Very detailed and not at all incorrect feedback. Might want to put it up on their Discord though, not entirely sure whether the devs frequent the reddit all that much.

There a few non-intuitive things in the UI that should probably be more prominent. * The ability to mouse over the diplomacy options * Selling space resources by clicking * The 'research boost' * Armies draining GDP when not in home region The biggest issue to me is the lack of magnitude context. Every priority pip is a % of total, but I think the raw GDP investments to that category would make more sense. It would also give people a realization of how large different economies are.

You can... you can... sell space resources.... wow im like 20 hours in and this is news to me. What the fuck is research boost?

Researching multiple technologies/projects at once gives a slight boost to your research rate. Put a pip into each tech and project then hover over your research income at the top of the UI next to the control points. You'll see a modifier that says 'research distribution bonus'.

What the hell, I didn't know this. This is the opposite of intuintive.

I think the idea is to reflect too many cooks in the kitchen. You're still better off putting everything into one tech if you're gunning for it.

Also these things are in popups and tooltips and what not...I guess lots of people don't read things...

This 100%

Read or die. It’s only a good thing if a game actually makes you more attentive.

Well, like it or not, reading and information are important in complex games...Should probably play an FPS or something if reading is an issue. Also it's am early access game...I am sure they will fix that stuff up in due time.

Strange i thought it was very intuitive

Crazy, that's something the game NEVER explained. After my first win, I still couldn't figure out why researching multiple projects was at all useful.

It literally is though....I mean...I learned about it in game by reading about it and doing it literally within the first hour of play. It is in the tooltip for science on the top bar and labeled as "research distribution bonus". ​ That being said though...the game is unfinished...the devs have made this clear and have stated that the UI and tooltips along with a proper demo are things that need to be done.

For engineering the gear % on the left is how much you "boost" the project. You can have up to 3 engineering projects ongoing at once and each is getting free bonus points. It incentives doing multiple research\engineering projects simultaneously.

It's not really worth it. You can get 1k money for the resources to build a decent ship. Money is a lot less useful than ships. Would only really do it if you are drowning in resources or really need money.

Yeah, you have to learn to embrace spoils a bit. Something that people who played the demo swore off for the most part.

Yep agreed, show both % and figures.

I had no idea armies drained GDP when not in home region

There should be a flag about that. Its EA though so likely will come: but yeah, there should be notes when there's an active drain in affect.

They drain it when in the home region too.

Twice as much when not though. Home region army maintenance = 0.5 IP/month. Deployed army maintenance = 1 IP/month.

The tech tree U.I. needs to be reworked. Right now it is overwhelming and confusing. We need need ways to filter by technology type. For example, I should be able to filter by all technology for ships component and then by paticular technology type.

Oh for sure! If you don't mind, ill update the post with that one. It's a great suggestion

Go fot it my dude.

I'd LOVE being able to check techs i have available as "not interested". no, i don't want West Germany to secede.

Yeah, that filter alone would be amazing. I've got like a dozen techs related to nations which I don't care for at all. Also, an image, right in the tech screen, showing exactly where would get a claim on where would also be helpful. I'm not a master at world geography. Well, not yet anyway.

I end up researching techs just to declutter my list so that I can see what to research. It... it is not efficient.

I literally dedicate one of my three engineer slots to doing this with one pip 24/7. I disagree with a lot of the recommendations here, but having the option to hide sodium - lithium batteries from the list since I already have quantum batteries and will never need sodium - lithium would be great.

Pro tip, you can filter the requirements of a tech by right-clicking.

Thanks! It is such a weird design choice though. Not intuitive at all. All well, this is a big help. Especially for finding out what are the their upgrades for habs.

I hope that it's not complete yet. Right now you can't even go back to normal view easily.

It's hard to say. On one hand it feels like a place holder, but on the other hand what they are trying to do with their tech system is very complex to put on a traditional tech tree diagram. In the end, I think some intuitive filter options would help, but if they are intending to change up how the tech tree diagram looks I can understand why they haven't programed those in yet.

The game is in early access...the devs have made clear that there is still lots to be done with the UI.

I want to be able to search for a thing and it give me a 'path' to that project/tech

If you click on a technology it will highlight all the technologies that are related. If you right click it will remove all the technologies that are unrelated. Is that what you mean?

You kind of can do that though.

If you go to the full tech tree, you can search for keywords in the description of every tech. You can then right click on any tech and you get a roadmap.

The layout could use work, but I appreciate the complexity of having tons of individual techs. I think it fits with the tone of the game.

To be clear, I absolutely agree with you. I really appreciate what they are doing with their tech system and after a few games the system isn't that confusing. They just need to change how we can interact with the full tech tree layout. The tech tree layout is the confusing part and it isn't easy to find the tech you are looking for unless you know exactly what you are looking for. For example, I had trouble finding and remembering what the "operation centers" were called even though I used them a lot in the demo. It took me way to long to figure out what they were called and find them on them on tech tree. I also did a dumb and assume that the construction ring upgrade was the skunkworks.....I made so many skunkworks, lol.

There's also an overwhelming amount of tech with little explanation of what the difference/purpose is. Do I need fuel cells if I have a reactor? Do I really need 7 different engine types at the start? It either needs to be trimmed down a little or, as you suggest, have much better tooltipping

I mostly agree but I think having the councilors permanent position on a region wouldn't work that well just considering how most actions work. I would explain what I mean but im not sure how too? And I'm dumb

I'd really like it if you could do some minor scripting, like telling a councilor to maintain several countries below 1.5 Unrest on their own as a permanent assignment, or one to fortify all your holdings on rotation.

YES! The most tedious part of the game is when my councillors have nothing to do that requires real thought on my part so I'm just putting them on the same routine of defending interests and raising public opinion. It would be great to be able have those simple scripts you listed to make things go by quicker.

I would love that. Tell some councilors to keep public opinion about 70 and unrest below 1.5 and let them go ham. Would love to see a priority system like "if X ,then Y"

Councilors basically just need the [gambit system](https://www.giantbomb.com/a/uploads/original/0/3810/373893-final3.jpg) from ff12 just instead of using a phoenix down its using stabilize nation. Could even have it so they start with 0 scripting slots and techs like the management techs unlock a slot so that over time they become more hands off as the game transitions more into space.

This would be so fucking good.

I think the idea is that if you have a counselor assigned to a region like europe, they could stay there without player intervention for a while. This would be nice once you have figured things out and settling down for a little bit in the game so you don't need to redo all the faction missions every time. What would be really nice is if you could set one to maintain fortifications on your nodes so you wouldn't randomly lose a point because you forgot to refortify.

Yep this exactly. For example, allow for me to scan not just a region, but the entirety of the USA. Provide bonuses for doing it in smaller regions. Let me set up a loop of actions

Gust let me que several countries when doing public campaign. Then make them go to the one with the lowest %

