L0ckAndL0ad
Posts: 183
Joined: 4/13/2018
From: Pale Blue Dot
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First time I saw Shadow Empire screenie in twitter, got curious due to amount of detail it gave. It screamed - “I’m a special, detailed game”. And then it whispered to me: “Reveal my secrets!”. So I bookmarked it. Later I investigated the game more and got obsessed with Shadow Empire fairly quickly. Watched the pre-release videos, listened to podcasts and waited for the release day to come as quickly as possible.
So when the 1.0 came, I was really prepared. I still had to read the manual, and it was sad that it became available only on release, when the only thing I wanted was to just start playing right away. But yeah, I read the manual and started playing. Now I can fast forward to the notes I took while playing.
I’m pretty much nobody, but I’m a novice solo game developer myself, so I’m posting this just to provide useful feedback and hope it’s not gonna hurt anyone’s feelings. I REALLY understand how hard it is to make a game solo from first hand experience, so I’m putting it the way I experienced it. No hard feelings.
Also, I do NOT require answers to questions that will be posted below. They are here to indicate the level of understanding I received by watching videos/reading the forums/manual and playing the game, which is a metric you may be looking for, so there’s no need to explain mechanics here. I’d rather read that in the manual/tooltips :)
The Bad Things
1. Vague Manual/UI. Game manual and many parts of the UI are vague and leave more questions than give answers. The game exposes you a lot of numbers that are not immediately useful and either cannot or hard to be affected. Terminology and phrasing is often confusing.
Example 1. Food consumption on management screen does not give the full picture. I was never able to properly understand what units required how much food, if Militia ever needed food and how it get it. Manual says that Militia get their own supply, but it is hard to see how exactly it is reflected or if it’s actually true at all.
Example 2. Supply base description. "Does not increase range, but extends it". Ehm, what? I understood how it works from having a practical experience using it, but the phrasing here makes the entire point of having the manual pointless if I have to play test it to figure out how it works.
Example 3. Ease of mining. Manual says: "The level of Mining Ease is indicated for each known Deposit and varies from Deposit to Deposit." Well, thanks for showing where the indicator is, but I was mainly wondering how to actually read it. Is higher level better? That's not obvious.
Example 4. Hovering over money ("Credits") tells you what they are. But not the income/expenditure or last turn change value, which can be expected from more or less every game. Not helpful.
Example 5. "Keep in mind that Battlegroups might provide flexibility, but also come at some costs." What costs? Again, I had to create a BG in game myself, put it into combat, read the battle log, and then see that there’s a certain penalty to stats.
Example 6. Empire Dashboard. "11 ppPoints provided 3 PP". Political Points vs ppPoints? Is is really necessary to make it so complicated to the end user? Game features a lot of such camelCase properties that are not explained anywhere in the manual when you Ctrl+F search for them.
Example 7. Model & Quality management window. You can view Design tab and see all the stats, and I even figured out how exactly everything is calculated, but with all my knowledge and experience and having read the manual couple of times, I still do not understand at what point it is more beneficial to create new units or when to create modifications and whether putting in newly researched equipment takes away anything from existing stats. I get that you will get bonus from field testing, but there is also structural design rolls at creation of the model, and there is also a price in BP to actually create the blueprint, so it’s not super straightforward to me.
2. Logistic system that came with 1.0 version is probably the worst I’ve ever seen: it is counter-intuitive and goes against what can be expected from a common wargame; it provides too much numbers as a feedback, but does not help you read them easily and leaves more confused; it does not scale well, especially when taking over AI territory with countless webs of roads all over the place.
It is okay that the system is unlike others and may require getting used to. But it just becomes another disadvantage of the system, as long as it provides little useful feedback that can be easily understood at a glance. For example, I stumbled into a bottleneck once, that was colored by the overlay in red, despite there being seemingly enough logistics points at that area and sealed road constructed. Two Supply bases were located not that far away and I had no clue what else can be done. Looking into endless cryptic/dry numbers in the logs can be useful if you’re debugging the feature as a developer, but to the end user it seemed quite useless.
