this is the thread to be posting this in so my bad if it’s not!

2 Likes

Hey thank you for your support and patience - sorry to hear you’re running into issues. Can you look in your %temp% directory and post both your INovaeInstall installation logs (they have INovaeInstall_*.log in the name) as well as your .NET installation logs (named something like Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Setup).

Hello all, its been a while since I posted here, but now that the alpha is out I’d like to give some feedback. I’ve only played for about an hour or two, but its clear the game has some major fundamental flaws so far. I realize this is a process but I feel like if I don’t say anything then the devs will not know what to fix. Sometimes its hard to see problems when you are on the inside and know everything. So without further ado I’d like to give my hopefully fresh perspective as a completely new player to battlescape today. Bare with me because although my playtime was short, I have a lot of feedback to give… Hopefully this comes across as all constructive and not just “game sux tbqh fam”, but I am kind of a dick most of the times so you be the judge!

Firstly, I want to start out with some good things that Battlescape does so far, so you understand that my intention is not to just shit all over the game:

  • The biggest most notable thing that Battlescape absolutely nails is the feel of the different types of ships. Fighters feel nimble and fast, yet fragile. Big capital ships feel slow, cumbersome, yet powerful. When you are in a destroyer you feel like you can take on the world. When you are in an interceptor, you need to play quite skittish unless you like dying a lot. (Spoiler alert… I died. A lot. Like a lot, a lot.)
  • The planets, graphics, and installations are beautiful. You definitely get the feeling when you take off from the hangar of a station that you are important going out on a mission. It feels urgent and great to blast out of the cramped hangar into the vastness of space and look down and see this massive planet that you can fly to. The freedom and vastness is epic.
  • The controls are easily explained and flying is intuitive and easy to pick up, yet incredibly hard to master. More on this later.
  • For the most part, the UI is easily understood and its pretty obvious what all the bars and numbers mean when you look at them. Speed is clearly displayed, shield and health are easily read as the bars on the left go down (or up too in the case of shields). It does have its bad sides though.

Now onto the bad (and theres a lot… Like A LOT):

USER INTERFACE, VISUALS, AND AUDIO

  • Firstly, although the weapons loadouts were clearly displayed in the top left, and I could tell that my target had lead indicators… I had NO IDEA which weapons corresponded with which lead indicator! The reticules are color coded to white and yellow. What these colors mean are not told to the player at ANY time, and the weapons in the top left are not color coded to match. I suggest as a solution to this problem to color code each weapon type to its individual lead indicator.

  • Reticule colors sometimes disappeared in certain lighting conditions. For example, my target flew into an area with direct sunlight and a light background and my white and yellow lead indicators completely DISAPPEARED! I had no idea where to shoot! All reticules should be HIGH CONTRAST colors.

  • The “hit” indicator is extremely weak. The only clue you have is a very low volume audio indicator, however in the heat of battle this gets lots easily with the sound of your guns. The audio indicator should stay, but there is a desperate need for a visual indicator as well such as the diagonal “x” that games like Call of Duty and Battlefield use.

  • The “tracer” on a shot is not even close to being visible enough. As it is now, an enemy combatant might be 5km away, but when I fire a shot at their lead indicator I cannot tell even in the slightest whether my shot hit, was a narrow miss, or went completely wide. I need to be able to SEE where my shots went, and how to correct them. Right now I feel like im spray-and-praying at the lead indicator, and I dont even know if I hit them or not. I realize this would get really confusing if everyones shots were super bright, so what I suggest instead is to exaggerate the shot brightness only of the shots the player fires. So for example, if I shoot it should be SUPER bright to me, but normal brightness to everyone else.

  • The user interface DESPERATELY needs a 3D velocity indicator to tell the pilot which direction they are travelling in realtion to the direction they are looking. Right now the current indicator is simply speed only with no indication to what direction this speed is going in. Granted, with a bit of wiggling its pretty easy to figure out, but players need more information than this otherwise during combat its very easy to get turned around doing advanced manuevers like shooting behind you, or strafing horizontally or vertically across a target. The only real way to avoid this mistake is to fly your ship like a fighter jet, which is obviously a grossly inefficient way to fly.

