Purchase, download, and install went seamlessly and painlessly, thank you for the SDCentral!
I'm really enjoying the game, but for the sake of advancement I'll be hyper-critical in this post.
Tutorials:
Going in completely blind, I lept immediately into the tutorials. They gave me enough information to feel confident starting up a single player game, and they were just the right length.
Gameplay:
Seems fairly good! I really like the balancing act that Bounties perform. I think I'm fine with the potentially very-long transit times of large, slow fleets (particularly on huge maps), but would like to see an ETA countdown so I know if I have time to make a sandwich or not.
UI:
I really dislike having fully researched techs "glowing" as if they were active buttons. I'd like to quickly scan the list and see what I have available to me now! Perhaps the research screen can be divided into three horizontal groups - a simple pair of
style dividers would do. Below a line could be what you've researched, above a line could be what you can't research (due to lack of research facilities), and in the middle can be things you can potentially research. The middle batch could then be highlightable if affordable.
I also dislike the way it says "you can't build a research station because you can't afford it," so I save and save and save and finally it switches to "you can't build the research station due to lack of logistic slots." Logistic warnings should have precedence over cost warnings!
I find myself playing 98% of the game fully zoomed out. I'm a "big picture" kind of guy, and really prefer holding the mouse over the enemy fleet indicator to see how the battle is going. To this end, a better "smart placement" of high-density icons might be in order. I only ever find myself zooming in to select a particular ship in a group.
I'd like news messages to "stack up" in the bottom left info panels, and I would like to have the ability to right click on it to make it go away (acknowledging the info, for example). I guess what I'm trying to say is I wish they wouldn't automatically fade out after a while, and I don't want the history to show events I've already dealt with.
Graphics:
The TEC ship styles seem kind of "blah." I find it very difficult to tell them all apart. (I like the robotics cruiser and the carriers, but otherwise they all seem the same).
AI:
The computer seems to select warp paths that aren't necessarily the quickest route, when taking into consideration where in the gravity well the ships are. Having a huge fleet traverse a planet's gravity well just to get to the 'warp gate' at the far side can sometimes take longer than simply exiting wherever the ships happen to be.
Bug:
I fired up the game, played Tutorial #2 and #3 very rapidly (I had forgotten how you increase the amount of fighters a carrier can have), exited, then started a new game. In this new game I could not damage any opponents! My ships swooped and fired but shields never even fluctuated on both pirate ships and enemy AI. Restarting the game from the desktop solved the issue; I think perhaps the tutorial conditions hadn't been reset.
