1. & 3. : Very nice. 2: Too bad, but understandable. I wonder what qualifies as lowend machine here. Would you mind sharing? I saw a few games already that aren't supported on iPad1 anymore due to higher requirements.
Questions and Suggestions With a few hours put into the game now, some things I noticed or am not sure about: 1) Wingman: Does your wingman actually use shields, or any active components (e.g. the SP repairer)? I only see an SP bar for my wingman during battle, but no shield bar. This is important to know for fitting out the wingman ship. Especially that with only one now you have less leeway. 2) Post-battle loot: The green loot containers apparently have a timer, and disappear when it runs out. Could you consider changing it in such a way that the timer stops when you start looting (=the green bar starts to fill)? I ask this because it happened a few times already that the loot disappeared right under me. Once with the bar ~99% full. Quite frustrating... 3) Crew: Is there a way to dismiss crew members now? I could not find it, and that was one of the most annoying things in GP: That I could not get rid of outdated crew. 4) Fleet interface: When you have a ship selected, it would be nice if I could switch to the other ship directly in this view; either by button or by swiping. This applies to the ship view (first screen in from Fleet view) and to the fitting view. 5) Similar for Store and Warehouse view: Let's say I go to my Warehouse, and to the Weapons view there. To get to the Supports view, I need to hit back, wait like a second, and then hit the "Supports" button. Buttons or swiping to cycle through the different views in Store and Warehouse would be great. 5) Crew again: What exactly do a crewmembers stats do now? In GP, they seemed to do more, e.g. decrease the CPU requirements, increase damage, etc. What I miss most is the first one (decrease CPU) . 7) Shipyard: Slightly annoying that I cannot manage my fleet there. Just a small quibble, I admit that. But it would be more streamlined if I had the fleet management interface there as well. ----- As for the game so far: I also got stuck at the "Rescue the Singer" story mission. So I started some serious pirating (which I do not consider grind yet. I think of it as the random battles you have in most RPGs while travelling from A to B. Something that is not present here) . Maybe I just got lucky, but I have another Archangels blueprint, and some better weapons and armor as well. Just got enough money together to build the 2nd Archangels frigate. Then I will see if I can tackle the story mission. The difficulty of the random battles varies wildly, even within the same colorcode. For example: Against a yellow 10Brothers encounter (3 enemy Archangels frigates), one time I can blast them out of space without much damage on my side, the next time they massacre me in less than 30 seconds. This needs some finetuning in my opinion.
Made it through the "Rescue the Singer" mission, after ~10 tries, and by sheer luck. My suggestion: Reduce the number of enemy ships from 2 to 1. I have the best ships and equipment I could find in a reasonable amount of time, and the difficulty was completely ridiculous. 2 enemy missiles to knock all my shields down and start damaging my SP? Please. Some more thoughts: On the post-battle screen: Could you change it that it does not slowly count up the EXP earned? Instead it should just display the numbers, and that's it. And for the sake of my hearing and sanity, get rid of the sound that is played while the EXP count up. For one, it is extremely loud (feels like 3x as loud as the rest of the game). For two, it gets annoying very fast, in part due to the loudness. Missile fire: I have RSI, and every click/tap is one too many (this as explanation why I am rather sensitive about UI issues). Currently I need to tap for every missiles I fire. Over just a few battles, this amounts to several hundred taps within a short period of time (30-60 minutes). Almost all of those taps are avoidable, though. By the simple solution to let missiles fire at maximum possible speed as long as I have my finger on the button. From playing the first GP, I know why it makes sense to not have this mechanic for slower firing weapons, but for the missiles the "tap for each shot" is a bad solution. Dialogue/Story: Find a better writer, and fast. Then redo the whole thing. No idea if that style is popular with certain demographics, but for me what I saw of the dialogue so far is oscillating between horrible and ridiculous. I feel it boils down to "We'z be pirates'n'stuff, and do piratey stuff because. Oh, and want to get in my pants, cause I be piratey?" I don't want to give away any parts of the story here. So let's just say that each story element I saw until now gets a cliche point, and an extra point for badly executed cliche (I don't mind cliches, provided they are executed in an above-average way, e.g. by taking one and giving it an unexpected twist). Same for the characters. Cliche? Check. Rant: If you have dialogue and/or story in your game, make sure it is told at least well, ideally excellent. If you cannot meet that target, better to leave the story out completely.
So, severe disappointment kicking in... Looks I hit the first paywall, and only a few hours and a little bit into the game already (4th story mission). You are pitted against an enemy Destroyer and another ship. The Destroyer alone is enough to annihilate my Archangels frigate in seconds. I'd need at least one Destroyer of my own, two would be better. Getting the needed cash is possible, too. But in over 2 hours I did not find another blueprint. Serious, Moonfish Games, why do something like that? Do you expect to not make enough revenue from a decent fullpriced game without IAP? My dislike of the horrid voiceacting/storytelling aside, I enjoy this game for what it offers me: Nice space combat, with some other stuff thrown in for topping it off with extra chocolate. And I'd be perfectly willing to pay a good price for a full noIAP game, say 10€+ . My recommendation: Make the game fullprice, and get rid of the current blueprint mechanic altogether.
