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[MekanikDestructiwKommando]

I'll repost this with clarity:
I envision the best way to manage units would be to choose from which asteroid they machines are from.
So you click on BX-13 and see

RX12 (Yellow bar 50 red bar 40 blue bar 10): 12
CY03 (Yellow bar 25 red bar 25 blue bar 50): 32

And then select from a list like that, THEN you order them around.
Possibly an "Add to current group" button, so you can select 8 from RX12, then 32 from CY03.
And of course you would be able to see the same distribution for enemy planets so you can use units whos stats counter theirs!

[agentd00nut]

Mekanik, personally your post confused the hell out of me, i'd probably need like a visual to understand what you mean.  Personally i think that moving units now isn't TOO much of a hassle, you just gotta be able to move kind of rapidly, although i agree its sort of tedius.

The biggest annoyance is say all of a sudden an asteroid gets attacked by 100 guys, so you take 20 from 4 or 5 nearby asteroids and put them there.  Now you have like 80 guys on that asteroid, and it takes too long for the game to count up to 20 to move them all back so i just tend to leave them together.

I think the best thing would be you can select multiple asteroids, then sign those asteroids to a group *Ctrl 1-0*.  Once an asteroid(s) is grouped, any unit produced from there is placed in that group, so now when you hit 1 all the units from asteroid X,Y,Z are selected, and now you just click where you want them to go.  So say you take group one mentioned above, and group 2 from asteroids A,B,C, and move them all to one asteroid.  Youd still be able to move them all together like you do now.  Or you could hit 1 and move that group etc.  Also maybe if you like double tap a group number the units will go back to the asteroid they originated from, that way you can move them all to defend, then double tap and cover a lot of asteroids again.

One other thing you could do, is that when you right click, a menu appears with grouping numbers, 5-10-25-50-100-200-300 or something, maybe you could go in the options and customize the numbers *that'd be neato*.  But obviously you just click the number you want, now you'd be moving that number of guys.  And say you have 40 units, if you pick 50 or anything up it just moves all the units.

The last thing i could think of that would be nice *i think its been said a few times* is just a button that brings units from nearby asteroids to the selected asteroid.  Kind of like an "oh crap!" button that just sucks in all units from asteroids 1 jump away or something.

[PenguinHat]

I find Ctrl-grouping very hard to do. Right click to produce a number menu would be nice however. Or maybe you could change it to percentages so that you don't have to micromanage as much when the numbers of units increases.

What if holding right click over a asteroid showed a pie chart that could be changed by holding right click and dragging the cursor over the asteroid? The pie chart shows the percentage of units that will be dispatched when they are moved from the asteroid.

[Eclipse]

When I first played through the tutorial, I thought it said you could raise animals by moving lots of seedlings to an asteroid. It may make the game too complex, but I think if there was something to develop the asteroid along (if not raising animals), then it would be pretty cool.

Overall, this is a really great game and definitely worthy of an IGF award with a little bit more polishing.

please no, with animals i'll have to send haowaon a cease and desist  :D

[Alex May]

No animals 

[Melly]

No animals.

[MekanikDestructiwKommando]

1. Select an asteroid.
2. Select a group in the lower left. Current group in red text
3. Right click to increase that number.
4. Number on left shows current selected.
5. Number on right shows total nanomachines of type on that asteroid.
6. Click in empty space, or press space or some other key to deselect all

In this example ALVITAL has 108 nanomachines.
52 of them were manufactured on ALIVTAL and have the asteroid's stats.
56 of them were manufactured on ENOMEGA (and then moved here) and have ENOMEGA's stats.

In the example screenshot, I have selected 30 nanomachines from ENOMEGA and am using Right Mouse to add 20 more (if I keep holding Right Mouse I can select up to 52).

Explanation: Why bother? This assumes different statistical setups are advantageous against others. Some additional design may be required to make this really interesting.

[Alex May]

That's really awesome, Mekanik. Thanks for the suggestion! We'll be looking into the interface and depending on how the game turns out may well need to incorporate some of this.

[Rudolf Kremers]

We were literally looking at this stuff now, I have been scribling down notes and ideas with Haowan on group selection while keeping the interface simple. SOme of my ideas are quite similar and I wan totest a few different ones so it is very helpful to see that the direction is not crazy. Many thanks for the ideas, we may use something much along those lines :-D

[PHeMoX]

Cool. 

[Rudolf Kremers]

Hmm not sure if it is too attentiongrabberish (I know that isn't a word) but just wanted to say that we started a proper devblog on developing Dyson now. Which may or may not be interesting but hey, what the heck ;-)

http://www.dyson-game.com/

[Melly]

Hey, I was wondering where this went.

[Rudolf Kremers]

We are happily beavering away on it. Doing some fundamental work on the underlying architecture first though, hence the quiet for the storm :_D

[MekanikDestructiwKommando]

We were literally looking at this stuff now, I have been scribling down notes and ideas with Haowan on group selection while keeping the interface simple. SOme of my ideas are quite similar and I wan totest a few different ones so it is very helpful to see that the direction is not crazy. Many thanks for the ideas, we may use something much along those lines :-D

With this, there should be some definite strategy with the way the attributes affect the battle outcome. Like.. 35% blue beats the enemy if they have less then 20% red but at 21% red the stats give an advantage over the blue stat..
Sort of like pokemon with HP/attack damage/accuracy -- the 100 damage 100% hit move works awesome as an instant kill until the enemy hp is suddenly 201 -- then you need 3 hits but they all go really slowly so you get destroyed by the faster, 80 damage, 90% accuracy move..

um, translate that into your three stats and adjust the weight and combat formula and i think it would lend itself to strategy just fine!

