Subset Games Forum

So far I have sunk 26 hours into this awesome game. But one thing that hurts my enjoyment is how repetitive the controls are. Almost everything is mouse driven and there are a lot of basic things you need to do before every jump. We don't have any control shortcuts so this turns into a grind that makes me want to stop playing.

Here are some improvements you could make:

Hangar Screen:
- Add two buttons to the hangar screen. One is "randomize" which generates a new set of crew names. The other is "previous" which loads the names and genders you used the last time you played with this ship. (hitting previous also changes the name of the ship as well)
- Hitting the rename button blanks out the existing name so that you don't have to clear it with backspace first. This applies to both ships and crew. VERY IRRITATING otherwise!

Jump Screen:
- When you mouse over any system on the map, the game should draw connecting lines showing which other systems connect to this one. We need this VERY BADLY because without it we can't accurately plan the path we will use to navigate the map. More than once I have lost a game by getting stuck in a dead end.

In-game Interface:
- I need the ability to reorganize the order of crewmembers. This can be drag and drop the same way you can shift weapons and drones around.
- If you drag one crewmember's icon beside another one, it links the two of them together. Now clicking on this button will select both of them. You can link together 4 crew this way.
- Add "duty stations" to a game. A duty station is a room on the ship a crewman is assigned to. The interface would have a button on it called "man stations", and when you press it all crew would return to a specific room on the ship. To assign crew you simply drag and drop their icon out of the list and onto any room of the ship. This would greatly speed up "pre-jump" procedures.
- Add a "heal crew" button to the interface. When pressed wounded crewmen move to the medbay, and once healed will return to wherever they came from. If the medbay is full they will wait outside. Again, speeding up pre-jump procedures.

Add the ability to assign "officer" status to crew. There are 4 positions, Helmsman, Weapons Officer, Shield Control and Chief Engineer. This has a couple effects:
- There would be a second "man stations" button that controls officers only.
- When an officer enters the room he is assigned to, he will automatically replace anyone who is already manning the console in that room. This prevents you from having to yank the crewman off that station by telling them to move to another room. Very irritating.
- Officers are less likely to die on away missions.

- When a missile based weapon is out of ammunition the box will stay greyed out on the weapons bar. This can be very confusing in the middle of a fight, so superimpose a big red NO AMMUNITION text over that box. Please consider adding a sound cue as well.
- Allow weapons to be autofired individually.

- Please add a PAUSE button up by the JUMP and SHIP buttons. This would allow people to play with mouse controls alone without need for a spacebar. (you would need to do this anyway if you plan to port to tablets)

Stats and Achievements screen:
- Give us more detailed information about each playthrough instead of only showing the top scores and highlights.

Credits Screen:
- Please add a fast forward, pause and rewind button! The list of kickstarter donors alone is gigantic and takes too long to scroll though.

Misc:
- When you end combat with an attack drone inside your ship, the drone should be salvaged for parts instead of forcing your crew to destroy it.
- When a boarding action is successful immediately recall all crewmembers off the enemy ship instead of forcing the player to manually teleport them back.
- Instead of the "officer" system I described earlier. When multiple crew are in a room that can be manned. Have the crew with the HIGHEST skill rating automatically take the controls.

Bugs!:
- The game's framerate is uncapped! This causes all sorts of problems. For me my video card races out of control and renders the game at a ridiculous FPS. (I can tell this is happening because the card will make a screeching sound) If I force vsync on using GPU settings the problem goes away, but the game's initial loading screen is OVER 10X slower! Some of my friends have the opposite problem, the game loads instantly but slows to a crawl once the game begins, UNLESS they turn vsync on.

The game needs to have a vsync option. Or heck you could just turn it on permanently, it's not like anyone is having trouble rendering it at 60fps anyway.

====

Anyhow hope you found these suggestions useful. I greatly enjoy the game as it is, but having some of the improvements listed would help me enjoy it even more.

+1 for interface improvements, but I think some of OP's suggestions are a little over the top. Just keyboard shortcuts for selecting crewmembers (F1 through F7 for example) would mean a lot, or even RTS-style control groups.

+1 for jump planner. Desperately needed.

And if I may add a thing, please make autofire on a per-weapon basis. For example I'd like to keep an ion on autofire (fast recharge, annoying to retarget) while selecting specific targets for slower weapons.

Some of the crew managing stuff I mentioned is kinda complex, but I was thinking about it from a mouse/touch driven perspective where you have limited buttons. Plain old control groups would be fantastic though.

Maybe QWER-ASDF for crew 1-8. Or for the lefties among us. 456+ 123enter on the numpad with 0 performing as pause.

