Nullzone covered it, thanks. Just one more thing, for the 3 warring major factions, if you kill their enemy factions anywhere, they will like you better. Especially so if you help them lift a siege by killing a few of their enemies. Note that, after you gain enough rep, their Pilots will seek to recruit you formally to join their faction. You will only continue to rep up with them if you formally join. So make your decision on which faction to join eventually, you can't join them all.
Well, I'm already enemies with the Omni Collective, they remind me too much of the Borg. The Human Empire shoot me on sight, even though I'm supposed to be neutral. Okay, Starborn Federation, it is, then.
Yes, I've played SG2 on PC, it's good but the voice acting ... ye gods.. Carriers are very OP in most games and here too. Though, gunnery or missile ships with skills are also very OP. End-game is balanced for fleet battles, on Hard/Roguelike (game only had one mode in beta, Roguelike!). Normal is actually easy mode. There's a respec NPC available on a station.
Human Empire is very tough on a lot of goods which are legal in other factions, check the goods info to find where it's illegal. Crime (Smuggling) does not pay... unless you're good at it.
Hmm, it's getting 1 star reviews from China/Russia, players say they can't understand how to play it. It's English only, maybe I should have restricted it, no access in some regions?
I would do that. It says English only. Games does have a steep learning curve though. And to second it being already said. It's not the steering or gravity but the braking that gets to me. I am on a iPhone 6+. I take a bigger ui and clutter if it made it easier to play.
The problem is that the game consolidates rotation and forward thrust as a single d-pad control scheme. It's almost like there was an attempt to apply arcade car steering scheme instead of rotation/thrust controls which you might expect for zero-g physics. Coupled with the lack of variable thrust control, everyone ends up flying around doing doughnuts, like cars on a frozen pond. Single d-pad control might work better if thrust power was variable, perhaps based on how far from the center of the d-pad the touch occurs. Either way, not being able to rotate without applying forward thrust is simply unintuitive and frustrating. I'm sure (I hope) the dev tried a of variety control schemes before settling on this one, and considering the overal positive reception of the game, apparently it's not an issue for everyone. For me, it's too frustrating, and wishing I had spent my $8 on something else.
@gmattergames I did try a variety of control schemes early in the port, I wrote a long post about it here and my reasoning for doing it this way. http://forums.toucharcade.com/showpost.php?p=3855836&postcount=62 Ultimately the circle pad is not meant to be used like a typical d-joystick, where movement away from the center determines impulse/thrust power, because your left hand does need to be away from the pad to do other functions. As you play, complexity increases due to acquiring more modules, squad mates etc. I needed a mechanism that allow the ship to fly "hands-off" or with minimal input if required. It takes adjusting to if you're used to other joystick implementation, if you do get used to it, you'll find that it allows ship piloting while doing everything else.
A bigger "break" area within the circle you mean? That's possible. I can check for screen ratio (16:9 iPhone 6 Plus) and adjust the size of the UI elements.
I get what your saying, and understand the intent, which under the scheme I describe, could be accomplished by double tapping an "auto-pilot" direction-thrust vector, leaving the left hand free as needed, with manual control maintained as long as a d-pad touch is held. The center brake would then only apply to autopilot, the ship otherwise auto-breaking when neither auto or manual controls are engaged. BTW: works fine on iPad4, no issues noted.
Sounds interesting, how would you toggle the auto-pilot mode, double-tap? If you let go of the thumb on the pad, it would slowly reset back to the center (reducing your impulse), so you had to do it quickly. How would the boost work? It's intended for boost to be toggled on/off often, to use that anti-Newtonian effect for really sharp turns to evade fire/missiles. The way it's intended is to Pilot the ship and use the boost activiation liberally all on the left hand. With optional ability to actually use the left hand to target a ship down towards that side of the screen as well, ie, hands-off the pad, tap on a ship to target-lock. I am open to better ideas and implementations. It could be a toggle in the menu options, like "Alternate Controls" enable etc. Great, thank you for testing on iPad 4! ** On the PC, the original flight design is for smaller agile ships to toggle boost whenever they needed to be evasive, so in combat, it occurs a lot. I wanted it to be a "incoming missile, full left, punch it!" style and it works very nice allowing agile ships to be immune to missiles, rewarding pilot skill. I wanted to keep this skill factor for the port so it seem like the best idea at the time. If you haven't tried it, do try turning on/off the boost for sharp turns.
