@101 don't quite see your point since playing with that voice for an hour or so would probably give me a headache. I don't think anyone is expecting the voice of god himself, and I also don't think it's too much to ask. But don't want to hijack the topic, so will stop with this line.

I've seen a lot of people saying. OMG professional voice acting is expensive. I charge 10 cents a word. That's the going rate for freelance work, and I tend to be fine with working out deals for game devs and stuff if it's a large project.

Oh, I didn't realize that the id of the ship was being announced as well. I don't think we need the ids until we open a menu.
I would love to see some kind of story line, set of achievements, or something more than just me going down the list of campaigns and options to try out my skills. I love the game, I would just like a little story to play with.
I would also love to see a mixture of traders of known space and this game!

I would like a progression or levels so that I feel like I'm going through a campaign or progressing in some way.
Perhaps it could be as simple as you're a general jumping through 3-5 year chunks and every so often one of the factions calls on you to lead ships to win a battle. I just want something that will progressively make the game harder while making me feel like I'm part of the story somehow.

I would also love to see a high scores board. This game would also be perfect for multiplayer battles, similar to Starcraft. Rather than making it turn-based, both players could set their ships at the same time, then the maps only sink once both have made their moves. Then there could be rankings.

I know I posted stats earlier for a larger game, but as I was beta testing some of the things for the update, I had a really rougher game than I've had in a while, and thought i'd share.  This is by no means a large game, but it gives a different flavor to people who have been seeing much smaller games.

Game Statistics for Playthrough of VGA Expanding Known Space, Version (22 beta ).

The player beat the game! woohoo!

The game lasted 1 hours 44 minutes 51 seconds  and ended on Friday, July 26, 2019 at 7:45 AM.

The war between you (the solarian federation) and the enemy (the interstellar union) started in 2850 and ended in 2866 (65 turns, with the solarian federation victorious.
Game was in ouch that's really not fair difficulty. Mission far corners mode was enabled.
Military victory condition was assigned - was not met
Colonization victory condition was assigned (60%) - the solarian federation met this condition with 70% for 4 seasons
Economic victory condition was assigned (60%) - the solarian federation met this condition with 71% for 3 seasons
Capital Control victory condition was assigned - was not met
The enemy was in normal mode.
the solarian federation finished with 28 colonies (70%) with the most ever held  being 28. the interstellar union finished with 11 colonies (27%) with the most ever held being 19.
the solarian federation colonized 1 of 1 asteroid belts, 4 of 7 space stations, 2 of 3 ice planets, 5 of 7 volcanic planets, 3 of 4 ocean planets and 13 of 18 earth type planets.
the interstellar union colonized 0 of 1 asteroid belts, 3 of 7 space stations, 1 of 3 ice planets, 2 of 7 volcanic planets, 0 of 4 ocean planets and 5 of 18 earth type planets.
At the end, the solarian federation was making 263 credits for 71% of the total income, the interstellar union was making 240 credits for 25% of the total income.
the solarian federation made a total of 9045 credits, the interstellar union made a total of 19952.
the solarian federation spent 0 on intelligence gathering, the interstellar union spent 325.
the solarian federation purchased 287 interceptors, 429 destroyers, 32 frigates, 111 cruisers, 104 battle ships and 49 colony ships for a total of 1012.
the interstellar union purchased 96 interceptors, 18 destroyers, 96 frigates, 25 cruisers, 705 battle ships and 48 colony ships for a total of 988.
the solarian federation lost 82 interceptors, 193 destroyers, 9 frigates, 20 cruisers, 29 battle ships and 9 colony ships for a total of 342 (309 lost in combat, 33 lost to hazards).
the interstellar union lost 74 interceptors, 18 destroyers, 75 frigates, 18 cruisers, 441 battle ships and 24 colony ships for a total of 650 (621 lost in combat, 29 lost to hazards).
the solarian federation lost 4 ships to changing loyalties, the interstellar union lost 12.
you have won 0 military, 3 colonization, 0 economic, 1 capital control and 1 mission victories and you have lost 0 military, 0 colonization, 0 economic, 0 capital control and 1 missions for a total of 4 wins, 1 losses.