+1 to this. I've also spent like 5-7 hours on the game and hit the brick wall (mission 2) with only 2 archangels (only got one extra archangel blueprint from hours of grinding). The majority of that time is spent grinding, and that is NOT fun. Not when there's nothing to gain from it to even advance in the story. Also, you said that you need to cut on the number of playable fleet from 3 to 2. That is understandable, but please also consider the playability impact: on the first game it's always 3 on 3, and now it's 2 on 3. Make the enemies coming in waves just like the first game if necessary, but make it always 2 on 2 at one time to make it feel balanced for the player. Please listen to what other members had said here. I really LOVED the first game. It was a grindfest, but there's a clear goal there (better ships to build). In this game, it feels like there's no end to the grinding since you don't know if you can even get the needed blueprints for a new ship.. so what are we supposed to grind for? Useless money that we can't even spend on anything worthwhile.. If only, for example, we can convert those into credits to purchase blueprint.. I insta-bought this game expecting improvements over the first game, but this just feels like all the others 'freemiums' game out there. I personally loathe the 'freemiums' model, and hate to see a game I like follows in that direction. Just give us a full-priced game and get rid of the blueprint system! The good thing is it's just 0.99, so I guess I'll just write that off as an addition to the original game's price (worth more than 0.99) and forget this game for now, until serious adjustment is made.
Thanks very much for your detailed comment and suggestion. We are very much appreciated that. 1. Wingman operates shield, of coz. We do not put its Dm bar on screen because we want player handle lesser information. 2. We are considering to increase the time limit of a loot, which is now 30 seconds. 3. At the moment, you cannot fire a crew member. I guess you want this because of money, right? Once we increase the money loot rate, will this become unnecessary? 4. Thanks for the suggestion! We will take it into consideration. 5. Noted. We will take it into consideration as well. 6. A crew increases the weapon attack (if he/she operates a weapon) and decreases CPU requirement. As you level up, their stat increases gradually. 7. This suggestion is good, but the current interface has to changed significantly. We'd rather spend time on other areas first, such as a better tutorial and hints.
Did you fully equip your ship? The 2nd boss is not designed to be a wall. With a DM, Repair ship, and perhaps an extra armor, you should be able to KO the 2nd boss even without wingman. We will double check if we are setting the difficulty a too high.
Yeah.. I fully equip both ships with DM and repair. Would love to add extra armor, but not enough cpu for that in Archangels. Usually I'll just resort to building better ships (frigate with 300 cpu, or even a destroyer) but cannot without the blueprint I also experience the same issue like this: The same enemy type (with the same ships) can sometimes be easy to beat, but some other times hit hard and kill me in 30 seconds. This is coming from multiple tries across like 2-3 hrs of grinding.
Are you sure you're equipping the ship repair an using it in battle? I crushed the 2nd boss with an archangel and an angel once I figured out how powerful that module was. The third boss was where I hit a wall (until I lucked into a destroyer print ). Also, my archangel has missiles, armor repair, DM, and extra armor, so it is possible, you just have to get the right parts (low CPU requirements) to balance it.
