I've successfully won a few difficulty 7 two-AI games, played around with a bunch of custom starts and minor factions, and am currently trying the Full Badger scenario.
This game has so much love put into it. It is so impressive that every single ship has a detailed and textured model when you're going to be playing most of the game so zoomed out they're just icons. The game does a great job of making you feel small, mechanically and thematically. So many of the factions involved are incomprehensibly vast beings that interact with humans like humans interact with microorganisms, the universe is a massive and uncaring void, and the best humanity can hope for in terms of friends is a symbiotic relationship with a giant space whale's immune system.
And besides the praise, I've also accumulated a list of minor complaints and things I'm confused about.
1. Bug: MRLS turrets upgrade with Fusion and not Splash, when every other MRLS ship upgrades with Splash.
2. Some ships, like the Artillery Golem Ark and the Revealer Battlestation, have insanely high weapon ranges that aren't infinite. Why? It would be more consistent and readable for all weapons with a longer range than any system diameter to have infinite range.
3. An Astro Train Depot spawned in an easily campable location that I could conveniently create a defensive line around, so I wanted to set up some defenses on that system and farm Astro Train fleets but my ships just automatically killed it. Why? They don't automatically kill Astro Train Stations or any other AI infrastructure.
4. The Cloaked Transport ship is so useful for deep strikes against AI infrastructure that I think it should have some sort of downside and there should be a way to get one even if you chose a different start. Like, maybe it has one less maximum ship slot or less health as a tradeoff for the cloaking. Maybe the same for the agile transport. Otherwise, it's the only start I'm ever going to take.
EDIT: Nevermind, I just found a capturable Cloaked Transport spawn. I guess they're just very rare.
5. If you press delete campaign without selecting a campaign the confirmation dialogue still pops up and hitting confirm does nothing. It should tell you to select a campaign to delete instead.
6. I don't understand why you can use FCEs to expand strikecraft wings but not frigate wings. Are frigates just that good?
7. You can savescum hacking rerolls to get exactly what you want. Is this intended? I'd like an option to make them pre-seeded and not savescummable.
8. Combat factories can't hack ARSs/FCEs but can still mount wings, which leads to annoying wing swapping when you want to put a new wing on a combat factory or expand an existing wing on a combat factory. I can't think of any balance reason why combat factories shouldn't be able to hack ARSs/FCEs, and letting them do so would reduce the amount of micromanagement to get the wings you want on the fleets you want.
9. The list of ship wings that you can capture in the tech tree tooltips doesn't take into account wing size increases; e.g. one wing of Assault Frigates left will display as "Assault Frigates x1", no matter if your maximum wing size for Assault Frigates is 7.
