So I just spent a good several hours trying out Beta 2 for the first time. I missed out on Beta 1 so I can't compare it to that, and could only go by my expectations from what I'd read about the game.
That said, when I first started out and went through the tutorial I thought I'd be disappointed. The tutorials were quite well done, and the interface and graphics slick and intuitive, but the game felt shallow, kind of like someone else said, like a shallow RTS mixed with a shallow turn-based 4x game. I just thought there wouldn't be enough types of units, buildings, research, and just options in general to keep me happy, since I like my games almost mind-numbingly epic.
Fortunately, it turns out I was completely wrong, and the first real game I played sucked me in far more than I had expected, and kept me quite happily engaged. Keeping in mind the disclaimer about it missing lots of stuff still, it's shaping up to be a very fun and solid game.
Now, as far as personal suggestion/observations go, and replies to what others have said in this thread:
I too find the logistics cap to be too low, if only slightly. My major reason for thinking this is actually related to another complaint people had, the crystal shortage. I too experienced a very limited income of crystal, and in the midst of my usual spending while my money and metal soared to the 10-thousands, my crystals would be stuck in right around the 300 mark the entire time. From what I read here it sounds like I could remedy this by building refineries, since it sounds like even once my asteroids get barren the refineries can still pull the crystals from them, but with the logistics cap I simply never had enough room to build a single refinery. Clearly my refinery would have to be in a system with at least one crystal asteroid too, and if I need to build something else in that system, there's no way I can fit a refinery too. An extra 1-2 points of logistics space at each planet should resolve that issue while still being fairly limiting and making you specialize, though the idea someone presented of logarithmically ever-increasing cost for each upgrade up to no hard limit at a planet would be even nicer.
I really like a lot of the little things in the game, like the choice of "all jump at once" or "ships jump asap" for fleet jumps. A very elegant and useful little feature. Likewise the order queuing ala Supreme Commands is very nicely done, though the overlay lines that indicate a ship's vector might need some optimizing, I saw the game skip sometimes for a sec when I hit Alt or Shift to view the queue lines.
I think ship speed should be reduced, and there should be some better way to intercept units (though I know one cruiser can do that), right now I'll have ships enter my system and move through it very quickly while my fleet tries uselessly to intercept even a single unit. I think turn speed is fine though, just the actual movement speed should be lowered imo.
My biggest gripe by far at this point has already been mentioned: fighter behavior, and ship AI in other situations too. Fighters are nigh-useless at anything but killing other fighters and bombers, so I'd really like to see it fixed so they always go after these targets. Having to alt-select my fighters and shift-click every enemy fighter/bomber group in the system every time a carrier enters it got annoying real fast, and without doing that they would just go around trying to shoot things they couldn't hurt almost at all. Likewise I'd like my turrets and bombers to be smarter at targeting groups of pirates bombarding my planet. A system to set priorities for units/fleets would be ideal, so that I can tell one unit "you always attack fighters first" another "you always attack bombers first" and so on would be really great.
Lastly, I wanted to comment on what some people have said about how ships shouldn't auto-repair. I strongly disagree with this, I think the current system is very, very good, if not amazingly realistic. If you want to justify it, say that they salvage scrap after a battle (with nanobots maybe, whatever), or have big slabs of material in storage that they then use (again, by decomposing said slabs with magical nanobots) to repair up any bigger damage. The reason why I think this repair system works well is because I think having to manually repair units is unnecessary micromanagement in a game like this, and a pet peeve of mine to have to constantly send units back and weaken my frontline forces and reinforce it with new units. Without auto-repairs, I'd just be sending in fresh units while sending old ones to be repaired, the outcome would be exactly the same, but with a whole hell of a lot more clicking and other annoying management that the game just doesn't need. This way, after a battle I can wait around a bit, attend to other things, and my units repair themselves somewhat and I can move my force on to the next objective. Without auto-repair I'd still have to wait after a battle but I'd be waiting for units to fly halfway across the solar system, having to micromanage building them and sending them back and forth.
Other than that I really thought the game was great, and can't wait to see what is added next.
Thanks for reading.
Sins Forums
Stardock Forums
) 4) i think that ships sould be able to make "emergency repairs" during combat, allowing them to slowly regenerate up to say, 3/4 of their max health. After the battles, all the energy and such that was being used to power the weapons can instead be used to repair the ship itself.