Solar War Windows, Linux game

Really excellent game. Had tons of fun with it. There are a few issues I'd like to discuss though.

First off, missions and mission penalties. It's been mentioned before, but the penalty stacking is horrible and makes the game incredibly stressful at the start. Getting a base on the moon is easy, but 6 months to get a outpost on Mars? Which is guarded by a Starbase? And a while after that you recieve a mission to take Jupiter all of a sudden? I had a tremendously difficult time at the start of the game dealing with the constant light cruisers and trying to establish a foothold on the various moons and planets in order to complete the missions. After you've taken Jupiter though, you stop recieving missions at all, and there are no varieties on missions so far either.

Secondly, the slow and awkward start of the game. You spend a long time just chilling at home on Earth and researching stuff. It takes quite some time for you to get going, and it feels incredibly odd that you have two ship classes, fighters and corvettes, who aren't used at all in the game. In fact, why are they even there?

Thirdly, the combat. More sprites would be absolutely great, but the one thing that annoyed me the most was the lack of feedback regarding damage. Beams are better against shields from what I understand, and ballistic weapons are far better against structure and armor, but there was a lack of feedback regarding this, and I'm still confused regarding which weapons you should use.

Finally, more structured UI and more explanatory tooltips. When designing a ship, make objects you can fit on your ship green in the list, so you know what you can safely add instead of doing a quick comparison. Objects which are red cannot be fitted, and yellow objects can be used, but will cause heat issues.

Game's great, but I see the game being even more great if these issues were adressed.

Ok got a good play in and I have to say I am impressed. I like the gameplay for the mostpart but a few things really need to be adressed. and i know this is a beta and its a long way from final ballancing but you really really need to take another look at mission penalties. I thought that if i failled to do a mission in the alotted time it would give me a one time negative mark on my review or maybe a short period of negative influence like 5-6 reviews worth. Not only did the negative marks stack they persist until you complete the objective. The mission in particular that i was up against was the mars takeover mission which had a starbase on it that obliterated 2 LCs 1DD and 2FFs in a single turn, leaving me with nothing but one DD. Yeah that was the point I rage quit. I think you should allow transplanetary travel at the DD level it would go a long way to helping with the early game and wouldnt leave you reasearching half the tree while waiting to do anything more than sit there waiting to get killed.

The only other thing I thought needed work was the ship icons. You really need to have different ones for the two species and whats better they could be in full color if you couldnt mistake them with the enemies!

I do have a few suggestions for you that arent something you have to fix like the above two.

I love this campaign its awesome! BUT you should see about expanding the game map a little to nearby earth systems. To be honest it really does not make sense that a species has to have warp drive to tool around their own star system. (Fusion drive would have about the same level of effect your warp drive does as far as moving around a star system)

Making fighters relavent to late game and adding in carriers that can spawn them would be a nice touch but its not necessary.

Not trying to be pushy or too impatient, but when will we see the new build on Desura? Saw the post that it was finished over 3 days ago and been checking here several times a day.

I just hope you keep the idea that ships and crew are valuable and shouldn't be wasted en mass on targets...

Quality over quantity is always better in my opinion, and something alot of strategy games overlook. They just expect you to fling wave after wave of nameless troops at the enemy all in the name of victory.

On that note, I would love to see better damage control and display for ships, nothing flashy but maybe a little diagram with red areas where damage has been done, as well as systems damaged. Maybe a way for crew to make small repairs to damaged systems.

Any plans for carrier ships? As well as late game fighters to go with them? I didn't see any in the tech tree, but I might have missed it... These would be great for the new weaker side and back armor system you are going to add.

This game is awsome and I can't wait to see it when it is finished. Voted for it on Steam, then found it on here and bought it right away and so far has been well worth the money. Thanks and keep up the good work.