But even so, that’s not the main reason I disliked the logistic system. It is a scaling issue. As long as my Republic was small, and front line relatively simple in terms of road layout, I was fine. But when I conquered a lot of territory from another Major regime, with all of its small webbed roads, the system leaked Logistics Points left and right.
Road signs would probably have been the answer to this problem. Yes, sure. You can put up road signs here and there, but it quickly becomes a chore. I played on huge map, but simply going 15-20 hexes deep into enemy territory and having to deal with his road network required so much fine tuning with signs that I was not prepared to undertake. I know that current version of the game features new Logi system, but my 1.0 save file left me with no choice but to resign eventually. Conquering the whole planet with the same logistical system issues was looking to be a nightmare I wasn’t looking for to face. It was one of the main reasons why I resigned in my AAR.
3. UI flow. UI structure and information flow/game loop structure is somewhat sub-optimal. Some functional and informational parts of the same systems are separated into different windows and require frequent back-and-forth between the tabs and screens that could’ve been avoided with better layouts.
Example 1. Maybe should go with #1 issue above, but I’ll list it here. Tech Tree/Research screen is super confusing. What is currently under research and what is just available and has some points already researched looks exactly the same. To figure out what you’re researching you have to go back to other screen (Empire Dashboard for example). Overall, the tech tree feels hard to navigate around and comprehend at a glance.
Example 2. SHQ items are located on the left, but buying items is on the right and only if friendly territory is selected. So, when you go through “How much stuff do I have? Do I need more? Let’s buy more” cycle, you have to select the territory where SHQ is located, have the left bar open in the right tab, and then open the right bar if it’s closed, switch to the appropriate tab and then find the “BUY” button. Faaaaaar from optimal flow.
4. OOB/Formation design/Unit design. The existing OOB mechanic is functional, but it feels super rigid. I looked into most recent version of Advanced Tactics Gold and found that the way OOB and unit design is done there is super awesome. It is very similar to HOI4 ground unit designer and I’d love to see Shadow Empire implement it in similar fashion. I know that there are Battlegroups in SE, but you cannot send reinforcements to them automatically, which makes them almost useless in my eyes as a strategic commander.
I made do with existing OOB system, but I wished there was something more flexible like ATG/HOI4. Also, discovering and researching new OOBs that are very similar in fashion to others seemed super artificial and not fun.
The Good things
My main “hat” as a solo game dev is being a game designer, but it still takes a lot of effort to reverse engineer game design intentions and reasoning behind someone else’s game. Fortunately, when “it feels right” and it plays great, you just know there’s little need for that. So I’ll keep it simple.
5. Setting. In my own work I quickly realized that WW2/modern themes (that are often used in wargames) are more limiting than sci-fi setting for letting the player come up with his own stories and experiences. Some people crave for Dune theme, I had a hard sci-fi theme mix of my own in my head when I think about Shadow Empire. And that’s the point, I’m very glad that you chose to go with a backstory that gives room to come up with a wide range of stories. ATG, with as much random map sand-boxines as it has, just felt weird to me.
6. Mystery, Intrigue and Anticipated surprises. Games need surprises, and there needs to be something you want to uncover at the end of the road. I really love the way you can explore the map, find ruins, cities, equipment, nomads, aliens, minor/major regimes of different kinds. Even geographical exploration is fun.
But for me personally it started to fade away at some point. During my second game, at ~110+ turn I stopped feeling that I could still find something that can surprise me. I wish there were more things to explore and find in the late game, maybe even as an end game goal.
I really don’t like the idea that I have to “reconquer the whole planet” in order to “win”. Yes, there are ways to make “victory pact” with majors and you can incorporate minors, but I want to get back that feeling of wonder that lays beyond the horizon that you THINK you can reach at some point, figuratively speaking.