Some other stuff:

- Increase oxygen generation speed when the ship is in no danger. If you happen to vent the entire ship you can just wait a couple minutes for the oxygen levels to rise again. But that's boring and a waste of player time!
- Allow us to send hull repair drones to fix the enemy ship. Why would you want to do this? Well for instance you could fix up a burning ship to allow your crew to board it without fear of it exploding at any moment because of fire damage.

Something my friend mentioned to me was that the reason we can't rename crewmembers other than the starting set is because having your name added to the game was a kickstarter reward. Is this true?

I don't mean to be selfish when I say this. But when I look at the page for the all-time crew records, I want to see the names that I come up with. Not the name of some random guys WoW toon or a clan-tagged name straight out of Counterstrike. Does that seem fair?

I know its a feature designed to be a reward for some people... but I paid for the game too. Just sayin.

Back to interface suggestions. I think I discovered the DUMBEST way to lose a game. I was on the last level and I accidentally hit the WAIT button while trying to close the jump menu.

Now, I'm certainly not going to make the same mistake twice. But the WAIT button is gigantic! Why do you need to make it so big? And being on the last level there should be an "are you sure" message if you click it because it has a profound effect on the last level.

Found a bug! If a crewman is attacking a door, using the teleporters on that room will not pull them out of it. Even when the boarding action is complete and there are no enemies left.

I'm in the same boat at you; I sunk crazy hours into this game over the weekend. Seems Roguelikes appeal to me more than any other game type. I'd highly recommend Spelunky.

My 2c on your suggestions.

Ideas that get a +1:
-Randomize names
Would be fun to just mash the button until you like what comes up. I almost always custom name my chars but I could picture using a randomizer sometime.

-Hitting rename makes it blank
Great suggestion. I'd also suggest allowing us to click directly on the names to do the Rename function as well. It always felt more natural to try to rename that way for me. Honestly they might even be able to avoid the two buttons by just allowing us to click on the name for rename, and the icon for the gender swap.

-Duty Stations
Amen. This would be huge. Kinda like the Close All Doors, this would just save a lot of tedious clicking.

-NO AMMO overlay
Yeah, this would be a great addition, but the missile launchers should still be greyed out and their power put back into other systems.

-Pause Button
No brainer here, though it's nice not having the additional clutter.

-Individual Autofire
Would be nice, but the micro required to manage auto fire isn't hard, so I'd say low priority.

-Higher Skilled Crew Member takes over that Station
It's really annoying and immersion breaking to have to make a less-skilled crew member leave the room so the actual skilled Weapons Guy will use that station, for example.

-Stats Expansion
Yeah, there's so much more that could be shown, that we'd love to see. Maybe a graph over time that shows Ship Hull level, fuel, missile and scrap counts. A list of upgrades purchased, with the jump number at which they were bought, e.g. (Jump 5: Drone Systems, Jump 8: Repair Drone). We'd drool over that stuff, especially if the High Scores would show it when clicked on.

-Credits FF and Rewind
Sure, but lowest priority possible


Ideas I'd tweak:
-Remember names
The game seems to remember the names when you Restart I believe, but yeah, if you quit and start anew you have to do it manually again.

It might be better to have some 'crew lists'. Maybe allow us three Crews; that way I could put in three different groups of friends / family and just pick one quickly. You could have a Pick Crew button that, when pressed, changes to Crew 1 and changes all the names / genders with it. If you change a crew member then, it's saved into that Crew 1. Press the button again and Crew 2 comes up, then Crew 3, then Crew 1. This would play well with the Randomize button mentioned above, which, when pressed, would set this button back to Pick Crew.

-Jump Screen
I actually like the system the way it is now, but would love it if this see-the-plot-paths functionality was added with the first upgrade of Sensors or the Helm. I know I rarely use the Helm upgrade right now, and only ever use the Sensors if I'm going for a kill-bio-but-save-the-ship build.


Ideas I'd argue against:
-Reorganizing Crew Members
The only value I see would be to keep a mental list of 'helm is first, shields second, weapons 3rd' etc. It would be nice but there are way better ideas to implement first, so I'd say this should be a super low priority.

-Link Crew Members
I see the intention (quickly sending the Boarding team to the Teles or the Repairs to fix), but I think the implementation would cause problems and it's too low priority.

-Heal Crew Button
Too complicated to implement imo, there's bigger priorities, and the micromanagement for healing up is frankly worthwhile for gameplay.

-Officers
Not needed, as the 'better Skilled crew in the same room takes over the station' makes it obsolete, and it's not worth the additional hud items and button.

-Auto-return teleported crew members
No way imo. What if you don't have the power to return them? And besides, they're on a burning ship about to explode, even with all the enemies dead it's still a risk for you to get them out in time.