  • The game NEEDS a 3D map display, that the user can pull up with a button, for example [M]. Right now it is very cumbersome and nearing on impossible to look spawn, look around the battlefield, and know where your friends, squad, and enemies are. I need to be able to see where I am, where my objective is, where my enemies are, and where my squad is. Otherwise battle can never truly be organized. After all, how am I supposed to fly with my friends if I cant find them?

  • A voiced fleet commander should pop up on entering the game explaining the current mission objective, and each time the mission objective changes he should pop up again. I imagine this to be a portrait that pops up in the top right of the screen, sliding in from the right, and then changing from static to the commanders portrait. Then a gruff anime admiral yells your orders at you and degrades you by calling you a worthless grunt or a maggot. (This is my fetish, please no bully). Seriously though, there needs to be something besides just some text in the bottom right. Its totally silly and theres basically no feedback when this objective changes. In the hour or two i played the objective changed like 3 or 4 times and I have no idea when or why they changed.

Below is a shitty MS Paint representation of how I think the UI should be changed. Also implements some changes from below in this text.

CONTROLS, AND CONTROL IMPLEMENTATION

  • The zoom currently is a hold-to-zoom and slowly zooms the player in. This is BAD! The zoom should function as a toggle between various zoom levels, and the current zoom is far too low and slow to be useful. Players should have, say, 3 zoom levels. Normal, zoom 1, and zoom 2. Pressing the Zoom key (Z by default) should cycle between the different levels of zoom. Holding is too cumbersome and makes controlling the ship and zooming too hard. At least let us choose which method we prefer, but I have a feeling most people would prefer a quick toggle button.

  • The free look function is totally useless in anything other than a capital ship at the moment. When you are flying at 2 km/s in an interceptor guns blazing, and you need to quickly track a target above you, or in your side mirrors, then you want to look back forwards… you can’t. Letting go of the left control button currently just leaves your camera all wonky and out of position with NO way to reset it except to switch between 3PV and 1PV. I suggest making the default operation for free look to snap back to original position when letting go of the left-ctrl button. I would also let players choose how they want free look to function by default. Perhaps it could also be a toggle, Press once to enter free look mode, press again to exit and reset camera. Either way, the current implementation sucks.

GAME MECHANICS AND PLAYER INTERACTION

Alright, on this section… Most annoying stuff first. Personally, these first two things practically break the game for me. They are that bad. If they are left in the game I will legitimately never play it again, and this isnt exaggeration. Its so horrible that I pretty much have no desire to enter the game again at the moment.

  • Warp should NEVER automatically engage! NEVER EVER EVER! Player control should NEVER be overridden by the game! NEVER! Just limit the “Real space” velocity max and prompt the user with a warning message like instead of saying “Auto Warp Engaging” it should say “Warp Speed Threshold Reached. Press [J] to engage.” I also think it would be fantastic if all warning messages like this were voiced by an A.I. Similar to the commander, her portrait would pop out of the top right of the screen and she would proclaim whatever is going on. “Shields lost. Critical damage taken. Warp is now available.” shit like that. Right now, you practically have to spam J to keep control of your ship…

  • The meteorite damage is totally retarded. I was flying an interceptor for my first like 45 minutes of play time, and I died instantaneously with barely any warning and barely any explanation because I was going too fast… In the middle of nowhere… With no debris around me at all. Just trying to fly between planets. Firstly, I think even if its realistic that micro particles could rip a ship to shreds, its not FUN. And this is a game, it should be FUN. It is NOT FUN to die instantaneously just trying to fly from point A to point B with no hostiles in sight and no objects around for hundreds of Kkm’s. I think that this kind of damage should be limited to low orbit situations and near planets that have rings. Also the debris should be visible and a real object, not some invisible nebulous speed threshold.

Alright now to some fundamentals…

  • There are far too many AI ships. So many in fact that I can barely tell where the actual enemy players are. I might as well be fighting NPC fleets exclusively. I personally think that the only AI in the game should be limited to installation defenses, and never to ships. I think there should be player ship combat only. At the very least they should be limited to defense only.

