Shipyard:

I must admit I’m frustrated with the shipyard in its current state.  (Alpha frustrated, I know.)

First, creating parts doesn’t seem to work right for me (or I really don’t understand it).  If I pick just 2-3 parts to make a new part, it seems to work.  But if I select 5 parts to make a new part, it doesn’t seem to like that.  I did this several times and while it would allow me to select more than 2-3 parts to export into a new part, the new part would only have 2-3 of the parts I selected.  Then, it wouldn’t allow me to use that new part to make a more complicated part (although, thinking back, I had tried to select 4 parts).  Also, on three occasions after naming a new part and selecting “Done,” my new part wouldn’t show up in the menu (with part names like spine_1).  I also could not find a way to delete a part I didn’t like.

Twice while resizing a part disproportionately, the game crashed to the desktop.

Which brings up the most frustrating aspect: I had saved a ship design, but not the game.  When the game crashed while trying to modify the design, the parts I had made and the design I had made (about 3 hours work) were gone.  It would really help if parts and ship designs were saved separate from the game itself (as was the case with ship designs in GC 2).  It was a really cool design, too.  ::sigh::

Fine detail work is very difficult.  For whatever reason, there are some hardpoints that just don’t want pieces attached.

Game Play:

On the positive side, I started a new game after the repeating crash at turn 215 on the previous game, and I am now at turn 309 with no crashes (other than the shipyard ones mentioned above).  I did change stars to “Occasional” on a large map, and I have avoided most combat so far.  I started out away from the other players (for once) and have concentrated on building up my colony worlds and starbases with only a few warships for defense near the AI players.  I also remembered a frequent crash from the Twilight of the Arnor beta, a “memory leak” caused during game saves.  Disabling the Auto-Save feature then was one of the “fixes” we used, so I did the same here.  If I get more time this weekend, I’ll continue the game as see how far I can get without a crash.

Overall, I am enjoying the game play.  I am hesitant to spend much time on ship design, though.  I think I’ll wait to do the detail work I like to do until designs and parts can be saved separately from game play saves.  (If there is a way to do this now, please let me know.)