Translated with Deep L Translator
Dear developer of Stellar Sovereigns.
After a few more hours in the new 4X game here are some impressions and suggestions to improve the game and I can only say something about the things I have seen.
The first is the star map . It is certainly taken from Swords of the Stars 2. It looks very nice and you can see that there is a lot of work in it. However, a 3D - environment always brings orientation difficulties with it. So the map is centred around the currently selected star and you have to zoom out and look for the home system. Here should be somehow quick dial functions that I can quickly jump from one inhabited system to another. The suns and planets are very complex animated and programmed, but I would turn down the brightness a little bit, so that the players don't overexcite their eyes and it becomes exhausting to look at the map for a longer time. I don't know what else is planned, the view of the full-coloured planetary system looks nice and creates a lot of atmosphere. But playfully decisive and needed is only the upper schematic planetary system view . So the first one is actually superfluous. Because then it is really used in the battle map. Furthermore the spherical display of the factional affiliation is confusing for outsiders - you can only see if you turn it a lot - this star is in my area of influence or not. It would be better here either to colour the font in the respective system in the player colour or even better and more atmospheric to use a different font for other factions and neutral stars. So you know at a glance what belongs to you or not.
With the generation of the properties of planets you should take care that it does not come to unreasonable combinations so I already had bars of planets without atmosphere with electrostatic storms. It would also be nice in the planetary view if the colour of the star would change with the corresponding atmosphere, according to the star light. Planets without atmosphere should be dark and only be illuminated by the starry sky or a nearby celestial body (moon gas giant). This creates a unique atmosphere.
The UI in the planet window should be arranged differently: instead of putting it over the well designed picture/video of the planet it would be better to move it to the right or left or up and down outside the picture so that the picture is more effective.
Also the fleet screen is overloaded. The right side is empty, but in the middle part all the information is crowded into the smallest space, especially the many installations are hardly noticeable when they are all shown at once. It would be better to show only the basic information and then to show the installations and modules on request.
I like very much that there can be accidents and setbacks in research.
In artefact recovery it is good to recover material and research. Here one could provide more adventure later by salvaging some super ships in several sections. The possibility to lay some "rotten eggs" in the universe. So the recovery of a super ship could start with the recovery team reporting back and finding out that they can at least provide the ship with a propulsion system to send it to the next shipyard. After further research, the salvage team is able to put the sensors and the astrometry into operation in the domestic sector. This allows the ship to serve as a temporary trade and science station. Further research may lead to accidents. An employee activates an unexplored circuit and holograms appear everywhere on the ship. Finally, weapons and propulsion can be activated and the battleship proves its worth against other factions. Then one day another defence alarm is triggered by an attacking people / faction, but this time the old battleship recognises the enemies as its former masters and puts the local crew out of action with security robots, and intervenes in the battle on the enemy side.
This was just one of several possibilities. But you should not overdo it 3 to 5 more should not be used per game, another thing would be a galactic "weather map", which could provide variety. But I will only tell you about this on request.
During the fight I would like to have a damage or overview of the opponent. Also the first ships seem to be too weak for the pirates, which puts pressure on the research in the combat area. That's what it should be for today e
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)