I would like to preface this with a few things.

First, I am one of the many Kickstarter backers that supported this game's development. I didn't contribute much toward it, but I did receive it for free as a result.

Second, I would like to make it a point that commercial video game development is not an easy task. It's easy to sit down and mess around with a game development engine in your own time on your own terms, and with your own ideas and your own way of doing things. Working with others brings its own plethora of difficulties and constraints. Working around a schedule, communicating between various aspects of the project at hand, delegation of various tasks to be pitched, delegated, tweaked, redesigned, and tailored for the audience. I'm in no way defending companies that don't deliver the kind of quality you'd expect from a functioning game, however-

Third and last, this game is not only early access, it's early early access. I can see why the amount of complaints have skyrocketed in such a short amount of time because one would expect an early access game to at least be playable at the minimum- I believe the devs need to be more transparent in the fact that the game is nowhere near the state of an early access release. Those of us who were emailed through the Kickstarter campaign were let known when we received the key that the game was being released in an extremely early state in order to receive feedback from the playerbase. The Kickstarter campaign itself was only launched August 6th, and the early access state of the game was only released to Steam on December 13th. That's a mere 120 business days of development in a professional setting.

For those who are accusing the trailer of showing the same exact footage, UI, or elements of Planetary Annihilation- It's understandable that they would not have new assets that haven't been developed yet. Reusing assets during preview trailers from previous games is an effective way of showing an idea of what you're aiming for while saving on artistic design costs. Yes, you could pay an artist to simply draw what the new UI is going to eventually look at, but at such an early state in the game which the studio claims is still going to be responsive to user feedback and could change at any moment, it's a much better marketing approach not to show a completely new interface that they may not even end up using. It's entirely possible that the company is focusing on getting the core mechanics and programming of the game into a functioning state before they shift their focus onto organizing it into neat menus, which is why we see the very disorganized and robust state of the UI as it currently stands.

Nobody was forced to support the development of this game, and nobody was forced to buy it. Should you expect your money's worth? Absolutely. Should you expect an early access game on Steam to at least be in a playable, functioning state? Sure. Should they have held off on publicly publishing the current state of the game? It's possible, but too late to go back on now. Should you as a consumer do a bit of research on the thing you're going to be spending your hard earned cash on? Yes. But it's not easily accessible yet, so let me help you.

Here is your research.

Industrial Annihilation launched its Kickstarter campaign August 6th, 2024.
At the time of writing this, the game has been in development for, at maximum, four months.
The Early Access launch of this game at the time of writing is in a functionally incomplete, bare bones, and almost unplayable state, so consumers can take a look at the earliest stages of the game and provide ongoing feedback for its development.

There are many errors and bugs in the game currently that I assume are being addressed before adding additional content. From a programmer's perspective, or at least from my own, it's imperative to squash out all of the bugs that affect the core mechanics of a game before working on adding the variety and content of said game. Procedural map generation, for example, requires the code to be able to differentiate between all the different things that need to be generated, handle how they generate, where they generate, what else needs to be generated before they're even considered for generation- only after these things are set up can the additional assets with their own individual parameters actually be worked on. You can't build a house without a foundation, right?

Some notable bugs, problems, and overall limitations in the current state of things from my observations are as follows.

*There is no proper enemy AI yet. This means multiplayer sessions require another human player or must be entered solo, which allows you to 'playground test' the current state of the game.
*The UI is essentially the bare minimum required to allow the game to function, meaning there are no functional keybinds for the various buildings, there are no menu groups, and its clunky design makes it difficult to find what you are looking for.
*There are no 'planets' in the current state, but basic top-down maps with no additional levels of depth. There's nothing to go under or over.
*Navigation of units through and around the base is far from optimal. Large clusters of buildings will cause units to walk around the entire base to reach the other side in most cases.
*There are currently some non-functioning buildings and non-functioning units, some of which can be placed but not used in any meaningful way, because they are still being developed.

