Wow, lots of key things already. These are great bullet points:
* Ten thousand on ten thousand fleet battles (no really).
* Still the only strategy game where your strategy is more important than your tactics.
* The best AI opponent you will ever have the pleasure of trying to outsmart. And fail. Over and over.
This is perhaps the best description I've ever seen, with some slight polish needed:
An asymmetrical RTS, where the enemy could crush you in an instant - but you're so puny it can't be bothered. Quietly become strong enough to assassinate the AI core before it realizes how dangerous you've become. Capture territory, steal technology, hack for information... but you need to be careful, because every action you take makes the AI more aware of you, and brings your death that much closer.
Cyborg, I want to be super respectful when I say this, because I'm not used to giving constructive criticism back to forum folks. So please take this in the same spirit you offer me feedback. I think that yours reads the most like something that I'd write on the store page, when I'm trying to give a "back of the box description," per se. You actually did a really good job of that, and were very concise with it. Yours is focused more on features than benefits at first, and then later on it talks about benefits (being memorable, etc), but in a very "telling, not showing" way.
Please please please don't take offense, especially after you just did me a favor in working on that in the first place! I think it gets at one of the core things about us as a group of gamers, though, is that we look for longer tick-list things on boxes, or enumerated features. But the problem is that so many game companies lie and use empty phrases and so on that sound like more than they are, it's hard not to accidentally blend in with the ones that are full of it.
That's basically why I was asking you to write it like you're talking to a friend: you'd speak differently in those circumstances than you would to a prospective customer. I tend to have a conversational tone in my blog posts and whatnot, and people respond well to that, but I've always been more marketing-y in my store page descriptions and press releases. I think that's been a huge mistake on my part, and I've been trying to bring more personality and humanity to the press releases and store pages, too.
Draco, I really like your description of that particular feature (scale and AIP, basically), but it focuses entirely on that in kind of a fetish-ish way.
I know you well enough that I can joke with you about it (noting that for anyone reading along and surprised I'd attack him or whatever like that). But basically it's focused so severely on the fact that things are Big and Huge that it could be part of a campaign for... wait, not going to go that far in my ribbing.
In seriousness, that was a reasonably concise explanation of one of the mechanics, but that's another trap that I find myself falling into: it's freaking hard to describe the forest without getting too excited about one tree and running out of space to describe the rest, in essence. There's always so much more that I want to say than room there is to say it.
Thanks already for all the help to everyone wrote wrote in thus far, and I hope I've not offended anyone.