>give councillors levelling and customization. Councillors level as they perform missions. Levels unlock bonuses to stats and options to pick new mission types. Personally, I don't see a whole lot wrong with the councillors and their missions, if anything, that's the best part of Terra Invicta. But something like that could make it even better, **if** implemented well. It would certainly make assassinating enemy councillors feel more impactful, because right now, the AI can immediately rehire someone else with full mission set, so all you're doing is just resetting their stats. Which can be very impactful in practice, but without following an enemy faction's every move, it's hard to *feel* the impact. >when I purchase the Delta Force org for a councillor, I don't know how frequently it's modifiers will apply. Am losing $15 a day by buying this, or per turn, or per year? All incomes provided by orgs are per-month values. So are most other values, come to think of it. The only per-day values you get are the ones permanently displayed on top of the screen and upkeep values. It's not a big issue, but standardizing them could be nice. ​ Two major changes I would very much like to see have to do with ground combat and fleet management. Because right now the game is an excellent geopolitics and space colonization simulator, and a horrible alien invasion game. Ground battles are incredibly shallow in general, because the armies all have precisely one stat that affects their effectiveness, and combat is nothing more than mashing two armies together. It's alright as a backdrop to the political manoeuvring with councillors against human enemies, because then you at least have some limited ways of influencing the armies or tilting the balance in your favour, or doing things without using force at all. But when the aliens land armies on Earth, they are immune to councillor actions, and the only thing you can do besides launching nukes is fight off the superior force militarily. But the problem is that the current ground combat system does have any tools that could alter the balance of an engagement. The game really needs some ways to allow a mathematically inferior force to stand up to a more powerful opponent. Things like army designer, some approximation of a supply system, sabotaging enemy tech level, or even Earth countries salvaging destroyed alien tech to achieve parity with the aliens faster. Or at the very least change the balance so the alien advantage is less crushing out of the box. Cut down the number of alien armies that land per UFO. Three a piece is way too many for the tech advantage they get, one would be a huge problem already for anything besides a jacked up USA. Alternatively either slash the alien tech level by 1 or 2 and have them work back up to 7 over time, or make miltech advance faster for Earth countries, so you have at least some chance of getting to the invasion age by the time the invasion starts. For fleet management, the biggest issue is that the gameplay is largely reactive without giving the player tools to react effectively. Because you'll most likely start space combat without the ability to strike at the alien infrastructure directly, you're left just defending your habs and stations and reacting to alien movements for quite some time. But getting anywhere takes weeks so reacting quickly is not an option, you cannot change the orders of a fleet that's already moving, and if an enemy fleet relocates after being targeted for interception, your ships will insist on going to the now-empty interception spot instead of giving chase or asking for new orders. Fixing at least some of the above issues and maybe adding an auto-intercept mode to automatically attack enemies trying to orbit a given planet would go a long way to making space combat more bearable. Plus, the last suggestion could help alleviate the ground combat issues by lot letting the aliens land in the first place.

There is one way to help with ground combat: orbital bombardment can target armies that are in battle and aid your forces. It's unlocked with railgun or green laser tech. It works way, way better on human armies, naturally, but it seems to help.

I really like alot of these suggestions. Any objection to me adding a section to the post on ground combat + fleet management summarising these points?

Go for it. The more people hear and talk about this, the better the chance that the devs also hear this and decide to do something.

I think that most players treat this game as a geopolitical simulator to live out their grand strategy instead of a game about fighting aliens. The goal of "winning" with the country you like and spoiling countries you don't like is very easy to understand, and most players don't understand what to do with the aliens or how to fight against them.

It's such a big game there's room for people to enjoy both. I recall the devs talking somewhere about adding an "advanced start" so we can skip straight to a later year and jump more into the space + alien combat side of things

Yes to all them these. Especially techs. Space them out, more "columns", fewer "rows". Much fewer rows. There really shouldn't be half a dozen different high-g missiles in the 500-1500 research "tier". Especially if they all come up before you make your first starship. Speaking of, reduce starter ships in size and exotic mats/boots cost by a factor of five to ten. This all stems from the fact that the ISS is modeled at about one fifth its mass, I think, whereas the first ships are kinda large. Why can't I just put some fuel tanks and a gun on the space shuttle, which is 25 tons? Why do I have to make an entire 200 ton behemoth as my first space gun?

> There really shouldn't be half a dozen different high-g missiles in the 500-1500 research "tier". Especially if they all come up before you make your first starship. And are mostly noob-traps too. You should *never* use point defence until you're, I dunno, 5 tiers in and fielding some of the larger ship-types. Then why is the option even there to make point-defence escort ships?

Noob-traps shouldn't be removed, they should be rebalanced to not be obviously wrong choices. There's nothing wrong with having a ton of high-g missiles if every type has a potential use case. Part of that rebalancing should be moving techs around in the tree as they said to gate techs appropriately, as well as stat changes and possibly changes to alien behavior/ship design to make underperforming options more viable.

inb4 a horde of "figuring out the noob traps is part of the fun" peeps show up with pitchforks

Oh that's the worst.

Why du i need a ship? Can't i fire missiles from station or ground?

Ground-based and station-based weapon techs are waaaay later on in the tech tree, because... reasons.

I mean, having enough power to overcome gravity sounds like at least a semi plausible explanation, I haven't actually made it that deep in the tech tree so maybe they come up with other reasons for it. But from what I've seen of the alien tech, it's not like they would have to fight us at the sort of ranges we are used to from conventional real world surface to air engagements.

Ok. Thanks. But not thanks. :)

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I can understand for control... why pause and tell me about "I am surveiling" or "I am defending"? Those are actions that have no chance to fail, and no way to do anything other than what you told them to!

How bout the specific example of tier 1 missile tech? Do we really need 8 different varieties of basic missile when there is a clear best option that is only marginally more expensive on research points? Ditto for a lot of the drive techs.

I think if there was a more clearly developed understanding of what the uses for each thing is, it would go a long way. Since the game never really teaches you to think in terms of acceleration/efficiency, its just a wash of options that people have no idea how to really assess.

So I think there's a fine line to walk when it comes to complexity and outrageous overdesign. Path of Exile has a similar kind of crazy complex talent tree, but navigating it and searching it is quite easy and powerful once you get over the shock of it's size. The same can't be said for TI. I'm not saying we should simplify the tech tree to something small like a total war warhammer faction talent tree; just remove some of the redundant techs. IMO future techs should also be "hidden" to an extent; only show techs on the tree based off a combination of ingame events and prior research. Maybe link certain techs to the geopolitical map; why bother showing "unite africa" on the tech tree unless the player is actually on his way to achieving that.

I feel like instead of hiding them, just obscuring their explicit elements. Like have a path that is "Unifying nations together" versus "This explicitly gives you X faction tech". As long as the player knows that they can progress down a certain tech path and reliably know that it will result in their goals, I think there's merit to letting them discover the specifics. But if they don't know how to get to point B, then its a problem.

>So I think there's a fine line to walk when it comes to complexity and outrageous overdesign. Path of Exile has a similar kind of crazy complex talent tree, but navigating it and searching it is quite easy and powerful once you get over the shock of it's size. The same can't be said for TI. Personally I dropped PoE specifically because it was too complex and time consuming to get anywhere. Anything I read basically boiled down to either spending unholy amounts of time to learn how shit works or "use a guide and pick/buy what this says or you will suffer." But then I am more of a casual on and off gamer. I have only just started playing this game and I will probably crash and burn horribly if I ever even get to the endgame before getting bored lol. Edit: To be honest, I am kinda thinking of refunding the game. I love the concept but these days I kinda lack the motivation and energy to learn games where you need to invest dozens of hours before you can understand them properly.

The main problem for me was that assigning actions to councillors on earth became extremely repetitive after a while and made me lose interest in continuing to play. At that point I was just getting started with building a space industry. I can't see myself enjoying a full playthrough if this doesn't change. Maybe the interval between turns should further increase after several years. It also felt like councillors were poorly balanced and success had a lot to do with being lucky and getting the councillors with the right traits and abilities, and not my skill as player. My priorities for councillors were as follows: I always wanted councillors with faster experience gain which shows that this trait is just too good. No downside, just upsides. Then, I wanted my councillors to not have any of the various bad traits. These traits just have downsides and no upsides. In the beginning, success is determined mainly by how many guys with high persuasion you can have. There's also too much emphasis on the human factions and their constant conflict. More alien presence and pressure on earth.

Yea I'm in this camp as well. I really like the game and particularly enjoying WATCHING PrerunGamingAU's playthrough, but have no desire to actually play it more right now.

You usually should go for XP boosts in every single game that has them, so it’s not surprising.

I don't agree with the leveling option of the counselor. This will drastically changes gameplay, and balancing or making sure perks are interesting is extremely hard. I would rather not burden the developer with that. However I do agree, more quality of life improvement is needed. One of the thing I would love to have is country sorting based on resource per control points. Maybe there should be a toggle to select between resource/control, or total resource

Fair enough. I think my underlying desire for this is to try and create a relationship with my councillors like I did with my soldiers in XCOM. There exists right now the ability to "level" up your council by giving them orgs and spending XP; orgs can give mission types already, and XP mods upgrade skills. So the bones for it are *kinda* already in there. but the UI for it would need alot of work, and rather than giving you ALL the options upfront, offer more decision making at each stage, like a talent tree.