  • Following on that, I think that when you enter the game for the first time during a session, the user should be prompted to join or create a squadron. Likewise, players in the game should have the option to at any time join or create a squadron. This is supposed to be a team game, so players should have mechanics that allow them to organize into groups. Also, there should be visual indicators on your screen that show you where your squad mates are. For example, if a squad mate is off screen to your left, there should be an arrow point that direction at the edge of your screen showing their direction and distance. Squad mate target indicators and arrows should also be a different color than the normal green.

The following two are subjective, but I think that they form the basis for what will make Battlescape special: large, newtonian, fleet battles.

  • Faction money should be paid out ala planetside. Each faction has a pool of resources, in the current case it is $Dollars. The name doesnt matter, it could be Schrute Bucks for all I care. In any case, each tick of say “X” minutes the faction should gain resources based on the amount and TYPE of installations held by that faction. Some installations should generate a lot of resources, and some installations should generate no resources. This will be in addition to a base resource gain per tick, such that no faction ever has 0 income. See below for example formula.
    I invision three types of installations: Commercial, Martial, and Logistical. Commercial will generate the most resources and have the least installation defenses. Martial will generate no resources and have the most installation defenses. They will also function as the only installation spawn points, with the other way to spawn being a carrier. Logistical installations will generate a medium amount of resources, have a medium amount of installation defenses, and will be the sole installations where players can repair and re-arm. Logistical installations will function as warp-lanes between planets and re-arm and repair installations. At each tick, all resources will be added to the factions resource pool and divided between all online faction users and installations. (installations will use these funds to automatically repair themselves over time).

Example formula:

Resource per tick = Base Income + (#ofInstallationTypeA * X)+ 
	(#ofInstallationTypeB * Y)+ (#ofInstallationTypeC * Z)
  • Each objective needs a REASON for us to fight over. Why is Zephyr more important than any other installation? Furthmore, fighting should be concentrated on certain theaters of war in a type of pseudo-lattice system. Each planet will be connected by a “lane”. This lane will have end points that are of the logistical installation type. I view them as sort of warp gates. In reality, the current warp system should remain, but the “warp gates” should have the ability to instantaneously accelerate the player to maximum warp speed in the direction they are travelling when they pass through the gate. It should of course still be possible to warp normally as the player wishes. I view each planetary system as having 1 logistical installation per inter-planetary connection the developers wish that planet to have. For example, if Cinder is connected to 3 planets/moons, it would have 3 logistical installations. Following these logistical installations would be a ring of martial defense installations, creating the defensive fall back position from the logistical installations. Finally, either in low orbit or on the planet itself should be the commercial installations. These could be cities, mining installations, etc. Either way, they are generally civillian in nature but major money makers. But basically you should have to peel away at the defenses of a planet in order to get to the next. I dont think you should particularly have to go in any particular order EXCEPT when moving the theater of war between planets/moons. In this case, I think you should always have to fight for the logistical installation corresponding to your attack point first. If this system, or a system LIKE this one isnt implemented then fighting in Battlescape will come down to this: send a small strike force to attack an undefended installation, take it, then leave and go to the next undefended installation. If you get killed, respawn and go to the next undefended random installation. Sun Tzu, attack your enemy where he is not. I think this is BAD, because I think Battlescape should focus on big, cinematic, newtonian fleet battles between lots of players. Not random 3 man conflicts spread out over a vast solar system. Of course you should still be able to have small battles, but I think the major focus should be on big organized fleet battles between factions over important strategic positions. Below is a really shitty MS Paint Diagram of what I think a lane system should be like.

So thats basically it for now. Theres a lot more stuff that could be said, but since those arent within the scope of the alpha, I dont want to include those yet. I hope you all found my feedback useful or at least not too retarded.

Thanks for reading my massive wall of text, and I look forward to hearing your responses, critiques, and suggestions.

8 Likes

Thanks for your feedback, it’s definitely helpful, and I’d like to address a few of your points. For starters please keep in mind this is an Alpha release so obviously a great many things are a work in progress or aren’t even implemented yet in any form. Keeping that in mind:

This is intentional. Our goal is to strike a balance between realism and “fun” and when it comes to our HUD it is intended to operate like a real HUD projected onto the glass of your helmet. What this means is that if you stare into a really bright light, like a star or an explosion, you will absolutely not be able to see your HUD elements very well. That being said we could add a brightness toggle.

