___ Interlude ___
The initial plan was to farm an army, settle the second ais neighbour, clear the second homeworld and neuter the other neighbour, and then build lots of turrets (including all beams) right by its final command station to help my army deal with the second avenger. With all the things to do i figure that would take 3-4 in game hours (so ~6 real hours considering all the pausing).
However, after checking the forums i found out the game would be won as soon as the station would go down, so i probably would have tried to take one planet to hop right into the final world and rush the command station for a quick win, then close the game and imagine the second avenger threw itself into a sun or something.
This game was quite fun, and really challenging for the most part, but it also came with some annoyances. Considering how tight my income was, i had no choice but to manually turn on/off the factories and power generators, and that happened about every 10 minutes because of the way i was capturing ships and then scraping them or dumping them in transports to put them in low power mode. After 19h this was really tedious.
The speed trains also reeeeaaalllyy got on my nerves since i had no reasonable way to deal with them while settling new planets, and early on i had no good way to deal because of the high power needed. So i was stuck waiting for all of them and those on neighbour planets to head away, but if i stopped playing and picked up the game again, the trains choose a new destination on load, so sometimes i'd have to wait again another bunch of time before being able to move if they backtracked through my targets.
I'm also left wondering how peeps are supposed to deal with the avenger without impulses (or i suppose polarizers). They seemed to have the undocumented feature of shooting through force fields since i managed to destroy the modules on the avenger very fast and before taking its force field down. Or was that the beamers? I still had to destroy the shield before taking the ship out. Weird. But anyway, since the avenger was immune to blades and missiles, that was about half my available firepower i couldnt focus on it, and with its high shields, about half of my remaining firepower had little effect on it.
Lastly my biggest gripe is the amazing number of hidden numbers. Those are the reason my friend isnt playing his game and my other friends dont want to pick it up. With no in game way to know that bombers take 1% damage from fortresses and they do like 10 times damage to it, my friend lost a game with capped fortresses on defense vs a wave of bombers and didn't scratch them at all, although it says on the tooltip fortresses are strong vs bombers (or rather... vs 1 bomber). He then quit and never played again since he wasnt interested in nerding out about it like i did.
The other things are all mostly only applicable to a challenge game, but there really needs a better way to let the player know about all the hidden numbers. I'd suggest either an in game reference or basic armor and damage types so x armor takes y% damage from z damage type. Anything really to make it more accessible, i think this game is a gem, and i'd really like my friends to pick it up.