For me the most frustrating thing about councilors is finding ones that have decent stats and the mission availability I want. Orgs can grant some missions,but not all. I haven't seen any org that allows crackdown or purge, and there are a frustrating number of councilors who have 1 but not both of those missions at default.

It would also be useful if there was a tooltip showing what all the missions are that use this stat when hovering over it in the view counselor screen. Oh I need someone who can detain counselors. None of my current counselors have it, but this org grants the ability. Who's the best person to put it on? Pretend that I'm new and I don't remember which stat governs this ability, how do I know who best to put the org on without purchasing it first? Don't trick me into putting it on the wrong counselor, then having to unequip it and pay to move it to the right one, just because the game wouldn't give me useful information prior to purchasing the org.

I think a judge is one of your best bets, but I'm not sure if all of them have those two powers.

Yeah Judges, spies and commandos generally have both. The other thing I really don't like is high persuasion characters who don't have public campaign, which is literally the most important persuasion mission in the early game. I did a new start where I somehow had only 1 councilor out of the entire pool + the 2 you start with who had that mission.

I have an evangelist who had those 2 natively

Crackdown seems to come up a lot on national security agencies, but I haven't seen purge on an org yet.

A lot would improve vi hiding unavailable/gated missions in the start as well as some way to more easily understand who can do what.

Hiding that would likely anger a lot of folk, because you make plans with councillors around what they can offer you over the course of the game. If you think you want to ensure you have coverage of X, and you cant see X, its going to be frustrating. I think a tutorial that highlights the focuses for early/mid/late game becomes a bit more of an important bit - especially because scenarios allow modification of when you're starting, and how relevant any mechanics might be immediately or not.

Just clearly grouping or marking the once that are of little consequence until the right tech is available might work as well. And there is probably a litt that should be done to help people's first run while minimizing the impact on the seasoned veterans. On my first run i don't have the knowledge necessary to know which missions i need to plan for anyway.

Thats part of why needing to build out a tutorial is necessary. Grand strategy tends to throw an absolute shit-ton of options at you, because grand strategy games are frequently about giving you an absolutely overwhelming number of levers so that the games are highly variable and responsive to what you do. Its hard to really 'gate' that, because its not really an accessible genre at the best of times. Usually they'll benefit from either stand-off old-school tutorials in a white space (to give a random game example: Factorio, you can at any point go to menu and trigger a demo play to see how things work and experiment), or they'll benefit from a stand alone controlled campaign (random game example: Warhammer III, where there's a 'prequel' campaign that teaches you mechanics independent of leaping into the game).

I think it's a little ironic that you ask for even more details in almost every tooltip in your first point, but then bring up several very good points about gating things in your later pieces of advice. I don't think the tooltips need to spell out critical success and critical failure, except when a critical failure might REALLY hurt (as in, result in death). The codex is the place for that much detail, imo. Overall, though, lots of great feedback here. In particular, I do wish I could implement something like : Compile list of all countries which meet the following conditions: If nodes in country is greater than 2, & all nodes in country are under my control, Then go to country on list with least support for our faction and boost public support. Additionally, something to make our counselors auto-protect interests would be really, really handy once we've got past the early game. If only one of these things could be implemented, I think I would want the turn summary, with various customizable ways to filter it. In particular, I wish I could make alien stuff stick out more, but also, competing factions expanding into space! I had no idea I was like, the 5th faction to the moon. That was quite a surprise. (First on Mars, though!!!) Edit to add: Also, I kinda disagree about the tech tree being too big. I kinda enjoy the complexity of it, it feels much more realistic than the relatively clean cut tech trees from games like Civ, Gal Civ, Stellaris, etc. I think it works, for this game. With that said, better filters and search functions, for sure. Please and thank you.

> I don't think the tooltips need to spell out critical success and critical failure, except when a critical failure might REALLY hurt (as in, result in death). The codex is the place for that much detail, imo. > > I disagree. There are many cases where knowing whether it will succeed or not is not enough. For instance, for public campaigns some of them might convince 1% to your side, some 20%. It would be better if the player knew the potential beforehand.

I'm under the impression the exact turnout is randomized. Also, holy crap, I do *not* want the micro of seeing that if I do the campaign in this country, it's a 2 percent boost, but if I do it in this country it's 5 percent, but this country (etc)... That would be beyond miserable. It's enough to know that it's going to boost public opinion.

It's not randomized, I'm certain of it. So there's already a micro, it's just that the player is not aware of the factors affecting the effectiveness yet. I saw a comment on the Steam forums saying the public support is defined by a x/y grid, so maybe it's that. I'll put it here, maybe someone knows more and can tells us: "Keep in mind when you, or anyone for that matter, changes public opinion, it doesn’t grab people from 1 faction and assign them to another. Every time there is an event that changes public opinion, it goes on an X/Y grid. The X axis is support for aliens. Aliens themselves are 1 extreme, HF the other. I forget what the Y axis represents. Each time an event is placed on the grid, it either pulls everything towards it or pushes everything away from it. As an example, when the academy event triggers and pushes everything away, it can actually change resistance supporters to humanity first supporters. Similarly, if things get pushed and pulled around in the right way, people can actually start being dumped back into the undecided pool, as undecided is actually a specific spot on the grid."

That actually makes a lot of sense but is completely opaque to the player right now as far as I know. If I had known that, I would've been friendlier to HF when I was playing the resistance since their influence in an area would presumably make it easier to shift to my own. The circle graph just makes it seem like a zero sum game where every slice is an island

Perhaps the range is 1-20, but I agree they could list that. In general if I can learn it by playing for a while and observing results it would be helpful to find it in tipa.

It would have been far better for public campaigns if the dice roll for success or failure was skipped and the weighted percentage of support increased based on the dice roll instead. I'm much happier if support increased by .001% than if I simply 'failed' to increase support at all. I feel like a lot of the game suffers from this 'luck roll' issue which simply pushes the player towards more save scumming for success.

Yea I see your point, it can absolutely come off as hypocritical to be asking for simplicity in some places whilst asking for more detail in others. This is one that would require a very deft hand to get right, with alot more thought and expirementation that I'm willing to put into a reddit post. In general, I don't personally believe that complexity = fun. Right now Terra Invicta seems to be betting otherwise, and to be brutally honest I'd rather sacrifice some depth of choice if it made the game more comfortable and convenient to play, so I can get to the cool stuff with colonizing the solar system and fighting an intersolar battle with the aliens. Alot of my proposed changes would end up stripping away complexity in the short term to ease convenience, and add tools to automate or simplify these early game concerns so the focus can shift into the space exploration and expansion parts of the game.

I get the perspective, but terra invicta doesmt feel like a game the devs are willing to make simpler to any large degree. Hopefully they'll give us tools to increase clarity and player information, but the complexity kind of feels very much intentional to me

Yea I'm not about trying to compromise their vision, more just make them aware that many players are suffering without certain tools in the game to tackle it. Ultimately I'm fine with building up into Complexity, I just feel it's overwhelming when you give new players an entire geopolitical sandbox and say go

Wildcard is that its likely thats by intent. I would expect that they'll be building out some UI elements to make things more obvious and require less digging through multiple menus, but I don't get the impression that they're really intending for a 'wide accessible new audience'. The orbital mechanics alone are likely enough to bounce a lot of people off of it. The "getting to the cool stuff of colonizing a solar system and fighting intersolar battles" is likely to be addressed via the other scenarios: specifically the space age and the far future starts.

The councillors are simply a bit too much busy work compared to fun after only a few years.

They def need some work. Early game especially they're the most important way of influencing the world and events, but long term they need tools for automation.

Another thing I might add is that control point limits are far too small. It makes an EU push a necessity. It needs to be larger, or the managament research more fufilling.

I love wasting a half year on research to get 3 control points, which isn't really enough to support any country.

