Out of Pod Experience

I can't believe it but I just won SOTS I complete and SOTS II in a contest
I never win anything !

So, should I ignore SOTS II for now and play I instead ?

An address from Mecron (aka Martin Cirulis), linking the Paradox forum instead of Kerberos due to the lag.

http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?567571-Putting-Things-Right...-from-kerberos-forum

The release of course was a disaster (possibly on par with Elemental : WOM), but I like the honesty and candid way he addresses his customers.

In retrospect, he should've set the expectations right if there's a very high likelyhood that the release's going to bomb with technical issues. It may not exactly encourage people to buy, but at least it'll preserve customer confidence and most importantly, trust. In the long term, it works out better for the company.

Anyway, tis a small bump. I read the game mechanics/gameplay is strong, that's the most critical aspect.

First of all the bad news...Thanks to various factors we are now sitting on top of a pile of blown apart code and unstable features. The first thing you can expect though is stability. There will be an update tomorrow which will set right much of the chaos created friday in terms of crashing and keeping you from playing that game. What it WON'T do is magically add back in every piece of functionality. Gods know I wish that I had that magic wand but the reality is that path leads to more chaos and more broken gameplay sessions. Remember that part where I mentioned making the hard calls? This is another one of those. As much as the team wants to throw themselves at this like crazy people, I am not going to ok that. Instead we will go about this in a relatively sane and orderly fashion with regular updates that make sure everything that goes back in is as stable as possible before you see it. Oh I am sure some stuff will leak through, but at least that will be dealt with quickly and cleanly. Sorry to just put the hard facts to you straight without flowers but I think we are somewhat past the flowers make it all better stage of this relationship

This plan means that you folks can expect at least 2 or 3 updates a week over the next month or so that will gradually make this game into what it should have been when the switch was pulled on friday.

Why removing a design doesn't remove it? What for do you gave an option to remove them, than? It's still available on the production screen? Whut? No way to get rid of it? If you really for some odd reason think that player should be able to use removed designs - add tabs in production screen: Current designs / Old designs. Where old designs are those I removed from the design screen.
This solves problem: I can view only designs I need, and you have your oddly-named designs still accessible. No list of 50 ships available for production from which currently I need only 6.
In design view: Clicking on the weapon turret should select it. It doesn't do anything now. Instead I have to randomly hover all the weapons icons around in hope to find the right one. Lines leading from icons to turrets are barely visible, and squares with icons are also hard to see - dark-on-dark isn't a very good thing.
In finance-management screen - the one with budget:
- Learn from Hearts of Iron: give an option to lock founds on specific value. If I want colonization budget set to 60k than let me lock it there. Not that each time I change research budget I also need to correct all the other sliders to desired values (not even saying about remembering all of them). Make locking by clicking the money value - a locked-icon would appear. if I click the icon: lock is taken off. Simple, but will make players lives hell easier!
- On top of the screen I can see a budget graph with colors that mean... I have no idea what the colors there mean. Do it this way: I hover part of the graph, and explanation appears with percent value of budget used for it. (see: point 2)
- Hovering on each name here should explain what are current effects. If I set research budget to 100k than hovering should tell me how many turns are there till research is complete. If I hover a "trade" than I'd like to know what's the effect of it - when I have no techs and no ships for trade than there isn't effect at all, so spending money here is a waste - game doesn't tell this in any way (but the older SotS experience does).
Game doesn't support keyboard:
That's a huge bug, almost as big as lack of explanations all around.
- Escape doesn't close currently active window, nor it deselects selected thing.
- Enter doesn't work as "confirm" or "ok"
- Arrows don't allow to scroll between tech trees
- There's no way to re-assign hotkeys in game nor in launcher.
- Browsing technologies generally is very overwhelming and needlessly-time-taking. Let us zoom-out to view more than one tech-tree at a time.
- Mouse scroll doesn't always work as expected (you know: it suppose to scroll things )
I'd forgive all of this if the game would be a cheap console port, but... it's a PC game so for me these are big issues. But easy to fix so I hope you'll consider doing something about it sooner or later
Game doesn't start in full screen even despite of having deselected windowed mode in settings. 1) it's a first game I know of that by default starts windowed. That's VERY odd. 2) Why noone tested the full-screen option? Huh? It's so silly bug that should be easily catch in beta tests.
Game crashes. A lot.
Game occasionally pop-ups some screens which are blank and there's no way I could do anything about them. Alt+F4 is only solution. Diplomacy screen seem to be most annoying in that matter for me.
Graphical glitches still occur. Ship-production screen seem to lead in this one. Although after a recent patch there's really a noticeable improvement - thank you for that!