Hello, I backed this game during the Kickstarter but I just got around to giving it a try now so I figured I'd give some feedback. Right off the bat when you launch for the first time, the game forces you to pick a ship type, color pallete, character, and profile name. This was a problem for me and gave a negative first impression because while I was at this screen the game's music was blasting, and the resolution was way off so I had to quickly click through all of this profile set up stuff while having to listen to loud music and read through it all in a tiny window. It would be much better to allow a person to access the settings menu and get things configured properly before forcing them to make all these decisions about their profile. My idea would be to bring the player to the main menu when they launch the game, and initially have the the tab on the bottom left say "Create new profile" instead of allowing them to start up a game, then once they created their profile they can start playing the game, tutorial, etc. You obviously don't want someone to be able to start up a match without creating their profile, but you need to give them a chance to tweak the settings first.
Onto the settings menu, I found it very annoying that every time you make a change and click save you get kicked out the settings menu, this messes with a person's habitual behavior developed from using settings menus from other games or software and for me at least I kept clicking save and getting kicked out of the menu out of habit so I had to keep going back in. It would be better to keep the player on the settings menu, or have a "save and close" button as well as just a normal save button (the former option is probably the way to go.) Also, there aren't any volumes sliders, just on and off buttons for the sound but I assume this is just because the game is still in Alpha.
Here are my initial thoughts on the game itself after trying out a match, some of what I say here may be wrong because I did not spend much time on it: The ship designs are really cool, the backgrounds of the planets are really cool, and I love the new look of the warpgates compared to the first game. I also think a lot of the changes I noticed compared to the first game such as being able to move your command station (and even use it as a combat unit while invading another planet) were really clever and will set this game apart from the first. Making things mobile that were previously stationary adds a lot of flexibility and allows unique playstyles to emerge. I would imagine you could treat your command station like the one in the first game and just leave it in one spot and surround it with turrets, or you could get a little risky with it and use it to help capture an early enemy planet.
Unfortunately, this game has it's own share of UI problems which while different from the first game, I found to be just as bad or worse. I'll start with what I liked and then get to the issues with this. The decision to have a stationary window on the side with everything you need (research, unit lists, and options to build units) I actually think was a smart call. It will definitely take some time to get used to but you no longer need to cycle through the units on your planet like the first game to get to what you need, everything is always right there in front of you no matter what planet you're on. I would like to see an option to shrink it when you're not actively using it so you can gain back some screen real estate would be a good idea though because it is pretty wide. I also really liked the ability to zoom in on the Galaxy Map, my issue with the first game was that there is so much that needs to be display on the map at once that unless you were constantly micromanaging your map filters it could get very busy and overwhelming to look at. Much of the time you don't need to see the whole map, you just want to focus in on one area of it and clearly see how those planets connect to each other and what units/resources they contain. It helps make things more accessible when you're not forced to look at everything all the time.
Now for the issues I had with the UI. With the Galaxy Map I don't like how the Planet names scale up as you zoom out to a point where practically all you can see on the map is planet names when you're zoomed out. I'm sure the names can be turned off all together like with the first game, but most players will still want to be able to see them, just not have them overshadow everything else. The planet view however is where the Major UI issues rear their ugly head. Everytime you hover your mouse over a unit, you get this massive, ugly, semi transparent window that pops up in the the upper left area of your screen right under your resources bar. It feels as if it takes up a fourth of the available screen real estate and gives way more information than it needed when you're simply hovering your units to go and select them. Maybe others don't feel this way but to me it actually makes the game near unplayable to keep having these massive boxes flashing at you whenever you move your mouse over anything that give you information you don't need and obscuring your view of what is going in in the planet. The first game didn't have this problem because the window that was popping up was in most cases smaller, much of the screen real estate it used up was already taken up anyways by the permanent ship categories bar so you weren't losing a lot of screen real estate you would normally have most times you hovered on something. With this new UI the resources bar at the top takes up more space vertically than the old one did, the new persistent action box on the right side takes up far more space than the right hand bar on the first game that just showed a column or two of units on the planet, and even with the unit categories bar from the first game not appearing at the bottom right hand corner of your screen you still have the new settings bar down there, so you really don't have a lot of screen real estate anymore. I think these massive unit detail boxes need to be made smaller and moved down to the bottom right overlapping that new settings bar. The way they are now the best thing I could compare them to is like if you had adware on your computer that pops up and covers what you're trying to look at all the time. Also, the window for ship selection doesn't tell you what ships you actually have selected, it just shows the number of ships and their strength. This may not need to be fixed, it may just be an unavoidable problem caused by having the massive persistent action bar taking up the whole right hand side of the screen. It's just annoying to not be able to quickly see a list of what you have selected. Last but not least, when you are having ships build it shows you a % complete but not a time until completion. I think showings seconds remaining to build the next ship would be a lot more valuable piece of info. Also the if the ship cap and amount used currently owned could persistently show on the icons rather than having to hover over them it would help justify having this massive bar on the right. If it's not going to tell you at a glance without needing to hover over it what your caps are and how many of each ship you have then I don't really think it's giving you enough info at a glance to justify all that screen real estate.
TL;DR: I think there needs to be a hard look taken at what information you really need showing on the screen at all times, and what information you don't need to show. The sheer amount of text is a real problem. Other more mainstream games with better UIs seem to utilize more symbols, and less text. This game (and the first one as well) tend to show you a mini-essay on what each unit does whenever the opportunity arises to show you it. Much of this information is going to be intuitively learned through play and not worth flashing huge text boxes over the screen to convey. This game isn't really that much more complicated than most other RTS games yet there seems to be an impulse in your design philosophy to overload the player with info you don't always need to see which obscures things you really do need to see at all times such as resource costs, ships built/ship cap, and Mark level.
I know I may have came off as a little harsh here but I am rooting for you guys, and I appreciate how transparent you guys have been throughout the development of this game, where as many other kickstarter devs go months without communicating to backers at all and then try and pass off the excuse that they were too busy to make a post. You guys are insanely busy as well, but you take the time to communicate with your backers because it is the right thing to do.