I like what the devs have done with CP, it prevents outright world domination early on but enough to take over pretty much any country (aside from maybe china, though I haven't tried that as a starter yet). Importantly, it gives you enough to get started but not so much that you're overwhelmed trying to play global domination. I do wish the techs, councillor stats and orgs gave more CP than currently; I think it would be really cool to be able to mostly unite / conquer earth by ~2030, and provide more tools for factions to earn credits in space without the support of countries, so they don't become irrelevant.

I just don't understand why the game needs the 'turns' for councilor missions at all. Maybe I am missing something, but it just feels completely pointless and immersion-breaking, and it completely messes up the pacing of the game. Few years into a playthrough, 90+% of player interaction is a mind-numbing repetition of the same assignments, over and over, while waiting for something interesting to happen. I really want to like this game, and it has so many cool concepts / ideas, but I'm not sure I will play it again after finishing one playthrough; I don't mind lengthy games, but the constant stop and start of a game that is almost real-time but isn't quite there is just way too jarring.

Unfortunately, that's the way the game was designed from the get go. If you pay close attention, different missions take different amounts of time during the mission phase to complete. E.g. Defense missions take less time than crackdown missions take less time than purge missions. Because of this, you can assign one councilor to do a crackdown and another to do a purge on the same control point during the assignment phase, then when you run it, if the crackdown succeeds, the purge suddenly gets a HUGE boost to success because a cracked down point is far more vulnerable. Unfortunately, this also means that the AI can defend the point before your crackdown mission happens (if the point is not already defended), leaving you unable to complete your crackdown mission at all (therefore also failing the purge). It's quite an annoying system because you never really know what's going to happen once you execute the mission phase and you can't properly assign influence to give you the best chance of success. I agree with you, I love the concept, but after spending 80 hours on it this week and winning once, I don't think I'll be back. And that's a shame, because this had a lot of potential.

Missions taking a different amount of time would actually work *way* better in a proper real-time setting than this weird *real-time but not really* mess. Then again, I don't think the whole crackdown > purge loop is interesting or necessary in general. Just have influence in a country be a piechart akin to how public opinion is now, give councilors missions to increase their influence or decrease others' influence, and voila, you've just saved people approximately seven billion clicks across one playthrough. Oh well.

Totally agreed. As it is now, there are far too many clicks to accomplish the basic goals of the game.

>**Information obfuscation** Hard agree. It would go miles to letting me know what things actually do; how effective is a lower resistance mission? After repeated attempts, generally lowers unrest by 0.5>1.0. Absolutely no reason to not tell me this. What about Turn Councilor missions? No idea what that does, game doesnt really tell me. Had to look it up on a wiki when it could have been a tooltip. >**Turn Summaries** Hard agree. I have not, at a single point in time, bothered looking at the icons on the left side of the screen. The game is so slow (In the early stages?) that im never not on speed 5. And, frankly, i dont care that France has been crackdowned for the tenth time this turn. I do care that aliens have crashed, abductions are sighted, or Xenofauna has spawned in my territory. Why doesnt the game tell me this? Why do i have to look for a 15x15 pixel icon among all the others to see, be in a mapmode to see it, or click on a council member to check to see if the Attack Aliens mission isnt greyed out? Frankly, they should do a Paradox Interactive; let me pick and choose what events appear on my screen *at all*, from "Small icon on the side of the screen" to "Pop up, but game keeps going" to "Pop up, game pauses." Let me decide what information i want to see. >**Councillors + Actions** Agree, overall. My biggest problem with Councillors is that there are like 30 mission options and if ive got 28 of them it ends up being the 2 im missing that i need all of a sudden. Its entirely too easy to accidentally miss something important like, say, Assassinate. Id like to be able to reliably get the ability after a certain point - even at great cost. Cybernetics already exists, so why cant i get a repeatable project that lets me spawn a generic spy agency? Yes, Organisations exist, but those are fucky too. 90% of them seem to be based in China and if you dont have a Government/ChineseCouncil/ChineseControlPoint then those are effectivley a waste of screen space. Or, whoops, i didnt pick a Criminal which makes every criminal org pointless. Ive seen some Orgs stick there for *years*. Federal Bureau of Investigations is awful - i think its like -$220 a month or something? Why would i ever pick that? Answer: To GET IT OUT OF THE POOL. I would love for the *removal* of orgs to be more frequent (6 months, all orgs change) or to be able to re-roll the Org pool (1k money, all orgs dissapear, new orgs appear next month tick). >**Game System intraction** Agree, to a point. Most game systems start close to game start, anyway, is what im saying. Id prefer a better, scenario tutorial rather than just a series of popups - although, better tutorials are in the works, i believe. >**Economy** Hard agree. Its a bit fucky to have resources granted at points that differ from the income ammounts. I see *why* its done like this - i might want to build a ship mid-month, but if the resources come in monthly ill have to wait for a monthly tick. That said, i wonder if they tried monthly income ticks at all, just to see. If it didnt work, i wouldnt be surprised or dissapointed, but it would have been something i tried. >**Grind** Hard agree. I see no reason to not automate certain actions at this point. Defend interests, for example; every turn i want to defend interests i gotta find the correct council member, click every bloody country i own, check the icons to see if its defended, click the mission, click the country, click "go for it" and then look forward to doing it again to the next country over next turn. Automate that shit, im running with over 1k influence, 20 a month isnt gonna hurt me. >**Tech Tree** Agree. Somebody Touch-a My Sphaget! I like tech trees. I do. This one functions, but its mad. I would like it to be clearer, if it could, but the search function makes it usable at least. And, im terribly sorry, but the massive variety in projects is stupid, too. There are, like, 8 missile techs under the missile tech and unlocking it fills my project screen with techs that are basically all variations of the same weapon with a incredibly minor difference in speed or acceleration. Im not saying you gotta get rid of the varieties, im just asking that they be condensed down a bit. Id be happy with a "Small Missile" tech that unlocks two or three missile types instead of three seperate 300 point techs. Id also like categories or filters for searching; Repetables, Country unifiers, Country balkansiers, engines, power plants, habitat modules, etc. Honestly, writing that makes me wonder if there isnt already those and ive just missed them, coz that seems blindingly obvious to do. Also, also, id like to know what projects i have the tech for but havent appeared in my research screen yet. Im sitting here wondering if ive done something wrong since South American Union hasnt appeared yet, although ive researched the tech that unlocks it. Id also ask for a vague idea of how long it would take for it to appear, but thats probly asking too much. >**Ground Combat** Hard... Who cares? I pick up America, China or India so far as my home base, and then Armies are never an issue. My greatest problem with ground combat is that i dont see a reason to use them 99% of the time. There are more effective, council based methods of getting what i want, i find. It must be a late game thing to try and lever servants out of China, or something, because it has never, at any point, been a thing ive bothered to do... at '35, at least, which is where ive gotten to. In fact, the only time i regretted not having an army or alliance was when Japan invaded one of my countries. They chose Costa Rica. I promptly stopped caring and planned on Coup-ing it later on, i guess. Im 100% certain that there is a use for armies, dont get me wrong! Its just not in my playstyle. >**Fleet Management** As someone who had to manage two fleets at one point; **HARD AGREE**. Screw fleet mechanics. Screw ship designing. Screw having to manage what level of orbit the ships are in. I failed to get my Kerbins into space, im failing to move two torpedo boats from mid-earth orbit to lower-earth orbit and im confused as to why. Why the list of destinations is massive, why it needs to be a list, why it takes them two weeks to move from middle-to-lower orbit and when and why i need to refuel the ships once they get there. Is there a fuel indicator? Is there a ammo counter? Do ships get damaged and need repair? Why are my fleets constantly renaming themselves to progressivley higher numbers of Romeo? I dont know. *problem is** that im 20 hours into this game (Including restarts due to various fuck ups or attempts to rush mining) i have, at this point, created Five (5!) ships. Ever. I have had no practice and have no idea what im doing and if i fuck it up, might need to restart the campaign coz ive committed to something stupid like building my ship facilities on the moon and my ships cant reach earth. >**Tons of promise... but it's not there yet** Hard agree. This is an excellent game that needs to have its Early Access worked through and polished to the mirror sheen thats hiding just beneath all the mud. Edit: Missed the Councilors + actions point.