7. Civilian economy. Oh, man, this one is the greatest things I love about 4X/economic/tycoon games. Having functioning civilian economy that has a life of its own is super cool. It reinforces the fantasy of being the national leader who deals with high level stuff. In my games, I never built any building unless it was “strategic” or served the people as a whole (hospital/university). If the game allows hands-off civilian economy (Aurora 4X is another great example), then I’m all for it. It’s not about “handing off control”, but about allowing the system to work more efficiently and the way it sees fit, not being micromanaged by people who are not connected/benefit from it directly.
It is also great that there’s an option for people who DO like to manage their economy personally, in socialist way. It also allows you to make adjustments if deemed necessary even if you rely on private economy greatly.
What I would’ve loved to see is the ability to specify what types of buildings governmental investment treasury would be spent on. Like, say I want private enterprises to create logistic bases in non-capital cities and not to build public ones. I want to be more specific about where the investment money is directed.
I also loved how trading works. If I understand the system correctly, there are both internal and global markets, with supply/demand influencing the volume of items available and pricing, which is super great.
8. Diplomacy. I liked the diplomacy between majors. Overall, I’m super open to have non-violent cooperation in wargames. I consider Shadow Empire to be 4X game, so there’s a lot of room for improvement. I wish I could select “Diplomatic stance” or something similar to each entity I deal with (or just one general Stance) in order to guide my overall relations into certain direction. Or any other way that can make diplomatic interactions more detailed and interesting.
As for interacting with minor regimes, I felt that there’s not that much variety there. Farmers attacked me from literally left and right, even though I had no intentions to fight them and wanted to coexist peacefully.
Also, I wish there were more options for stopping wars. Forcing surrender or truce/cease fire. I dislike having to fight everyone till the end.
9. Equipment Designer. I'm a huge fan of Equipment Designers in games! Rule the Waves and various 4X games provide them, and it's absolutely cool to play with them. They become a mini-game you ponder about in free time and want to come back to whenever possible. I wish there was more supporting UI (like expected stats) and options, even if cosmetic.
10. Art & music. I love 2D art in general, and although SE is not the prettiest of games, it has its own charm. The soundtrack also connects with me very well. Good job!
Miscellaneous
In no particular order.
- Strat page - Small Strategems button keeps reverting to "Small" every turn. But I want “Large” Strategem images!
- Hex Perks that give you recruits/colonists: there needs to be a way to turn them off. What if you don't need these recruits/colonists at some point? It's tiresome to keep transferring/disbanding them, and they cost you food. A “mothball” option would work great here I guess.
- I was unable to convert independent "(leg) artillery" into motorized, once created.
- Lack of strategic redeployment using sealed roads, ie for leg infantry. Examples: US Army Corps truck pool in WW2 Europe / modern tanks redeployed on trailers to conserve fuel equipment lifetime.
- Event "Our spies in $RegimeName have found info" lacks "don't do anything" option. Same with "Set OOB Operationalisation" and Research option selections. You can't default to "Keep searching for something better".
- Suggestion: Strategem filter, to leave out certain types of Strategems within the category. Example: Zones tab - Economy / Fate / Unique Artifacts.
- Culture name. Can't seem to be able to change it. It is based on the original name of your capital and if you don't like it, you're stuck with it anyway.
- No "Explore" Strategem for peaceful exploration of land. Only “Spying”, which can be off puting/sub-optimal for some. Maybe refactor the existing "Spy" into "Recon" to make it appear less ominous/aggressive?
- Strategic map is super small, at least on huge map 197x79 @ 1440x900. Fullscreen mode, less space for borders bars for Strategic map mode please? Similarly to the way you open Tech Tree.
Okay, I’m done with my notes. I’m pretty sure I forgot something I did not write down immediately, though. But if you have some specific questions, I can provide additional feedback if needed.
Nikita “L0ckAndL0ad” Machatov
< Message edited by L0ckAndL0ad -- 7/16/2020 5:01:08 AM >
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