Here's some gameplay quirks that all of you might find useful, even those enjoying the game currently.

*Conveyor belts are instantaneous in the current build and can be done from a far, but limited, range from your units. It's not transparently conveyed that a conveyor belt must be placed within range of your units in order to be built- attempting to build it from further away causes the starting or ending point of the conveyor belt to display red, though many people don't seem to catch on to this right away.
*Mortars seem to have various targeting constraints in their current state. This makes the early access campaign #2 difficult for some as the mortars don't seem to target and fire upon their marks, no matter what the user is doing. I have found that the mortars have difficulty targeting items that are behind a shield, but they have little trouble targeting the shield generators themselves. Once the shield generators are destroyed, the mortars no longer seemed to have a problem targeting the exposed enemy structures. See if this assists your gameplay.
*The commander is a mobile, low-output power source and all the power in the game is done by placing power network infrastructure around your base. It's not clear to new players how the power network works. To put it simply, if the 'ring' around the power structure you are placing touches another 'ring' of a different power structure, they are connected. This means your long-distance power poles don't need to be within the ring, they just need their rings to touch in order to effectively transfer power. This includes your commander, which can be tactically placed to connect two disconnected power networks.
*You can queue your commands, as in most RTS games, by holding a modifier key [in this case, shift] when you issue the command. You can mix various commands into the queue this way, such as 'go here, build this, walk this way, then go here and build this, then return to the base'. The game generally handles these queues quite well in its current state. The resource delivery trucks can also be queued in this same way to create a looping pickup and delivery point so they can be left to work autonomously.

Here's some genuine personal opinions for you and for the development team.

*The current state of conveyors and trucks is slow and clunky. Trucks take far too long to load and move far too slow for any kind of prolonged use in an RTS environment, and because they can be destroyed so easily, they are also risky to use as the time they spend getting from point A to B, loading, and then B to A again can easily be a few minutes long. Meanwhile, conveyor belts are much faster but there is no current and easy way of crossing conveyor belts over each other, organizing or sorting things without overflow being a problem, and getting things hooked up. The initial period of getting all the various ores into all their various containers is painstakingly slow, and if you don't know exactly what you need to get started, you will get steamrolled. I believe that the logistics portion of the game needs a way to 'quick-connect' structures together and generate a conveyor blueprint between them automatically in order to be more accessible to players, especially those with physical impairments which might make fine-placement difficult. Creating complex conveyor lines would still be accessible for skilled players while creating a simple, functional base wouldn't require a handbook for new players.

*The game's base building takes far too long just to get to a starting point where you are producing units. The process of creating the mining rigs, sending trucks to pick up the contents, creating half a dozen storage containers, unloading the trucks into them, creating crafting facilities and another half dozen storage containers for the finished products, setting up the conveyors between them, creating the unit manufacturing building, and then delivering the resources to it, and then finally getting your first unit takes such a substantial amount of time that players are not likely to even start basic combat until 20 minutes in, and if one player is even slightly behind, only one component of their base needs to be destroyed for it to completely cut off their line of production. Even creating base defenses is a huge, equally time-consuming ordeal. I don't have my own suggestions on how to make it better, but no multiplayer RTS game should be locked behind twenty minutes of building before the first person to build a unit is the first person to win. I could also be completely wrong in this assumption, but in my various attempts to come up with good starting strategies, it always took an absurd amount of time to get a proper base started, which is in the territory of being a chore rather than being a fun or competitive experience.


In summary, the game is in early access as its bare minimum and it's in no way a complete, functional game right now. Please do a bit of research before you buy it and rag on the development, because it makes the useful feedback the developers are actually looking for hard to find, and I for one want my money's worth from this game so I'd like to support them in finishing it so it actually turns out that way.
If you are looking for a complete, functioning game, save your money. It'll get there, it just needs time.


For those of you that want to talk about mechanics that are hard to figure out, the current state of the game, what we think we're going to see from it, and other feedback like that- please, put your two cents in. I like discussing this stuff.