What is the problem with SE5?

[Slick]

There is no "one" thing. As said before there are numerous small things that kill the fun in the game. Here are some of my top examples (all of these have been posted about numerous times):

1) The UI sucks, specifically:
-- too many mousclicks overall
-- too many double-clicks
-- no drag & drop
-- can't see info you want on screens that you make decisions. 1 examples of many:
---- Research: what did I gain on the last couple of levels of this tech so I can determine if it is worth it to research another level?

2) The AI sucks. No explanation necessary. This is significant because most buyers of a game don't play multiplayer more than single player.

3) There are too many bugs, many of them still crash the game.

4) The "rate" or "pace" of the game seems too slow. SE:IV had it just about perfect to give that "just one more turn" feeling. SEV is far off the mark. Balance Mod is a great improvement, but, no offense, not there yet and still overshadowed by the other issues that can't be currently addressed by modding.

5) There are several game mechanics that are not fun:
-- retreating. A ship with even 1 less movement point can successfully and repeatably keep retreating from superior forces.
-- needing to constantly fiddle with research allocation. I don't know if most people do this, but I do because it bugs the crap out of me to lose research points when you spend more than required on the last level, which you can't know you are at unless you constantly check the data files or memorize them over time. BTW each turn research points change due to construction, happiness, etc.
-- the pathing routine sucks. I'm not sure what the fix is, but the "Stutter Step Dance" illustrates one problem with it nicely:
http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/thr...1910&Forum=f23

6) A big one for me is not being able to have the game process a turn with the game minimized. Who in SE:IV didn't surf the web or do other things when the game was processing a turn. Not anymore under SEV unless you use crappy winDOHed mode.

7) Having to keep coming back to lists to get things done one at a time. Each time, based on the delay and the reordering, it seems the game recalculates the list. Very tedious. Only the Log remembers where you were at. One example: I'd like to select multiple construction queues and place them on hold with one click, and then later release the holds all at once.



I'm sure you get the idea; I'm not going to rant or make a huge list here, but, taken individually, many of these wouldn't make too much difference, but taken in total, the game just isn't fun.

I will probably upset some people here with the following, but please don't be offended. It appears to me that too much effort was spent making the game super-moddable; so much so that MM either consiously or unconsiously is expecting the modding community to improve the game for him, at least the AI. And this effort took away time from making a fun game. I know that many people find fun in modding and that's great, but it sure looks to me like SEV to date has been more an exercise in making a game engine, with little to no work on making a fun game - expecting the fans to make it fun by fiddling with all the modability. I think I personally might have preferred a less moddable game that was fun out of the box. Just my opinion here, folks, please don't take offense.


I know that everyone, myself included, WANTS to love this game and is giving it more than a fair chance. I know that there is every reason to expect that someday after lots of patches and a long time, many of these issues would be fixed. I give great credit to MM for unsurpassed support of games after release.

Bottom line is that SEV is not fun, but everyone mostly agrees that it has the potential to be great. Time spent waiting and dealing with the problems frustrates a lot of people so much that they may be lost forever. And the absolute bottom line is that a game that isn't very fun isn't very profitable.

* steps off of soap box and thanks people for not being offended *

[President_Elect_Shang]

Slick the first half of that was great. That is what I want to hear about so I can understand what is going on. Here is the two problems I had. First and foremost you speak of everyone and the majority. You aren't the voice of the crowd and I wish to avoid comments like those. Why? I want the crowd to speak up and add their thoughts. Second problem, what game crashing bugs? Tell me and show me them. I keep reading that the game is crashing but when? I haven't had a crash since something like pre-1.17(?or maybe 8?).

[President_Elect_Shang]

Now there is the winner. Thank you PvK! Oddly enough the ship system doesn't stall my very old computer; however, ships moving in asteroid filled systems does. One thing you said gives me a new thought. How would you implement the retreat feature if you could?

[Uncle_Joe]

That may be true for you but that won't help to make it fun in the future. What I would like to do here is start to understand the problems that can be addressed. Just saying it ain't fun isn't going to improve anything. Not that I am saying your opinion is less valid than a person who specifies a bug with examples. To you it is a valid point.

Well, you've got to make up your mind what you are looking for. You want ONE REASON?...the game isnt FUN. I can make a laundry list of WHY the game isnt fun for me, but you seemed to want one and ONLY one thing to point to.

If you want the laundry list, then Slick did a pretty good job of covering it. Like he said, any one or two of those things isnt a game-killer, but taken as a whole, it sucks the fun out of the game IMO. The game feels very poorly paced. It feels like a pile of features that never quite gelled into a cohesive game.

And again, as Slick mentioned, I'm trying to like the game. I think it if was just some random game from someone I had never heard of before I would given up on it and written it off as wasted money. But I enjoyed SE4 quite a bit and I had extremely high hopes for SE5. So, for now, I'm hoping that the game can be 'saved' by either patches (unlikely considering that 'stock' will probably never be that great) or modders (which, I again agree with Slick that the game seems to be tilted towards).

[PvK]

President_Elect_Shang said:
... One thing you said gives me a new thought. How would you implement the retreat feature if you could?

