Hey there! Been awhile, sort of. Things have been derpy on my end for the past few months, so I've been nigh-impossible to get ahold of. Heck, I'm suddenly aware I've missed a bunch of emails recently, apologies to those who sent them.
Anyway, now that this is in EA, I decided to start in on it. I havent had all that much time with it, but enough to say a few things. I apologize if this ends up seeming rather negative, but that shouldnt surprise anyone at this point...
My overall opinion of this one so far is... uh... I'm not sure yet. The one big thing that keeps coming to mind is just how similar this is to the first game. Which is actually a bit of a problem, in my eyes. I keep having the thought of "But I could just be playing the first one, with all of it's expansions and content and such". So far, this new one isnt really doing anything to stand out... I mean, alot of the content seems to just be stuff taken from the first one. I dont think I've seen anything yet that actually qualifies as being new, beyond the Ark (and I'll get to that in a moment). So the big question for me with this one is: How is this going to end up differentiating itself from the first game enough? The original ideas you guys had shown all that time ago had seemed VERY different, but now it's gone back to the traditional route, and just.... yeah, it all feels the same to me. Nothing that says "hey yeah, this is different and new and cool".
Now, the things that ARE different immediately is the UI and such, but... ehhh. I dont have much to say about that. After so much time with the first game, everything was fast and easy to do already. So the QoL changes dont mean much to me. That being said, I can appreciate their existence, even though I personally prefer the original game's UI (since I"m used to it).
What I REALLY dont like with the new UI though is the way it displays ship stats. Hoboy, I hate it. I find this dramatically more confusing than before. With the first game, each ship had alot of stats, sure, but the important parts were so easy to remember and understand at a glance. I could look at a ship, go "okay, it's got HEAVY armor, and it's immune to leeching", and it made it easy to then look at my units and make a choice on what to use. It used those keywords well. But this one doesnt use keywords anymore. Now it's all things like "if it has less than 50MM armor, we'll do some extra damage". Instead of keywords, now it's impossible-to-remember number comparisons. It's very frustrating.
I still wish the scouting mechanics had changed... never liked that, never will.
Uh, what else. Oh, right. The Ark: I dont get what the intended use of this thing is. At first I thought, oh, it's like the Champion from before. Until the moment I tried to move it, and found that it's slower than a turtle that's been glued to the floor. The game sure seems to think it's important, constantly showing it's position even on the galaxy map, but.... yeah, I dont know what the heck it's really for. Being so dirt-slow, it seems like a purely defensive unit, but... I dunno. Doesnt seem good for much. Even chucking it into some battles, it just doesnt make much of a dent... may as well not be there (and really, fights are often over before it can get there anyway). Makes me miss the old champions, though. They could do stuff, usually within the same century.
Also, I'm wondering: Is there a way to show the range of all enemy structures in the area? I can get it to show MY range in the area, but I dont really need that.
I'm aware that one big change is supposed to be the graphics here, but... if I'm being totally honest here, while fancy 3D graphics are neat and all, it seems mostly wasted here. It's not that it's bad or anything: It's that I'm never going to see any of it. The game seems to almost always be played very zoomed out, and I'm no exception to that. Honestly I forgot it even WAS in 3D until I happened to get an unusually large unit that was big enough to be noticable.
I'd originally thought I'd have more to say here, but... with this being so very similar to the first game, there's just not that much for me to say about it. It's still good, and I'm going to keep going in order to keep up with testing, but at this point I dont see myself really playing this one over the first game. It's just too much of being the same thing as before.
Anyway, that's just my thoughts on it... I'll add more here if I should have any. Glad to see that it's going well so far. Wish there was something I could do to help out with this, but this is absolutely not my area of expertise, that's for sure.
