OK updating some more impressions from last night's play session. I'm up to 8 hours of play time on this one medium galaxy game now! Ok, so maybe i'm slow and like to build up
I do have every civilian research topic done now and most of the military ones too. Finally got Kodiak heavy cruisers.
Fun things:
-Right as I started taking over the last couple of planets in my galaxy (still 2 others to conquer!) the AI player who had taken over one of the other galaxies sent in a massive fleet to my star. I noticed it when I went after the Pirate faction planet and had to go through the star to get there. He demonstrated to me the folly of a mostly capital ship fleet through his usage of like 25 Perchien Light Carriers and tons of bombers. He tore through 8 of my capital ships before I could retreat. I've got a nice fleet being build nearby though!
-Auto-saves still take < 1 second and i'm 8 hours into game now on Medium Galaxy game! This is a phenomenal improvement from the last version I was playing, great job!
A few new issues/comments i've found:
-When you have lots of Robotics cruisers, I had trouble getting them to auto-cast their repair droids on my nearby capital ships, I kept having to manually do it.
-AI still does the phase jump in, phase jump out bit instead of fighting (except pirates they are suicidal!). Really starting to wish phase jump inhibitors could force them to stay put better. I'm wondering if the removal of that ability is what messed up their AI some on retreating or something.
-It would be nice to see pirates utilizing capital ships of their own designs later in the game.
-AI isn't spending any money on upgrading their capital ships as someone else mentioned, this being 8 hours into the game you'd think they would have at least spent some on it. They also aren't spending as much on research or developing planets as I do, of course they are on "Normal" difficulty.
-Would like to see more intelligence from the Dukan (sp?) Capital ships repair shields ability where they target the ship who is worst off or under heavy fire at the time. Also capital ship ability usage in general needs to be tweaked, Kol Battleships using their shield absorption ability even though they aren't being shot at at all is a silly waste of anti-matter so I usually have to turn off auto-cast on it.
-Some sound issues when in large battles where weapon sounds etc will sometimes clash and/or start making clicking noises like too many sounds at once are going off.
-Would like to see a capital ship with some sort of Tier 6 ability that can do a massive flak burst or something to combat players who are utilizing massive carrier fleets (like the AI player was and was completely owning my capital ships with them because cap ships have little fighter defense - even the flak ability on the Kol doesn't seem to work that well nor does the magnetize ability)
-Stationary defenses (gauss cannons and/or hangar defense) need to work better vs. fighters. 2 fighter squadrons were able to fly around my planet with impunity for over an hour because my gauss cannons couldn't shoot them, and my 2 hangar defenses (each had 1 squadron of fighters + bombers) also couldn't seem to do squat to them.
-Crystals are still a bit of a crunch but not as bad this late in the game because i'm making 40+ tax income a second I just buy them. On that note though, the Black Market capped out at 2147 to buy crystal, is this an intended cap because i know the supply/demand should have forced it to go even higher. Might be nice to have the cap though as it does keep it slightly reasonable to get more crystal late in the game. I still think crystal prices on a lot of items, especially research and planetary upgrades should be lowered. There just isn't enough crystal in the starting nodes and it ends up slowing the game waaaay down.
-I noticed that I do have a "ping" button but the AI doesn't seem to care if I ping a target I want attacked or noticed. See my earlier comments about "Attack Here" or "Defend Here" priority based pinging needed.
Thats all the stuff I can think of now, maybe i'll finish a game in Sins eventually!
