I agree with almost everything you said. I feel that the game is good, it has good game play, it just...needs aesthetics. I do realize this is a beta to test for technical and graphical errors.
The orange background does not give a sense of deep space.
Ugh. The background looks like it's a low pixel image, and hey maybe it is. I wouldn't mind seeing just the blackness of space. The best game I've ever seen with blank space backgrounds was Freespace 2. Sometimes in a big battle I would fly my ship to a safe location and sit there and watch the battle pan out across the darkness of space. I also feel it needs more stuff going on the screen, for example, space dust. It's a little touch that I think would add a lot when moving around.
had problems selecting desired objects in order to zoom as well as grouping ships.
When zoomed out fairly far I try to click on a planet, but half the time I accidentally select a ship passing through the system.
Wish I could name fleets.
That's in the game...just not in the beta. If you click on the yellow arrow it says that it has features that aren't in the beta yet.
Cockpit view would be fun.
Seems like it would be a stretch, right now I'm still trying to figure out how to lock the camera onto a fighter. Sometimes it works...sometimes it doesn't? For now I live with just locking onto a bomber and watching it dive bomb a ship.
Some of the repetitive voice comments grew annoying "time for war, etc."
It's really starting to bug me too. It all sounds like the same guy, so I'm assuming it's place holder, some programmer who recorded it and they added for the mean time. Previous games that have had great voice overs- Conquest Frontier Wars. They had six admirals that could be assigned fleets, and each admiral had a personality and different accents. I loved the admiral with a thick russian accent, or the cowboy that would say yee ha. A game that I kind of despise, but enjoyed the voice overs-Sword of the Stars. Ok game, not quite my taste but all the voices of the human ships sounded like they were talking through old fashioned radio signals. It sounded like Battlestar Galactica. Garbled battle voice overs would be great, fighter squadrons getting shot down, a real military feel.
The only option to take a world is to nuke morbid? That seems rather extreme and wasteful. Should have some other options – blockade, enslave, enlist, forced exodus, take hostage for trade, etc.
For now I think that's the only option, I know some of the other races have the ability to use psychic powers to turn the population over to them. I also think one of the races has a super device that wipes out a population. I think the developers don't want to end up with one of those tide of wars where it keeps switching back and forth ad nausem.
Sound effects need work; rat-a-tat- tat not good for space combat.
Ya....my sound effects cut out periodically which is driving me nuts. I like the the way the guns fire, I just feel there needs to be more variety. I mean, to make the game truly classic is to have amazing sound. Bombers could have a really cool dive sound effect when they swoop in for a bombing run. Sound effects should change based on where you are. The farther out you are, the less you can hear, as you zoom in more sound effects should be heard. When you're right on top of a ship you should hear the engines humming.
Not sure pirate thing is working for me.
Gah the pirates. Right now, the pirates feel like....something in an RPG that's placed there just to make you have a reason to send ships out to gain experience. First time I encountered pirates I pulled my ships back because I wasn't I would win the battle. I sat there at my homeworld waiting for their counter attack. Nothing.
The pirates should become their own entity. I don't mean make them a second entity but make them a part of the game play. I assumed pirates would make appearances throughout the game but once I had finished expanding all pirates were wiped out of the universe...? I also figured that all of my trader ships and refinery ships would come under attack from pirates....or even my enemy, but rarely were they a threat. They definately look cool, and help make the universe feel more alive. If you added more aspects to the pirates-the ability to hire them to attack the enemy, for them to develop and grow, not a little just a little, building pirate bases, perhaps in a pinch you could buy pirate ships and own them out right, or even offer bounty to pirates to just attack the enemy in general?
Other then that the game is fantastic, I play a six hour game on a Core 2 Duo 1.86 with an ATI 1950 pro and 2 gigs of ram. Didn't crash once, I had it on max settings and almost had a constant 60 frames, except when huge battles were going on the game dropped to 10 frames every here and there.
