Al right, I played more with these thoughts in mind and tried to think of what else could improve the player's quality of life (and since you're matching item per item, I'll go with a numbered list this time):
- To make for the clearest indicator that one is reloading, it would be nice if the accuracy cone is simply removed entirely.
- This is the same reason for why I was looking for a more blatant friendly-fire indicator: sometimes it's so hectic that:
- You can't hear when someone says "Traitor!" because so many other deaths are going on at the same time. Actually, those statements sound like injury exclamations, not death exclamations (which could help oneself realize earlier to knock it off).
- Sometimes a friendly soldier steps right in front of you and turns your cone red before you can react and change your mind to not click in time, so a brief "Friendly Fire!" notification would be nice (not in Hardcore, naturally).
- So when it comes to friendly fire, it would be really nice if soldiers who are right next to each other (especially a soldier standing behind one who is prone, even if they're aiming vertically/diagonally right through the prone soldier's body) do not hit each other as they wouldn't in real life. Maybe I'm not paying enough attn but it seems that prone soldiers spawning out of a barracks-under-fire tend to hit each other unnecessarily.
- This is especially a huge problem in Beta Mission 16: Hold Steady, in which you're the only one with the bipod gun, only to be shot from behind by a friendly, oblivious rifleman.
- One of the biggest problems that I see with the game is determining whether you are in cover or not (which is why I think the neighboring-soldiers avoidance of friendly fire can be implemented, because cover clearly has no problem ignoring nearby projectiles): sometimes you can hide inside a sandbag and be fine, and those giant rocks seem completely impervious to bullets. So is movement collision going to be added to the game? It's hard to tell if I'm protected by a tree stump or not, or what exact angles it protects from.
- Oops, the special weapon boxes were the weapon-icon boxes that appear as not part of any building nor the ammo crate. For example, the bottom enemy barrack in Alpha Mission 5: One By One has a gun icon near its sandbags, just northwest of the ammo crate, which seems like it doesn't do anything. I was hoping to be able to swap out my gun for a superior one.
- Yeah, I did not initially understand Grabby Mode at all, haha. It would be clear if "/Spectator" was added to it, since I thought it was a cheat mode of sorts so I unsuccessfully tried to pick up enemies. Maybe some sort of mouse-over graphic showing what can be grabbed before clicking would help cement this (or a 🚫 for non-interactives).
- Speaking of Grabby, it'd be nice to be able to press Alt again to resume normal play.
- Being able to zoom in and out in Grabby would be great, too.
- Be able to go into Grabby Mode when you die as the last soldier on your team and have to wait to respawn
- Ooh... I did not know about Unsportsmanlike; makes sense now! Maybe they could do some sort of idle animation, then, to reinforce the end-of-battle event (like the helmeted ones taking off their helmets or something).
- When I'm really trying to repeat a mission like "Rockets!" (Alpha Mission 6), I actually don't want to have to wait out the "game over" music every time before pressing R to retry. It made it more aggravating lol.
- In the map editor: my big, custom mouse cursor itself covers over the name of the building I'm trying to read to place. If the name showed above the cursor instead of below, that'd be nice.
- The mission font is a bit... weird to see periods suspended in mid-air like "·"...
- I've now noticed a major problem: your rounds fly completely outside of the accuracy window, even when staying still. This is most noticeable with a veteran sniper; when aiming east, I have to set the cone slightly south of where enemies are for my shots to place (so I'd assume I'd have to over-aim above western soldiers' heads).
- In the menu's Barracks for upgrades, I don't understand what the upper-rightmost sticky note means.
- Being able to somehow flag enemy buildings for takeover instead of destruction could be nice... or at least for your soldiers to not grenade buildings whose flag are in positive movement towards their side.
- It'd be nice if personal fires could be extinguished by medkits (unless that's intentional).