(that made sense right?)

[GregWS]

Sweet!  I didn't know you guys were continuing work on this.  Good luck making a good game even better!   

[PHeMoX]

Hahaha, yeah, that would be cool. Keep on it guys, looking forward to the next update.

[Hypersapien]

Great game

Here's one problem that you need to fix. When randomly generating the colors for the armies, make sure that none of the colors are too similar to each other. I just started a game and the first planet I went to had enemies that were almost exactly the same color as me.

[Alex May]

Hello everyone, we just updated Dyson to version 1.08.

For a list of changes, please visit the official site where we've listed the changes in the release notes.

We've added defensive trees and a limit on sending, done a graphical overhaul on the trees, and a bunch of other stuff was changed or tweaked or added too.

We also made a Linux version so we could do with some folk testing that if possible! Link is on the download page.

Visit the official site for Dyson

Download Dyson

[LtJax]

Woa, that version does add a lot more to the game. I really liked the first one, and this one improved quite a bit on that. Still, there are a few things I noticed:

The influence sphere makes moving your seedlings to the front more difficult/annoying. My suggested fixes for this are to either make the influence area the union of all your planets, or add some kind of waypoint system like in Dar/Multiwinia.

Since you now have two kinds of trees, it should be possible to somehow "change" which trees you have on a planet. The easiest and fairest way IMO would be to allow destruction of trees. The reason as to why this should be allowed is that the enemy can do it for you (destroy trees) - and it's potentially frustrating if you need the enemy involved for something that *could* improve your situtation.

I really like the fact that different types of planets now have a greater significance. Maybe that was there in the original version, but it certainly didn't show as much. It kinda seemed like my seedlings had a harder time to capture small planets (mainly because they didn't hit the entrance to the core most of the time). Is that intentional?

Gameplay wise, the game still gets too easy towards the end. I suppose this is mainly the AIs fault. I think multiplayer should be added ASAP, because it'll help finding potential balancing issues faster - the most probable will be some kind of game-theoretic equilibrium, that'll just lock the game in the worst case. This will require some external intervention to unlock the situation - something functionally equivalent to the crates in multiwinia.

That's all for now. Keep up the good work - I'm already hooked!

[Loren Schmidt]

I've played both versions 1.0 and 1.0.8, and I must say you have a very intriguing game on your hands. I really appreciate the esthetic of the game and its deliberate simplicity. Something about this game really invites player dedication, because despite wanting not to burden you, I feel oddly compelled to make yet another detailed, long post! I shall endeavor to be constructive, and if any of my ideas are off base I apologize in advance.

In order to be really compelling, there are still some fundamental issues with the arc of the game that need to be addressed. There is a brief but interesting 'competition' phase, followed by a very long, strategically uninteresting 'winning' phase. Oddly losing is fairly interesting, but winning is not. My favorite part of the game is the beginning (up to around four asteroids). I also like midgame multiple front wars where supply issues cause different outcomes on different fronts, and expanding too thinly is a constant threat. Colonization itself is not interesting, though combat is. In the late stages of the game, the major activity is endlessly collecting small numbers of seedlings from out of the way hicktown asteroids. And on a design level, I find it odd that war is the focal point in a game with such a mysterious, peaceful esthetic. Don't get me wrong, I have favorite games in both the violent and peaceful camps. But this one feels like an odd mismatch.

On to another topic: I think the unit statistics really aren't in keeping with the simplicity of the game at all. It really feels like an idea that somehow migrated over from more stereotyped RTS games, rather than something that grew in place and fits within Dyson. It would be a lot more impressive if the game relied on natural strategic depth rather than creating false depth via that old erroneous RTS idea:

more fiddly = more interesting

Of course I don't think detail is inherently bad. Even though I'm kind of against them on principle, I'm sure you'll work the statistics into the game in a meaningful way.

Since it seems like you're actively working on making the statistics more meaningful, I'd like to note that it seems the statistics you have chosen are a bit odd. Speed works neatly. It's a clear case of a specialization that is good for some things, and bad for others. But the other two statistics seem sort of wobbly strategically. They both make seedlings better in combat. But one makes you win faster, and the other makes you.. lose slower? This really doesn't create interesting decisions for the player.

I propose keeping attack strength, but either removing energy altogether, or replacing it with something more interesting. Very tentatively, perhaps extra damage when defending would be interesting. That seems like it would be redundant with your new defensive trees, though? Hmm.

On a more minor note, I'm still seeing the AI fly fleets unscathed by occupied asteroids. I've tried to do the same thing myself, and my seedlings always engage any hostile asteroids. It seems like either the player should be able to skip over asteroids without engaging, or the AI shouldn't.

Another issue is that my seedlings seem unresponsive when I tell them to disengage. The normal move UI (arrow, range circle, etc.) does not show up, though the 'number moved' indicator on the destination asteroid appears. I'm getting mixed messages. What is going on here?

One thing I like about the new build is that it seems like the asteroids are more interesting now. In 1.0.8 I find myself frequently weighing the cost of new trees against the quality of an asteroid, and deciding not to build past the first tree.

The new range limit seems to work nicely, though it clashes a bit with your stage layouts. The randomization + range limit combination sometimes gives the player three or four safe colony options, yet other times it places the player with only one piddling colony and two or more hostile neighbors. This makes the difficulty vary significantly.

I hope some of what I said is useful to you. I write this not through a desire to disagree with or correct you, but in the hopes of sparking interesting lines of though and opening things up to discussion. I wish you the best, and look forward to future builds.