General feel for the game and feedback

Hey everyone,

First off I'll start by saying I've absolutely loved playing the game this week and I'm truly thankful for the time and effort you've put in to making a very nice RTS with some original concepts. The market system is fantastic.

I've played around 30 hours now and feel I have a good enough grip of the game to give some reasonable feedback for you.

The main downside I'm finding now is game play at the later stage between two players who have a good idea of how the game works. There is very little you can do to reverse the inevitable defeat and it tails off in about 10-15mins of off world market launches. As long as the player uses goon squads nothing really can be done by the opponent. Another idea to make the end section of the game more variable is to add a level 6 with one claim and with level 6 the ability to build a tourist hotel. I would also add one randomly placed "land mark e.g Olympus Mons/ Valles Marineris per map with the tourist hotel revenue correlated to the distance from it. That way at least if you are lagging behind someone slightly on off world market battles you can risk it all to go after the tourist hotel and level 6. I think balanced correctly it would work well?

Also a second point is that a good player will ALWAYS judge what and where to play as by looking at the colony city at the start. If it's glass you should go robotic, chemicals scavenger etc etc. I feel that the colony city needs more random events or influence by the players. I think a great way to deal with this is maybe through the black market to sabotage the colony or to "donate" a module of choice to them. You could also add natural disasters that take out some of the modules.

Overall I couldn't think of a better concept for a game but without addressing some of the later game stage game play the playing experience (at least for me) kind of plateaus after about 25 hours of play.

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Also a second point is that a good player will ALWAYS judge what and where to play as by looking at the colony city at the start. If it's glass you should go robotic, chemicals scavenger etc etc.

I don't think you can distill it to a binary choice. If the colony is producing chemicals or electronics of course carbon will be in demand at some point. That doesn't mean it's an automatic scavenger found. Especially with random prices in the next beta version coming out (which you most likely haven't seen yet) there is a lot of variability yet to come with founding decisions and HQ types.

Let's stick with the general assertion from above though. You're correct that you should always look at the colony at the start. In fact it's the first thing I do. Your decision to go robotic if the colony is producing glass may not necessarily be the most efficient every time. Sure you will get cheaper upgrades because you don't need glass but someone else may look at that situation and wish to go scientific so they can overproduce glass and take advantage of the high prices with minimal resource input. Someone else may go expansive knowing that all their opponents are going robotic and going to produce glass which will lower the price and invalidate the increased glass cost.

The beauty of this game is that you can look at the same problem different ways and both of you may be correct.

Regarding your point on the inevitability of the end game there are in fact a lot of things you can do late game to change the course. Sometimes you can have one player that's so focused on getting 2 offworlds up that they miss the opportunity to invest in stock and buy other people out which pays dividends. Amassing the correct players as subsidiaries can be more powerful than offworlds in many cases. Things like slowdown strikes can penetrate through goon squads and delay offworld launches. Throwing low priced black market items to take out their goon squad (circuit overload and NV are common) eventually makes goon squads prohibitively expensive to buy. Finally if you're down to just you and one other player building a hacker array and hacking something the other player isn't producing (or can't produce effectively) can give you an edge to make up ground.

Hope this helps!

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