- Nothing seems to happen when you try to surrender early in a timed mission; the timer keeps counting down and only at 00:00 does it show Defeat, even if your entire side has been eradicated.
- Now that I played Hold Steady, I think it'd be fairer if the ranking-up formula for soldiers is dependent on rate-of-fire + range + area of effect of their weapon, so a bipod gunner shouldn't be able to rank up with the same number of kills that a rifleman makes, for example (unless I really was just slaughtering that many blues, lol).
- The sniper's accuracy cone no longer turns red when you have snipers' piercing ability enabled, I think.
- It'd be cool to see powerups that fall onto rivers slowly float downstream!
- Playing "Run Through the Jungle" and seeing toooons of mines trigger near the enemy barracks made me think that enemy Engineers were spamming them there throughout the entire session. I'm thinking that there should be a minimum placing distance between mines so that this weird experience of the screen massively shaking for a moment doesn't happen.
- There's no way to go to the Barracks directly from the surrender-defeat screen.
- It's a bit odd to see idle base defenders facing the wrong direction...
- Somehow I ended up with -7 points in general training after a battle, so I unchecked something and then could no longer recheck it until I returned to a positive number. I think the problem is that, even though I've been in the Beta campaign for a while, the barracks must have thought it was counting points for a different campaign (because I checked the barracks before playing that mission, and it didn't show any Advanced training even though I had unlocked it).
- I haven't been able to adjust my resolution to max, even if I quit and restart (it keeps returning to 1440×900 which it's always been at).
- So I found out about the special weapon in the Beta campaign's "Blast 'em" level, and I was just thinking: wow, it'd be SO cool if the entire screen had a dark-gray filter over it to simulate night-time fighting, complete with muzzle flashes, helmet-mounted lights, and tracer fire!
- Pressing Escape instantly ends a Quick Battle instead of pausing the game first, sadly...
- I hope to see some Quick Battles in which the building spawn positions are swapped!
- Despite reading the version release notes, I was still able to control a dead character and even walk and roll all the way over to enemy buildings and take down their flags. Aside from this, it'd be a nice touch if soldiers see that their buildings' flags are not at optimal height and go to raise them.
- Map editor woes:
- When test-battling a timed map, Escape doesn't appear to do anything, even after the enemy has been eradicated.
- It would be nice to have an instruction saying that right-click deletes objects that you can click-drag to reposition stuff.
- Instructions to click on Barracks to select what units they can produce would be nice.
- It would be nice if all of the river art could be rotated in the four directions (or mirrored) for more variation without further art having to be manually made. Come to think of it, mirror images of... well, literally everything including buildings would be a nice touch for graphical variation.
- Campaign editor:
- Adding an instruction that Available Missions need to be dragged over to the Campaign Missions column would help. I'm also seeing that if you stay in the game the entire time and edit a map and retry the campaign it's in, the campaign still goes off of the old map (even if you saved the file over the same name). It'd be nice to auto-reload all maps when you visit "Missions" in the menu.
- Given all of the space that there is for instructions on missions, I wish I could use line breaks in the .TXT files to add multiple paragraphs of text.
I have to say kudos for the excellently efficient, homebrewed programming. I have a 5-year-old laptop that doesn't summon forth any considerable processing power when running this game, unlike literally every Unity game I've ever tried on it! Making a campaign with tanks and garages sounds sweet. The procedural quick battle is amazing
EDIT: All right, I now see the soldiers rolling away and getting-up-and-running that ammo-less soldiers do! I just didn't play long enough. There is just way too much thought put into this.
One thing that I'm really hoping for is larger maps for marathon missions, like 2×2 sheets' worth of papers connected to each other! I don't know how the camera works in multiplayer though, so that may be impossible, sadly...
EDIT #2: So I'm now trying out making my own campaign, and it was awkward for a level with prisoners to finish right after killing all enemies, even though the prisoners weren't actually untied. If freeing them up could be made a condition to win on such levels, that'd be nice.