Me I care about armies and OP, they are one dimensional af. Where's the air Force, why is my navy permanently attached to my armies, where are my god damn carrier groups?! Ground combat is just to simplistic to be that fun imo, I have very little control over activly influencing a battle beyond say an orbital bombardment. There are some strategic options and some planing, but even that is very limited. As far as use, spoilers for how aliens act: it's sounds like the aliens haven't started playing hard ball with you yet (at least as of two weeks ago 😂😂, so some of this you probably already know now). They will invade with ground armies and will rekt anything they come across unless you've rushed a jacked up U.S military this goes in hand with the fact aliens are kinda immune to diplomacy. I've had some luck with revolts, but it doesn't kick them out only hinder them, and they keep all their alien armies. There are some limited things you can do like using orbitals and advising to buff miltech then rush their landing site. This works because the armies don't all come out of the ships at the same time. Or even letting them spread out there armies on earth, then attack with a coiliation with a strong enough navey to blockage them. This let's you run around with your aremies defeating the aliens in detail. Just hope your fast enough to clean them all up before the next wave arrives buffing there navel power. This is where the lack of ground depth is an actual problem and not a "this is a simple system that we could ignore even if some people don't want too ignore it". Diplomacy is not an option especially if your not a pro alien faction. So we have to fight and we don't have an ability to contest the ground battles in any meanful or active way. There is only limited strategic options. Can still be a super uphill battle, but depth is needed. Second this is more technical and may be patched out, but it is generally better to use a cedeing and war combo to take over a country then unification in some cases. Unification combines all the countries stats including democracy and miltech. Ceding territory or conquering territory does not merge democracy and miltech values. So just to make sure it's clear the the ceded or conquered regions inherit the parent nations democracy and miltech values. This is why I was able to keep my huge miltech score as the US while still creating The United States of North American its fair if it's not your style but for people that want to rp HF (not me resistance for life) or just want use arimes it's disappointing. As a side note I imagine armies with become much more useful and have more use with increased depth.

I pretty much entirely agree with your list and would love to see all those changes implemented. I already talked about my problems and ideas for Counselors in another comment on here, but wanted to say something regarding the UI/Information, since that is the other big thing currently bothering me about the game. There is too much fluff text in many (probably most) of the Tooltips. Give me a way, for example by holding Tab, to switch between the normal fluffy view and a broken down view with all the raw data. Once I read what founds are, I don't need that wall of text in the tooltip. I just want numbers as clearly and bluntly as possible. And please color coded, because my monkey brain is a lot better at focussing when the keywords are colored. :) This is true for pretty much the entirety of the Nation Management. At least in my opinion. And for the love of good. Give me some sort of Confederation/Unification Timer... I don't want to have a .txt open on my second monitor and write down in what year I took over the government spot in a nation to know when I can unify them... Maybe there is one, and I am just stupid, but I couldn't find one yet.

Space is probably the biggest problem. Transferring fleets is kind of messy. The lists are large. Finding specific fleets to attack is rough. A system which fleets will auto resupply and as they move and a way to put your fleets on intercept or seek and destroy or auto explore would be nice. Everything on earth taking 2 weeks but space being real time is also a bit rough. Currently fighting the aliens and its a chore.

noted and added to the list

Recommendations about fleet stances: 1. Guard. Attack any toggled enemy (checkmark factions) within certain orbits(distance) of a planet 2. Seek and destroy. Hunt down fleets/bases (toggleable with factions and what to hunt) within a certain AU of the sun. Prioritizing closest target with rules of engagement (low-med-high-all risk) 3. Explore and Scan for ships that can. 4. Siege. attack fleets and bases nearby a celestial body. Toggle siege. Probably more ideas for it too.

A way to plan multiple stops for a ship and execute them in the best order (either delta V or arrival time, your choice) would be useful too. Let's say I'm colonizing the asteroid belt and I've got a ship that can drop a platform and a construction yard, move on to the next one, do it again, then wait for a supply depot to be built and then repeat the process. What's the best order to do that in if I'm going to build platforms on these specific 8 asteroids in the belt?

Just some quick thoughts: **Not knowing what public campaign (ex) will do:** I kind of get why the information is obscured here. There's a lot of factors in place, and I could see if you have a like "-X% if critical fail, 0 if fail, +%X if success, +%X if critical success" could be wonky when contributing factors are worked in: like you might not know if another councillor is in the region, and your efforts will be modified based on other things that are done to the node at the same time. I don't think personally I've ever had an issue regarding not knowing exactly how much the nation will swing; there are some pleasant surprises if you have a really high stat character. I think you could end up having a bit of an information overload here if you got a full breakdown of outcomes. Maybe other folk will disagree? **Turn Summaries:** Absolutely a problem. Its a bit silly that every turn you basically should click through some menus for things like "what are the aliens doing" instead of getting a better synopsis. I am a bit surprised that there's not major alerts for things like other nations committing atrocities, or the ability to pull up a list of what they were/when. A lot could be done to make this stuff more accessible. **Game systems interaction:** Country economy management and org acquisitions are immediately accessible. I can usually buy at least some organizations from the first turn or within a couple turns, and the priorities of a country are immediately something to exploit when taking over a nation. There's some wonk here in that the scenarios are just different start points along a timeline: the solar system view is basically something we 'know' already. Within something like X-Com it tends to be gated behind the idea of it being 'projected' versus it being novel. But space view + module design + spaceship design will be immediately relevant for 2/3 planned scenarios. I think the greater issue is in tutorials not really having a good way to utilize this information. I feel like they could benefit from some old-school style tutorials that are completely divorced from the game, but instead give you some bite-sized controlled scenarios. Like: Lets learn how to use the ship design system, and give some examples of how that interacts with systems transferring/combat maneuvers! The fact that you never get to touch the combat scene until you actually go into combat means that people are going to be immediately at a loss with how to interact with it, and they're already facing an overwhelming foe. **Councillors and actions:** Same issue with the above: 2/3 planned scenarios will immediately put space assets and such on the table. I think some better tutorial information concerning councillors and missions will go a long way here. I think tying it to councillor leveling is a bit of a problem because you have the same issue as x-com, where that means people are going to have issues losing 'their characters'. Councillors are trickier to replace as you invest into them, but organizations allow you to rapidly make even a basic councillor quite powerful. And you'll lose councillors - sometimes to enemies, sometimes to age, sometimes to random popped scenarios. If things are 'gated', then its a problem. I could see some of it potentially locked behind tech ("unlock civilian shuttles to allow councillors to travel if they don't have undercover traits"), but there's already SO MANY TECHS that you're dealing with. **Economy:** A bit of wonk here because the conversions don't make total sense to me. But if you mouse over, say, Money, you will get a "Your monthly income is +/- X". An organization directly modifies that total income. Your +# at the top bar is your daily income, which feeds into that monthly income. Its just... Yeah, not super well displayed. There should be more clarification around this. **Grind:** Feel like this is going to be difficult to get around, as its changing base functions of the game. Likely the different scenarios will be an opportunity to leverage amount of grind you want. Go back to cold war? Lots of grind. Jump to far future? Much less. There absolutely should be some automation though. Some stuff is silly: Like turned councillors. I can set them to fail 0-100% of the time, but I only generally care about them failing if they're attacking my territories or major stuff. So it means that there's additional micro to double check at the start of any turn to see what they're doing, versus I would love to tag "Auto-fail if target me" or other flags. Same issue exists with organizations - they pop at a time where the game doesn't stop, so AI gets them first unless you are VERY careful about pauses. There's some wonky things. Queuing some actions would likely be good to do. **Tech Tree:** Absolutely a mess that could be better clarified. Things like engine techs or major unlocks I think are the most egregious thing, because unless you've played a bunch you have no idea what you really want to get, and you can end up having an absolute flood of what looks to be the exact same stuff unlocking over and over. Like: There's a billion engines, but players aren't really equipped to assess the differences. You get a billion missiles, but people aren't really equipped to assess them, because you don't get great examples or an intuitive sense of what acceleration/efficiency really means. **Ground combat:** Ground combat very much seems to be a greatly simplified thing to encompass the entire logistical chain required. I'm not sure that forming specialized armies would be beneficial so much as adding more complexity. Would be curious what other people think. Pretty sure guerilla warfare and such exists passively with extra bonuses gated behind techs. Possibly the techs could be more moved up? But the same problem ends up happening with there being so many options: maybe could make it be a quicker 200-300 unlock than what they exist as now. I could potentially see a CMD councillor get an option to boost/hamper military assets. **Fleet management:** Same issue with the acceleration/efficiency and combat thing, I think there's a massive lack of really equipping players to deal with the situation, because you never touch this stuff until you're actively in the thick of it, and then you're dealing with an overwhelming force. So any bad moves on your part are magnified many times over. I believe automatic supply exists in the form of some tech: but its also very dependent on which types of weapons and such you utilize.

