The Patch!

[Phoenix-D]

Notice how, they, for example, teleport to your location instantly..

Speaking of, I wonder if it'd be possible to 'borrow' the music box function to make a race of traders that take time to arrive?

EDIT: it is. I haven't found a way to make a warning box appear yet though..

[ZylonBane]

Heh, yeah, now that I think about it they can fly right over black holes, so they'd pretty much have to have an anti-graviton shunt.

Still, the game should probably check to make sure it's not putting a Klakar on a black hole. If that trader has the only shunt on the map, he'd be completely inaccessible.

Something else I'd like to see added to any theoretical next patch-- If you order one of your ships to attack an enemy ship, and the enemy ship is destroyed, have your ship continue to where its target ship WAS, instead of just stopping dead in its tracks. I can't tell you how many ships I've lost this way.

And add FIRE to the enemy ship context menu. Doesn't make sense that I can fire at an empty point in space, but not at a ship.

[Brainiac4]

I usually just fire right in front of the enemy ship, but I agree that adding a FIRE command to the enemy ship menu would be nice.

[Fingers]

The Klakar won't appear at a black hole by default, but you can summon them there, or they might jump there in the event of a nova or vacuum collapser going off.

[TaoLibra]

ZylonBane said:
add FIRE to the enemy ship context menu. Doesn't make sense that I can fire at an empty point in space, but not at a ship.

Yes, please! "Attack" and "Ram" both require my ship to move, and I frequently prefer that they sit still and shoot from right where they are.

Also, I would very much like to have back the movement option that SAIS had, where you could click on the enemy ship, drag away, and set a "waypoint" — telling your ship "Go here, THEN turn toward the enemy ship," and when they got too close to the enemy they'd turn back to that waypoint again and repeat the same movements.

I miss that a lot, particularly with regard to fighters, because it allowed you set up an attack run that the fighter would follow over and over. Now the fighters just stupidly circle right on top of the enemy, usually too close to even fire.

[rocky8311]

(Long post, sorry )

No, what would be REALLY great is a Hotkey for FIRE instead of just a mouse popup menu. It's a pain to use the fire command in the heat of battle; I tend to pause just to make sure I'm not too late with the mouse command b/c yeah, the destroyed ships coasting in to ram you is a problem. It doesn't often harm me anymore but it's really annoying b/c selecting fire with your mouse takes a few seconds.

But another problem is that while your ships don't follow through and detonate a destroyed hulk that's coasting into them, they also ought to stop attacking a ship if it's totally disabled and not moving.

I can't tell you how many times I would have won a battle with a bunch of Tan Ru b/c I couldn't get my ships to stop firing missiles at a disabled ship (all weapon/item/etc slots grey, totally immobile, but still some green on the "health"? bar) and move on to a more imminent threat. It doesn't seem to be a problem with other weapons installed on my ships, but it just seems like if one's ships would consider greyed out enemies a non-threat, such battles against groups would be easier to win.

Even when I manually target my weapons in the direction of another ship, it seems like my ship continues to fire missiles at the disabled one even though the disabled ship is further away

Also, I think 'attack' doesn't work as one would expect. Instead of actually firing on the ship, it seems like you just follow it while firing on whatever ship is closest along the way.

[Spaceman]

Resolution independant ship and nav selectors, nice. I like how they initially appear bright and then fade to a more reasonable shade. The brackets are all right-angles though, how about some curves(like the derelict)?

I've seen ships suddenly double their speed a few times now, what's going on there? It seems to happen when a ship is headed towards another, like the avoidance code is bugged. I have avoidance turned off.

[Tanelorn]

for rocky, the 'heat' of battle is no longer the 'heat' of battle when you his 'spacebar'

[rocky8311]

Wouldn't hit spacebar if it didn't take like three seconds to manually fire...

[PvK]

more like the twitch of battle...

Personally, I would have lost interest without the ability to pause. If I want an action arcade game, I'll fire up one of those, about star fighters... starships have crew so that they don't suffer from delays which one guy on a Windohs PC has.