And after much thought, I decided to show my fuzzy face here again to toss in my two cents.
I read all the comments regarding the new build and other various tidbits and offer the following feedback:
Loading Time - I'm not seeing much difference on my end between Unity and SlimDX. The added time to start the game with Unity is almost unmeasurable for me. If it's a gain of 1 or 2 seconds, then I wouldn't notice at all. Older machines probably see more varied results is my guess.
Teleporting Engineers - I'm also one of those players who strives at some point prior to mid-game to unlock the teleportation ability of engineers. I usually have too much going on from that point on to babysit them through cross-planetary journeys and/or to sacrifice a small convoy to escort them around. This way they are more efficient overall, faster, and evasive to enemy harassment. Normally, when Chris puts his foot down, the forest shakes...so, I wasn't going to push it. But since he kind of broke down with the MkIII idea, I had to cheer for that because I'm very keen on options. There is so much to learn in this game that one more mechanic down the line isn't going to kill the camel, IMO.
Graphical Splendor - Now when then hammer drops, it rewards with some satisfying eye candy! I love the new effects overall and add to the experience quite a bit. The yellow highlights on the option buttons are very nice and the fonts are great and varied enough to keep it interesting. It's fun to watch a battle take its course and watching stuff blow to smithereens like it should. I'm really happy with the results that P.I. brings to the table and everything is shaping up nicely. If you care to add even more, I'm all for it.
Response Latency - I'm not really getting much lag so far. When I start the game and it zooms in on the initial structures, it's a bit jerky zooming in until I finally get in all the way - then I'm good after that. I've only had about 50 or so units attacking at once and I didn't notice anything slowing down at all - but I haven't done the epic space battle thing, either.
Voluntary Donations - Why not have a little Paypal button somewhere on the site that allows for voluntary donations to aid in future development of the company? I see Indie sites do this occasionally and it doesn't hurt to have it up there, but can make a big difference if people decide to use it. There are quite a few of us here who feel we were undercharged for the amount of content we get and wouldn't mind helping out a bit to extend funding. It's not begging if people are willing and I don't think it would detract from your image or mission statement at all. Those who don't want to can avoid it completely - those who do can pitch in whatever they want. Nobody is going to condemn Arcen for not having the budget of Activision and I'm sure lots would love to help out.
Manual Errata - I still have a couple of things that linger such as the missing logos on the landing page and the buttons on the left side of the Galaxy Map are missing (although, hovering over that area yields its description). I see that these have an "assigned" tag in the bug reports - I'm assuming that means stuff in the works then? Which leads me to the overall effectiveness of the bug report page - that is one incredible system and I've never seen anything like that in a public forum before. It's like a giant public interactive spreadsheet that encapsulates the entire project stem to stern and upon a glance, you can see the status of things in real time. I'm not sure how you got that up and running so fast, but that is truly remarkable.
I'm still not feeling all that well this week and I won't be able to test extensively, but these are just some observations I have made to throw into the mix.
