Eurgiga

Boss Swoks III is named for this Imgur post: https://imgur.com/gallery/Swoks

Small craft currently come in two flavors: Fighters and Cargo Shuttles. I suggest adding a third type which can transfer crewmembers between ships. If this was coupled with an option to automatically transfer crew between ships with hangarbays (along with some knobs to tweak this behavior) it could do a lot to help when managing large fleets. More than once I've found myself looking back at one of my fleet ships and wondering why its hull is damaged. I'll hop over and find it's in need of command crew (sergeants and whatnot) because it manufactured a couple of fighters or some crew leveled up or whatever and now my engineers are on strike because they're not getting flogged enough I guess. I'll fly my command ship over and shuffle a few of the command crew over, maybe repair the ship if I feel I really need to. If Crew Shuttles were a thing my command ship could've shuttled over the needed crew long ago and I wouldn't be wasting time or resources now. Or there was that one every single time I updated the turret layout on a vessel and had to shuffle gunners, miners, sergeants, etc. around. I'd have given my left wingnut to have my ships shuffle everyone around on their own instead of trudging over and adding six miners here, three gunners there. Crew Shuttles would not remain in the hangarbay of the ship receiving the crew. For simplicity's sake it could simply touch a hangar on the target vessel, transfer the crew and return home. Leaving them in the receiving hangarbay would mean you'd end up with a hangar full of Crew Shuttles every time you built a ship with a hangarbay from a blueprint and would be stuck shuffling them around for ten minutes. The less we have to micromanage shuttles, the better. A few suggestions for the 'knobs' to allow players to define the behavior of this crew transfer: Each vessel could really use Ship-level sliders to set the per centage of each crew type you want that ship to keep, relative to the performance rating of that crew type's associated function. So if we were to set the slider for Engineers to 130%, the ship will not send out an engineer if doing so would drop the ship's Engineering performance below 130%. Crew in excess of the slider per centage are considered excess and can be sent to a fleet ship requesting crew. Include a job-level fill box where players may manually enter a per centage, as well as a ship-level fill box to set all jobs to the per centage entered. These sliders and fill boxes would be handy, for example, if you want to pull all excess crew to a single ship or station with a shipwide value of 10,000, or if you want to empty a vessel by setting it to 0, or for several other uses I won't prattle on about. A few on/off toggles would be very useful as well: 1. A toggle to let us pick between sending the highest level crewman available for the job and sending the lowest level available. 2. A toggle to allow sending untrained crew. 3. A toggle to let us pick between sending untrained crew before or after trained crew. 4. A ship-level toggle to allow/disallow crew sharing with fleet ships. 5. A fleet-level setting with three options: Crew Shuttles On (Ship Level), Crew Shuttles Off, and Crew Shuttles On (Override Ship Level). Finally, an additional consideration: The mechanics required for Crew Shuttles are quite similar to some of the mechanics one might see with boarding parties, a planned feature. It may be that code created for that system (boarding craft, anyone?) can be cribbed from to make this, if not super time-efficient, at least not so much of an undertaking as to be unfeasible.

I feel Captains have unexplored potential. Would it be possible to treat Captains more like "heroes", where each Captain is unique? Having their own stats, personalities and so forth would be far more interesting than "Here is a captain for your spaceship". I'm sure other ideas like upgrades and equipment can be bounced off this as well. I'd quite like to see a ship captained by a Captain with the "Cowardly" trait turn tail and run from pirates, for example. Thoughts?

Seconded. The shield shimmer is goddamn annoying when I'm trying to build.

Most bulletin boards in any given system are empty. You are in communications range of all stations in the system at all times. Why would these stations not keep a unified bulletin board for the sake of practicality? Why does the game not keep one for the sake of practicality? Would be a lot less time wasted.

The group turret selection feature (pressing 1-0 to select the corresponding assigned turret group) could be improved by allowing us to either set custom icons or short names for our groups. As it stands, it's a little hard to remember which of my four groups of turrets is which, as they all sort of look the same after a while.

Like it says in the title. It's silly that my mining turret crew won't scoot their butts over to the salvaging turrets when I'm not mining.

It would benefit the game to add galaxy generation options in an easily accessible manner. I will refer you to the world generator of Don't Starve: This worldgen allowed for tweaking of a vast number of variables to allow for highly customized world generation. Players could adjust the map to fit their playstyle- less gathering, more exploring, higher danger, more competition for resources, so on. By allowing players a high degree of control over their galaxy generation, I think you could broaden the game's appeal on the basis that people will customize the game how they like it and therefore be more likely to like the resulting generated galaxy. Given the game's early state and dependence on reviews both casual and professional, options to allow players to customize their experience to please themselves might not be a bad inclusion.

Accidentally put this in Gen Discussion when it should be in Suggestions and I can't delete it. Can a moderator move this thread please? Thank you.

Systems feel a little small at the moment. I know this is alpha, but sometime down the line I'd like to see systems get more expansive and include more than a dusting of gravel and some stations. It takes about twenty minutes to mine out a sector with a small mining fleet, after that the vast majority of sectors are simply dead, with nothing of interest. For a singleplayer game this isn't bad, but on multiplayer it requires the usual gamut of 'fixes' (such as respawning resources). I hope to see systems become much larger in the future and include truly massive asteroids, mineable and not, such that exhausting a system of resources completely would require days, not minutes. As-is, the small size of systems is one of the only turn-offs about the game for me.

Earlier posters are correct in asserting that stopping a ship is a pain in the ass well beyond what it should be. It would be far simpler to just give us an "all stop" button that automatically rotates your ship to the reverse vector and stops you rather than the mess of "guess, decelerate, realign, guess, decelerate, realign, guess, decelerate, realign" we have at the moment.

It's also realistic that they'd keep working while I'm away and not sit on their space butts. If they stop working but I keep paying the "realism" is already broken in a manner detrimental to Fun.

Simple enough concept. If the sectors are not loaded, the ships are not doing anything, including mining. If they're not going to pay for themselves while I'm away, why should I pay them?

When you zoom out far enough the view goes into a third-person "command mode" where you can individually issue move orders to your controlled vessels. I believe this mode has a great deal of untapped potential and would benefit from the following improvements: 1. Fleet selection commands such as "Select all owned ships", "Select all damaged ships", "Select all carriers", hotkeyed fleets, etc, as well as click-drag select (if it's not in already) to allow for issuing commands on a fleet scale rather than an individual scale. 2. Fleet action commands, like "Mine", "Salvage", "Repair", "Launch/Recover Fighters", "Clear Asteroids", etc. 3. Fleet formation commands such as "Wall", "X", "Wedge", so that we may command our fleets effectively rather than the current state of "Everyone bum-rushes the next target the moment they can". Secondly, I believe the star map could benefit from the ability to move your owned ships from sector to sector via remote orders. As it is it's something of a pain to gather up a fleet that's been spread out over a few systems or to muster a new one from disparate elements. Thoughts, opinions, suggestions please!