First off, I want to give voice sincere appreciation and thanks to the Dev's and the Starmade community as a whole. This game has captured my interest, challenged me both creatively and logically, and forced me to learn at least one new concept every time I play. For me, this is the first game since EVE online that has changed my perception of what a "game" can be, and I am proud to be a supporter for its developement.
With the pleasentries out of the way, I wanted to throw some ideas I have had into the hat for consideration. I realize some of these may have already been voiced, or might have side effects I have yet to consider, so please bare with me...
- The ability to build and join modular peices of a ship.
This suggestion spawned from an idea I had to manufacture intricate "rooms" that I could then market to players who wanted a custom engine room, bridge, etc. I ran a test to see if power capacitor recharge, thrust and so on would combine to the "pilot" ship, and found that they did not. I realize there are ways around this by building around joined rooms, but it would be nice to have a product that was more than just asthetic to join up with other rooms custom made parts. For example, I would like to be able to sell an "reactor room" that not only had really cool spinning parts and logic, but also provided some actual power production to the ship it was connected to.
- A better external ship camera and targeting system.
I dont by any means want starmade to turn into an EVE clone, but having the option to manually lock targets in a third person perspective would really help combat (especially in large ships) feel more authentic and less cumbersome.
- A further update to the chat interface.
Communicating with fellow players is something I have found to be a challenge with the current chat system. Having small things like notification sounds, larger font, and the ability to change the chat channel you are in all in the same window would make the social end of starmade much more pleasent.
- A segmented tutorial covering basic to advanced topics.
As much as the current tutorial helped me get started in this very complex game, I felt very lost on more than a few occasions. Youtube and other online resources did help me up the steep learning curve, but I can see how other less dedicated players might get frustrated and spread word that starmade is inaccesable without in depth research outside of the game. A great example of why this is important can be found by looking at EVE's tutorial system. When I started playing EVE in 2006, it had a short tutorial and then threw you into the universe, but as time went on and CCP wanted to expand its player base, they chose to impliment and improve on their tutorials, letting players choose what they wanted to learn before being walked slowly through the process.
I will leave it at that for now. Thank you for reading the wall of text, and again thank you for creating such an inspiring and deep game.