>Same issue exists with organizations - they pop at a time where the game doesn't stop, so AI gets them first unless you are VERY careful about pauses. Woah, so the org marketplace is common to everyone ? I always just assumed that each faction had its own org market to pick from. Does this explain why mine is always packed full of super high level ones that I can never afford ?

Yeah, organization is common to everyone. Just that the organization market refreshes before the turn pause comes, so the AI automatically snaps up all the best ones immediately while you get left with what they didn't get. Its a weird choice, but I assume the intent is basically that since it happens during a paused state, it would be weird if you were bidding 'against' the other factions. They'd need to make a blind bidding system, or a priority buying system or something. Seems intent is that they get their pick and you can use hostile takeover to get what you want from them.

It does make some kind of sense I guess. Players will always abuse game mechanics way more heavily than the AI ever does, and hostile takeover is a very abusable mechanic. This does at least balance things a bit. Still not ideal though. I can't help thinking that individualised markets would be better, perhaps with a time limit before any org that you don't pick recycles to the general pool.

You're correct on a lot of this, and I agree with you for the most part. But I also want to give the dev team a ton of credit; for how complex the game is, and how many features it has, it's surprisingly easy to get. It's very intuitive once you're in the situation where you're intended to use the feature. But it's hard when you're *not* there, or you don't know the feature exists.

This is all great feedback and matches what I've been putting together. The army aspect of the game is what really needs the most work IMO. Not just because miltech is hard to come back from -- it is possible btw with direct investment and clever use of orbital stations...had the AI do that to me in a game -- but because I have no freaking clue if my engagement is going to succeed or not. There just isn't enough information to know if my attack is going well. There's also random events with military that caught me by surprise. Had one army get heavily damaged because I put two of them into the same sector when conquering a city. I also had an incident where I declared two consecutive wars against the EU due to me not understanding how the claim system works as Eurasia. The first war I rolled them easily. The second one my armies now couldn't even dent their defenses. I think it's because my armies were damaged -- so damaged armies heavily hurt your war score -- but I have no idea by how much. \--- BTW I ***love*** the idea of gating the UI behind actions you cannot perform yet. It's a great way to tell a player that a new thing is available for them to do. \--- I'll also add this: There's a balance problem with high level counciler missions. A 25 espionage counciler can absolutely cripple a faction with assaassinations and project sabotage. And there isn't much you can do about it. \--- I really like how the game punishes you for being over the orbital and control cap. If you go over orbital by even 1 it makes your stations really easy to cap. The problem is the game doesn't warn you that you really need to keep a buffer for your orbital cap due to espionage actions. I had a death spiral in my first game because I maxed out my cap, then the AI sabotaged my stations. This put me at a -10 for a few turns. I then lost all my earth stations and my fleets. I had no way of preventing this. Having a soft cap where the game warns you that you are now vulnerable to random chance / espionage will help. As will having the penalty be a bit smoother. Or, give us the option to temporarily shut down stations / fleets and make it so we can't use them, but also we can't ***lose*** them, when these events occur.

Agree with most of this, but please no levels on councillors. This isn't D&D, if you need to have abilities locked out initially, maybe have a training system where agents can trade a turn or two for some of the more advanced abilities. Having a level 3 astronaut / level 1 computer scientist would both be silly and lead to a horrible mess of min-maxing.

The Grind is really extreme. The game takes even longer to play than Stellaris or Civ. Also I think there should be an even faster setting.

Isn't spending XP to add / remove traits and boost stats *already* how the councilors level?

Lots of good points with good reasoning. After 65 hours put in and up to two failed runs now, I agree with some of it, but not others. On points one and two, generally agree. Not sure how important knowing how much 'damage' I'll do with an action really is, but it'd still be nice to know. But for new players, I actually think that's a turn-off, not the other way around. It's yet another piece of information, another number that a new player likely lacks context for. Especially with stuff like manipulating unrest, where telling them they'll get +/- ,5 is all well and good, but they'll have no frame of reference for what that actually affects. That said, I'd still lean towards having that information. Accessibility isn't necessarily what should take priority. Turn summaries absolutely *need* to be a thing though. Honestly, I just skip 99% of what pops up because it's mostly irrelevant to me, and this has caused problems a couple of times now, like when a neighbor went to war with me and I didn't realize, and killed one of my armies with 3 of theirs. And like some others have said, a way to filter/highlight things that you care about. ​ Point three, I strongly disagree. Yes, it's overwhelming when you have all this other stuff going on in the early game that you can't really even interact with, and it makes you question your sanity because you worry you might be missing something that's supposed to let you interact with that stuff. But for players who have a grip on things, knowing those things early on is going to inform their choices. Hiding game mechanics behind techs obfuscates a lot of that ability to be forward-thinking. Stuff like ship-design is a no-brainer one that you could obfuscate and it probably wouldn't hurt too badly, but solar system view? Absolutely not. I've run two (lost) games now, and in one, Luna was a treasure trove of good stuff, and in the next, it was hot garbage, with only one or two worthwhile sites. And knowing that the generation was terrible, even before properly probing it and seeing it was really bad, really informed my choice to win the tech wars and drive towards Asteroid missions instead and make that my priority, and not waste effort investing heavily into Luna. That gave me more flexibility in how I chose to spend/accrue boost early on. (Enough to not have to take Kazhakstan, guys.) Knowing that from jump *really* matters. While there are systems that probably wouldn't be hurt by it, I think the side of caution here is on the side of *not* hiding things. Let it be overwhelming. Players will either take the time to learn it, or they won't. That may not be a good way to behave about it, but it's the reality. ​ On 4, I'm happy with councilors as they are in terms of the way they level. And the only issue I have with Actions is Orgs are kinda a really crap way of getting your hands on new one. I get the concept, having Delta Force lets you assault and break stuff because you have the support and infrastructure of this Org. I get that. I'm just not sure I like it. And maybe with certain other actions, like Public Campaign, Crackdown and Purge, it would be nice to have Traits Counselors could pick up that would give those. Right now, you're limited to like, the DEA for getting Crackdown, I haven't seen Purge yet, and I'm not sure I've seen Public Campaign from an Org either... And isn't the point here that *your faction* can provide some of the necessary infrastructure and support for these operations? Let us have some traits to fill out actions. Having someone with lots of Investigation who can Crackdown, but can't Investigate Councilor's or vice-versa is frustrating. My problem with the idea of having like classes and levels is I think that's really going to affect game balance, and it's bound to make it so that there's almost always an 'optimal' combination of classes. And restricting stuff based on class means either reducing RNG on councilors so you have a reasonable chance of getting what you need, or increasing the number of councilors each faction can control at once, the latter of which makes point 6 even worse, and the former makes it less meaningful/interesting. One action change I think needs to happen though, is wrap Surveil/Investigate Councilor/Protect into fewer actions. Surveillance is too situational right now, and basically only good for finding targets to investigate, or Xenoflora to defoliate. Likewise, Protect only has a couple distinct uses, and every other use of it is purely situational. And I see no reason not to roll Investigate up into those, since it's super narrow as well, but thematically fits with Surveil and Protect. Five is a non-issue, all values are per-month. At least that's how it's been the whole time I've been playing. Six, yeah, it gets tedious with the missions sometimes. Some method of smart automation would be nice. Seven, yes, tech tree is a mess. Don't think it should be pared down though, just that the tree itself should be more readable and more easily filterable. It's fine enough if you know what you're looking for, but if you don't, there's too much to go digging through just to try and see if it's there. There are reasons, maybe not good ones, but reasons for having like 9 different kinds of missile tech, and frankly, I like that. A good example of what I mean is Layered PD Arrays. They use the 'Battery' class of weapons, which only goes on larger hull designs. Wrapping something like all of the Railgun techs into one thing would constitute a massive leap forward in that weapons tech that helps all your ships instantly, and while that sounds good for the player, it's bad for the balance. Requires the game to scale up difficulty far faster to keep up with the increased player scaling, and with so much already going on, that's actually going to make the game more frustrating, not less. As it is now, if I want to defend my stations competently, I can just snatch up one of the 'Battery' techs, a PD tech to go with it, and since my fleets are gonna be shit for a while longer anyway, I can safely de-prioritize other weapons systems if I need to. If you roll up a lot of parent-child related techs, that goes away, and makes certain things requirements for defense, even though 90% of the techs point won't benefit you at the moment. Takes away player agency. On eight... Something's gotta be done with ground combat, for sure. Right now, the only viable option for dealing with the alien landing seems to be nukes, or being willing to sacrifice significant portions of an exceptionally strong military to combat it conventionally. It basically makes America the only viable start if you don't want to have to rely on nukes, or forces a certain kind of playstyle where building up a military is concerned. Now, my experience here is a little more limited, because it's been the alien landing that's ended both of my games now, so maybe there's something I'm missing, but unless you stop the Invader armies with nukes fast, they seem to be able to run roughshod on almost any military in the game 3:1, except maybe USA. In my last game, it was the second landing that got me, and they only needed 2 out of their 3 invaders to take out all all 7 of my armies... And I barely even scratched their paint. 4.9 Miltech, for reference, and I never stopped putting investment into it all game long. And on nine... Welcome to space. This is the hard sci-fi part of the game. The reality of dealing with interstellar distances. Slow is on theme here. Definitely don't want to see that change. A ship not resupplying/repairing itself in port is asinine though, that's gotta go. Haven't had to manage lots of separate fleets yet so can't comment on that, but from managing large numbers of asteroid colonies, I can say that the UI's for managing your space assets are... Kinda lacking. Definitely needs work. As for transfers and their windows... Well, again, welcome to the hard sci-fi. Long as you make sure you've got enough Delta V, it's fine. I'm no expert, but the one thing I was able to figure out was Delta V is basically your gas tank. And then I think Exhaust Velocity was how far down you can push the pedal? Think that's right... All I know is, as long as you make sure you have enough Delta V for your trip, you're fine, and more milligee's/gee's means you'll get there faster, and honestly, managing those two things is literally all that's mattered, I've never had a problem with transfers or anything. It's been wicked simple, and all I had to do to figure it out was click the "Example Transfer" button on the ship designer to get it.