During the course of the game I lost Zion, Vishnu, Vesta, Grunwelt, Paradise station, and Amundsen.  I managed to retake Vishnu, Zion, Vesta and subsequently lost Vesta again.  The only reason I won was because I made a lot of smaller strike fleets and sent them to run around in his rear area striking where he didn't have many forces.  Between colonizing planets he had skipped or not gotten to, and taking over his colonies, I managed to win.  I never saw Bolivar, but likely couldn't have taken it over in any case.  The AI in ouch that's not fair mode sometimes has upwards of 120 battleships on Bolivar.  Still it was touch and go, even til the end of the game, he was still sending fleets of 20 battleships to Earth.  in addition, these were not single large fleets.  There were multiple occasions where fleets of 20-30 battleships struck me at multiple points.  There was a point in the midgame where I was fairly sure i'd end up losing. 

Take care,

Jeremy

ok so am listening to this review. 3 problems with it:
1. the person reviewing it is talking over the in game speech a lot of the time so it makes it difficult to hear what the game is doing at times.
2. the guy so far is not explaining exactly how he's doing what he's doing. some things he is explaining but not others.
3. when going through various options the guy is not allowing the speech to complete what it's saying. which creats the obvious problem of not knowing entirely what is happening.

thanks for taking that into acount smoke. hey glad they won though! lol i had to listen through to see if they won.

But it's a strategy game, not an rpg. Yes, there is some plot for the game world, but it's along the same lines as time of conflict. There's no story in that either.

there is the stat thing at the bottom telling you how many games and of what type you won/lost.

Having the mission, and clicking next would be weird, because you win the game, then you have to reconquer everything all over again. It just doesn't make sense. Plus, choosing missions based on difficulty is really subjective. I'm not sure how you would rate them.
They are still working on the update though, so maybe that will help, and read the blackscreengaming review. It is a good assessment of what the game is and what it is not.

with the likes of AOE they had 2 modes of gameplay. 1 was indeed a story mode, the other was the open ended kind that just kept going until the game finished one way or other.

Dark,

Thanks.  We appreciate it as always.  I really like the introductory paragraph.  Very well done.

We are working on the update.  Aaron's family lives and works a farm, and this is fair week, so they've been very busy.  That's slowed us down, but we are working to implement those things we can.

Some will have to wait on a more extensive update, or may never happen.

Right now though, we have address three or four of the major concerns brought up here.  We still have another 8 or 9 we want to address.  No guarantees when this will be out, but any update we do will update existing copies of the game free of charge.  We're hoping for end of August at the latest, but it might be longer depending on what roadblocks we hit.

Take care,

Jeremy

Darren,

In answer to your question, so far the changes are these:

1. We have created an o hot key that replaces the old on hand credits o hot key.  This one allows you to see ships not on planets that have no autonav orders.

2. On hand credits was moved to become extra information given with the t hot key.

3. L now gives cursor location, and shift l gives location of last selected ship.  This moves cursor location from the hot key u because of the next change.

4.  U and shift u now cycle through five purposes for ships: scout, defense, attack, and convoy.  The fifth is unassigned.  Putting a fleet or ship in scout mode now enables scout mode on it without going into the autonav menu.  These purposes are displayed when the player looks at the ship or fleet on map mode. 

5.  We have prepared a text file that will list all file names in the speech folder, and the contents of each file for recording your own voice pack, or for translation.  In addition we've created a utility that converts this string file into SAPI speech.  It is not a complete fix, as because of the way our voice sends are written it makes Sapi rather choppy.  However, it does provide an alternative.  We still encourage the community to record their own voice packs and use those as the recorded speech will be much more effective.  We are looking at things we can do to smoothe the SAPI speech out, and might include a pregenerated SAPI folder, but that's still being debated.  Our stants is still that we're sticking by our original script, we're providing the alternative, but the onus of use is primarily on the end user.

Those are the completed, or near completed items that we've worked on.

Other items that are under discussion, and will probably be completed are these:

6. Providing an examine square menu that will tell you all ships on the square that are not in fleets, possibly having submenus for each fleet to display its contents separately.  We're looking into what options are the easiest and most efficient to code in a short time.  This might take a completely different form in the final version.

