I tried again last night and really the main thing I'm having problems with is that beyond the broad distinctions between fleets at the start, I'm not really sure what they *do.* What they're for. The strike fleet, for example, has a few different types of ships in them but I don't feel like I need to care because that's not the level of control the game is steering me toward. But if that's the case, and I really don't need to care, then why are there different types? And if I *do* need to care, then I'm not given the organic process required to teach me the differences. I just start with a bunch and am told to get started.
I understand the reasons behind the switch to fleets and I agree with them in the broad strokes but the way they're implemented, they maintain the granularity of detail with much less of the interaction, which is frustrating. It's like being given a jigsaw puzzle already completed and glued together and then being told I need to understand how all the pieces fit together before I can hang it on my wall.
Specifically interface-wise, it still comes down to the disconnect between icons and the 3D models they sit on top of. I wrote a lot on this topic ages ago and while quite a lot of it has been fixed with the switch to fleets, the essential problem - the relationship between the two visual layers - is still there.
The best example from maybe the first 2 minutes of the game is the AI's stationary posts. I think one of them is called a guardian...? It's shaped like a soccer ball, whatever it is. But it's tiny. I mean, really, really tiny. Probably less than 10% the size of one of the player's ship groups. And if it has an icon, I either couldn't find it or it was so far away from it that I thought it belonged to something else.
And when I say tiny, I can't articulate how tiny it is. It's so tiny that when my mouse hovered over it at a reasonable zoom level for tactical control, a yellow selection ring popped up over EMPTY SPACE. And the only reason I was hovering over there was because I kept seeing laser shots coming out of EMPTY SPACE and thought maybe there was a bug in the game that had made the model disappear. Then I zoomed in all the way and saw it, dark against a dark background, a little floating soccer ball.
That's when I quit again. Since I couldn't even see, let alone identify, the things that were shooting at my fleet, I knew I wasn't going to enjoy playing any farther along.
The game really wants me to play by paying attention only to the icons (which are always visible), but overlays them on 3-D models that have not been fully thought through in terms of what kind of information they provide or prevent. The result is either a blobby incoherent mess (when I'm looking at my fleet) or empty nothingness (when I'm looking at something small from a game-appropriate zoom level).
Edit: My tone, as before, is less civil than perhaps it should be, and I apologize. But it's a product of my intense frustration. I adore AIWC. While I only have 140 hours in that game, that still puts it at #6 in my list of the Steam games I have played most in my life. Back in the heyday of that game, it was my #1. (For comparison, the #1 spot now is only 540 hours.) When I saw AIW2 was being developed I put my money down in a heartbeat, right at the start. I don't regret it - this isn't me angry that I spent money, I did so and would do so again even knowing what I know now - but I'm sad that I haven't enjoyed even this relatively polished version of the game, and for reasons that I feel could have been solved super early on if only someone had spent a little more time thinking about UX.
And with that said, I truly hope that I'm an outlier and that most people who come to AIW2 will find the interface useful and helpful and information-rich. But I'm really quite worried that I'm not, and that a huge chunk of the potential audience is going to bounce right off for the same reasons I did.
