StationmasterDev I've been away from this game for a while and just finished a playthrough. I know you always get problems and criticisms so I thought I'd highlight some of my impressions on the changes you've made over the past year.
- The game, overall, is much more stable than a year ago. Even with 600 slaves, 500 tourists, and a very large 'station' my computer was pretty much able to keep up. I did notice minor stuttering, likely to do with auto-saves or something i/o intensive like that.
- Related to this, path-finding seems to be much improved. In my last playthough I had to eliminate all walking locations so slaves/tourists had to "teleport" from place to place. 600 slaves and 500 tourists walking around would have been impossible but now, especially with the 'icon' representations at higher zooms, it's much easier!
- Slave models are 1000x more attractive. I know this is subjective, and never finished, but kudos on good work
- Building is sooooooooo much easier! No more carpal tunnel from a gazillion clicks. Being able to click, hold, and drag out 20 hotel rooms or spa pools is a dream.
- Ctrl-Shift clicking on ship selection in the galaxy dream is also a huge savings on carpal tunnel!
- All of the arena events work now! I can actually watch the race, fights, and xeno deaths. Wow!
- I was initially annoyed with having to research stuff, but it's an excellent improvement in game-play! It really highlights the benefit of training slaves with intelligence.
- The UI, especially icons, layout, etc has seen much improvement. I seems much simpler to navigate than old (i.e. 0.19) builds.
- Diplomacy is actually functional! No more 'stealing' a foreign leader in the first 10 minutes of gameplay. Now I can actually interact with them.
- Decorations are a nice touch. Adds some flavour to the game and makes the hallways and rooms less sterile!
So kudos on a lot of really good work over the past year. The game is much more playable and enjoyable!
Given the improvement in carpal tunnel, I did have some suggestions, when time permits:
- As has been mentioned elsewhere, the ability to modify slaves beyond just the 'job' on the slave screen would be helpful. I did encounter the old bug with needing to click 'previous' and the back to 'next' to keep the screen from freezing up when moving between slaves.
- Please add the ability to move between planets on the management screen without having to exit to the main list every time. When I'm managing governance of a planet (especially after taking over a system and having many to manage at once) it'd be nice to be able to click 'next' after finishing one to set everything up on the next one. This is especially true when I'm trying to set up proxies and whatnot.
- It seemed like many of the events I'd seen in the past weren't available. Perhaps this is a temporary glitch but I wasn't able to sneak out and capture people in distress or camping or whatever was available before. How is a psychopathic sociopath slave owner supposed to get his kicks if he can't sneak away from time to time and reconnect with nature?
- I don't know if it's possible given the table you're using in unity, but I wonder if there's a way to set up one column in the slave and planet tables with shaded pixels or single letters/symbols representing specific choices (i.e. clothing, drugs, etc for slaves, policies/improvements for planets). Put a legend down below and at a glance I can see which planet or slave needs attention. I'm sure I'm not explaining it correctly, but if I open my savegame in excel I can easily see all of the data and sort it by what I'm looking for.
- An alternative might be a button for an 'expanded' management screen that I could scroll horizontally left and right that had all of the slave or planet's options contained in it.
Anyway, this has gotten too long. But thanks again for all your work. It's really showing and the game is much more fun!
