Down to one opponent left (from three), and fifty-some ships in a system is about where I end up just zooming out and watching icons on account of frame rate. Kudos to your optimization guys that I could get that far.

I know you're not looking for UI feedback at this point, but that's where I think the game needs the most work. As it is, it works, but there are four things that could make it much better:

1. Make the alert messages select or focus on the thing they're about. That is, clicking on a 'ship completed' one would select the ship, on a 'fleet under attack' message on said fleet, and so forth. So far in this game I've already built two dreadnoughts and forgotten where I put them. That number may decrease as I play more, but the easier it is to find the decisions you're trying to make, the quicker you can make 'em.

2. The List. You know the one I mean. Give us a few different ways to sort colonies; alphabetically, by number of friendly/enemy ships present, by idle construction frigates, and by idle ship construction facilities spring to mind as the most useful off the top of my head. If you add sorting, it might be nice to give the option to open a second list to allow more access to data. While I'm thinking about it, is there a way to take a stack of, for example, five ships and say, "Select three of these"?

3. A deeper rally point system. I'd give a lot for the ability to be able to say, "Build these ships, and when they're done put them into group 1." Permanent points and a manager a la GalCiv2 would be nice, too.

4. A better system for long queues. Don't change the current interface for production, because when you can keep an eye on it it works great, but give me a window that lists every place that can produce things that have a cost, and from there give me an empire-wide queue that I can fill past my current available resources.

Numbers one and two are related in that they're best for on-a-moment's-notice work. Quick access to idle production and large groupings of ships, and the ability to locate completed production quickly and efficiently are both exceptionally important abilities, and the way things are now, it becomes harder as you have more and more going on.

Three and four, on the other hand, are for setting up long-term strategies. Being able to tell four or five planets to build different parts of a fleet when the necessary resources are available, and then to have them arrange themselves into a group without human intervention, would make managing an empire with a lot of production capacity and a lot of ships moving around all at once far easier.

Tomorrow, I attack the final AI and see how the one-on-one, massive-fleet endgame is.

So, I noticed this with the scroll bars yesterday. In any menu where a scrollbar isn't necessary (but not during the actual game), I see the bars stuck at the top of the screen. Graphics card is, as mentioned, a Radeon 9600 LE, and the drivers are the most recent ATI official ones (07.3).

To continue, and there's only one more I have off the top of my head.

4. Phase inhibitors. At first, when the AI just threw massive fleets at me, I sort of liked it. Now, thinking about it, I see it more as strategically limiting. There are two possible solutions, as I see it, depending on what phase inhibitors are supposed to be for. The first possibility is to make the phase inhibition ability antimatter-dependent. This would serve more to pin a fleet in place while you come to attack it with your own ships, as the phase inhibitor couldn't keep it up forever. The second idea, which I like a lot more, casts phase inhibitors more as a way to prevent penetration deep into your empire all at once. Instead of making a single phase inhibitor cover the entire gravwell, make each inhibitor cover a single exit from it. Possibly only make them usable on links to gravwells you control. If you don't want people to penetrate past the fortress of gauss cannons and hangars you put up, then you'll need to put up phase inhibitors to cover all of the exits deeper into your territory, and defend them and so on.

To sum up: in combination with more advanced unit AI--both options for full automation, such as in #2, and better stances, like 'defend resources', 'defend planet', 'defend modules', and 'attack' stances for all of those--and larger gravity wells and/or slower ship movement, I can see the possibility for a much deeper tactical-level system game as well as a deeper strategic one.

Picture, for an example of the first, attacking a planet and choosing to jump in high. Your top-level group arrives, and there's a massive concentration of enemy ships near where you would've popped out if you'd jumped in straight (which is what would happen if you chose not to jump high). The phase inhibitor's antimatter starts ticking down, but it won't be done fast enough, so you--lucky enough to jump in closer to the phase inhibitor than the enemy fleet--select your heavy frigates (organized into a convenient subgroup) and an Akkan cruiser and assign them to a separate group. The rest of your fleet hangs back, while you engage the defenses around the planet with your sacrificial cruiser. You hit the phase inhibitor with an ion bolt, and just as the enemy fleet reaches weapons range, yours jumps away.

Or picture the strategic side. You're attacking on a wide front, pressing at four planets that can be reached from the star of the system you're invading. You send fleets to each, organized into groups that all have specific orders--your flak frigates screen your capital ships, your heavy frigates attack frigates, your dreadnoughts and carriers attack modules, your battleships focus on the enemy capitals, and so on. The fleet sticks together as it moves around the system, attacking the periphery first and moving in, but all of the ships work on their assigned targets first. Instead of having to watch all four fights and make sure that your carriers aren't trading broadsides with those three battleships, you can zoom out, watching with confidence that the AI will be able to handle itself effectively, and focus on production for the next wave.

I think, summing everything up, is that when it comes to games like this, there's no such thing as too much depth or too much control. What can make it seem that way is if there's no option to pull back and let the computer handle the details.

Now, would you please talk a bit nicer about my computer?!