I'll add one suggestion, not sure if it's on this thread yet:

LINKED WEAPONS.
The lack of this feature makes the auto-fire button useless, since weapons with different recharge times get out of sync and must be manually fired together to overcome shields and actually do damage to shielded ships.

Amazing compilation of tweaks. I have stubbed my toe in each and every of these figurative table legs, and this would go a long way to correct a lot of the tedium that comes from dying and restarting all the time.

Not too sure about officers, though; and I'm a bit skeptic about the "man stations" button. Yeah, I could have a use for it, but micromanaging each single crewmember is no that inconvenient and helps the player to stay caware of every little thing on the ship. Also, you can select crewmembers at once dragging a box over them, so that crewmember "link" would be the only thing I'd drop off this otherwise completely awesome list.

Thanks for the feedback!

StixNStonz wrote:-Duty Stations
Amen. This would be huge. Kinda like the Close All Doors, this would just save a lot of tedious clicking.

YES! Tedious repetitive clicking is the ONLY problem I have with the game. (aside from actual bugs). If we were supposed to micromanage every damn thing then the close-all-doors button wouldn't exist right? It's designed specifically to be a handy shortcut, we just don't have enough of them.

StixNStonz wrote:-Higher Skilled Crew Member takes over that Station
It's really annoying and immersion breaking to have to make a less-skilled crew member leave the room so the actual skilled Weapons Guy will use that station, for example.

StixNStonz wrote:-Jump Screen
I actually like the system the way it is now, but would love it if this see-the-plot-paths functionality was added with the first upgrade of Sensors or the Helm. I know I rarely use the Helm upgrade right now, and only ever use the Sensors if I'm going for a kill-bio-but-save-the-ship build.

Now that you mention it, I never though of making it part of sensors or the Helm. How about this:

- Helm level 1: No navigation help
- Helm level 2: Show next two jump connections. IE it would show all possible two-step jumps from current system
- Helm level 3: Same as above, but you can mouse over any system to show it's jump connections

Would something like that work? The reason I suggest this is that NO ONE ever buys upgraded Helm just for the autododge. I mean if your pilot has to the leave the controls for ANY reason the shit has already hit the fan in some fashion. So this would make it MUCH more attractive to sink points into Helm, especially given the high cost of level 3.

StixNStonz wrote:-Pause Button
No brainer here, though it's nice not having the additional clutter.

I just thought of a way to take the idea one step further. The game is almost completely mouse driven. But not all of the mouse buttons are used. So how about:

Mousewheel Scroll Up: Select next weapon
Mousewheel Scroll Down: Select next crew member
Mouse Button 3 (middle click): Pause the game

And there you go! No keyboard required.

StixNStonz wrote:-Reorganizing Crew Members
The only value I see would be to keep a mental list of 'helm is first, shields second, weapons 3rd' etc. It would be nice but there are way better ideas to implement first, so I'd say this should be a super low priority.

A lot of the time I run into situations where I want to check the health status of "the boarding team", or "the repair team". And it's a lot harder when those names are not placed beside each other.

For instance if you play with the Red Tail ship you start with a Mantis on your crew. I always put him on weapons, but when I get more crew I move him to the dedicated boarding team. The problem is he is always the 4th on the list and the other member of the boarding team could be anywhere from 5-8th on the list. This is why I want to reorganize, and why I also suggested the "link crew in pairs" idea. I doubt this would be too hard to implement as all you need is the ability to drag and drop crew icons. And I should point out we can already do this with weapons and drones.

I know it's not a huge problem but I would be lying if I said I never lost a crewman from reading the interface wrong. Crewmember confusion is a MUCH MUCH bigger problem when all of your crew is the same race. It happened to me once. (that was a fun game)

StixNStonz wrote:-Officers
Not needed, as the 'better Skilled crew in the same room takes over the station' makes it obsolete, and it's not worth the additional hud items and button.

In retrospect that may have been a little complicated. I thought of a better idea though. When crew members have the highest skill rating of one type on a particular ship they get a special gold icon that goes beside their name. Other crew members with the same skill get a silver icon if they reach at least level 1 experience. This would help differentiate the "career" or job of each crewman at a glance (which is currently impossible).

StixNStonz wrote:-Auto-return teleported crew members
No way imo. What if you don't have the power to return them? And besides, they're on a burning ship about to explode, even with all the enemies dead it's still a risk for you to get them out in time.

Hmm okay what if I change that to "automatically return crewmembers who are in no danger"? Like you mentioned there are all sorts of problems that can get in the way of safe return. Lack of power, damaged teleporters, teleporter room on fire, enemy boarders in teleport room etc...

But if no issues are present then manually going to pick them up again is just extra busywork the player shouldn't have to do. It's kind of like how the FTL engines immediately charge to full when combat is over UNLESS you are somewhere dangerous like an asteroid field. Make sense?