There has been a lot of internal debate over this. To some degree the lack of feedback is intentional because in real-life you have no idea if your shots hit beyond what radar and your eyes tell you. Obviously our current implementation does not exactly adhere to that as it has an extremely annoying “ding” sound. An X popping up on the reticle, as you suggest, may be a happier middle ground. Either way it’s a WIP.

Another item over which there has been great internal debate. Again, from a realism perspective, tracers will only be so visible. Artificially increasing the brightness/size of tracers creates a great many problems, some of which you highlight, but there are others like its ability to screw up our HDR or problems from size/distance distortion. We actually are already using a special algorithm to artificially make tracers more visible and to be honest it’s unlikely this is going to get any better than it is right now.

We already have a flight path vector in the same fashion as modern jet fighters which, when combined with your speed indicator, gives you your velocity. What about that doesn’t work for you and what do you mean by a 3D velocity indicator?

On our TODO list.

A proper mission/objective system is on our TODO list and has been mentioned by @INovaeFlavien a number of times both on Discord and our forums.

I legitimately LoL’d after reading this.

Our AI still needs a lot of work as it was originally never intended to be a part of the game. We still haven’t determined the full extent of the role it will play just yet.

On the TODO list.

You raise some interesting points which we will certainly discuss.

1 Like

Well even so, I think in real life the designer of the HUD for the ship would create reticles that would not easily be lost in bright conditions, and there are even adaptive brightness controls on phones even today, so I think this explanation is not a good one. Furthermore, its a video game, and being able to see is pretty important to being able to play… Just my 2 cents.

Well, my 2 cents on this is that if you’re going to give any indicator at all, you should at least make it useful. I think everyone can basically agree that the current audio tone isnt really a great solution. I understand its WIP, but thats what feedback is for so you guys can tune/tweak it how you see fit. I do also see the point in realism, but I would refer to ARMA (a military simulator) that gives indicators visually when you hit an enemy by showing a small cloud of blood when your bullet hits the enemy. Perhaps it could just be more visual, like shields flaring more or explosions on the ship taking place. Something to make it more obvious that youre not wasting your time. After all, in real life your effective hits wouldnt just do NOTHING… right? I mean i understand there is some visual damage right now but its just too weak to be useful.

Please refer to bottom left of the screenshot i posted. You will see current ship orientation and an arrow pointing to velocity. I hope that helps explain what i mean.

Well I think this is critical, because what we have right now might as well be the ICP, which has existed for a long time already. No offense intended.

2 Likes

Variety feedback post, mainly committed to quality of life in the form of a few UI changes and naming schemes and various small suggestions of tweaks and additional content. Though I do want to comment on this specific point brought up by mattk50.

  • Fixed and unique spinal mount capship weapons. Will touch briefly on an example or two at a later point of this post.

Missile UI stuff:

When locking-on it is too difficult to estimate when the lock-on will be completed. I recommend aping Freespace with a moving aspect locked indicator or something of similar nature.

https://my.mixtape.moe/bovfkd.webm

Estimating time to impact of a missile and determining the direction it is approaching from is not really tenable in an intense engagement. The easiest way I have determined is going third person camera and free looking. This doesn’t hold up in large battles where doing that along with fighting is too difficult to pull off and will just get you killed.

I recommend some sort of UI element that highlights the direction, and hopefully estimated (current) time to impact as well. Unfortunately I have no good suggestion for what this might look like. I spent some time mulling this over and referencing the space games of past, and I just cannot visualize any method that would get the job done and also work in the context of Infinity Battlecape’s huge battles. But I want to stress, some sort of way of visualizing the threat of missiles needs to occur, as indeed situational awareness is a serious problem as things stand now.