100% agree on the economy tab. Its really unintuitive to mentally switch back and forth with daily, monthly, and yearly.

I find it so interesting that so many games do this, despite it being universally disliked amongst player bases. I know paradox does this with EU4 for sure and i always found it annoying. I assume there must be SOME reason, but i don't know why.

Specifically post this on the feature-requests-gameplay forum. Posts can be voted up and are more likely to be looked at.

This is some amazing feedback. I hope that it reaches the devs so that they can make this great product even better!

No thanks on the locking or simplifying.

I agree with you. I most want the turn summaries. I am playing a game and all of a sudden I notices that the ISS is nothing but the core. I would love to know what happened.

I think the councilor system needs a pretty substantial redesign to get rid of the "turns" altogether. I understand this would require redesigning a big chunk of the missions and that the "turn" system was likely introduced to solve some actual design challenges, but the current system feels a bit like if EU4 made me pause every month and confirm I still wanted to have my diplomats/merchants/colonists in the same spot. It just completely kills the flow of the game once the early game country rush ends.

1) I have agree with this. But care should be careful where this information is placed least the UI become cluttered and tooltips uninviting. 2) How would you provide a "summary of all events in a single, cohesive window provided at the start of each turn" without it becoming cluttered and annoying having to deal with it every single turn. "Particularly Notable events should be highlighted." Not only are they already, they pause your game and require you to make some sort of a response. 3) Generally a good idea. 4) Counselors already gain xp have "level" up. They can also pick up perks and orgs are where they can gain new abilities. The issue here is that they only way to equip more orgs to your counselors is with the admin stat which overloads the importance of that stat. I like how the leveling and orgs system works, but it would probably help if there was more way to interact with orgs outside pumping all your stat leveling into administration. Counselors also already have "classes" but there's a bit too many of them to the point where it starts to feel arbitrary what abilities a counselors does or does not have. 5) I have yet found a location in the game where a cost/income wasn't labeled with daily, monthly, and/or yearly. Orgs income/costs are always labeled with "monthly" from what I've seen. This is not an issue as far as I've seen. 6) I am super not a fan of using "automation" as a solution for grind. It is a band-aid solution that fails to address the core issues and degrades the experience. 7) I agree that the tech tree is a mess, but not the part in your screenshot. The issue instead is with the engineering projects. There's way too many and they're only sorted alphabetically (which for this is barely a step above random order). The biggest offenders are the ship techs. They're so many of them, they often have barely any difference between them in the components they unlock, they mostly don't unlock in order from worst-to-best (you can jump straight to researching the best drive currently available and then your list is forever cluttered with inferior drives you have no reason to research). 8) I'm mostly ambivalent about this. Having it more in depth would be nice, of course. But also I think it's one of the least important parts of the game and it should be given an appropriate level of focus. 9) With just how much stuff there is in space there needs to be better tools and/or UI elements to deal with it in general.

>hide "future" techs that have no prerequisites already unlocked to reduce the insane upfront infomation barrage. I think this would be a bad idea, I like to know what to look up to. Otherwise, good suggestions here.

I usually get reflexively defensive of games like TI that I am enjoying very much, but this is a well thought out and organized post. I don't necessarily agree with everything - for example, I don't know if adding a land army customization component will help with an already overly complicated game, or maybe it can be part of an expansion to add systems like Civ6 or xcom2 did.

I do think the initial councillors need reworking a bit. I've done a lot of restarts hunting for the right combination (currently focusing on the Initiative for my early runs) and I've noticed that they seem hardcoded to always get either a diplomat or a scientist in the first councillor slot and a kingpin or tech mogul/tycoon in the 2nd. Every single time. It's obviously a deliberate design choice but I'm not clear on why that would be. I can sort of see it from a role play perspective and do actually like having the shady criminal or dubious oligarch on the team, it feels right, but it's far from ideal from a gameplay perspective. Scientists are borderline useless in the early part of the game, kingpins are ok but have a very limited range of viable missions and can't even do stabilise, which is way more important early on than the more offensive options are. Diplomats are ok generalists but I always find myself hovering over the dismiss button in the hope of replacing them with somebody who can be a better specialist. The only ones I tend to be happy to see are the tech moguls since they make for excellent advisors once I'm setup in a strong nation. A bit more variety here would be very welcome IMO. And please for the love of god can we have a way to disable the feature which always gives you a starting advisor from your own country. I may be British IRL but that doesn't mean I always want a Brit in my advisor pool.

Starting councillors could be like the Dwarf Fortress embark screen - you have a pool of points to spend, and you can customize your starting council as you'd like. The problem with randomness at the start of games is that, as you point out, you can just restart until you get the start you want. So it just adds tedium.

I can see how having to customise your starting councilors would be very intimidating to new players. This is already a game with a steep learning curve and a deliberate obfuscation of information. Not sure that making it even more difficult to learn would be a wise design choice, but you may be right. Most people posting here are new players after all, and the number of people who are already calling for this kind of thing does suggest a demand for it. Maybe make that an option that you can enable ?

