Demo feedback

[Notorious]

I've been playing the demo of Drox 2, with no prior experience of Drox 1. I've played quite a lot of Din's Curse, Zombasite and Din's Legacy. Here are some things that are confusing:

• What does technology do? Where are they stored? There is no entry for it in the manual.
• What are the uninhabited planets for? Also here there is no entry in the manual.
• The inventory sort buttons overlap the bottom row of the inventory. Can they move down a bit?
• Is the inventory sort order locked? I.e. when I pick up new items, do they get added according to the last used sort or not?
• Why is my hotbar filling up with multiple copies of the same skill?
• Movement options are confusing. Which combination of options makes movement closest to Din's Legacy? I don't want to use WASD to move.

[Notorious]

So now I have bought the game, and in 1.000 the inventory sort buttons are lower on the screen, that's good. However, the hotbar bug is still there. Each time I click on one of the inventory sort buttons the last 4 slots are overwritten by random items. I have disabled the sort buttons for now, but this needs to be fixed.

[Excellion]

Lets see:

What does technology do? Where are they stored? There is no entry for it in the manual.
Technology can be traded with the various races. If you open the relations screen and press the "Technology" button you can see a races current tech. If you have found a tech of a higher level than the race currently has, you can trade it / gift it trough the "Trade" screen. A races ships will have components based on their tech level, so the higher their tech the stronger they will become (Tip: Don't trade tech to races you wish to destroy).

Tech is automatically collected and you cannot see what you specifically have - which is fine as its only purpose is to trade it anyway. (Tech used to be a dropped item that you manually had to click and convert from the inventory. The current system is a LOT better).

What are the uninhabited planets for? Also here there is no entry in the manual.
Uninhabited planets can be settled by the various races, provided they can settle a planet type. (You can hover over the "Planet Habitability" icon in the races screen to see a races affinity for various planet types).

As the player you can scan planets and sell the planet data for a race. A race can only colonize a planet if they know about it, so selling planetary data allows the AI to actually send ships to colonize a planet. Of course the AI races can also find planets on their own, and you as the player can subsidize a colony ship for a races as well if you want to allow one to expand faster.

Why is my hotbar filling up with multiple copies of the same skill?
Do yourself a favor and go to "Options" -> "UI Options" and disable "Auto Fill Use Slots". With the setting on the game will place items and skills on the hotbar automatically, but it has a tendency to overwrite slots, place duplicates and replace skills that you simple want deleted or grouped into weapon groups.

Just managing the bar manually makes things a LOT easier, cleaner and more intuitive. (The game will force slot "1" to be filled though, but thats just a minor hassle).

Movement options are confusing. Which combination of options makes movement closest to Din's Legacy? I don't want to use WASD to move.
Honestly, use WASD to move and the mouse to aim and fire your weapons. You can technically enable the UI options "Allow basic mouse move" and "Allow basic mouse target move" to enable "Click to Move" similar to Din's. That said: The games faster pace, emphasis on long range combat and weapons that have to be aimed manually make that movement style a lot less suited for this game. WASD combined with mouse to aim and fire works an order of magnitude better.