First off,
PRAISE MAGELLAN
Thanks for your continued work on Prospector!
Well I had fun, just "ended" my last game which turns out ran over 56,000 turns in length. I did savescum though...
I had just 10 crew (crew limit) completely decked out with Very Powerful Disintegrators (a few well/balanced) and thick Adaptive Body Armor
Some thoughts:
Even with the best personal guns in the game I guess, most of the aliens I encountered took several full on shots by most team members before going down, and even with some of the best armor, my guys still drop like flies to everything. These guns fire pale light that turns things to dust, but it doesn't feel that way when the indigenous wildlife say "ouch" and keep coming.
I guess I suddenly saw Disintegrators everywhere because of the length of the game, but I do wish they were rarer. The other weapons are basically filler until you get the big D's and it would be pleasant if they had more punch to them so they stay more relevant. So when I blast a small alien child in the face with anything not a Disintegrator, I'm not sent running for my life.
Also, why such great loot everywhere? I don't find enough crappier stuff lying around so the game feels like it's rewarding you for surviving by making it easier on you. The only thing I was finding were Disintegrators, Adaptives, and "fake adaptives"... Squidsuits. I feel it's more immersive if the best stuff around wasn't popping up from the soil so often and instead regular weapons were more likely but still uncommon, especially if they are more lethal and not practically garbage. I notice in my earlier version of the game D's had a power of 1.2-ish? And now it's 3? Was this an effort to make the combat quicker? If so, I like that direction.
It would be nice if you could save without being sent to the title screen or shutting off the game. As well as stopping the game from auto-saving you in terrible spots. And when you restart a save it's odd when you realize you still have the map/biodata and resource from before you died for some reason. o.O
I know this is first and foremost a Roguelike. You play, you die, you start again. Fun! But when savescumming because you like keeping your men and doing more stuff with them for once, it would be nice to have the option to not be forced out of the game and going back in over and over. As well as worry "when I come back, am I going to be insta-dead?"
A pretty cool feature I've always wanted to see more in games is a living breathing world. When you land on a planet and there's another prospector doing his thing, that's pretty damn cool. As far as I know you don't see anybody else in space, you just get notified who's around you. While being a bit more demanding on resources, seeing the others zipping around in space, doing their thing without you would be breathtaking. NPCs starting out with a motley crew of hopefuls to get rich, NPCs buying a new ship for transporting cargo because their algorithm decided it was worth it, NPC prospectors turned pirates chasing them down and the game tracking their adventures and eventual demise. All as you do your own thing, or help them do theirs, or be the reason they can't. I don't know if you can already, but blowing up an NPCs ship and leaving them to die on the planet sounds awesome. Him being rescued and coming for you with a vengeance sounds even more awesome. Basically, it's Space Rangers 2. Which I've never played, and probably should.
I love this game, I've got Morrowind, as well as a bunch of great full games just sitting on my PC that I'm never in the mood to touch, because when I need my fix, this and Rogue Survivor (sadly left to rot so far) are usually what I play. I've also spent quite some time messing with the tileset, changing the newer tiles I don't like back to old, giving the surface tiles a warm bloom to better contrast the cold space tiles of metal flooring and walls. and making TRAPS visible, if only slightly. Damn traps.
Thanks for taking the time to work on this game, I want this game to be so amazing, feature rich and polished I never want to leave it.
Also, I can't find ALL of the dialogue in the data folder (I fixed a lot of the grammar mistakes and punctuation inconsistencies), I also can't find where the stats for the regular weapons and armor are. I'd like to tweak them and such!
Thank you for your time.