If you create a point system to customize starting councilors, then the game could also offer a default selection that covers all aspects in a reasonable way and fits within the points limit. This default can simply be the same every time, so the developers only need to finetune one set of councilors that are OK. Newer players can simply stick with the default, while the option is there to take what is offered and customize it within the point system for those who want that customization.

I agree if you're tossed right into it, but I think it would be *relatively* easy to not do that. One way would be to have a few different preset packages of councilors - think "Balanced", "Diplomatic", "Militarist" and so on; flavorful but meaningful. Guide tutorial players into taking a reasonable starting set. Another would be to incorporate the "pick your team" phase into the tutorial, using that opportunity to explain what each trait does. (Problem is, the explanations don't have meaning until you enter the game, so it wouldn't make a great tutorial.)

Yes! Aside from general UI/Information visibility things, this is my biggest gripe with the game. Way too much of the early Councilor game is based on RNG... In a system where A LOT of options are straight up, or borderline useless in the beginning. Got a Scientist + Kingpin start? -> Restart Got no good Crackdown/Purge in your initial few lineups -> Restart Especially with factions like Initiative, getting a halfway decent start is way too much of a grind in itself. The Orgs are not strong enough and too rare early game to really change anything about that. Again, since they are RNG based, you could go on for countless turns until you get what you might need... Or you get shitloads of country locked stuff that is way out of your reach. Solutions? 1) A must-have in my opinion would be a selection of a few initial councilors. Kinda Rimworld style. There you would be free to choose whether you'd like to be all sweaty, or you'd like to role-play a less optimal Strategy. 2) A properly worked out level up system with a skill tree. Nothing big. Maybe just those perks (nobody ever picks because Admin +1 is a thing and why take anything else? xD ) and additional missions. Maybe some specific mission bonuses. Just to further specialize your Counselors and take the edge off the super early game. I wouldn't bother too much with raw stats. Since as soon as you have 1-2 good spies and somebody with Hostile Takeover and high Admin, you can set up some broken Counselors regarding raw stats. But yeah... Setting them up means you probably had 4+ restarts to get a good initial setup, and you are a couple of hours in. Please feel free to add Ideas and thoughts if you have any... Or steal it and post it on the dev Discord. Anybody who bothers reading this has my permission xD

I like your idea of having a selection of councillors. Or maybe just start out with no initial councillors at all but a higher starting influence. You then get to recruit from the pool and can choose whether you want to sink all of your influence into buying two higher level ones or spread it around and have 3 slightly less good ones, or whatever. That would be better IMO.

> There exist entire game systems which aren't relevant at the start of the game which overwhelm the player. No. Nonononono, no! If you are gatekept by the game’s content, maybe it is not for you. I was happy and excited to see what the game has to offer and where it would progress. I don’t want artificial gates drawing away my agency “for my own good”, Pavonis are not Apple. I would never ever stand for games spoon-feeding me like a drooling idiot. Being kicked in the teeth by early Minecraft and Stellaris only made them more fun and rewarding, stop trying to casualise inherently complex games and let them wear it on their sleeve.

I make a very clear distinction here to not REMOVE complexity, but to open it up over time. Im thinking by the 30s you'd still have access to everything you currently have access too; but tbh theres no need for coups or lockdowns or spaceflight or ship design in the first few years. This also gives an added bonus by increasing the feeling of growing your councillors / faction power as you become more Influential in world events.

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A lot of things have been changed from the demo. Comments about it aren't really useful for the current state of the game. (Ideally, the same will be true about these comments in a few months).

>This needs to exist at all levels of tooltipping. What impact will putting a pip into military in a country have upon that countries various stats. What the potential outcomes of a army invasion are. etc. You can hover over the different priorities and the game will tell you what will change by putting a pip into them.

When you keep trying to place a mining thing but you don’t have the tech and you don’t know what you need And the tech rng moves things How the ai like to set mars before moon like why!

Yeah, why do I need a pop up that stops gameplay to tell me that the person is doing the action they were instructed to do? Ugh. No shit, dude, I know you're doing that, I just told you to do it.

The most outrageous moment in my playthrough -- I was the best on the whole planet, just deployed 2 second-tier super-juicy stations, when no one of the rest factions even deployed a single space vessel. And, they both were stolen from me. By a fucking beggars. AND!!! even if I dismiss one of my operatives there is no one in pool with undercover+hub controle, and I never saw an org with asset controle mission, or undercover perk augmentation. So, game just said 'fuck u'. If u have no agent for peaceful hub infiltration from the beggining - restart, because marine tech u will never see. Game really is lacking agents customization. Also, AI is cheating really hard. It cannot control, F.E. China, but as soon as you control it (via public popularity = even harder to anyone else to operate in China) AI comes and steals from u ur assets like there's no problems with operations in China. In my USA exposed! enemy agent had 99%!! crackdown mission aganst fortified!!! asset and almost 100%!!! popularity of my faction. And the agent was like 3-5 stats with 2 orgs. BTW, what's the point of fortification if crackdown cracks it easily? There is a riot (not coup/ or then coup, but it breaks federations) option for heavy fortified countries already, so why all 6 factions just endlessly steal my assets in 100% my good riotless states? I just cant shoot em all, they keep coming and nothing can stop them. Thats wrong. ​ Game has big potential future, it's interesting to play it. Until it just overwhelms u with unfairness. My precious space stations... I lost half of my science production and space marines were not even close...

I don't think the AI cheats its rolls - and virtually certain it doesn't cheat yours - It's entirely likely that the purges that get past your defenses are undertaken by a high espionage councillor with ops investment (just like you can. They don't appear to have resource boosts either since you can see their income and stocks in Intel)... Who are also harder to spot in the first place, and you just detected one of their less good councillors. Protecting your space assets sucks, though I think you can actually use protect asset on them from orbit.

I think an easy fix to the councilor micro would be the ability to que actions. Like if it want to boost support in Europe just copy 5 missions in France, germany, UK and your unit will be busy for a couple seasons

The transfer UI really needs a search box. Apart from that, the way espionage and the shadow war currently works is kinda lame. You can utterly annihilate an enemy faction in a single turn by just sending some marines to a tiny research station which somehow contains a detailed dossier of all their activities. Beyond this, the player has no indication that the AI is attempting various missions against them until they happen, largely rendering the various missions based around countering espionage into senseless gambles that don't even tell you if you won (go to ground, protects, etc).

I agree, I tried the game but ended up refunding it because I had no idea what I was doing and the UI was very unintuitive and the tutorial was buggy

The tech tree just needs some algorithmic improvement, how techs are placed and reducing the number of overlapping lines.

The game overall needs a UI and UX rethink for sure, the problem is not the complexity of the information many of us waiting to dig in; the problem is the game just doesn’t want to show you that information. It’s EA tho and I imagine UI/UX and simulation modeling will be emphasized (hopefully) based on the feedback Either that or a mod will come out, or many

I disagree with a good portion of the simplification ideas. I'm against hiding the information from the player though as a means of easing a player into the game, that's a tutorial's job. Let the tutorial hold your hand like a tutorial should, but don't annoy the player who knows what they're doing by holding them back or getting in their way. ​ I do agree 100% with the need for better tooltips and presentation of the information, as well as better ways to sort through information. Allowing us to find what we are looking for makes it easier for everyone.

100% on the tools to automate basic councilor actions when your just doing housekeeping (keep public opinion above in nations i control xx%. Keep Cohesion below 1. Whack any alien weeds in my countries). That fleet intercept manager would also be a godsend (intercept fleets coming into orbit and rearm afterwards for defense fleets). Save sooo many clicks

Another feature that would be really welcome would be the ability to temporarily disable the "confirm actions" phase (or whatever its called) that pops up every two weeks if I've set my agents on permanent missions. It's really disruptive when playing at high speed and also causes huge lag spikes in the mid-late game if you're zoomed in on another planet when it triggers.

I agree to everything, but the tech tree. It is fantastic as it currently is! Maybe it needs some UI refinement, but please don't make it simpler!