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Okay, I have been playing the TEC Loyalists for the first time now on the 8-player map Grindstone (Capital Planet Victory being the only special victory condition I enabled and playing with 3 Hard AI's as friends and 4 Hars AI's as enemies) and I decided to create a list of issues that I encountered while playing. After playing for about 3 hours here are the things that I noticed while playing that are not what they are supposed to be (or at least I believe they are not).
After I selected my (capital) planet, I clicked on the yellow button where you can select which titan you want to construct (that button similar to those for constructing capital ships, frigates and cruisers at your planets). Because I did not have any titan factory built yet I heared the message: "Capital ship factory required". This of course has to change into "Titan shipyard required" or something similar. The dev's have probably thought of this already but I thought it would be useful to list it here anyway in case they overlooked it or something.
The titan ship factory enables the exact same sound as the capital ship factory when selected. A new sound for it would be nice. Again, the dev's have probably just not had the time to implement this but just like the first thing on this list, they may have forgotten about it.
The zoom key (default 'Z') does not zoom in as far as in Trinity. I think it would be better if it zoomed in a bit further. This is not really in issue though. What did bother me is that even when my cursor wasn't directly pointing at a ship, the ships' infobox did not disappear when the cursor was still close to it. The box did disappear in cinematic mode, however. Maybe the infoboxes of ships and structures etc. now show up even when hovering over their shields with the cursor, I don't know. But it bothered me a bit so I put it in this list aswell.
The AI had no clue what to do at all during the few hours I played. Capital ships kept traveling between 2 adjecent planets all the time. These planets were already taken by the AI player and where of non strategical importance at that time. Also, when the AI had cleared out a planet of enemy structures with it's capital ship-less fleets, it did not send any bombing frigates to assault and later be able to colonize the enemy planet.
The AI players did not listen to my requests to attack an enemy planet or defend one of it's own planets. Even when I had a 20.00 relationship with some of them.
The listing of ships in the empire tree doesn't match the imortance of ships anymore. Once I had my titan join the fleet it did not land on position 1 (or behind the fleetleading capital ship), but behind some frigates and cruisers. This also goes for the new capital ship. Also, the titan that I had build did not get autopinned on the empire tree like what happens wih newly built capital ships and starbases.
Early game pirates seem to be weakened. They were really easy to take care of with a couple of gauss defenses backed by 2 hangar defenses. Gauss defenses seem to be nerfed aswell, but that's not really an issue here.
The ability description of the Ankylon titans "Disruption Matrix" ability contains the word structures twice. "Targets enemy ships, starbases, structures and structures" doesn't make much sense right?
Not all of the Ankylons missile hardpoints actually launch missiles. four rows of missile launchers (the two rows in the rear and the two rows in the front of the titan) don't shoot at all.
Even when I did not have the artifact victory condition enabled, there was a second star on the map (while normally there is only one star system) that did contain a world defended by a neutral orculus starbase and that creepy looking Vasari titan. Don't know if it would be impossible to remove it because of how the code behaves, but I thought it was a little awkward.
My Ankylon titan tried to attack a structure several times and turned to bring it's weapons to bare while the structure was still out of weapon range. So the titan just 'stood still' in the gravity well without shooting at all.
When another empire build a titan I did not get any warning, not even when it was launched. When yet another empire built a titan I did get the warning when it was launched but when I clicked the warning no planet was selected, so I had no idea which empire built that titan (this not selecting a planet where the event occured after clicking the message also happened in Trinity when clicking the "our culture has neutralized the enemy on [planet name]" notification). Also, the warning for the titan that was launched appeared in the planet reports section and not in the threat reports section.
The text for special stuff found after exploring a planet still misses a word (even after so many updates in Trinity no one spotted this?). For example, after finding Space Ponies on my asteroid after exploring it, the message is: "We have discovered Space Ponies our planet [planet name]". It should be "We have discovered Space Ponies ON our planet [planet name]". The text is correct when discovering an artifact though.
Both faction's corvettes look exactly the same, I don't know if that's supposed to be the way it is or not but I thought I should mention it here aswell.
Well, I guess that is about it. I will be playing the TEC Rebels tomorrow and maybe I will find more stuff that can be altered in the next update.
I hope the dev's be reading this one. The game's new ships are awesome by the way (especially the Titans) and I love the new shadowing. Keep up the great work!
I totally agree with everything in this post. Single Player with terrible AI is a waste of time. Furthermore based on the additions to Sins I've seen in this beta so far, I would hardly consider this a standalone game probably more worthy of the title of expansion. Lets be realistic, one new capital ship (per faction), a corvette, and a mobile starbase (titan) is pretty weak on new features