In the game, ships are viewed side-on, and their modules are operated by individual crew members. During combat, players give high-level commands to a small fleet, positioning their ships, ramming and boarding others. Ships and terrain are fully destructible: they can catch fire, explode, break apart, and fall. Players can also compete against one another in Internet and LAN matches.
The ships are highly detailed, teeming with sailors moving around at their individual tasks, like an ant farm or a cut-away drawing. The player's choices in ship layout are crucial, and an important part of the game is exploring the design space of different airships and their matching tactics.
It's been a few weeks since the release. I've squashed the immediate bugs, and while I'm generally very happy with the state of the game, it's clear that the conquest mode needs improvement.
I've gone through hundreds of recent reviews and forum threads and collected all your feedback about the conquest mode. Reading through everything that's wrong with my game was a bit... emotionally draining, but I got through it and have put together a list of the biggest issues that I think I need to address:
- Conquest starts out hard, with lots of opponents to fight, and then becomes very easy once you have a big enough fleet to steamroll everyone.
- Some enemy ship designs are very weak, and once you do have a big enough fleet, your ship designs don't matter very much.
- The mechanics around attacking, intercepting, and fleeing cause a lot of back and forth with little progress for either side in a war.
- Town defenses and counter-espionage are both expensive and not very fun.
- It doesn't really matter where you attack because all cities just give you extra income.
I have a whole bunch of ideas for how to improve all this, but I want to avoid just making a pile of additional features that buries the underlying game design flaws. So I'm now going through these ideas and figuring out how they can fit together to address the points above. I'll be making another post soon detailing my plan.
In the meantime, do give me additional feedback and suggestions. Do note that there's a lot of different things I need to balance, and that your game experience may be different from others'. :)
Minimum Setup
- OS: Ubuntu/Debian/Mint
- Processor: 1.8 Ghz+Memory: 256 MB RAM
- Memory: 256 MB RAM
- Graphics: 1 GB VRAM+
- Storage: 1 GB available spaceAdditional Notes: Not currently compatible with Intel HD graphics controllers. May run on other Linux distros. but no guarantees.
Recommended Setup
- OS: Ubuntu/Debian/Mint
- Processor: 2.2Ghz+ Dual-coreMemory: 2 GB RAM
- Graphics: 2 GB VRAM+Network: Broadband Internet connection
- Storage: 1 GB available spaceAdditional Notes: Not currently compatible with Intel HD graphics controllers. May run on other Linux distros. but no guarantees.
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