Allright. Got my hands on the game, and I've given it a few goes here.
The very first thing that stands out to me: Learning curve! Gonna be a tough one. At least, that's how it seems anyway. Not that this is a bad thing, mind you. I think anyone that's familiar with your games is going to come into this one quite expecting and ready for that.
And if #(%&-ing Windows doesnt stop switching window focus while I'm typing, I'm gonna throw the damn thing down the stairs.
*ahem*
So, my first couple of goes at it were a total and utter mess. The AI just ate me. Alot of me scrambling ships in somewhat random directions, or trying to just group-charge at various targets. It is a good thing that these types of tactics simply do not work, or at least they havent worked yet anyway. These first couple of matches were done with totally random ships chosen and basic AI pilots.
After that, I let the game randomize the enemy fleet, and chose my own fleet carefully, keeping the number of pirate VS non-pirate ships somewhat even, since the pirate versions appear to be stronger. Paid more attention to the ship types and what they're good and bad at, decided on specific roles for each, and started choosing targets and positioning carefully. Chose the pilots carefully as well. This sort of thing appears to be very necessary in order to win; moving things into the wrong position or choosing the wrong targets just gets them wrecked. It's interesting, actually, as to just how much the positioning seems to matter here. I won that one by a fair margin, but the AI still put up a heck of a fight and smashed up the shields on my flagship as well as destroying a few squadrons. In the end though I had a good number of seperate ships of varying types left when all of his were gone. Proper tactics kept important ships alive through the fight. Attacking the flagship before smashing up it's army seems like a bad idea, too.
The Thoraxians seem quite a bit tougher to fight against than the others; the total focus on extra damage seems to mean quite alot here.
Let's see.... ship types. Interceptors dont seem all that helpful for much aside from spinning around the flagship and bothering anything that gets close to it.... having more than one squadron of them seems like a bad idea. Predators seem kinda bad, each use of them just involved them getting squashed. They havent done much damage for me and die quickly... this has been the case for the AI as well. The various others are all fairly good at their roles. The Claymores are supposed to be good at popping small targets, but they seem to have no trouble at all popping large ones as well. Lancers are pretty good, but just letting them choose their own targets is much less effective than ordering them to focus fire each target in order. The purpose of Cutters and Monitors seems a bit too similar to each other, both being meant to attack larger things.
The AI seems fairly good at getting it's ships to exactly the spots where I just dont want them, so that's a good thing too.
There's some wonky glitches and such, I'll submit those seperately a bit later here. Overall the interface is pretty good. Flagships are hard to click on when they're spawning ships. Switching up the order of deployment is kinda annoying.... Dragging them would be better than clicking for each individual slot switch. Hotkeys for selection are good, and this part of the interface is easy to understand. Ships seem to get a little confused at times, and will sometimes randomly break off from a direct attack order to randomly shoot at and move towards something else. They'll occaisionally get even more confused and stop moving for a moment before moving to obey the order.
I dont entirely get what the yellow bar is for in the bits at the top corners of the screen. As such I've mostly ignored it for now.
So far overall, a good experience; the game rather hypnotized me for quite a bit longer than I'd intended on playing it in a single go.
More to come as I keep going at it.
