DirtyDog

Hey, thanks for the reply ScareYa :). I hadn't noticed that link, I do appreciate you pointing it out. I'm not frustrated by the lack of replies...far from expecting responses or changes in the game, Im just happy if one of my posts is read by even a junior designer who thinks about what I've written. I think this this game has amazing potential that is unrealized and would like it to be better, as it seems like the kind of game I could happily lose hours to. I have a lot of respect for the products that BIS puts out and am contributing my time for free...if they don't want to take advantage of that, well it's everyone's loss I guess! ;) Having been on both sides of a beta, I know that it's often not possible to respond to even those comments you agree with, so I'd hardly expect designers in here going "oh good idea we'll DO that!", hehe. Thanks again for your time and the info ScareYa!

The current state of Quad AA is not very fun, for a couple of reasons: 1. The camera shake when firing is annoying; combine the shake with the hard-to-predict dodging of the enemy Mantas and the lack of feedback on if you are hitting or not, and it's just not as satisfying or fun an experience shooting those guys down as it could be. I'll just let the AI do it (after moving the unit into the right spot), when at just about everything else I'm substantially better at killing than the AI. If the idea is to make players shoot bursts, perhaps a faster overheat or only adding the camera shake after an extended burst would be better. 2. The fact that the guns *almost* traverse down low enough to engage enemy ground units is weak. It's a lot of fun to use on ground units but I hate having to find a good spot on the terrain to angle the guns down that extra 10 degrees that allows me to annihilate them. If these guns are designed to NOT be allowed to engage ground units at all, there are better solutions: make the rounds only good against air units (no AP capabilities), turn them into something that requires locking on to an aircraft to fire, or something else that isn't just a mild frustration to using them but rather outright denies the ability. As it is, I'll ALWAYS be tempted to roll it ashore and park it on a hill to get them to come to me, as it's one of the few starting ground units I have that's capable against both ground AND air threats (and I don't like waiting for the AI to catch up to me when I go driving, hehe). -dirtydog

Currently, destroying enemy units is somewhat unrewarding. By destroying them you DO have less active threats to fight against and this is the only thing that's stopping you from rolling right into their base and capturing it -- but this formula's a little long in the tooth and becomes slightly tedious after a short while. What if you could create more incentive to destroy enemy units and reward players for doing so -- and at the same time create more attachment to a specific unit, increasing it's value to the player emotionally even if it doesn't affect the game balance? 1- Proposal: allow units to gain veterancy. By killing enemy units, your specific units can acquire prestige, skill, valor, rank, whatever you want to call it -- a measure of how much effective combat experience they have. You could progress a unit through newbie rank, to skilled, through veteran, and maybe in exceptional cases, heroic status. What are the rewards? Well, offering cool unit rank insignias would be cheap to do -- provide an icon next to their number on their "stat card" on the carrier. Provide a little drum roll and "level-up" notification with some text when the vehicle levels to let the player know he's doing a great job. On the list of lower priority (more expensive) things to do, perhaps the unit AI would get better at aiming and dealing damage (or moving!) when the player isn't directly controlling it. Maybe there's some other perks, like a fire extinguisher that puts out fires (i.e. repairs that last 10% of your hit points back up to 20% if undamaged for a period of time), or maybe there's nothing besides the icon and the notification. Might be a cheap and fun reward to be able to "name" heroic units -- that could be an ultimate reward. This could increase player attachment to units, and make them play more carefully with some of their resources. You might think twice about sending your entire squad of walruses in on a risky objective if one of them was of heroic status -- don't want to lose "The Crusher" (my named unit...) 2- Proposal: A completely different alternative could be to cause enemy units to drop a small bit of health, ammo, or energy. Collecting pickups for killing enemies is addictive and fun -- if it seems "outside the fiction" (I'd argue the fiction is slightly tenuous already, but whatever :) ) perhaps vehicle corpses could be "Scavenged" for small rewards. This wouldn't put off the eventual return to the carrier for resupply and refit, but it could delay that long (usually boring) process. Thanks for taking the time to read this. I know I'm not an expert on your game, and have no doubt that you've got a long list of features you want to see developed yourselves. :D

Great post, sums up a lot of the same feelings I have about the game. There are some awesome moments in the game right now, but they are too few and verrrrry far in between -- some of your proposals would help fix this. I too love the idea of a tech tree, and also of different unit types. Not to get too crazy here, but Warzone 2100 had *the* best unit configuration mechanics I've ever seen, and parts of this game reminded me of that...give me a couple of more chassis for the Walrus and Manta (what about a Seal and a Stingray? :p) and let me research my way up the tech tree and *BOOM*! Dramatically extended gameplay. There was only one point I really found myself in disagreement with you -- I personally like the small numbers of units, and think making a 90+ unit raid on an island the size of the existing ones would be overly chaotic and actually LESS fun than I have managing my expeditionary unit of walruses and mantas manually. That's just opinion though, and I'm sure that what you describe could be fun too :) Cheers, dirtydog

severity: low reproducibility: 3 of 3 workaround: n/a On occasions I've heard the bird ambient sounds (twitters, cheaps, squawks, etc) play inappropriately when driving around in a Walrus: on a frozen waste of an island where it was clear there would be no birds alive (or if they were, they'd be too cold to sing about it) and at night. I accept that this could be an alien planet with birds that sing at night (or in the freezing cold I guess), but night seems a more appropriate time for an insect ambience (buzzing, clicking, etc). -dirtydog

suggestion -- improve the user experience for using the shell with the walrus I enjoy using the Walrus loaded out with the Shell (cannon). However, most of the time the enemy cannons are engaging me from a distance that requires that I aim very high up to hit back at them. When I do this, the camera placement is such that the physical model of the gun is directly over my target, making it very difficult to observe the trajectory and effect of my shells. If I want to see what the result of the shot was, I have to aim back down to depress the gun model low enough to see if I hit the target -- which causes me to lose my estimated point of aim, making it much harder to bracket shots and walk fire onto the target. I suggest that the camera placement be moved to prevent the gun from occluding the target when firing at distant targets with the Shell. Also, a HUGE improvement would be horizontal bar attached to a vertical line descending from the reticule. They don't have to correspond to an actual range or distance, just the fact that I can use these bars to range targets would help a lot. Here's some bad ascii art to illustrate what I mean :) (crosshair in center of screen is represented at top with the "+") (+) -|- -|- -|- -|- The point of these bars is, once I learn at what range the shell lands in game when I put one of the bars on the target, it makes it easier to acquire new targets at the same range, as I have a persistence aiming point. -dirtydog

severity: medium reproducibility: 5 of 5 workaround: yes If the player gets the carrier very far up an inlet and then tries to enter timewarp, the carrier will get stuck and you can apparently be in time warp for a very, very long time. I haven't tested how long, but after a number of minutes my carrier was still in the exact spot I left it in at the starting island with time warp engaged. I was able to reproduce this several other times, and it isn't necessary to "beach" the ship on shore; simply putting the ship into a position where it would have to "back and fill" or "k turn" to get out would cause this bug. (the carrier would have to back up turning, move forward turning, back up turning, move forward turning etc. to avoid hitting the land) :) workaround: move carrier to more open waters before engaging time warp suggested resolution: fake pathfinding to simply move time warping ships clear of land. barring that, actually get it to pathfind correctly in the small constraints of the inlets. if that's too expensive or time intensive, refuse to go into time warp when "too close to land" - dirtydog