
According to Steam I played the game now for about 84h, time to get my feedback notes I made while playing here into the forum. This includes general feedback, some bugs and ideas for improvement. The goal is to make an awesome game out of this current "Pre-Alpha" which is great and sucks at the same time, you know what I mean. Throwing stones makes no sense, but constructive feedback should help.
Please try to keep this thread clean, so the developers have an actual chance to keep up with the discussion. If you want to comment an issue please use it's reference ID. If you want to add unrelated feedback to this list, introduce a new ID somehow derived from you name. E.g. I use "CC" for "Coolcat" with yellow color.
Current XR version: 1.21
CC01: I'm a programmer working on AAA games myself (at BlueByte in Düsseldorf, just ~80km away

Of course only if that's not already happening. I don't know the internal procedures of course, but from the outside it certainly looks like this is not happening. E.g. CC03, CC05, CC12/13 and CC29/30 would have been quickly identified and fixed when the "right" people would have time to actually play the game.

CC02: I'm playing the game with a gamepad. It think the game would benefit a lot from a more flat menu structure. Currently only 6 directions are used and one of them is "back", so you have actually only 5 options. Why not use 8 directions like the drone menu ("X" button) does? The most often used options "property owned" and "navigation" should be directly available in the first level. There should be no extra "back" option, "B" button is enough. Before doing this please let several people actually try how often you select the wrong option by accident when using 8 directions.
CC03: Ships should have names! I have something like 10 Rahanas freighter, it is near impossible to tell them apart. Especially since the sorting in "property owned" changes at random. If you don't want to add the UI the enter custom names, please at least add some random name generator or just display the name of the captain.
At the ship dealer you currently need to use the number of drones aboard to tell ships apart, that's just crazy.
CC04: "property owned" list should display the location and potentially also the cargo of each ship.
CC05: When going back to an item, e.g. from ship details back to "property owned", the item you came from should be selected, not the first one.
CC06: Trading menu should show current cargo (and name, see CC03) of the ship. Cargo already sold should be grayed out or something.
CC07: Allow to cancel trade orders individually. It might be to complicated and confusing when having to delete dependencies of an order (e.g. buying an directly selling stuff), but it should be easy to implement a delete button for the last order.
CC08: Increase trade queue length to 4: E.g. 2x buy and 2x sell should be a common thing.
CC09: Auto merge trades at the same station. The ships should only need to dock once and such a merged trade should count as one in the queue. That should speed up the game a lot in cases in which you have gather a lot of small amounts of different stuff, e.g. when building a station.
CC10: Similar it might be useful to merge maintenance orders at a ship dealer. E.g. repair and equip drones & ammo.
CC11: Give specific orders to engineer. E.g. repair engines first.
CC12: Additional orders for captain:
- "GoTo" works just like "Take me to", but they can to that without you!
- "Follow Me" to replace the squad feature, see CC13
Maybe squads could be used just as a marker feature for ships currently of interest: A list of the squad members with some essential infos (name, location, orders, cargo) could be always visible on an additional cockpit screen.
CC14: Maybe allow to queue captains orders together with trade orders. Usecase: Buy some stuff, then go back to safety until I have time to give you additional orders. Same goes for the "Refuel"/"Follow me" order.
CC15: Additional orders for defense officer:
- Attack only enemies actually attacking. Never fire if there might be a chance of hitting another target. (Sometimes freighters get in fight with stations they are currently trying to dock with, just because there is an enemy passing nearby firing, causing my ship to fire on normal traffic that can't even fire back...then hitting the station by accident and everyone starts shooting)
- The "hold your damn fire!" order might be useful as well in these cases
CC17: In general it would be helping if using the menu would not cancel travel in a highway.
CC18: Freighters should not wait somewhere on the jump drive while under serious fire. They should power up their boost engines and make a run. I already lost several ships at the Wrecksville beacon. They should not jump to known enemy beacons if the engines are damaged.
CC19: Targeting is sometimes buggy when being near a ship some time and targeting individual spots (e.g. engines or weapons). After that it is not possible to target the whole ship anymore an hail it for example. (Workaround: Save the game and reload)
CC20: Cutscenes can't be canceled, only the video can, audio and subtitles keep running?!
CC21: Shipyard/Shipdealer should show/highlight resources not in storage before/while building! Since the economy in DeVries is not self sustaining you need to know which resources you need to ship manually from Albion! I even had the case where some NPC started to build a ship that could not be finished and was blocking the shipyard. Had to dig into the savegame XML to find which resources where missing.
CC22: It should be possible to dump cargo from freighters. E.g. when you capture a freighter just because a single resource (e.g. reinforced metal plating for the campaign) and have no way to sell the other stuff on board.
CC23: Speed in the highway should depend on my engine type. With an MK4 engine I would assume that I would be faster than most of the traffic? Anyway, why is traffic in DeVries MUCH faster than in Albion?
CC24: My engineers can remote repair my ship? Just hail them. Bug or feature?
CC25:The UI is sometimes stuck. I think this happens when the "property owned" list is updated while it is open and you open the details page of a ship after that update. (Workaround: Alt+Tab to the desktop and back in the game, that closes the menu.)
CC26: URW Wrath build for the campaign has a strange production chain? It takes Plasma-somethings and converts them into URVs. Ok, but what do I need the steel refinery and the wafer plant for?
I was assuming the reason for the station was that we can build URV's in DeVries just from resources available there, so we don't have to ship everything from Albion?
CC27: Big campaign battle for the Albion/DeVries jumpgate makes no sense:
- Taradis capital ship does not even fire back.
- I got an objective to destroy some fighters 20km outside of the battle zone. Some of them where invisible or switching between visible and invisble every few seconds. I think it was at the border between two zones. (Or is this actually a stealth mode or something?)
- Campaign let's me fall back with still 3 capital ships left against just one warden carrier and the damaged&weaponless Taradis.
CC29: Fast iterate list items in a menu when holding down the button for some time. Currently you have to press the "down" button some 20-30 times to get the the last ware in the trade menu. E.g. move down something like 10-15 items per second?
CC30: Directly select the same ware when switching between buy/sell in the trade menu. Before buying something you always want to know first how much you will get when selling it.