I had quite a good time playing the game and here are my suggestions

[Siran]

This game is wonderful, I like the background story, real astronomy, BDI model-based agent and the concept of fleet being the smallest operable unit, as well as simplifying ship design by equaling the strength of a component to the number of modules they take up.
Right now I am at 0000.0a:94.8d:c3.b6, that’s approximately 6.57 earth year. I have a well-constructed start system and the second system is halfway constructing the new permanent space stations on the canonical orbit, and I’m planning to form a fleet of battleships to conquer the nearest roamer faction which occupies a system with rare metals right next to my second system. I have a scout fleet made up of some fast military ships and cargo ships which has explored a third of the margins of the cluster along with a dozen of abandoned ruins. So far the game is CPU and memory friendly, I’ve encountered no crash or lag at all (my spec is 9750H + GTX 1660 ti max-q with 16G memory).
With all the good aspects of the game, I think there’s still something can be done to make the game better. So here are my suggestions:
1. Add a catalogue of available fleets and shipyards per fleet designation in the cluster window (like Stellaris). This decrease the steps needed to select a fleet or its shipyard.
2. Add a new fleet designation: Exploration. And I wonder if an auto-explore agent is possible with current agent system? A fleet managed by an auto-explore agent will orient towards the nearest unexplored system, and will loot any abandoned ruin it encounters. When the fleet is below threshold of spare parts or exceed a certain percent of total cargo capacity, it returns to a system to export the xenotech to certain fleet and import spare parts from other fleets.
3. Some supplement in the manual. For example, it should be stated clearly that it cost only spare parts to maintain a ship, but many others to repair or retrofit it. Also, it would be great if the developer could list all the recipes used in industry and ship construction in the appendix of the manual.
4. The freight transfer screen needs to be improved. I suggest using fleet names to identify freight in and out (left side fleet A, right side fleet B), and replace the current UI with something similar to the fleet split cargo transfer UI so that I can easily check the current cargo amount before deciding how many to transfer.
5. A notice of “Mission Complete” in the message window for the following events: Ship/Structure construction complete, abandoned ruins discovered, certain fleet have reached its destination and is now idle.
6. “Survey” cargo limit is not reasonable as it doesn’t include ammunition, and the export threshold of xenotech should be set to 0% so the fleet set to this cargo limit can export them to research hub.
7. The freight transfer again. It would be great to be able to transfer (or allocate) cargo or inhabitants not only by amount, but also by percentage.
8. Ship design screen is so long that the lower part of the screen is unselectable (1920*1080). This screen should be able to be maximized like all other screens in the game.
9. The remarkable and scanned view of the cluster window should be merged if possible as I use these two views most commonly when exploring the cluster.
10. The alarm sound effect is too sharp. Considering that this sound will be played every 5 or 10 minutes in the game, I suggest to have it changed with something milder.
11. A new tag called “Fleet Template” in the faction screen, where players can design the composition of a certain fleet template and give order to shipyards to construct ships a fleet need and let them automatically rally somewhere.
12. A new order for the fleet to “accompany” another fleet. If fleet A is ordered to accompany fleet B, they will move together like one fleet and engage as one fleet, but has different designation and cargo limit. This allows for a military fleet to escort a cargo fleet.

I’m not a native English speaker, so some of these suggestions might not be conveyed accurately. Anyway Diaspora is an excellent game for me and I hope it can be better. Thanks to the developer for your 12-years hard work on this game.

[Magitex]

Just a word on #8, I don’t seem to have this issue in 1920×1080. Are you running text scaling higher than 100%?

Lots of good suggestions here, I’m still just at 0000.07 myself – too much micro-optimization 🙂

[Siran]

Yes, the text scaling of my laptop is 125%, that might be the source of the problem. Right now I have to squeeze the window from the top to select the OK button at the bottom.

[Zorro]

thanks for taking the time to suggest improvements, some quick thoughts:

Fleet designations is something i’m thinking about. Exploration sounds like a no-brainer, but it’s also pretty useful for agent behaviours so was pondering letting players define their own designations. It’d be a bit of work as at the moment it’s an enum and shared with the AI but could be worth it if it makes creating agent services without variables easier

Yeah freight transfer sucks when you’re splitting fleets. I’ve got into a pattern of just “export right/junk left” and going with it but it’s not very obvious,intuitive, or particularly useful for 99.9% of the game (maybe right at the start if doing an eccentric start you might care about not losing specific bits). Inhabitant transfer is even worse

yeah “mission complete” stuff would be handy, there are callbacks for when things finish but not really wired it up to anything meaningful yet. I’ve left scout fleets sitting in space far away almost to starvation too many times

i forget how/why i set up the survey limits. I’m not sure if i even use them myself! (probably set them military). I’ve added so many custom cargo limits of my own that i just load in my set at the start of a game and forget what the defaults are. Probably worth a look in case they’re out of date

will take a look at the ship design screen. i think that’s caused a few problems (grown a fair bit over time, and i’ve just kludged new fields into it without taking time to consider a broader redesign. It always tends to get longer rather than wider, the opposite of display monitor shapes.

i nicked the alarm sound from the US Navy, i was using it for an alarm sound for monitoring systems at work, where the “attention-grabbing”-ness was handy. Perhaps another one to make configurable

good point re: remarkable and scanned views, they are essentially compatible (remarkable implies scanned)

fleet templates: yep i’ve had this on my mind for a long time. Definitely nice to be able to build a suite of ships in one click, shouldn’t even be that hard and need to put time into it.

fleet escorts: have been trying for a while, was originally implemented keeping the fleets entirely separate and buzzing around each other but it’s quite CPU intensive and not always perfect (the cargo ship jumps first and gets interdicted before the military jumps).. might end up with a new generalization of a “wing” or “group” or something that is a set of fleets so if there is an interdiction you get to choose which fleet(s) go into combat, and would always jump together as if the same fleet. Still working out how best to implement it (potentially huge number of changes as just about everything is fleet-oriented so hoping for a stroke of genius)

[Author]

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