Hi,
Just started along with the other players brought here by youtube’s Space Dock. Got a few ideas that might make the game more newbie-friendly:
- Allow sorting by columns. It’s one of the most surprising omissions from the interface.
- Give a clear, and visible warning when building a factory that will cause your base to require more employees than available (ideally: also show current average production efficiency vs average production efficiency after the building is built)
- Give a clear notification that your base requires a building for the population you have without one.
- Add non-zero currencies (liquid assets) to the inventory view (top-right of the panel) - if there are any objections, add an option to toggle it on/off? It just seems very counter-intuitive to have my stuff spread out between two panels. Took me a while to even find where the money is in this game. I kept on spending it, without realizing where it was.
- Clicking “Satisfaction” bars in the base should open the population view, or preferably: A dedicated view that would show how much each factor affects the efficiency (right now I guess that the efficiency is down due to the lack of employees, but by how much? I have no clue)
- There is no information as to how long will the consumables last. You have to math it out. >_<
- I’m missing tools to estimate profits and costs. At a very least - on the PRODQ view add a bottom line with total prices for the current input and output (preferably also splitting it between satisfied inputs market price vs missing inputs price)
- No way to search planets by resources (or any other criteria for that matter). Also: empty planets / 1-resource planets make zero sense.
- In comms, when someone uses a known shortcut (“LM”/“PRO”, resource names, buffer codes, etc.) it should replace them with either a hoverable explanation tooltip, or a link, as relevant.
- When creating a new order with order size >1 it’s not clear that it will be provided all at once (not to mention that it’s super weird, given that factories tend to operate in a serial production line). There should be at least a small (i) tooltip explaining that next to the “Order Size” label.
- Why I can’t rent a unit in a warehouse? Every inactive button must have a tooltip explaining why it’s inactive.
- Why ordering larger batches does not cut the production time? It’s so bizarre. If I wait 8 days for that H2O there better be some benefit to that.
- Why there are no sublight-only ships? And ships seem to be absurdly expensive (how many years you have to fly them to even earn that money back?!). In general there seem to be some odd jumps in terms of how much time & effort it takes to get something and what’s the ROI on various activities. Difficulty and time curve definitely could use some smoothing-out.
- Locking shipping behind not just a paywall, but a subscription (if I was informed well - my rating gets downgraded to nothing if my subscription expires after the game “release”), is a fundamentally bad design choice. This will cost you players, if not to say: will cap you to the most loyal base with little growth prospects.
Other than that - this “No image data” on my spaceship burns my eyes 
Any plans for making this image customizable? Or in general - let me customize my company in some way, let me write a description for it… anything, really, to add some character and depth. (Honestly: I would far more prefer having this game earn its share through cosmetics than paid subscriptions… subs are soooo 2010s. Think about the way Star Wars Combine made it, where images were reviewed by humans, but you had to pay to submit them)
