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Thanks, I appreciate your kind words and I'm glad you had a good time playing :)

The Steam page is already up ;)
The current build is also available there as a Playtest so you can play it through Steam if you prefer!

Hello! The waypoint system is now there! When you hover a settled place on the map, you can press a button (R by default, same as pinning items) to open a pin menu:

• You can pin the marker on the map to emphasize it with a target circle
• You can activate an arrow that shows in real time the direction while you move the ship
• (maybe those two should be a single option, but I wasn't sure  so I kept them separated for now)
• You can change the color of the marker pin and arrow
• You can change the icon of the marker, either the default one that changes with the population count of the city, or any resource icon. I felt using a resource icon would be quite relevant as maybe you want to indicate what is the main production of a particular place

Let me know what you think about this waypoint system, I hope you will find it useful!

I agree it could be a nice addition. I already have a waypoint system partly working because this project was more of a trading / taxi game in an early prototype, so being able to pin cities on the map and move easily towards them was a core aspect. So I guess I can bring this feature back, I'll see what I can do once I'm done with the quest system!

The size and the lack of variety are a good point, I will try to improve these aspects!

Thanks a lot for your detailed feedback, this is very helpful!

I uploaded a patch  to address some of your remarks, they are fixed right now. The text boxes in the tutorial now have more vertical space and should be easier to read. Also, I fixed the resume button not working, and the mouse cursor should now scale at large resolutions.

For 5 and 6, I decided to increase the reveal range on the minimap, and to make the camera a bit smoother, adding also a tiny delay before it starts zooming back. These changes will be live in the next patch.

Regarding 2, 3 and 4, this is all very interesting. I agree there is too much info given too quickly, and I really like your suggestion of breaking things down by locking some features. This goes on par with feeling a bit directionless in the beginning, not knowing exactly what to work toward. Taking inspiration from your suggestion, I'm thinking about implementing a quest system that could serve the game progression, giving hints to what to do and unlocking new features as a reward of completing them. First goal could be to reach a certain amount of population, and it could allow to settle new cities. And then reaching another goal gives access to ship upgrades. And then another to buy travel permits. And another to upgrade buildings, etc. And then the tutorial is split into many fragments that trigger only wen relevant, splitting the information across a significantly longer period of time. This is quite some work so it will take a bit of time but I think this would be very beneficial to the game. This is my next priority!

As for the waypoint system, this is possible but I would be interested in knowing more about the underlying motivation. What do you think it would be helpful for? Is it more of a nice option or does it feel very much needed from a quality of life standpoint?

Thanks for your feedback, this is very much appreciated!

Do you think it would look better without any box or with a different model like fences in square for instance? I'm afraid it could look very empty with nothing at all and make it more difficult to see instantly if there are empty tiles remaining without opening the city menu. Also, looking ahead, I'm considering adding a few 2x2 and 3x3 spots for the future prestige buildings and end-game wonders, and so I think having the tiles totally empty would not help to see the exact shape of the spots.

Having some production building craft only at the cycle ticks is an interesting idea, I like it! It would indeed add some variety in the way building works, I'm keeping this is mind for when I create more content!

I can add the wooden barrel in the press, this is a nice suggestion. I will tweak the grape juice icon to make it more consistent too.

There was indeed a weird interaction bug with the loom, thanks for noticing and reporting it. It is now fixed. And I'm taking note about a building boosting itself when adjacent to the same, that can be interesting for sure!

Thanks for playing, I'm glad you're enjoying the game! Yes, the grape juice is available in this version, you should be able to find an island with grapes and place vines. It you can't find any, that probably means you got unlucky with the generation seed. In the next patch I'm going to add a check to make sure nothing is missing in the generation.

Thanks for your comment, much appreciated! I will increase the view range to have a bit less fog, I hope this will make it better to enjoy the scenery!

Thanks a lot! I'm hoping to release a patch soon with some bug fixes and very-requested quality of life improvements :)

The way I implemented those "incompatibilities" currently is that merging a Fleeting and Persistent/Exile will cancel both effects on the resulting stone. But if you merge another arrow, then it adds Fleeting again. I think I prefer that it works the same for everything instead of having a different behavior for Exile compared to Persistent. But that means I need to nerf Eraser then. Maybe removing half of the opponent moves instead of all is a good compromise, it's still strong if played every turn but later opponents will also still give some challenge. Or I could instead give self damage to Eraser so it would be risky to spam it too often.

Thanks for the feedback, that's interesting! I like the idea about Fleeting and Persistent canceling each other out too, it would makes sense! I'll make the change in the next patch. I agree the goal is not to balance everything evenly, there needs to be effects allowing for powerful synergies, it's just more fun that way!

Thanks for playing and reporting the bug, I was able to reproduce the issue! I found out it was not limited to Wildfire, could happen as soon as there were two identical marks under the same stone for an effect that needs to happen only once per stone. I uploaded a patch: version 0.1e fixes it. Also, I replaced Wildfire marks with attack marks for the encounter on the screenshot. Wildfire needs a range, so I realized it was actually doing nothing for most stones...

Yes, the game auto-saves at the beginning of each turn, so players can almost always recover and continue their game even if it softlocks during the effects triggers :)

As for the arrow, does that mean I should increase the hidden tier of the Fleeting effect? That would make arrows more expensive in the shop.

Alright, I'll make them cancel out, it'll be in next patch. Until then, enjoy your overpowered stone :)

Thanks for sharing a video of your playthrough! I plan to watch it shortly, your  feedback is very appreciated :)

The Fleeting and Exile effects are incompatible, so I gave the precedence to Fleeting. But that can be indeed completely overpowered in this case... Maybe the effects should just cancel each other out? Or do you have another suggestion to make it less broken?

Thanks, I'm happy you like the UI design!
If you have any quality of life suggestions to improve it further, please feel free to share them!

Hello KingofCharge,

Thanks again for playing the pre-alpha of Comet Force a few month ago! I'm happy to let you know that I have now released a new alpha build directly on Steam, as a free public Playtest. If you give it a shot, I'd gladly read your feedback on the Steam forums!

Link to the Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2954690/Comet_Force/

Indeed there is an issue in the code here, thanks for reporting. It will be fixed by next patch.

Hello KingOfCharge, thanks for your feedback!

I agree with you about the balance discrepancy between the crusher and the two other classes. I see several solutions here, but I'm not sure what to choose yet, I will have to experiment with them and see how it feels.

• I could add a brief increased speed at the end of charges so that players can quickly go away and avoid the bullets
• I could add some sort on shield to make the back of the ship invincible, I think that's mostly where we get hit after a charge
• Stunning enemies as you mentioned is also a good idea.
• Increase the max health of crushers

But even with that, the safest would still probably be to have the crusher as a companion. Since the leader can take damage, but the companions do not, I feel every type of weapon that involves closer range and more risks will be a better fit for companions. And I'm not sure how to counteract that. I think it would be best for the game to have all classes be equally viable either as a leader or a companion (but obviously having different pros and cons for each). Balancing this will be challenging!

Hello! Thanks for reporting this, I indeed made a mistake when configuring the default bindings and swapped those two :/ This should now be patched! If you haven't changed the bindings already, you can click on the button to reset all controls to default in the options menu.