Lacuna is too two dimensional. There's no substance.
The game is basically a Sim City, which in itself would be nice, but nothing happens. There are no earthquakes, meteor showers, or giant monsters roaming around. You build you colony, upgrade your buildings... and upgrade your buildings... and upgrade your buildings... to the point where you can get new buildings, so you build those, and upgrade some more.
All the while a whole lot of nothing happens.
I thought I'd see more from the Diabloton empire, an AI run program (in game) that sends out probes and attacking forces. Problem is, they only send out two different types of craft, the Scow and the Thud... one drops garbage on your planet, the other destroys a plot of land for a period of time; when one considers how many plots are available (11 by 11 grid), and maybe a third of those plots are allocated for use, seeing a few "removed" is no big loss.
A few months back there was an other AI which sent emails to all the colonies about how they are returning to the Expanse, and that they would remove all from their home / territoy. Cool! But, nothing happened. Zero. Zip. Nada.
Nothing happens in the Expanse! Oh sure, you may have a friend in the game, and you may test or try things against each other, but that's it. Most of the other players are isolationists, meaning they can't do anything, and you can't do anything to them. And really, who wants to seem like a bad guy and just attack someone just for the hell of it? Me... I am getting close to that point where I need to do something other than upgrade buildings!
And, quite frankly, I am rather bored by the fact that all my planets seem to be carbon copies of each other. Building levels are the same... hell, the buildings are the same; same defenses, same offenses. My planets have been upgraded to the point where each one could be exchanged for an other, and there would be no difference. That may be my fault; I've always liked turtle defenses... but still.
Here are some ideas I would like to see implemented in the game...
1. Resource management - fine tune your generators or mines or whatever, so that you can reduce how much they produce, which then allows for more energy to be allocated towards something else.
2. Useful patches - the makers of Lacuna keep coming out with patches and new items for the game, which is great. More is better. BUT, in their wisom, they decided that the new items don't do anything, or the patches are only good for the items that don't do anything. Case in point, the four new structures for spy training. Allow for items to have a purpose!
3. Bring in real world events - I want to see earthquakes! Floods! Natural disasters! If you have the building "Network 19", you get news feeds, and sometimes there will be news about such things, but those events don't happen!
4. Enemy Ai - By the gods, if you are going to introduce a storyline, or an atagonist, make them do something!
5. University levels effect the empire as a whole... why not make it an alliance wide affect? Have it so alliance members need to allocate a certain amount of resources to gain the benefits, or are required to supply a specific amount of whatever.
*sigh*
