A few comments after spending some time playing last night/this morning. The game has made amazing progress.
A few comments. Well, it started as a few comments at least.
Especially on your first few planets you are capturing, I sometimes had to wait a minute or so to capture the Knowledge/metal/power buildings; time which is just non-interactive. I propose making those structures cheaper.
Once you've extracted the Science from a planet, there's no actual need for the Science Generator structure to still exist. However, if I'm fighting over border worlds I'll continually recapture them when I take my planet back from the AI. This is a waste of metal. I suggest that after you've gotten all Science from a planet that the Science Generator self destruct (this would suggest changing the name to "Science Extractor" or something, so it doesn't match with the Metal/Power Generators).
Cloaking seems like it's in a weird state when the player uses it; it feels like my ships never actually get decloaked. There's a mantis bug with a savegame.
There's some sort of bug that prevents structures (ARS, Golems, Knowledge, etc) from being captured at some point. There are a few saved games in mantis.
When you have a force on a planet, it reports "Number of Ships (number of Squads)". Should we also include the Strength for both sides, since that's a seperate and not necessarily obvious number? Sometimes the 1K enemy ships are easy to defeat, sometimes they crush me.
There's no obvious way to distinguish between a Drone Fighter and a regular Fighter, which I worry will confuse newer players who don't understand why they can't control "that fighter" when it's a drone. Perhaps drones should be implemented as Anti-AI zombies (though still called Drones), since that will give them a different color icon?
In the sidebar, it's hard to read the mark level; that value is too small. Could we make that larger?
I feel like the best way to start currently is to begin owning the first planet, then to immediately build a starship constructor and some starships. However, this means I need to wait about 3 minutes for the starship constructor to build. Perhaps if you say "Start with first planet" you should always get a Starship Constructor? You can always scrap it later.
As I mentioned earlier, we really need to be able to rally constructors to the front line. I typically have my starship constructor behind my defenses, and constantly going back to the Staship Constructor planet to send troops forward is annoying.
As I mentioned earlier, it's hard to tell when I've build my full cap of a particular kind of ship.
I miss the ability to double click on (say) a fighter and immediately have all my fighters selected.
The Zenith trader definitely gets stuck sometimes. There are a couple saved games in Mantis.
I bound the "Select Mobile Military" to the "M" key and it is invaluable.
At the moment the AI isn't really sending waves, presumably due to the negative wave timer bug.
We are having Exogalactic Strikeforces, right? It would be nice if they could be readily triggered from the External Code.
General balance observation. Since you can't fortify a given planet too heavily with the per-planet power, it feels like you need to take more planets in general to be able to survive a big wave/CPA/Exo. Defending an isolated planet seems nigh on impossible, and you'll need to take more planets to build your fleet due to the fuel restrictions. Low AIP games will be tough, and guerilla warfare in general will be harder I think.
