Is it just me, or does this game uses sound assets from FTL?

Wouldn't surprise me.

I'm pretty sure it uses some text/plot elements from FTL.

Also the basic style of sending crew to rooms to fix/fight/commandeer a station, as well as the two side-by-side schematics and targeting of "rooms".

Except somehow they've figured out a way to make the interface as annoying as possible. Firstly the enemy ship is either out-of-the-way but too small, or nice and close-up but then blocks a chunk of your own ship. FTL managed to fit both ships in side-by-side without a problem...

Also I wouldn't mind some kind of indicator that shows where I've targeted a weapon at the time I target it - I shouldn't have to wait until the weapon is charged before the targeting reticule magically appears on the enemy room. Most of the time I'm not sure I've even fired something.

Oh and then to make matters worse the "auto-fire" button has the opposite description of what it's actually set to.

Sorry - went a wee bit off-topic there. Just wanted to vent but can't really be bothered writing an actual review, though I'm tempted to. I mainly can't decide if this game has unrealised potential if certain things were fixed, or if fixing those would simply make it even more of a slightly-graphically-more-3D-ish FLT-clone-with-huge-amounts-of-gratuitous-extra-stats-for-everything-that-add-little-to-the-game-but-more-numb ers-to-give-the-illusion-of-depth - except without the rebel fleet up your ass.


But yes - many of the sounds sound suspiciously familiar. Of course it's not like FTL sounds are radically unique or different to many other space games though...

Hi,

Thought I'd clarify what I meant in the previous post: Yes I understand that since you have a whole other dimension to work with that fitting things neatly into one screen isn't as easy as FTL managed to do it - and I know that there are controls to switch to full-size view or to enlarge the enemy ship's view on the same screen.

The full-size view I have no problem with - it's actually a nice feature and allows one to see the enemy in more detail. Unfortunately it's really easy to miss what's happening in your ship then, which is why the 2 initial view (2 ships on one screen) is generally preferable, since otherwise it's easy to get carried away with the enemy, then when you switch back find out your hull is 10% and half your ship is on fire. ;)

The problem i have with the standard view is that the default size of the enemy ship in that view is too small to be able to make much out. Enlarging it makes things much clearer - however then a portion of my ship is obscured! The thing I didn't mention before - and why this really bothers me - is that there appears to be a significant chunk of space to the left of my ship that's just empty space! Personally I think that if the image of the player's ship were moved a small amount to the left, you could fit both the enlarged enemy ship and most (if not all) of the player's ship on the screen at once.

Naturally the above is only with the initial ship - I don't know if the other ships we get to control are larger, so the "move it to the left" solution may not be viable.

It's not a game-breaking issue since we can pause whenever we want - but it's a departure from the streamlined way of ship combat from FTL. Ah that could be part of the issue; however, what I was referring to was the tool-tip text. To me, the tool-tip appears to indicate what would happen if I press the button, but it appears to actually be telling me the opposite. So if auto-fire is on, the tool-tip says something like "push this to turn on auto fire" - but if auto-fire is ALREADY on, then the tool-tip SHOULD say "push this to turn OFF auto-fire".

Luckily the highlighting of the button works as expected - that is, it's lit up when auto-fire is on - but I still think the tool tip is confusing.

Finally, to clarify another point I made, which is the targeting. In FTL, when you target an enemy system, the system is clearly marked as being a target immediately, irrespective of whether the relevant weapon is charged or not. Then, once the weapon has finished firing, it disappears - except of course in the case of auto-fire. Additionally, when on auto-fire the targeting reticule changes colour to make it really obvious.

In FTL, often there'd be one or two weapons I'd target prior to charging on a certain system (e.g. shields), then after they've fired I'd fire another weapon to follow up - so that I'd get coordinated shots through temporarily-downed shields for example.

Also in FTL it's really obvious which weapons just fired, and you can tell when they hit or miss - you can see them clearly firing from your ship, you can see them clearly heading towards the enemy ship, and you can see the impact (or miss). This is helped by the fact that the targeting reticule for a weapon (if not using auto-fire) is there up until the point the weapon fires, then it disappears.

