TL;DR: The game has so many bugs your brain will melt. Wait until it gets patched a bit.
While I think the concept is fantastic, I think you guys would be better off holding off the game for now. I played it for some 20 something hours and holy heck... the bugs are insane and so bleeding numerous you will tear out your eye sockets and replace them with carving knives.
I'm not talking fun bugs like in DF which could be miscontrued as "features". No, we're talking ships will attempt to path through the sun and start bouncing off of it until you tell them to path another direction (I managed to overcome this later on by building ships so fast they flew THROUGH the suns). Jump drives literally do not work. They just don't. You cannot delete obsolete ship designs from your build list, so god help you if you like to design lots of ships (By the end of one of my games I had a ship build list that had over 100 entries that took an awfully long time to scroll through). You can't even update existing ship designs or replace existing ship designs. You can't update existing ships or even scuttle them. You cannot delete fleets unless ALL the ships in the fleet die, so god help you if you pressed f (create fleet) more than 5 times. You can't select a new leader for the fleets you already have. If you load a save, all your saved fleets, groups, icon pins, etc are all deleted (you can imagine how annoying this was on a 200+ solar system galaxy). There's no way to tell what on earth you are fighting other than to stare at the generic models (of which there are only 4 - 5); no enemy ship info, no enemy planet info, nothing. If you dock ships into a planet, they will get stuck when undocking.
Other more major annoyances include:
- Like any sane general, I have decent mixes of different kinds of units in each solar system. The problem with this is that it's nearly impossible to select specific groups of units. The drag box selector is very, very generous is selecting units (and planets and noncombatants) nowhere near the box. There's no "select this all of this type of unit" command in this game. And even worse, when you do select a group, the game won't tell you what is in that group! Imagine this with the normal scale of combat in this game, where there will be thousands of ships fighting and you can see the problem here. For example, if you have an extremely slow moving ship in that selected group, the entire frigging fleet will travel at that super slow speed. In normal games, this is mitigated by the fact that you can easily click on say... a picture of the unit in question and remove him from the group. Can't do that here. You have to find that ship manually. Again, with thousands of ships, all of which look the same 4 - 5 models... It's a major pain. I eventually gave up and comprised every single thing I had with just one kind of ship. If this was the intent of the game... well... =|
- There are literally no instructions of any sort. The tutorial is really sparse. The wiki is barely even a wiki. I spent the entire time learning the game from my friend who followed it from beta. Until now I barely understand 70% of the game's terminology. This is compounded by the fact that you'll very often stumble across game commands that literally don't work or commands that should be there but aren't.
- It feels like the game isn't even complete. It's like they released a beta. There's only one kind of galaxy. There's no races, no avatars, no pictures, no voices, only those 4 - 5 ship models, a patheticly small tech tree, a very very basic game generator (how many stars + how many ai), piss poor AI, a small set of weapons / ship parts to choose from, etc etc etc. I could continue, but I think the point has been made.
- The interface. Oh god... the interface... It's so hard to do anything! I normally wouldn't be so pissed over longwinded ways to execute commands but my god, when you expect me to make several thousand ships over 100 solar systems, I don't want to get carpal tunnel from all the scrolling and clicking!
- Good luck getting a solid multiplayer game together. It's desync heaven.
There's literally hundreds of these kinds of bugs that eventually drove me completely off of it.
I mean, I definitely admire the game when it works. It's fun to see your deviously designed ships tear your opponent a new sphincter, or the swarms of size 0.25 fighters crush a size 3600 STAR ship (It's the size of a star and I fell off my seat when I saw it approach). I love the cute planetary and unit AI when they work as they exhibit interesting traits. The game is very successful at making you feel insignificant at the size of its grandness but once you get bite past the thin layer of frosting, you'll discover it's full of fruitcake. Hopefully they'll live up to their promise to put in most of the features later on but for now, I cannot with a straight face recommend this to anyone.
Author
Topic: Star Ruler: Thats no Moon! (Read 175119 times)