Reticle stuff:

I would like to see an alternate type of lead reticle for aiming weapons:

As a choice that can be set while playing with a hotkey to switch in real time between the lead reticle as it exists now and a lag reticle as shown in the .gif. The lag reticle system I personally believe is better as it offers better awareness of what the target is doing. Since you don’t aim at a UI element that is placed away from the ship. You instead place a UI element over the ship, same end result but yea you get a better focus on the target. But sometimes it is worse, as well if the target is at the edge of your view and some folks will prefer one or the other anyways so allowing real time switching makes everyone happy.

Weapon naming:

Current weapon names are too hard to parse at a glance during an intense fight, and knowing what they are requires either experimentation or reading outside of the game. I recommend using very dry and direct names, using no acronyms at all and also adding “EMP” to the names of Blasters to make it more clear they only do shield and subsystem damage and renaming the heavier of the two Machine Guns to “Autocannon”. Also adding “Turrret” to any weapon that is not a fixed mount. Examples such as for currently extant weapons.

  • Machine Gun
  • Machine Gun Turret
  • Autocannon
  • Autocannon Turret
  • EMP Blaster
  • EMP Blaster Turret
  • Heavy EMP Blaster
  • Heavy EMP Blaster Turret

I understand that such things would be hard to fit into the radial menu, but really it is too opaque right now with the current naming scheme of weapons.

Additional weapon type recommendations and changes to existing ones:

  • Change the basic smaller Machine Gun to have a higher rate of fire and lower damage per shot, assuming this is not a performance concern.
  • Change Torpedos to not require a lock to fire, I found this exceptionally confusing at first expecting them to have some level of guidance. I understand one can disable the safety lock to require no lock-on to fire but this just feels like redundant and opaque mechanics.
  • Add a basic spammable short-range unguided Rocket weapon that the Interceptor and perhaps the Bomber can use as an alternative choice to the basic missile. Literally just a saturation attack of inaccurate unguided weak rockets, to allow strike craft to do somewhat damaging strafing runs to capships and bases, and at close range nuke other fighters. Would also detonate with a small AOE explosion at max range.

https://my.mixtape.moe/semcru.webm

  • Add a stereotypical Flak Cannon as a large mount point defense weapon for capships and bases. Cannot fire without a target lock, when locked-on and fired at said target, it gets the time to target intercept point and sets a timer fuze on the round which then detonates for AOE damage when the timer expires or if it hits something directly. The first video I posted from Freespace 2 illustrates this concept well, though there really is nothing unique about this idea except requiring a lock-on to fire which also arms the timer fuze to make it less good at murdering vast swaths of fighters and missiles.
  • Add a different variant of Flak Cannon weapon that fits into small slots, so available to the Corvette and the small turrets on capships and bases. Would also require a lock-on to fire, and just like the the other AOE damage Flak concept would arm a timer fuze when fired. But when the timer expires it instead detonates the shell spraying a directional and conical burst of projectiles. No AOE damage at all, simply a projectile that splits into more projectiles at just the right moment a fixed distance from the intercept point figured out when fired. This is much less strong than a AOE damage flak weapon and thus seems more suitable to being used on the Corvette and as multiple smaller mounts on capships and bases.
  • Add a fixed spinal mount Railgun weapon for capships. High velocity, low rate of fire cannon that is fixed forwards with no traverse. Destroyer would get one on that projection on the front of its hull, Cruiser would get however many it takes to balance, and the Carrier would not get this weapon at all. This weapon could also possibly be “large+” turrets for bases to use.

Anyways, I understand new weapons are not the highest priority at the moment but the suggested ones here and other things talked about are from my experience with the game so far and such additional variety and tweaks are badly needed when time allows.

3 Likes

Yeah, striking that balance is the challenge.

We do already have a visual effect similar to ARMA’s puff of blood - it’s an orange glowy flash. The problem is that the orange glowy flash is only reasonably visible from “relatively” short distances and of course the distances and sizes of objects in Infinity Battlescape are anything but normal relative to other games.

We’ve tried unguided, it doesn’t work well due to the velocities and distances involved.

I pretty much agree with all of this part. Incoming missile is too vague, and there should be some system to tell a player how long or how far they have until impact. I think an arrow like in the screenshot I posted would be good (in my screenshot I posted the arrow is for a squad mate, but could easily be a missile incoming as well.)