In Space Rogue, if a weapon hasn't charged yet and I target a system, a target appears over the system for a split second before disappearing again - making it almost look like the targeting failed. So you have no way of knowing what systems you've targeted, and additionally makes it more difficult to coordinate fire like described above since I can't be sure that weapon has just fired, or is still waiting to charge. It's actually possible to miss the fact it fired at all (thereby wasting time while a charged weapon sits there idling), or think the weapon has already fired (or hasn't been targeted yet) only to waste time targeting it again.

For a while there I think I was targeting the same system multiple times with the same weapon before it had even charged, because it looked like it had already fired a shot off so figured I'd retarget it before it charged again - only to have the reticule disappear immediately again.

Finally - and I think this is also a contributor to my confusion - I assume there's no way to set auto-fire on a per-weapon basis like in FTL? Because that was really useful - there'd generally be one weapon I'd always want to fire straight away, while there'd often be others I'd want to fire manually (e.g. if there's a break in the shields or something). I'd rarely (or possibly never) target all weapons with auto-fire.

Another weapon point - it appears that it's possible to swap out weapons at will in Space Rogue during combat. Sure we have to then wait until they charge, but it seems a bit simplistic to be able to do that, as that's generally one of the reasons one upgrades the weapons room (to enable more/powerful weapons available in a battle).

Also the fact missiles/bombs don't have ammo, and the fact there's no fuel - straight away there are two other things you don't need to manage anymore. While in some ways this is welcome, in others it takes away another aspect of the challenge.

On an unrelated note, it's not immediately obvious whether or not your shield is still up. In FTL, you'd notice straight away when a shield layer was taken down, and it was immediately apparent when your shields went down completely. In Space Rogue, half the time I'm wondering if my shield is up at all - and whether that even seems to be making any difference (I'm sure it is, but it's surprisingly non-obvious).

Also - and for this point I concede it could just be me not knowing the mechanics yet - but it seems that capturing ships is really annoying at the moment. For one thing, it takes the enemy hardly any time at all to repair anything - especially annoying when it's their medical bay - and even at the lowest power levels the med bay heals them way faster than you can damage them, even with multiple warriors against their crappy engineers. Also it appears that apart from rockets (which appear to be the weapon of choice for system-only damage), using almost any other weapon practically guarantees that you'll take out the enemy hull before you kill the crew.

Anyway, thanks for your responses so far. I was actually looking forward to liking this game - and it's not a bad game by any means - it's just these small niggling things that feel a step backward, being a long-time FTL veteran.

Also I was hoping this game would expand on what FTL brought to the table, in addition to a different graphics style. Things that worked as gameplay elements in FTL but that could be expanded/modified/improved upon. This is personal preference, but I would have loved to see a significant increase in drone quantity, such as small fighters for defense (against other fighters and/or missiles), fighter/bombers for attacking, plus of course lots of breaching bots. Also being able to target the weapons themselves (not just the weapon system room - possibly damaging the weapon or hardpoint if hit). Finally I always thought it would be cool to have the main reactor be targetable or have it be damaged some other way (e.g. via overload) - kind of disappointed that there is no power management at all in Space Rogue, since balancing weapons/shields/cloak/engines/etc. is a significant part of the strategy in FTL - here we always have everything maxed so we only need to worry about system damage.

Before I sign off, better quickly mention some stuff I liked: although mining is a bit simplistic, it does at least bring another resource into the picture; the fact some missiles have a reload (in addition to the per-shot power-up) is kind of interesting; differing campaign objectives is definitely a cool idea; it appears drones are limited per type, which makes more sense (though I haven't played enough to know for sure, I suspect each "drone" comes with a limited number of copies as it says, and when destroyed you need another "drone"?).

Cheers again for indulging my ranting - whether or not you decide to implement or adopt anything I've said, I do hope you guys will continue to support this game for some time and/or make a sequel/spinoff or something, since it has the potential to expand upon FTL - I'm just not feeling it at the moment...

Thanks for taking time to respond Jourua.