Here are my impressions from 2.5\Warlords after finishing one game. Overall – I like it, but there are some issues and room for improvement.
Regarding features introduced in Warlords:
- I really like the new ship doctrine system, it adds a lot of variety and tactical depth.
What I found a bit frustrating is that I couldn’t update doctrine on existing ships.
- Concerning new war aims. Tried it once, when I declared a war of expansion. The “progress” bar filled pretty quickly to 400+ % and I got a few events, which were meant to discourage me from continuing that war. Of these, only one was more or less impactful (-3 to diplomacy fo 60 months). But then again the war didn’t last too long at that point (10-15 turns). I wish the whole system was better explained. Like, e.g., when exactly penalties start to appear, what does affect the rate at which they appear\their severity etc.
- New modules and techs are cool, though probably need balancing. More cool stuff is always good.
- Battleviewer has become better for sure. Finally no more reverse camera controls. Now, if only I could use right mouse button instead of wheel to control the camera movement, that would be awesome. Also, I wish the camera was more respnosive and could move around its axis. The ability to increase zoom speed (e.g. shift + wheel) would be very much appreciated as well.
- Regarding updated invasion system. It looks cool, but adds very little depth. The issue is – in the current system, defenders are doomed to lose and it is just a matter of time before any planet falls. To give defenders a chance to fend off a planetary invasion, attrition must be introduced to the game, so that attackers would also take damage during invasion. The current logic if I understand correctly is that, if you lose a space war, you lose planets sooner or later anyway, why postpone the inevitable? While it makes sense, I personally would like to see real battles for core worlds with defenders having some tools (defensive tactics, defensive planetary improvements, etc.) to at least significantly delay the enemy if not repel an invasion completely. If anything it would create a sense of achievement for the invader and a sense of satisfaction for the defender, after successfully repelling an enemy invasion. As of now, orbital bombardment is my way to go, allowing to take any planet in 2-3 turns no matter how much soldiering defenders have. I never even bother to research soldiering techs, because for the attacker it is not needed, since a planet will fall anyway and for a defender it is useless, since it is not going to help to stop a planet from falling into enemy's hands no matter how much solidering they have (hello -75 % orbital bombardment). The whole system has a lot of potential to make the game more interesting. I hope this was just the first step.
A couple more issues that caught my attention:
- AI is still not very good at waging wars. I played on incredible difficulty and hardly ever felt challenged. Even when at ~40 turn Drengin declared war on me, being at that moment more powerful overall. The problem is that instead of sending several powerful fleets to destroy my main fleets, AI sends in a mixed fleet with several invader ships, which are an easy target. After losing 2-3 such fleets AI can’t come back and often resorts to sending small fleets of 1-3 ships, which can be annoying, but can not win a war for him. It would be great to see AI, sending invasion fleets only after they have dealt significant damage to my defense fleets. And if they can’t achieve that – play defensively.
- Already posted it in discord, but just in case here it is as well: upgrading ship designs feels tedious now. Whenever a tech that enables a new tier of a weapon is researched, I have to go to a shipyard, then select a ship class, i want to upgrade with that new weapon, then select operational ability and targeting priority for that ship, since they go back to default every time, then remove old modules and place newer ones and click save. And then I have to do the same for all ship classes that use the same weapon type, which is typically all of them. That is 3-4 ship classes even in the quite early game. Later on it becomes even more tedious, since the number of ship classes grows closer to the late game and new weapon techs are being researched faster. Thus, you have to go through that process over and over again, which takes quite a lot of time.
In addition, for some reason, whenever I upgraded my ships, some time later (perhaps after re-launching the game) I would often see the same ship design with exactly same name repeated several times in my shipyards.
I think the game needs to automatically upgrade modules\weapons with newer ones on all existing designs of such modules\weapons do not require strategic resources.
- Refit system needs rework in my opinion. In its current system it is very inconvenient to go through every single ship in a fleet and individually upgrade them.
-Perhaps it would be a good idea to make military starbases sort of guard planets and shipyards in their zone of control. For example, if you attack a shipyard, while such starbase is nearby, you have no choice but to fight it as well.
