I would have liked it if shells stopped glowing a little bit after they touched the ground

First off, cortex command is looking good and is already awesome! However, there are a few areas that if polished I feel would make cortex command much more fun to play. Fortunately, many of these shouldn't be too hard to implement (speaking as a programmer).

1. When I'm building my base, if I place a gun over a robot/clone/etc. equip him with it. I spend the first 30 seconds of play boringly the same way every time -- cycling through my bots and giving them the guns I dropped over them.

2. List menus for picking objects for base construction are too twitchy on analog sticks. Unfortunately I'm not sure of a good alternative.

3. Pie menus work best when there are 4 items with a maximum of 8 (each cardinal direction). Anymore than that and it's hard to get what you want. I think "nested" pie menus would be a good alternative. Rather than having each AI option on the pie, have their be a single option labeled "Command". When you pick it, a new pie menu shows up, with just the four different AI options.

4. The pie menus and their icons should be larger. It's not obvious enough at a glance what your options are. This should be easier to do (more room) if you use pie submenus.

5. Gold dig mode shouldn't show up in the pie menu unless the robot has a digger. Or change the AI to be smart enough to pick up a digger if it doesn't have one.

6. It's very difficult to get a mental picture of the battlefield when you're constrained to the view of your current robot. I assume you didn't mean for this to be a fog-of-war sort of limitation because you can view the whole map when placing a dropship. It'd be a lot nicer if I could just look around.

7. When moving between bodies, it would be nice if you didn't stop the AI from running until you performed an action. Switching to a bot that was in the middle of a firefight can get you killed, and it's annoying that to keep my digger working when my other units are dead I always have to switch away to my brain. This would also soften my #6 complaint.

Lastly, if you want some good UI ideas, I would recommend picking up the game Grimoire for PS2. It's by the same people that made Disgaea if you're familiar with that. Grimoire isn't the best game in the world, but the developers definitely spent some time thinking about how to do an RTS in 2D, and some of their interface ideas could definitely be reused in CC.

Number 1 is good. Probably being worked on. Along with various other problems associated with the build phase.
Number 2 could be fixed by making a maximum scroll speed on the menu.
Number 3 is a good idea, but I worry that the menu could get too cluttered. Perhaps just the commands submenu could work.
Number 4. I think it's fine the way it is. Once you learn what all the icons mean, you will remember where to go. It's almost the same motions as it was when there wasn't the pie menu.
Number 5. The AI is still being worked on. This will probably happen in the future. Anyways. It's the leader's fault for not knowing that the clone doesn't have a digger. The clones are mindless minions after all.
Number 6 apparently is being fixed by way of "Minimap" soon.

6. Use the sharpaim feature. It hoists up your weapon and simulates "ironsights"; you look down the barrel of the weapon and see farther.

Has anyone played as the green team lately? The enemy drop ships start dropping units of your color (unfortunately there is no enemy brain to launch a major assault with).

I have.

Also: if a actor starts with a weapon in the build menu then it will shoot people WHEN ITS STILL A GHOST!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yeah, unspawned units are cool like that. You can go digging with dropships.

Uh.. One question. When you open up the pie menu on your brain, there's a "Propose cease fire" option. Who the **** is gonna use that?! O_o

The Pie menu is cool but can we make a modification ...

I'll try to explain with my poor english :

Switch weapons with a tap on the left (or right) key
without closing the pie menu (Because it's sloooooow ...)

Like : Open the pie, tap right, release right, tap right again, without releasing the right mouse button.

I think it's better and faster.

(Sorry, poor English, i'm French)

Are you running a lot of background processes, like antivirus and the like?


At the moment, you can cycle through many weapons at once by tapping fire after selecting left or right from that menu.

Right, but not fast as quick tap on right or left ...

Thanks guys for the great feedback. Especially Jengu; everyone should look at his post for how to write some really good constructive and practical input.

Here are responses to his points:
1) Yep, definitely planned.

2) We can try to just tweak the sensitivity down a little.

3) We steered away form hierarchical pie menus for the reason that they quickly get tedious and lose the benefit of having a quick overview of all your options at once. The idea was to keep the most important and frequent options on larger areas in the cardinal axes, and squish the stuff you rarely use in between.

4) Again, it's a balance of size and manageability.. remember the menus have to fit on each player's screen even in four-way split screen games.

5) Agreed, good idea and we'll add it.

6) We are working on a way to get a better overview that is separate from the minimap. It'll be a series of icons at the top of the screen showing all your actors' relative horizontal positions, their healths, AI modes, and little alerts if they are seeing any enemies.

7) Hmm interesting... will think about this one.

8.) Thanks, will check it out.

Also, the 'propose cease fire' option. I'm guessing this will be for when both teams have low funds from fighting. A cease fire is proposed and accepted, and a mini gold-rush starts.. right?

That's really cool!

One more question..

How are you going to stop players from going on a blitzkrieg early in the match? On Death mode, I can easily take my starting bot and quickly fly to the opposing base, easy win. Are the teams gonna start out with very low funds?

I suggest it would be good to start off the match gold digging.. 100oz with blue clone and a medium digger? Just thinking out loud.

I have a question. How do you change the starting gold in Build 18?
I checked just about every .ini file in the game but I couldn't find it.

Did you check Activites.ini?
Because it is in there....