7. An option to flip the Y axis.  I want to say the original reason we flipped it from common usage was due to complaints on the original TKS forum, but I might be wrong about that.  For me, I always think of the map as the lower right quadrant of a cartesian plane with the origin in the upper left corner, but we get the confusion factor, and figured out an efficient way to provide a toggle.

8. We're looking into a way to make map mode disappear once you place your final ship, and making this a toggleable option that would be a replacement for the current behavior which is the map hangs around until dismissed.  The game used to cause the map to disappear, and it is messing with several beta testers when it doesn't.  This might or might not get implemented as it is complicated, and currently not something called for by most customers.

9. We're looking into introducing a second demo mode to provide more combat and/or a regular game experience.  We're still debating which way we want to do this.  Our original reasoning for using lightning mode was that if we set an arbitrary turn limit, there's no guarantee that a player will actually encounter the AI by that limit.  Usually, yes, but not always.  This one is going to happen most likely, but we don't know what form it will take.

10. We're looking at adding two more missions.  Currently, this is merely a speculative idea, so might or might not happen.  one was suggested by this forum, another by beta testers.  If others get suggested and we have time, and they are again efficient and easy to code, we will strongly consider including others. 

11. We're looking at including three new stats in the game status, end game, and copy text options that would track how many planets out of 40 you have discovered, how many static hazards, and how many mobile hazards you have encountered.  The same stats would be provided for the AI.

12. I'd like to rearrange the way the copy and paste text is presented, if I can convince Aaron it's worth doing, but this might or might not happen.  I include this one as a side note.  This copy text is in line with how our other games have been set up for the most part, so it will probably stay as is, but I had originally wanted a more broken up format that might list for instance how many interceptors we bought, how many the AI bought, and alternate more to make the comparisons easier. 

13. We're looking at where we could profitably insert sounds for those who want them, and still put them on a toggle for those who find it too cluttered, slow, or makes the game less responsive.  Whatever we do in this direction, the soundscape will still be very sparse and will likely be mostly sounds to indicate small events, and shifts in game phase.  As I noted in an earlier post, having individual sounds tied to individual ship events can get spammy and annoying very quickly in certain game situations.

That's the quick overview.  Those will definitely happen, and we hope to have this done by the end of August, possibly the middle of September.

What won't be happening in this update are these and I'll explain why:

1.  Major changes in maps, units, or other major game elements. Quite simply, EKS is a very complex system, and introducing new variables often breaks the game and requires a long testing process to find the bug and squash it.  Squashing a bug of this sort often creates more.  We had an issue in beta 20 that came from a similar issue, and we do not want to slow down this update by trying to make the game bigger, more involved, etc, and then have to wait three months or better over one bug. 

2.  I like the story ideas, but they would require a major overhaul to how the game plays, and again, in the interest of getting an update into players' hands quickly, we are going to hold off on any changes in that direction.

One last teaser, but this is only a teaser and may not happen.  We are examining ways to make computer to computer play possible.  This falls into the same caviots as above with new units, new maps, new story: if it is taking too long to figure out, or won't work in a way that satisfies us, we're not going to do it at this time.  We have always envisioned an online possibility for this game, and we would like to make it happen, but our policy with past updates, and I think it's a good one, is to fix immediately obvious large scale issues that are raised rather than to try and retool the game entirely.  In the case of TKS, we have been working on retooling the game entirely, and it took us over two years, and we're not even halfway done with the ideas we want to pursue.  It has currently gotten sidelined by EKS and some other projects, and will take even longer now.

One thing, as with any small developer to remember is, it's just two of us.  only one of us has extensive coding skills.  I can do a little but I learned programming back in the days of Basic and Pascal and so modern programming languages blow my head up.  I can do some data entry things like if then statements or hot keys if they're simple,but I just am not useful code wise.  As with any small company run part time, RL interferes.  SO sometimes we make choices based on how efficiently and quickly can we get this game to work, work right, work consistently, and provide a good play experience.  We don't always  go for this would be the coolest if ideas.  Many of the ideas suggested here have been excellent ideas for places to take the game, and they are ones that we will explore if we ever create an expansion, a further update, or a new game that builds on EKS.  However, many of them I estimate would take us five years or better to complete, just because of the inevitable delays we  would encounter.

Take care,

Jeremy