While more choice is great, I dont think this is really critical to add during alpha. Its really more of a post release type addition to me. Also how would it work with the multiple types of weapons?

The rest of your post I do not feel fits the scope of the alpha version of the game, but thats just my opinion.

Yea of course, this was not all aimed at things that are needed soon and was stated as such. But at the same time, even the things not needed soon, are things I feel are needed to solve issues as I see them in the alpha. Assuming they happen, when they do if they do it would likely be during beta for many of them.

As far as the lag reticle, that would help shots hitting awareness since leading with that means you are looking at the ship, not a distance away from the ship. So in my opinion, this particular option sooner than later could not hurt and code wise is not exactly hard to add.

1 Like

The lag reticle won’t work in battlescape. The distances are far to great and since the reticle is dependent on the distance, vector and speed of the target it would be even more confusing all the time when the reticle goes out of the screen, which happens a lot during close fighting. It’s easier to just search for the lead indicator rather than estimating where it could be and hoping to have it show up IMO.
The distances between the indicator and the targeted ship are often to far apart. A lot of times you need to aim at the indicator when the ship isn’t even in view. That would make the lag indicator then useless.

Perhaps a playstyle difference between us then. As I use freelook and lock it in off-center directions oftentimes. So I will concede that, perhaps it would not be as useful for most as I would find it.

Sorry I forgot to reply to these point earlier…

Multiple reticles, same as the lead reticle system does.

That surprises me, but I will take your word for it. Really my primary idea for a spam rocket, is a much weaker torpedo weapon that the Interceptor and Bomber can use instead of missiles if desired. And hitting capships isn’t that hard with the torpedo so a rocket that is faster seemed workable to me.

Imho, you can end that debate right here and now. Strong feedback is never wrong.

When it comes to UI and it’s visibility then UX trumps realism every time.

Currently you do not loose your target indicator only while looking at the sun or an explosion, planets do it for me, and brighter sides of stations. It’s awful and IMO I should be able to choose a hot pink max saturation indicator that is visible freaking always.

2 Likes

I dont understand. Are you disagreeing or agreeing with me? You are truly the master of playing both sides of an argument!

This is basically how i feel, but hey its their vision for the game so… Im just trying to be helpful. I think they would sell more copies for sure though if the UX was as good as it could be.

2 Likes

BTW AI is fine and good, fix the missile spam and no one will have too much trouble with it.

Now one thing that popped in my mind just now, team colors. If we have only two teams then friendlies should always be green and enemies always be red. The way it is now i honestly ought myself mid firing on some poor friendly ship in the heat of action because our brains are wired for “red = bad, green = good”

It really starts to feel like a game now, awesome.
Some things I noticed while playing:

  • Warp acceleration feels a bit too slow, way slower than the previous manual warp allowed
  • Approaching a planet in warp without touching the throttle always ends in micro meteorite death for me, only when I press deceleration on approach for some time I don’t end up slamming into the planet
  • otherwise the automatic warp speeds work well, but acceleration is too slow and arriving at planets too fast
  • when arriving at planets and continuing to press deceleration at a point the automatic deceleration is faster than the manual input and pressing deceleration results in decelerating slower compared to the automatic speed.
  • cap ships and turreted ships need to be able to fire in a straight line (ignoring the automatic aiming), otherwise destroying installations becomes really difficult
  • OR modules on installations need their own targeting rectangle, and it would be nice to see their remaining health, or at least somehow be informed if the shots even do any damage, for example I am not really sure if normal bomber or interceptor shots even do damage
  • lot of turrets on installations float above them or are otherwise misplaced
  • the automatic warp engagement is annoying and somewhat useless
  • chaff is weird to use, pressing the chaff releases a chaff, but almost always the missiles continue to follow me, maybe it is meant that way but there is no clear indication if the countermeasures even work
  • I never differentiate between secondary and primary fire and end up holding both buttons anyway, it would be nice to group weapons together in weapons groups
  • it is nice that station/factory indicator icons now pop in when approaching a planet, but I think ship indicators should be switched off at larger distances, 1000 km away enemies should not be visible as icons IMO