u/xaviermace

Overall, I absolutely loved the demo and I'm looking forward to the full release. After 13 hours and unlocking everything available in the demo there's only three things that I feel like could use some tweaking unless I'm missing something.

https://preview.redd.it/3qz2n4l75gah1.jpg?width=3840&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9b5f74695b17e875cad10d4283ddd9c1643f1cdf

It feels like salt is a bit too far away on the story map resulting in there being no way to efficiently get bread to your starting camp. This has resulted in constant cycling of the unhappiness quest. It runs out, quest triggers because they're angry. Next load comes in and they're happy again. Rinse, repeat.

Related to that, I feel like the coin economy might need some tweaking. I'm assuming it becomes less of a problem later in the game but with what's available in the demo it feels like either coins are too hard to come by or the coin related construction is too high. The buildings are 100 coins a pop, masts are 20, elevators 50 and lifts 300. That last one especially confuses me. Isn't it functionally a horizontal elevator? Why so expensive? Then you have the gambling den using 120 per roll.

Automating the trade port so you don't have to click the button every 90 seconds would help substancially. Ideally with an option to set/limit consumption ala the Anno games. All the resources I've traded so far are a 10:1 trade rate which seems to make straight food the best option because of the larger stack size and ease of production. But that still means 3 full trades to do a single gambling den roll or 6 full trades (5,000 food) to pay for a single lift. That feels off.

Lastly I feel like the replace ship option should include same tier ships given some missions are really only completable with certain ships. If you want to do a same tier swap you have to manually remove your captain and crew then dismantle the ship.

So far the only bug I've run into is on my current run the quest when you build your first tower didn't complete properly. As you can see in my above screenshot, it's stuck highlighted.

Seriously though, job well done guys. Very happy with this demo.

Played most of the day single player without issue (campaign and survival). Trying to play with my roommate (me hosting) crash to desktop within 60 seconds of the match starting. Not sure what the deal is with that given I don't see other mention of that but tried multiple times but certainly doesn't give a good demo impression.

Let me preface the rest of this by saying yes, I'm having fun and I'll probably be buying it. But I do think it still needs a lot of work. Most of this below feedback is from playing survival coop with the AI. That said, in no particular order.

The UI in general needs a lot of polish. There's a lot of overlap and just in general it feels very unpolished. I'm not sure it was a good idea to release a demo at this stage. Gamers are exceptionally unforgiving people and as the saying goes, you never get a second chance to make a first impression.

Escape key doesn't always reliably bring up the pause/settings menu and if you enable a lot of modifiers, they're blocking the button to get to the menu (playing at 3840x1600).

Given how ground focused the game is, pathing needs some work. It's most noticable playing coop survival with the AI. It mostly follows your hero around which is questionable behavior to begin with but once they get larger numbers or large units (IE Striders) it's just one giant roadblock. Related to that, there's not enough air units.

Combat and pacing just feels off in general. Given the games clear SC2 influence and assuming that's the feel and pace you're going for, let's give a quick and easy example. These number come from their respective Wiki's so I'm not 100% sure on their accuracy. Base numbers:

Stinger 90hp, 9dps
Thrall 70hp, 5dps
Zergling 35hp, 10dps
Marine 45hp, 9.8dps
Zealot 150hp (Combined), 16dps

Or high level units:

Reaver 1100hp, 51dps
Reaver (Infused) 1650hp, 77dps
Dark Template 120hp (combined), 37dps
Ultralisk 500hp, 57dps

This doesn't carry over to defensive buildings however.

Sunken Colony 300hp, 13dps
Cultivator Defender 400hp, 17dps

Not saying copy SC2 should be the goal but 10:1 HP to Dmg was about the spongiest you get in SC2. That's basically the starting point here. So if you're going for faster paced game, that's problematic. This just makes units feel useless/unsatisfying, especially because a lot of the AoE's don't have this problem. The various nukes will one shot most of the weaker troops (as they should) but this is a problem when you start talking kill times for regular attacks.

A base Zergling would take 30s to kill a sunken colony. A base thrall would take 80s to kill a Cultivator defender. A stinger would still take 44s. These higher kill times are a problem because of the aforementioned AoE's. Your units have to spend a lot more time sitting in one place which makes getting nuked by AoE's far harder to avoid. In general this means you can't really do quick hit and run attacks.

Speaking of cultivators... Their inconsistent base size is really annoying. Placement says it's a 2x2 but it frequently blocking more than that.

Lastly, I think this is specific to survival, but you don't get any biomass spawl/spawn in the starting zone at start. You effectively can't actually build in your starting area until you clear the closest rocks outside the base and build a second Bloomwell which makes them wildly inefficient at start compared to the other options. Since you don't have biomass that also means it takes forever to get you first buildings built because of how slow the movement speed is.

Again, I am having fun with it. But it does feel pretty rough right now. People generally expect demo's to be more polished than an early access release so I'm not sure it was a good idea at this stage.

