I love the Top Down camera, a la AIWC. The game spends a lot less time in your way than it used to, which is great. I spent some time playing this evening, and here are a few comments.
I think the Settings menu is way too filled with unlikely-to-be-used options right now. We need to split it by topics. Main Camera settings (this means "planet view", right? I might call it Planet Camera or something more obviously descriptive), Galaxy Camera Settings, Sound settings, Window/UI, etc... right now it's hard to find what you are looking for.
Threat sometimes does this rubber-band thing with my fleet. I'll have my fleet on a planet then move it off the planet. Just as my fleet leaves the planet, the Threat shows up; Which is menacing and alert, sure, but half the time I'm still looking at the planet so I see the Threat fleet come in. As a result it's easy to defend against but rather annoying and unfun. I propose that as soon as a planet that the Threat is waiting on becomes weaker, the Threat waits some number of seconds before striking. That would make it less predictable. One other means of accomplishing this would be to just have the threat waiting on a different planet. To illustrate, lets say X is my planet, Y and Z are the AI planets and a wormhole is <-->, like so: X <--> Y <--> Z. Right now the Threat waits on planet Y camping the wormhole onto X. What if the threat were waiting on Z? Then it would take a few extra seconds to arrive, which would accomplish my desired waiting as well as making it a bit less obvious what the Threat is doing.
I really don't like that I now have to hit the extra ` to get to my Pursue button. I very often want to select a Ctl-group and toggle pursue and I don't like the extra button press. I think Pursue needs its own hotkey if we are putting Pursue behind a opening menu.
Fabs, ARS and so on need to show what Tech they'll grant, before I actually capture them.
This might be my fault, but waves are being a bit weird. I'm an hour and 70 progress into a game and I have a wave with a total of 13 ships incoming. It doesn't sound like much, but they're all Mark V. I kinda preferred the AIWC behaviour where the AI would hold back their high Mark ships till later in the game.
I'm wondering if I could get that behaviour back by tweaking the line
buildMenus[i].AddEligibleItemsToBag( bag, faction, BuildMenu.EligiblityFilters.Standard );
to use MarkLevel_RequiredAIPLevel? This is where the AI picks which ships it gets to draw from for a wave.
There are some bugs in Nanocaust balance right now for me to investigate, but as a heads up I wouldn't use the Nanocaust unless you are just messing around. Speaking on the Nanocaust, right now the Galaxy "Threat" meter includes Nanocaust forces, which is quite deceiving (since the number will now always be > 20K, so it's not helpful). To check the Threat to be displayed the code checks
planet.GetLocalPlayerFaction().DataByStance[FactionStance.Hostile].ThreatStrength
How can I control whether the Nanocaust forces are Threat? If the Nanocaust is sending a fleet to attack you I should make sure it does get tagged as Threat, but not otherwise, so a means to control it would be desirable.