Re 1-star reviews: Don't know if restricting it regionally would solve anything. No matter in which language, SN2 does have a really steep learning curve early on, like jsrco said. You'd really need a better and longer tutorial to remedy that at least somewhat. @gmattergames: AH told me the same earlier - "Ultimately the circle pad is not meant to be used like a typical d-joystick" - and when that clicked it helped a lot. Once I stopped treating it like a regular joystick, things went much smoother: you tap the direction you want to go, and depending on your speed it takes a bit until your ship turns around. Using it like a joystick results in doing donuts all the time indeed. Braking/positioning is still quite the pain though @AH_Phan: I think it would help if you made the "activation distance" larger. For example, to trigger a chat with a green question mark on the map, I have to sit almost right on top of the ship in question. A few millimeters off and it doesn't work. Same goes for everything else: picking up cargo loot, landing, warping. This is what makes things so frustrating. I should be able to talk to them, even when I'm a centimeter or so away on-screen (iPad Air); or - even better - as soon as I have them onscreen, three cheers for radio communications (yesyes, this solves only one situation, but every little bit helps).
Bought this yesterday while on my lunchbreak and had a quick 30 minutes on the iPhone 6+. Found it really frustrating not knowing what was going on didn't really get on with the controls at all. However, after sitting down with it last night on the iPad and investing some time in it, I'm loving it. It takes some getting used to and I'm sure I haven't even scratched the surface yet as I've only just ranked up a couple of times and bought 1 new ship so still looking forward to getting wingmen and drones. I hope icloud saves can be added in a future update as it would be good to continue my ipad game occasionally while I'm out on the iPhone. Keep up the great work. A couple of issues I've had - There are still lots of messages telling me to do PC things like press LMB or hit F1. I had to deliver a crystal to a system which I did and collected the reward then thought because I've just been given 25,000cr I'll stop the game here and come back to it later. When I did come back and load it later on, I was in the same port but without the credits I'd made and also without the crystal to claim the credits again
@Nullzone Roger that, I can make the activation range larger for those functions, it's on the list to-do for the next update. @DGee Yes I had a player email me saying I still have a LMB reference in some info, doh! I know the quest you are referring to (Ionus?). It should have saved the status of the quest, I'll look into it. In the future, if you launch into space, the game auto-saves before launching. So it saves once when you land, and again when you launch. Glad to hear you guys are loving it though, gives me hope, as I was worried about messing up the port.
Yes, pretty sure that was the one - top right of the starmap. Docked, had the envelope icon top right and claimed the reward. As it allowed me to buy a new ship I thought I'd come back to it later but, as mentioned, the reload lost the credits and I no longer had the envelope icon available. The LMB reference was when I joined the Merchant's Guild, telling me how I could see other systems' buying prices. It took me a while to realise that the prices for other systems appear where they do in the buying section. I was pressing and holding on the star map thinking maybe they should appear there The F1 reference was just other pilots sending me comms to turn on the newby flight mode, probably after watching me fly into the edge of the map repeatedly when I first started out
@DGee Thank you, I'll be sure to fix those in the following update. That "To learn how to fly, press F1!" is a joke, they do it to all rookies. As you gain exp & fame, other Pilots will have different things to say.
Thanks, good news! No worries about that, great job overall. And a few more questions: 1) Sometimes the whole game freezes for a second or two, and then continues as if nothing happened. My best guess is it needs a breather to do calculations for all the simulation stuff going on in the background. Any ideas? 2) Hangar: This implies I can have more than one ship. But I couldn't figure out yet how to put a ship in storage. How does that work? 3) Wingmen: Can I upgrade their ships? I am close to buying my Drone Frigate, and would really like to give the current one to my wingman. If not, can I give them better weapons/equipment at least?
@Nullzone 1. Yes, that's when it does major calculations for faction fleet sieges to resolve or prolong as well as economic output resulting in new military ships produced for the fleets & fleet movements. On the PC this isn't noticed but yes on mobiles, once in awhile it takes a second delay to calculate. 2. Hangar, yes if you have enough rep to access the Hangar (at major worlds only), you can "store" your ship in one of 3 available slots on that world. You will have to buy a new ship before you're able to launch into space ofc. Note the info tells you it only stores the ship without equipped modules, bare-ship. So place modules into your Module Storage first, ie, strip it down before cold storage. This was a feature I added based on player request on Steam. 3. Wingman have their own unique ship with special abilities. But you can decide how to upgrade it via their perks, to specialize their roles. They also gain some special bonuses if you successfully complete their story mission, which they will talk about as they rank up.
Bloody hell... a whole economics & political system "just" to support flying around and shooting in space? That's a metric f-ton going on behind the scenes, color me very very impressed. Thanks for clarifying! Once the launch dust settles, you should set up a website for all the extra info that's not explained ingame. If they all have their own "pet ships" they are attached to, it makes sense why they don't want to part with them Noticed the perks already, but it'll take a while still until my wingman levels up.
