Hi.

First of all, thank you for a very nice game. Though this post will, of course, mainly be filled with complaints, overall your game is quite fun. I'm an old gamer (40), and play only medium games vs the PC. I used to play Civ4 a lot, then WoW.


What works very well:
- the global pace of the game, it's quite intense without being overwhelming.
- the sessions also don't last too long.
- no reading the manual required
- varied strategies possible
- runs nicely on my old PC (Athlon 3000, 6600 GT, 1 Gig)
- difficulty is nicely paced with the 3 levels
- AI is OK globally, with just a few glaring issues (detailed after: autoexplore behaviour, trying to cross pirates home, PC always focusing first ennemy ship to appear...)

My gripes:
- the exploring ships are VERY dumb when set to auto-explore. They should avoid the Pirates home planet at all costs, or at least exit asap, backtracking the first time, taking a neighbouring exit if no other choice is possible. Come to think of it, all ships should have that behaviour: I've often lost lots of ships towards the end, even capital ships, when I failed to notice their rally target took them through the Pirates home.
- also, why do exploring ships (I usually start off with 3 of them) go back to explore already explored planets when there are still unexplored planets on the map ? In practice, I have to micro-manage them a lot.
- the combat ships are also quite dumb and require a lot of micro managing: I'd like to be able to set them to flee when at 50 or 25% health. and fleeing should not make them leave their fleet.
- when I set new ships to rally to a fleet, they should rally that fleet, not its leading ship, which may get destroyed or degroup. It's a major pain to have to manually hunt for tens of stranded ships when that happens.
- I'd really like a command to "clean that planet, then move on": capture the planet, destroy all ships and structures, then go to the next one.
- the planet build menus are not very practical: when building structures, I don't see if the logistics/tactical capacity is already maxed out, and I can't upgrade it. So, I spend my time going back up, then back down the menu... I shouldn't have to do that, even if it means having the "upgrade capacity" command repeated. Maybe capactiy indicators on the galaxy view woudl work, too, there free space for that on top of the planets.
- queuing is a bit rustic: I'd like to be able to queue ships when a fleet capacity upgrade is pending. I can do that for structures, which is very nice... Having it for ships would be nice also.
- the speech alerts are very unreliable: I get spammed with "ship arrived at..." that I don't much care about, while too often I don't get the "pirates auction starting" message. Some kind of prioritization would be nice (Pirates > Combat > Travel > Build > Capacity upgrade messages).
- the pirate auction is a bit of a pain, though the idea is fun: as I said, I often miss its start, and there is no indicator of how long it still has to run when it gets to the "flashing red" state, so I have to keep watching it. Which may be intended, as it forces us to let the ships act by themselves, but is also very frustrating since the auction is sometimes long (I feel the duration is not always the same, but that may be subjective to how much is going on in the game at that time). A red-phase countdown, and a 10 seconds grace period during which the computer no longer bids would be nice. It's, indeed, also very frustrating when the computer bids a split second before the end of the auction.
- it would be nice if Akkan cruisers could also capture mines in gas clouds and such. I sometimes have a frigate running around just for that purpose.
- it would be practical to know easily which capital ship is what class: when one gets destroyed, I have to go in and check its type. Giving the ships names with the same initial as their class would be a very quick fix.
- the save and load menus are irritating. And I don't understand why loading and saving can't be done from the same screen. Also, I'd like the game to autoname the saves, ie by asking for a "game name" when I first save, the tacking on a incremented number every time. Being able to comment saves would also be nice: right now, with all that's going on in a typical game, if I stop playing for more than a few minutes I loose track of things, and I'd rather restart a new game. Being able to jot down notes would be very helpful. Also, pressing the "enter" key sometimes works, and sometimes doesn't - I then have to click the button to actually save.
- Also, I'd like to be able to set the autosaving delay, and to have 2 levels of auto save: major ones that are kept until I start the next game (say, every 30 minutes); and minor ones (every 10 minutes ?) inbetween major ones, that get erased after a couple of major ones.
- it's nice to have the option to have all ships phase jump kind of at the same time. I'd like to expand on that, and designate a leading ship, normal ones, and trailing ones. Mainly because the computer is a bit dumb and will mostly focus the first ship to appear, which sould be a solid capital ships, not robotics frigates (these should wait a bit before joining the fight).
- the auto-positioning of gauss cannons is too random: I want them on two levels, close to the planet to fire on colonizing ships, and further away to catch transients, constitute a first line of defense, and help with planet protection. Come to think of it, all auto positionning is quite dumb: I often use Trade Ports surrounded by Gauss canons as honey pots for the computer, so these should always be right next to their planet, to maximize gauss canon protection.

That's it for now.

Again, thanks and congratulations for a very nice game.