Had a playthrough of iteration 11, conquered the nearby base, overall I’m very happy because I had zero crashes in the play through, also another strong aspect is the ship to ship combat. But there are weaknesses and glitches, that need to be addressed.

One of the major ones is that control over your units is fairly hard, the units are a bit too independent, I need to work on giving the player the ability to issue “hold this position” and “patrol this position” orders. Most likely this will be done via something like a “navigational point” in tactical mode, where the player will click a spot to designate a go to point and then select friendly ships and right click on that spot to bind ships to that point. Right now there is no way to do this, although behind the scenes the code exists for wait here, or patrol here AI.

The other weakness is waiting on resources, this is far too inactive, although it is great that bases automatically produce reasources meaning that the player can focus on combat or issuing orders, there has to be a way for the player to actively gather resources to speed up ship/station building. If you’ve noticed asteroids can be shot at which yields what we internally call baby roids, these will in the future be ablet o be “harvested” and then dropped off at a transfer station to gain more resources. This too will be automated with ship’s crew doing most of the work, however this will attract attacks so the player should defend these miners to keep their output strong.

Its funny because the week after a release, I do very little coding, instead I jump on the forums and talk about the game, but its also a neat break from the frantic and obsessive drive towards a release, it also gives me time to prioritize and decide what I want to work on next.