Well I was using the Repair part gotten from quest which seems to be the best compared to the others available in the shop (4x repair @30%). So my equips are that Repair, the standard DM, and the Missile from quest (70 dmg). Both archangels are equipped like that. The problem is each time I entered the battle both enemy ships were already in the range to attack me, and it took only 1 hit from the missile to nearly deplete the standard DM. A couple hits and my archangel is toast, no chance to even hit the 'repair' button. Seems like there's a certain lag when the trying to hit the button under heavy fire (no effect when I push it). So, in theory, if by luck I could get only one of them within fighting range when I entered the battle, then Yes, it should be manageable even using one ship.. no luck so far, but I'll try again later. I like to over-power the enemy before every fight . So in the previous game I'd grind till I can get the best ship available in the system before attempting to continue the story, and kinda sad that the option is not apparently available here unless you IAP. Fighting 'FR' with 'FR' is not my style.. Walk softly and carry bigger guns! Imagine the fun of being able to ignore the story, 'role play' by questing, trading, robbing, or whatever to gather resources, then carefully trying to get to specific planet to build a CS/BS/BC early in the game (and steamroll the story's bosses later). I thought that's what it means by 'not a one-way track, but a freedom to live'
Good to hear that you consider things, I greatly appreciate that. 1.) Wingman: Then maybe you should make this clear in the tutorial (add something once you get your first wingman) . Also, could you explain if the wingman uses active components (like the SP recharger), or if those are wasted on him? And I still really would like to know what you meant by "lower-end devices" when you wrote that a 3rd wingman is too much to render on them. If it is something like iPod3, maybe it is time to drop support for that device (as many developers do already). Even iPad1 (unfortunately for many people) is already outdated when it comes to graphics and processing power. One solution I saw in Dangerous was to offer a variety of settings to affect the detail level (e.g. turning nebulas, explosions, etc. off, and reducing graphics detail in general). It does not look good on a lowend device then, but still gives you the full content. And highend devices get the full experience. This is similar to trying to run a brandnew game on a 5-year old PC. You have to live with compromises, if it runs at all. Yes, I really want to see the 3rd wingman again. And I also get the impression that the difficulty is still geared towards having a fleet of 3, not 2. 2.) Loot timer: Either increase it to a few minutes, or stop the timer once you get the green "looting" bar. 30 seconds is just not enough. I had several situations where I had to fight off 3+ hostile fleets coming for me. And as the lootbar resets when you enter a fight, I lost the first loots because I could not grab them in time. 3.) Firing crew: No, not for getting some money back. It gets really cluttered after a while with crew I will never use again because their stats are too low. In GP, I ended up with ~50 crewmembers, and had to scroll through a huge bunch of folks with - say - Weapon 10, to get to the one with Weapon 100 that I wanted to use. Being able to retire crew members would help alot here. 6.) Crew: I just doublechecked: No, different crewmembers do not change the CPU requirements, nor do they change stats in a significant way as they did in GP. Please check again if this works correctly. Test 1: DM-2-C Shield. With Jack (Part 138+33) it has CPU 112, DM 123, DM Recharge 10.5 . With Ada (Part 13+3) it has CPU 112, DM 123, DM Recharge 15.5 . For a 10x difference in stats, that is not really much you gain here, especially compared to the big improvement higher stats were in GP. Also, I noticed something odd here: Once it is equipped and the crewmember assigned, it shows for Ada: DM 123 -> 120 (120 in red) , and for Jack DM 123 -> 81 (81 in red) . I could not figure out what this is supposed to mean. Mind explaining? Test 2: Missile-3-I. Matt (Weapon 84+20) : CPU 96, Attack 147, Ammo 35, Combo+1% (what does that mean, bye the way?) . With Kyun (Weapon 17+4): No change to the stats at all. ----- And I notice that you did not address the various concerns and suggestions regarding IAP at all (e.g. why not make the game fullprice?) . While I understand perfectly well that you are in no way obliged to answer, I think that I am not the only one who would appreciate a clear statement (and also an explanation of your reasoning for the current IAP setup) .
Which quest did you get that module from? And the repair button does not react when you use the joystick at the same time. You need to let go of the stick for like half a second, and then hit the repair button. Took me some time to figure out, but at least it works. Moonfish, this is something you might want to correct as well. Superior firepower is also my favourite approach
No, that's the fight that seems impossible, the one I'm referring to. Within a few seconds I have a hull warning. After several attempts I manage to get their shields down before dying but that's the best I can do. I've completed games like TIE Fighter and X-Wing, and while it's kind of different, find FTL far easier than this, and that's a game in which you're MEANT to die repeatedly. My point about the story was that it's not at all explained why you have to take out that ship by the rafiation-emitting space station. It's supposed to be why you can use the jump gate, but you can use it anyway. It's like being told you need to find a key to open a door, but the door is unlocked.
Hey thanks! That's probably the most important tips in the game: let go of the stick before hitting 'Repair'! I usually keep moving during battles in a desperate attempt to magically avoid missile (is that even possible?) barrages. I might just win with that info [EDIT: Still hitting the wall, sadly. Damage from enemy missiles > repair rate/cooldown] That repair module is from the delivery quest from Nepoton (IIRC), it's the uppermost planet in the first system. The 2nd/3rd quest. Can you share from which system (even better from what enemy) did you get the Destroyer blueprint? That's the one thing that's unclear: Do all systems and all enemies drop all blueprints, or certain blueprints are only dropped in certain systems and/or enemy.. ?
I'm not sure exactly which group it was, but it was a group of small ships, no transports, and they attacked me near Andcken in Hydreeto if I remember correctly. It was a tougher than usual fight for that system, and I believe that the payout was larger than usual in addition to the bp drop.
From my experience so far it is impossible to avoid missiles. The only chance I see is to break the enemy's lock, but I have no idea how to do that. When you pay attention to your own missiles, when you don't have a full lock, they tend to miss. And I would like to know that too, how blueprint drops - and drops in general - are distributed.
More comments As I mentioned earlier, the game is fun, but like Diablo 3, this game was absolutely built around IAP. The blueprint system makes the game unbearable and the story...hard to role play as a pirate when there is a story. Please give some sort of free play mode with no story so WE can be the pirate. And get rid of blueprints. Please.