Just a reminder that the roadmap is a living document and features often get pushed back. IE NetFlow support has officially been pushed back to 8.2 which I've seen several people saying was the reason they were waiting for 8.0 or going to deploy beta. I believe a couple others were as well but NetFlow was the main one I was personally watching for.

Our TAM tells us they're pretty set on not pushing back any further so my personal opinion any feature which doesn't show in dev (which fortunately is down to one), is probably getting pushed back to 8.2. But again, if you're planning around a feature and/or 8.0, you should be checking the roadmap occassionally to make sure things haven't changed.

Let me preface this by saying I've been playing since beta (3,600 hours on Steam) and I'm definitely in the whale category. TLDR: You need either need a better endgame experience or a better story experience.

STO has a fundamental problem and always has. It's only real draw is Star Trek and I say this as a person that really likes Star Trek. That's the only thing that's kept me even semi-active this long. Star Trek is (at least in theory) about the story. Try to group up with a buddy and play through the story. Even ignoring the forced single player missions, it's incredibly buggy and just unrewarding in general. There aren't any large player count missions/events. That makes it a really hard to call it an MMO. PvP has always been largely non-existent and I say this as somebody who liked PvP back in the day. So let's treat it like a single player game.

The newer story missions are generally a huge improvement over the older missions as far as story goes. That's great, truly. But new missions are only being added to the end of the story/timeline which creates two problems.

Create a new character, and play through the story from the beginning. It's painful. People forget just how painful it is. This is a problem for both new players and returning vets. Vets know it gets better so they generally just skip the older missions when rolling new characters. New players just get frustrated. Especially once they start getting into it and then get told they picked the wrong faction/species by the DPS chasers.

Then you finally get to the newer missions. As said before, they're generally longer and of notably higher quality than the older missions which again is generally great. But the rewards are generally crap, especially with how long some of them are. For a while you were doing episode gear sets (IE Quantum Phase), which was great because that provides a better incentive to not just play the mission but even replay it to get the rest of the set. Even for players already at "endgame" stages, especially if they're F2P players.

Your last two episodes for example however provides outfits and basic/common gear. The former is only potentially of value for space barbie which doesn't appeal to some people. The latter is unlikely to be of value to anybody other than to sell for a minimal amount of EC. At which point why not remove the extra step and just award EC? Unless I'm really invested in the story, I have no incentive to play the mission.

There's additionally no real incentive to play missions on higher difficulties either as the rewards don't really get any better. The XP payout doesn't offset how much longer it takes to run the mission unless you're already well into the DPS chasing phase at which point you don't need the XP. This applies to story missions and patrols. If I'm farming patrols for mastery unlocks, it's far faster to do it on easy and no other incentive to do it on a harder setting.

The only difficulty incentive is Elite TFO's. The problem there is if you're good enough to do an Elite TFO without a pre-made group, you're probably already at the point where you don't have a use for the rewards other than to sell on the exchange.

So you effectively have two options for end game gameplay. You can DPS chase and the game doesn't really reward or incentivize that. That makes it unappealing for anybody who's not here primarily for Star Trek. There's no leaderboards, in-game tournaments, clan battles, ranked gameplay etc. I'm honestly surprised by how passionate the DPS crowd is given the game provides no reward or recognition for their efforts.

That leads to TFO's often having 4 players doing 10k-50k DPS and one player doing 200k+ if not 1M+. On non-elite TFO's, that just makes it boring for the 4 low players as everything is dead before they get in weapon range. On elite that makes it frustrating for the high guy as he's having to hardcore carry and will still probably fail unless he's so far into the chasing that he can solo elites. That gets old for most players, regardless which side they're on.

Then there's space barbie which if we're being honest is probably your most profitable endgame group. The game has always been heavily weighted towards FED for content, including uniforms which to some extent makes sense but is problematic for space barbie. People have been asking for FED playable Orions literally forever and that ask has just gotten stronger since Lower Decks. Then you have DOM which is abysmal for space barbie. DS9 gave us no shortage of options for humanoid species aligned with the Dominion that aren't Jem'Hadar. For the love of god, give us a non-Jem'Hadar option when rolling Dominion toons. Changlings would be awesome but I understand the mechanics difficulty. But Vorta, Karemma, Dosi, Tosk, Wadi, Paradan, are all options and all have enough canon story/flavor to give them a unique species trait and would give far more space barbie options. Yes, I realize there's hurdles for both FED Orions and non-Jem'Hadar DOM. You're way overdue to rip off that bandaid. I said in a different thread a while back, you could legit make a whole story arc around Tendi and the Orions in general. Pretty much everybody loves Tendi. Make use of that.

How much experience did you have when you took yours and did you find the later ones actually easier to pass than the early ones? I passed my ZCE today with flying colors. While it's got a practical/hands on portion and more technical than ZCP/ZCS it still felt easier than I was expecting. I'm about 3.5 years into my Zabbix journey.