Okay. So. I'd tried to get into this game awhile back, only to be stopped by stupid arm pain and such, since this game does get really.... clicky. All the other games dont need nearly as much and so could be handled at the time without my pain going out of control.
Recently, that problem has gotten much better, and I can do games like this as I want to, so it was time to jump into this one.
Now I'm sure you guys have heard all manner of feedback and comments and such before, yet I"m gonna ramble on anyway, because... because. I'm used to giving feedback on everything everywhere, so I may as well do it here. This is all from the perspective of someone familiar with strategy games as a whole but coming in very new to this one. Though at this point I doubt I at all need to explain where I stand with this sort of thing, I'm guessing that's pretty much known by now.
First: The tutorial. It seems better than it was when I'd tried before.... did it get updated? It seemed to take quite a bit longer to get to the "Okay, I'm done explaining stuff... go off and win now! Try not to die!" point. That being said, it kinda seems like it could go into a bit more detail on some things. A few things arent so obvious, or perhaps arent so easy to get used to and grasp initially. For example, the big horrible blob of data that is displayed for any ship you hover over is... well, I'll say, "intimidating", that's for sure. It's like, holy crap, that's ALOT of stats for this tiny fighter. And even more for anything large. Figuring out what is good at what isnt always so easy. Moreso, when looking at specific enemy ships/stations/whatever, getting a sense of what to use to best topple them is also difficult. So many stats on those too, and finding just where the holes in any given thing's defenses are is tough. I'll get the hang of it quickly enough, but that's what I thought going into it. The further I go though, well, yeah, I can see why this game is considered to be so tough to get into. This isnt quite Dwarf Fortress, in that I probably dont need 60 half-hour tutorial videos to learn it, but still, it FEELS just like the process for learning that game did. Quite a challenge.
So, I do think the tutorial could be greatly improved, though exactly HOW is beyond me, I'm not some sort of tutorial scientist. But it's decent at least at the basic concepts. Though, when it DOES leave off at the end, suddenly it's like, okay, so now it's just given me the goal of "go win", but there's SO MANY different THINGS that I could make/do now, and what's the best choices here?
To my suprise it immediately forced some experimenting on me by throwing stuff at the homeworld, including a few big spiky horrible things that took me a bit of time to figure out what to do with. Again, all that data...
That part of the game though, I think so far is very well done. Defending against AI assaults is interesting, challenging, and fun, as well as satisfying once a difficult attacking group is beaten. What was kinda tough though was that it was hard to get a sense of just HOW MUCH defensive stuff made up for an effective number against forces of varying sizes. I'd thought I'd built enough turrets and thingamajigs there. I was wrong. Also tough to get a sense of which turrets are good at dealing with which threats, though I'll get a sense of it as I go, but figuring those out seems tougher than figuring out uses for most other things.
Interface is mostly good, though I'm not entirely sure how to use that bit in the lower left. That bit is a little confusing. The bit on the right is just fine. For the galaxy map though, I notice that it seems to be able to show enemy ship numbers, in red, over planets where I can see them. It'd be kinda nice if it could do the same for my own ships, or if I could look at my own planets on that same map with a similar view to how it displays summaries of enemy planets. I've a terrible memory and can easily get lost when dealing with large amounts of stuff, which can be irritating when I've got some complicated plan I want to do, so there's alot of moments of, okay, so I've got some number of ships here... but where's the rest of this force split up? Where's my raid ships? How many things are defending this place over here right now? Possibly, I"m missing stuff here. I do that alot.
Hacking: Explained, but I really dont know what to do with it. Of everything explained in the tutorial, this seemed like it needed more detail more than anything. Obviously, still in the tutorial, I dont *need* to be using absolutely everything, but I figure it's a good time to experiment and mess with stuff before jumping into a real game, but this part specifically has me lost for the moment.
Scouting: OMG STUFF. Another "kinda intimidating" part initially. So many.... red things... dunno what half of them do, I just know that alot of them are big and lumpy and covered in spikes, which typically doesnt mean anything good.
And finally, the controls overall, pretty good as a whole. One thing that did kinda bug me was the initial binding of the pause function. It might be just me, perhaps others are more used to this one as-is, but it felt odd having it be on that particular key. Switched it to spacebar. Other than that, the default setups work well, and commanding units is pretty easy provided I dont forget which keys do what, and thus order them to do something really stupid by hitting the wrong one.
So that's my experience with the game so far. There is also of course the expansions.... I bought all of them because yes. I'm doubting there's a pile of seperate tutorials for each one, so what is a good way of learning the stuff in each expansion? I'll mess with them once it's time to get into a real game. Alot of features in those sound neat.
All in all, very good so far, albeit with a mean learning curve. Very polished overall. And murderous. No complaints here, though, as per the usual.
