Vovo listed most of the things. I don't 100% agree with all of his points, but a good 90% will do and I'll try to not repeat them too much.
I'm not going to focus on the balance too much, because cost/effect changes are coming to majority of LF features, and speculating before the final numbers doesn't help.
Will be brief about the current state:
- Sub 3 minute system flights with BCs in a x4 speed universe is not ideal.
- Deuterium consumption of "1" is not ideal, specially not with refund in case of recall.
- 7000+ attack battlecruisers are not ideal, and you can just assume that cruisers will be killing death stars, since one has tech buffs and other doesn't. Reapers and pathfinders, same issue.
- Black hole reduction being possible at all is not ideal
- x10+ boost of mining production is not ideal, specially since it stacks with metal packages
- Performance on small account refreshing page is <1 second, on larger account on same server is 15-30 seconds. That is very very much not ideal.
- A lot of technologies could benefit from clearer descriptions of what they do, most of all the class bonus technologies. It makes no sense to put something at tier3 that's fairly expensive to unlock, without describing its function.
But yeah, a lot of current bonuses are getting rebalanced, so it all will need to be reviewed afterwards.
General design feedback:
- Food being lootable seems pointless, would work better as energy. As of now it is taking cargo space on plunder, if there was an option to never plunder food everyone would check it. Like vovo said, it is not realistic to feed your population with the looted food.
- Population regrows so fast, you may as well remove the mechanic entirely and save some performance on population growth calculations. It takes what, less than an hour to go from 0 to your max capacity? May as well not exist, specially with bashing rules globally limiting attacks to 6 per planet.
- It will be very hard to not over-buff collectors with this update, as there's so many more technologies boosting them, relative to f.e. discoverers. Of course, not talking about combat expeditions; if that's back, that is entirely its own(large) problem. Talking about resource/ship/dm finds, the amount of technologies and their %'s just don't compete with how many different things can boost mining production. Not doing anything playstyle should not easily eclipse active playstyles.
- I personally don't have a problem with lategame collector overtaking discoverer. Disco gets quick growth fast that caps out relatively early, but that also limits people abusing multiaccounts and/or bots. Still, I'd prefer to see technologies that can, with diminishing return, modify the existing expedition find caps. In other words, that'd allow disco to scale into the lategame, while also not giving too much free resources to low point accounts that can be abused.
- I am not going to compare balancing of general vs collector, since general's income is coming from what collectors mined and discoverers found. General, given enough activity and skill, will always be best while there's enough active targets of a relevant size; and if there aren't, collector is going to be better; that's just how ogame works. The update is making general more relevant with class bonus increasing technology, as extra deuterium reduction and speed increases can be seen as more valuable than a corresponding mining boosts from collector - provided the general boosts do not get axed hard in the rebalance. Either way, even if we disregard classes, matter of investing into mines vs fleet always depends on the universe and targets available.
- However, designers should be very careful with overbuffing collectors. If collector becomes the most efficient playstyle per effort by a mile, that does not lead active players to "just" playing collector; it leads to them making a trade network across the community and abusing trade rates as the main source of growth; and their competition is left with a choice of doing the same(mind numbingly boring endeavor), or no longer competing. That just isn't healthy design. Still, considering that pilot profits come from collectors at their base, this problem is at least somewhat self-balancing.
- Mechas will be very hard to balance in a way that they are not OP, since their unique buildings are just too good. Even if they get significant nerfs, it could still result in mechas not being OP early game but still being OP at some point in the lategame, simply because there's so many technologies to boost.
Some current issues, all already reported:
- Not sure what causes it, but something can make a fleet impossible to recall(error message on attempt)
- Population race bonuses and building bonuses do not apply to moons, as moons do not have a race. Sometimes it makes sense, sometimes it doesn't (e.g. anything to do with fleet). Probably better to just make the moon inherit all modifiers from the planet under it.
- Buildings that increase ship building speed do not work at all, at the moment.
- Cost reduction mechanisms have many potential problems, across the board.
- Technology bonuses have like 1/10 to 1/15 chance of not applying at all. E.g., recyclers having no cargo bonus, research being started without time reduction, fleet recall deuterium refund not applying at all, etc.
- Obvious difficulties in timeback hits due to all the ship speed modifiers, suggested to have lanx display the modifier %, or make a sum-of-all technologies visible on espionage reports.
- Large concerns about third party tools compatibility / necessary data being exposed in oGame API. We do love our simulators, calculators and antigame.
Overall the communication is the best I've ever seen it at. Some of the issues have been resolved with beta11, such as deuterium consumption reduction technologies not working, planet updates breaking when population gets over cap, caps on teches being introduced(although %'s need rebalancing), etc.
There will be a more detailed feedback once we have the next round of numbers.
