Hi,
Okay, I have put in about 10 hours of playing a large campaign with 5 star systems and I have to say, my overall impression... this is the most fun I've had from a 4x game since Masters of Orion 1 & 2...and no offense to anyone, but that includes GalCiv, so its saying alot. I even sneaked in an hour before I went off to work today
As well, I've finishedplaying through all the tutorials, and a small 2-3 hour campaign before this. In my large campaign, I've researched all the techs available, so I feel ready to give some overall/general feedback regarding gameplay. I was not in beta 2, and I know this is mostly a tech beta, but I've posted some tech issues already so here it goes (I apologize if some of these things have been posted before):
1. PIRATES
Keep the pirates, they are fine. Yes, they can be annoying at first, but in my games they've essentially provided a motivation for me to build a large enough fleet to actually take them out. The added income from taking the pirate bases is welcome too. No need to nerf this, pirates become a non-issue after you've grown in strength enough to wipe them out.
2. STAR SYSTEMS
Theres a few things about the star systems I don't like...and thats well, they just don't feel very 'astronomically correct'. The planets feel like they are sort of haphazardly placed around their stars. It would be alot nicer if each had an orbit around their star, complete with an orbital trajectory that they follow. In short, basically modelled after how star systems like our own solar system work. This is one of those 'immersion factor' things that in my opinion would improve this game significantly.
3. SHIPS
When I first heard about this game, I was sad to learn we can't design our own ships. But after playing a large campaign, the reason is evident, there is just to much going on in a larger scale game to take time to crank out a new ship design every time you research some new techs.
Having said that, some sort of ship customization would be nice. Here are some suggestions:
A. Capitol Ship Naming: Add a button on the capital ship menu that allows us to rename the ships. The fact that capital ships in this game level is a wonderful concept that really makes you feel invested in the ships, so being able to custom name them would just be the icing on the cake.
B. Capitol Ship Design: Taking customization a step further, a capitol ship design interface for making some basic design choices would be nice. It would work on a point system basis, where a new capitol ship design would be allocated X number of points to spend on various abilities and attributes that we currently see available in the game. The choices would be restricted to the options available for the race, off course.
First, you'd pick a ship model from a library of capitol ship design models available for that race. Then, points could be allocated to ship armor, shields, hangar capacity, antimatter capacity, number of gun/missle batteries as well as the special abilities we see on the different ships, such as colonization, ion cannons, reactive shielding etc.. Available points would be such that designed ships would be on par with the current ships, but this would allow you to design ships geared to the task you want. I could, for example, design a carrier capitol ship with more hangar capacity then the stock carrier and only defensive abilities., but with none of the offensive abilities that the stock carrier has.
Since the ships level, your designs won't become obsolete as the game progresses, hence you won't spend too much time re-designing ships all the time. The only time you may redesign is if you researched an ability in the game that unlocks a new capitol ship ability...but I havent seen too many of those in the game so far.
4. Enemy AI
My first campaign had the AI set at Medium. Honestly, I found this setting to be pretty easy. I have only had to retreat from one battle, and I found that none of the other factions made an attempt to take any of my planets or asteroid complexes, with one or two exceptions. The only time they attacked is if I conquered one of their planets or asteroids via culture. My next grand campaign will be at Hard setting so we'll see how that goes.
5. Diplomacy
This is kind of meh...but the rest of the gameplay is so strong that I can live without a more robust diplomacy system. I like the little messages I got from other empires, that its kind of silly for an empire to tell you 'you should evacuate X planet' cause they are pretty much telling you where they are going to attack. I really haven't seen a good diplomacy system in a game since MOO series (Civilization games are an exception), to be honest, I wish someone would make a new and improved system that follows that model.
6. UI Stuff
I'm generally fine with the UI, I just have one request... have a cinematic button somewhere that just gives you a full screen view with nothing of the battles. I love watching the battles, and I don't want to have to go into the options menu to toggle the unit cards and other things off. Just put a button on the screen, or use a hotkey, you press it, all the UI stuff goes away so you can watch the battle full screen. I think Star Wars EAW had this feature, it was one of the few good things about that game.
7. Sound & Music
I love the music in the game, dont change it. The battle music actually gets me pumped up and I feel like I'm almost watching a Star Wars movie!
The sound effects, on the other hand...could use improvement. The Cobalt Light Frigates sound really weak, as do some of the other weapons. I like the distant thumps you get from orbital bombardment though, those sound good.
Okay, so thats my long winded feedback for now. I'll make another post after I've played some more. All in all, a very good game, and it will be great with just a few improvements like the ones I've suggested. About 4-5 years ago, after I finished playing Homeworld 2, I made a post on relic forums saying that it would be great if Homeworld 2 were essentially made into a 4x/rts hybrid. Though I'm sure thats not why this game was made lol, I'm so glad to find out that the folks at Ironclad were thinking the same thing! Thanks again, keep up the great work!
PS: For those that think the game is too slow, try playing a large campaign, it picks up speed with the more territory you control.
