I bought the Game 10 Days ago, and it is worth the money.
It took me 83 Restarts on normal until i beat it with the Kestrel for the first time, but some of those Trys did go towards me playing reckless on purpose, to see what i could and could not pull of.
I'd like to see the game evolve and get bigger, because i think the concept is really good.
But after 200 games i found a few things i'd like to see changed or implemented. I read through most of the forum
and i found some of my thoughts written down by others, but i'd like to give a complete List, even the things allready found in other threats.
1)
In my normal everyday fight my mouse is over the enemy ship, because a weapon will be ready every few seconds.
But with the way the UI is build i need to move the mouse away from there every time i want to do anything other than fire a weapon.
Thats bad in itself, but i even need to move my mouse to bottom, bottom left, bottom right, left, top and back right, because the buttons for everything are everwhere.
We need Hotkeys for allmost everything, fully rebindable of course, we are in 2012 afterall.
I want to write down a List, aswell as Keys i'd likely use.
Select Crewmember 1-8
q,w,e,r and a,s,d,f
Open/close doors
t and g
Teleport too/from
z and h, would be y and h on english Keyboard i guess, im sitting in germany.
Ship menu
Tab
Jump
Ctrl, if the Map is open Ctrl should close it.
Active stealth
^
Cycle energy
F1-F6 corresponding to the 6 Systems that are not Weapon and Drone.
What the F would that do? Every buttonpress would allocate 1 Level of Energy into the System.
Thats two bars for shield, one bar for the rest. If the System is at its Max energy or if you have none available
the System gets unpowered.
The Shop Button can stay without Hotkey.
2)
We need Autofire for each weapon seperately, in addition to the global button.
3)
The left side of the screen has massive amounts of room to work with, im talking about the Crew overview.
First, the Health should be Numbers next to the Name, not a bar below it.
Below each name could be symbols corresponding to the Skills, all 6 initialy grey, gettin green and yellow showing each Members skills without having to mouseover. Again, there's room there, use it.
4)
Add the shift button for command chains like in RTS games.
I know its not a RTS and we can pause all we want, but being able to pause at any time is a gameplay mechanic in this game, not a matter of convenience. It's unrelated to convenience with controling the game in general.
Two examples how i'd implement shift in this game:
a) I have a wounded dude from the boardingcrew in the teleporter room.
I send him to the medibay, shift-rightclick it once and then shift-rightclick the teleporter.
Sending him to the bay is like right now, he just walks there and starts getting healed.
The shift-rightclick on the medibay makes him "do the appropriate action once".
The appropriate action for a wounded person in a working medibay would be "get healed to full".
After that is finished the shift-rightclick on the teleporter makes him go there and wait. He can't do anything other than wait, because the teleporter is operated directly by the player.
b) Room X has 4 damaged bars and i have Dudes A, B and C. Dude C is the one responsible for Room X, he has the Skill. Dude A is my Pilot, Dude B can be whatever.
I want the Room repaired quickly but i also want to jump out soon.
I send C into the room, send A into the Room shift-rightclick it twice and then shift-rightclick the bridge.
B is send into the room shift-rightclicked three times and then shift-rightclicked wherever.
C will act like right now, repair the room to full then operate it.
A will help with repairs until two bars remain damaged then walk to the bridge.
B will help with 3 repairs, then walk away.
It's important to note that the Situation at the time of giving the command is what counts.
If B had been occupied and arrived only after the first bar was repaired he would still only help until one damaged bar was left, the last bar is for C to repair alone, no matter what.
What if i shift-rightclicked a wounded dude once into a partialy damaged Medibay ?
Would he repair and walk away even if not at 100 or would he walk away if at 100 even if the repairbar is not full.
Common sense dictates that the "repair" command goes over the "wait for heal", because if the medibay would be repaired he'd be healed faster, and the repair, if canceld, looses all progress, unlike the healing.
5)
For now thats the end of my List. I don't expect everything in there to be implemented, but i hope it's readable and that the suggestions make sense for the most part.