Beowulf
Arcane
- Joined
- Mar 2, 2015
- Messages
- 2,027
I agree, the combat is lacklustre.
The battles are instances, where yours, and your enemies fleets (and bases) are locked in. You can retreat, or reinforce. But that's about it.
I've noticed so far my ships clipping regularly through enemy space station, haven't checked if that happens with other ships as well.
It also looks like the speed of the ships changes when you enter the battle area, at least my ships regularly slow down, when just a second ago they were cruising noticeably faster.
I just came from a battle with the enemy AI using missiles - they concentrated fire on one of my ships, when it got destroyed, on the other, and so on. I'm not sure that point-defense weapons work against missiles - or maybe only if the ship with point-defense weapons is target, because sure as hell they didn't fire on missiles incoming on my spearhead ships (that serves me well for designing pure anti-missile corvettes to support my damage dealers).
I got similiar vibes overall.
Good points are few for me so far, namely the modern look and complete lack of crashes (at least for me).
UI is a mixed bag, the map lacks filters,
Perhaps there are key shortcuts to highlight various stuff, that I'm somehow missing?
EDIT: Ok, by holding Alt, or toggling that little checkbox in the bottom right corner you can toggle the details of what's in the systems, that provides some overview at least, but that's no substitute for a proper list.
Some command can be issued by clicking on an appropriate order icon, and then selecting a target, like attacking or surveying systems. But somehow it didn't work when I tried that with Ground Support for a fleet, had to right-click on the target instead (very minor issue).
You can't even zoom out from system view to galaxy view using scroll wheel, you have to either click a button, or a key shortcut (perhaps it could be improved to snap to the closest system when you zoom in with scroll).
When you select an entity in the system map, like a ship, planet, or mining station, you can freely rotate camera in z-axis, under (assuming the default view is the "over" direction) the entity; but without selecting the object, and still being in system view you cannot do that, as you are blocked about 20 degrees from reaching ecliptic plane.
And perhaps one could find a hundred more barely significant nitpicks like the above.
Overall I'm slightly disappointed, as I hoped for 4x with Paradox staple diplomacy and pop management à la Vicky 2 (I know, I know, nobody said it'll be anything like that), but so far the game presents nothing new. Granted, it's not yet boring and I'm having some fun, but if things won't change in mid- to late- game for better I will perhaps wait 2-3 years for it to mature, get good mods and discounts on DLC's with more features (like espionage for example).
EDIT: Also, the already mentioned lack of auto-pause setting in the menu is slightly annoying. I presume that can be changed by editing one of the files, as the auto-pausing is turned on for some pop-ups, but the default settings are not ideally thought-through (for example the game doesn't pause when someone declares war on the player). It requires ditching habits from other paradox games and pressing space on every other pop-up, until you learn which one are important, and which are not.
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