I only digged into it for about 30 minutes, I will later give a better insight but here are my insights so far.
The overall UI is a lot better and the new combat interactions are SICK. This is exactly what i wanted to see from a successful sequel, not just recyclen the old stuff, reworking and improving on it.
The new triangle ship interactions are a lot better because it gives you a better understanding how you can use them. Also a lot more flexible too. The old Rock-Paper-Scissors system was easy to understand but not very intuitive. It all boiled down to "This is ship deals more damage to this ship simply because of the hull type".
Now we have different special abilities that directly influence how well ships will do against each other. For example the Fighter (now branded V-Wing) will slow down ships massively which opens up new strategies. Combined with their higher than usual movement speed they can slow down retreating ships for your other ships.
Corvettes deal now massively damage to anything that isn't heavily armored. The damage is INSANE. And the new use of personal shields together with Fusion Bombers ability to bypass these by a big chunk is also great.
This makes the game a LOT more intuitive for new players. In AOWC we had a simple rock-paper-scissors system that worked but the problem was, if you do not know all the different ships and interactions (which is basically impossible anyway) you had to look them up again and again.
Now a player can just look at ships and quickly decide what he needs. A ship has strong shields? Bombers? too fast for your fleet? V-Wings. And corvettes will deal with beefy targets. I cannot express how much I like this change.
Now, I also noticed soem drawbacks witht his change. All the new stats are important for special abilities (armored units will reduce effective damage of corvettes for an example) but all this boils down to "if it has X value it does not work on it". Do the stats have any other purpose besides that? Does a stronger engine reduce the impact of stuns/slows even if it does not reach the threshold where it is unaffected? Does armor reduce effective damage on the target or does it simply reduce damage when something like the corvette attacks it?
And oen of the stranger things is Albedo. I actually had to look this uop because I didn't even know what it means (I'm still clueless btw). It has soemthing to do with light reflection I think (or beam reflection, does not have to be light). Anyway, in AIW2 it seems to affect cloaking but the word in itself is not common. Players will look at the UI. Engine, hull, shield, these are all words that everybody knows and understands even if you do not know it in this context you will have a general idea what it does. Albedo however will confuse players and they will have to, like me, look it up first. Maybe you could change it to a more common term or explain it somewhere in the game?
Okay, now some balancing issues I have. I don't know how much Starships are integrated with these new changes, I guess they are still in the progress of working. An example is the sniper starship which basically isn't even a sniper, it has less range than corvettes, in fact it has less range than ANYTHING.
I have for soem reason TWO raid starships in my tech menu with the exact same stats but one costs twice the amount of tech than the other.
Sniper turrets are terrible compared to spider turrets. They are essentially the same but spiders do three times the damage and also slow/stun targets, they have also more hull and HP but both cost the exact same amount of metal, energy and tech.
In my opinion snipers shoudl be the damaging kind and spiders the supporting type but currently spiders are in everything superior for the same cost.
I don't see an attack on the military command station. Or maybe I'm just blind?
Anti Cloakers tell me that it decreases "x Cloak points". Where can I see cloak points on cloaking ships?
