Been playing this on and off this month. I've really enjoyed my time with the game, you've done a great job with it: being mostly faithful to an all-time elegant design and adding your own flavor in places. Portraying the Klackon hive-mind as a singular "I" was especially a nice touch (your artist also did a great job with their spy).
Some beta notes follow. Sorry for not posting these on Reddit as I don't use the site:
0) Most important thing first. The AI doesn't feel "bloodthirsty" enough, and doesn't really do warfare effectively. Usually their war declarations result in little more than a small skirmisher fleet entering 1 or 2 star systems and then getting repelled (despite possibly having a significant fleet strength advantage), or managing to conquer the star system they're interested in. After that it's Phony War all the way so they make no further attempts to gain systems. Now, due to the defensive nature of midgame MOO1, this may be a fully reasonable decision but the AI seems REALLY passive after its first attack and REALLY unwilling to press any advantages it might have. I can leave a front very lightly guarded against someone I'm in war with to attend some other war declaration elsewhere and still the AI makes no attempts to advance or capture any systems.
This seems to apply to AI-AI conflicts as well. The systems different races colonize tend to stay with their owners even though they might be at war for a century. At most, a few systems might change hands.
There was one exception to this when the expansion phase was over everywhere and Meklars on Hardest difficulty made a series of concerted efforts to conquer my bridgehead planet between our core worlds. They actually succeeded while I mopped up a few of their fringe planets and we had many turns of glorious galactic scale warfare going on. Then they won a Council victory and I had no interest in trying out the Final War scenario since you had released a new version of the JAR. So no idea if Meklars might have extended their warring efforts after they secured their initial objective.
1) The AI has a tendency to create functionally identical ships with 2 separate designs. Hard to see any purpose for this:
2) The AI also has a tendency to scrap <90% of its fleet strength at once. The Silicoid in this screenshot were not warring with anyone. They just got bored with their designs apparently:
3) The distance estimator map mode should round decimals upwards. I had this situation occur where a 4,0 ly star required the 5 parsec fuel cell technology:
4) I think MOO1 didn't have these either but how about more fleet selection options when deploying? I might want to split my 1200 small ships to 2 fleets, for example, and the only way to do this is to click-click-click 1-increment arrows. My suggestions would be a "select half" option and a 10-ship increment with right-click, or something similar.
5) The ambassador texts seem occasionally mixing up who's speaking to whom. When accepting a trade pact, the alien ambassador says something like "The [player civ] eagerly await the goods from [alien civ]"
6) It's odd to be in a war with someone, have the relations jump up to affable+ due to bombing a shared enemy, and have an audience with their ambassador who refers to me as a dear friend etc. yet refuses to sign a peace treaty. Ambassadors from warring races should give a neutral-at-best greeting.
7) The ECO slider doesn't seem to follow the CLEAN level quite right. In the early game when factories are being built, the amount required to keep the planet CLEAN usually decreases as the factory capacity is filled but the slider keeps missing this. I think earlier versions didn't have this issue.
8) Missiles could show a similar MISS text as the beams do, if none of them hit.
9) Anti-matter torpedoes are being shot every turn.
10) If all 6 ship slots are full, I'd still like to have the option to start designing a new ship to see what I can fit in with the current tech without having to scrap an existing ship.
11) Why keep the inconsequential Size & Power visible in the ship designer main view and keep the most important Space attribute hidden in the item selection menus? Do the Size & Power even have any effect in ship cost or anything?
Thanks Ray, and Merry Christmas!
