ironwill96

Figured i'd make YAP (yet another post) on my opinion of the game as a new tester.

First off, its nicely polished for being a beta and I noticed very few issues.

So far, I did all the tutorials and then I created a Medium Galaxy game with all the AIs on medium and pirates on. It took me a while to move out of my first system and take out the Pirate Corsairs guarding the nearby asteroid planetoid, but once I took that out and setup another area of operations there things really started moving. I actually made a huge barrier of gauss cannons at the one phase lane that could threaten me (my starting point was nicely defensable once I took the asteroid planet behind me) and then hunkered down.

I teched up for a while and attacked anyone who came near (the Trade Coalition does indeed hate me now!). Eventually I got a capital shipyard built and churned out 4 of them (skipped cruisers completely). One thing I can say for certain is capital ships own! I used those 4 with upgraded abilities on them to run roughshod over most of the trade coalition and at one point fought off 25+ frigates and about 10 cruisers of varying types that they had. Capital ships might be a touch too powerful for their costs in fact..

I'm still not done in the epic length game I got myself into though as i'm only 3/4 of the way through taking my galaxy and there are still 2 more galaxies to take over before I'll have beaten everyone else into submission.

Ok now for specific comments:

Pros+
-Graphics on the whole are really good
-Game runs really well on my system (Athlon 64 X-2 4400+, 2 GB DDR, Geforce 7900 GTX 512)
-Capital ships are fun
-Defense is fun
-I like getting to manage 3 resources (more complexity is good!)
-Fleet size feels about right to me, can get pretty epic fleets once you upgrade fleet cap on each planet you take

Bugs/Cons-
-Diplomacy with the AI is still a bit odd, they will do things like have a ceasefire and artifact pact and trade agreement and then cancel your intelligence agreement that you've had the whole game for no real reason (they never attacked me after that or anything and later requested an intel agreement again!). Also there doesnt seem to be an easy way to curry favor with the AI unless you have a trade agreement and can give them resources etc or if you assist in defending one of their planets - all things you can't really do until you have at least some form of agreement with them.
-Capital Ships need to take longer to build and have higher costs because of how good they are once you tech up the armor / shields / hull repair rates / antimatter regen rates
-Fighters seem mostly useless in large ship fights
-Crystal production seems to be a huge bottleneck and can get painfully slow since there isn't a good way of passively boosting crystal production (I have researched all the crystal upgrades and put refineries down all over the place to little effect) I ended up spending literally hundreds of thousands of tax income on buying crystals so far in my 5 hour game
-Research tree needs to allow easier access to new ship designs - else people will just go for capital ships like I did. As it is now it took me a lot of thinking to figure out how to even get cruisers or unlock some additional frigate types.
-Capital ships should require more research to get and be higher up in the tier - why are they so easy to get and cruisers so hard? My 4 capital ship fleet took out at least 12 cruisers by themselves and I could tech to capitals *really* fast if I had a multi-player alliance with a human player to feed me resources to help me tech - this could be a major balance issue when Beta 3 and multi-player hit
-Research in the tutorial implied you could research multiple upgrades at once (parallel) but that behavior doesn't seem to work. Even when I have 9 research labs and try to research Tier 1 stuff at the same time it won't do it, still goes in sequential order research each one in turn.
-Think this is already a known issue that the AI builds lots of frigates and little to no capitals

Some additional suggestions that i've seen on the forums here already are to do more movement in combat, even with larger ships. Nexus is a great example of how to do this with capital ships and good physics, but i'm not sure how hard it would be to "fake it" at this point. Also one thing that could make combat even more exciting is to lower the cooldowns on things like the cannons on the capitals and lower the damage, making a more constant stream of projectiles flying in (a la Battlestar Galactica when she unleashes the fury). Your engine seems to really render it pretty well for the effect of massive firepower. I love just zooming and watching a battle play out.

Also the bounty system didn't really seem to have much effect in my game on pirate activity one way or another, I have a massive bounty and the pirates are pretty much ignoring me at this point so dumping money into bounty from my perspective seemed like a waste of time, instead if could just spend it on ships and attack them more efficiently but maybe it is to support multiple play styles?

Sorry about the wall of text, even though I included lots of suggestions I really love the game and can't wait to have huge multiplayer games that take days to play out! As I think of more comments I will reply to this post and/or edit it.