Well, my design style is different from MM's in many ways, but I would do it by making it less abstract. I like the feature that allows the players to specify where within a system the ships are deployed - I think it should be applied more literally. So, the game would track where all ships are within the ENTIRE sector, meaning the sector would be much larger, and time/rate/distance would be consistent. Ships would actually travel across a sector to reach the next sector. Combat would occur and endure whilst ships were in range and engagement was imminent. In other words, continuous action, and rates/times/distances actually consistent, with no artificial rules about combat ending and restarting, or ships teleporting an entire sector, etc.

Now, that's not the only way to do it, I doubt MM would choose to do it that way since Aaron seems to like abstractions, and there are probably abstract ways to represent it that don't have so many loop-holes. For example, in SE3 I believe ships were only allowed to retreat as long as they had strategic movement left - that alone would solve one of the problems with retreating. Improving the conditions under which retreats occur would also help (i.e. realizing when ships are all running away and no combat will occur so don't record it as a combat, and realizing that slightly faster ships WILL catch someone, so make a scatter decision and then start combat only somewhat outside of range, and let it continue based on relative speeds not based on artificial distances or time limits).

PvK

[Slick]

I'm not going to defend who I speak for; I speak for myself with reference to the extremely numerous comments I've read on this board. There have been several threads about this game (I had a poll or 2) where the majority of responses were hopeful, but not positive. Check out the big threads since the game was released last year.

As for bugs, I wish I could provide more, but when the game suddenly gives me an exception error or some such giving some memory address that is meaningless to me and goes to the blank screen that can only be closed with ALT-F4, it is kinda hard to provide feedback to get them fixed. I have to admit that the number of crashes under 1.20 has lowered significantly, but they still happen, they still seem to me at least to not be very reproducable, but once I get one, even if I load a previous saved game (auto save on) the game still tends to crash around the same point even when I try to figure out what the problem is and change numerous settings/orders/whatever.

If you are not experiencing crashes then you are lucky and/or not performing the same operations that lead to the crashes as other people; which again seems impossible to reproduce or narrow down. I sure don't have the time to meticulously bug hunt. At 3 months past (overdue) release and 20 versions past release, soon to be ~24, I would be embarrassed as a developer to still have hard crashes. Besides, this whole thing is a side issue; crashes are getting admittedly rare, but they do contribute to the overall frustration and lack of fun.

The key here is fun, "just one more turn", looking at the clock and saying "<EXPLITIVE DELETED>!!! I CAN'T BELIEVE I'VE BEEN PLAYING SO LONG!!!

SE:IV had all of these for me and SEV has none.

Lastly, PES, from your tone, it appears I have offended you in my last post even though I hoped not to. If so, I am sorry and it is not my intent. Please keep in mind that all opinions here on these boards are part of a terrific community who is just DYING to enjoy this game. Trolls die here from lack of food, so don't forget who the "good guys" are...

[thorfrog]

I have to agree with Slick too. Those reasons and many more are why I will not invest in SEV. This game should be challeging and fun right out of the box. Plus it should be some what balanced. As it stands right now it ranks up there with other big strategy let downs like MOO3.

Right now I'm having a blast with GalCiv2 because its fun and has that next turn appeal. Plus the support is incredible. Looking forward to the expansion.

Aaron should be looking at what Stardock is doing to get this game back on track. SEV should have dominated. I still hope a year from now this game will be on par with SEIV.

[Captain Kwok]

To be fair, at least Stardock has an actual staff which makes it easier to provide great support. I don't have any financial knowledge of MM's situation, but I think having a person on the payroll to handle time-consuming tasks like manuals, modding guides, and data file work would have made a significant difference to the current condition of the game. I can't even count the hours I spend working/testing on the Balance Mod, let alone imagine having to write manuals and descriptive text for everything in it. It's a monstrous bite to chew...

Overall I am optimistic about the future of the game and what it can offer, but unfortunately the rate at which it will take to bring it all together is too slow for some. Outside of the need to finish the AI's scripts, my main area of improvement for the game would be the little UI things. Such items would include condensing units in planetary/ship cargo (as it already has been done elsewhere), adding drop list boxes in place of pop-ups when possible, and copy/paste functions in text fields.

[Uncle_Joe]

Stardock's problem IMO is that they constantly dismiss (out of hand) the multiplayer market for TBS games.

I remember them pointing to a poll that they conductd on THEIR SITE about wanting multiplayer or not. They said the results were overwhelmingly against. Well, if you ask on a SINGLE PLAYER ONLY forum, its not likely that you will terribly many MP players hanging around to participate in your poll, are you? And they refer to this completely biased opinion poll as gospel (even the way it was stated was biased...ie, "would you want to see multiplayer capability added to the game instead of other cool features?")

Ahem...sorry...side rant. But IMO to release a strategy game without multiplayer capability in this day and age of connectivity seems silly. Of course, they are being successful and you can't really argue with success. But its the smug attitude they take towards it that totally turned me off.

[Demorve]

AI is the biggest problem I have with the game. I can live with the rest of the problems, but knowing that I have just won the game when I meet another race's 5-6 ship fleet with my explorer ship and blow them all up without a scratch.