-3 dimensional space was handled very well. While you're free to rotate the camera any which way you please, any ships or structures within a planet's gravity well are confined to a circular plane. This is a lot less confusing than having an orbiting cloud of stuff scattered inside a big sphere. The play is completely 2-dimensional, it just doesn't look that way.
But in playing this game we are in space, not a body of water! Space is 3D and Ironclad should bring the 3-dimensional combat back from Homeworld. Units get stuck when grouped up in large numbers... and shouldn't! We're orbiting planets, so there should be plenty of open space for movement!
-Autocombat does a fair job on its own, provided you go through the slight pain of adjusting your auto-engage range on your orbital bombardment ships. You can do better than the AI if you're willing to micro it a bit, but often it's not worth the hassle to do more than shift-click a bunch of focus-fire commands.
Grouping is your friend. If you have a main offensive that only requires one battlegroup, put each role into a different group, with an overarching group for control en masse. (I.E. Planet sieging ships into 1, main offensive ships - frigates, bombers - into 2, flak frigates and fighters into 3, colony ships into 4, all into 5)
-Combat doesn't feel fluid enough. As a consequence of being confined to a plane, your warships just freeze at maximum weapon range and exchange volleys. The only ships that actually buzz around are the teeny little fighters and bombers that your carriers manufacture. Would be nice to see some more ships swooping and diving around.
I'm only in half-agreement here. While ships do need more movement (evasive actions), it should be more scrambling-like maneuvers than just having the ships diving into each other. You have to remember scale when talking about space combat. The ranges at which ships in space would be facing off are very great distances, so only small movements are needed to dodge incoming fire. On top of the engagement range, most ships in this game, excluding the fighters and bombers, of course, are extremely large in human standards. A battleship could potentially reach a kilometer in length, if not more... that's a lot of bulk to move when you have shields and armor plating to take hits for you.
-They did the scale a bit too well. Ships are absolutely microscopic compared with the planets, and at any viewpoint where you are zoomed out to view a useful amount of space, they all get reduced to little icons. The ship icons are impossible to distinguish, and get buried under a large empire designation icon anyway. Possibly this is a consequence of playing at 1600x1200. I'd rather that they made the ship scale unrealistically large, so I could get an easy visual look at what the makeup of my fleet was.
The scale as it is is fine. I run at 1680x1050 and I have no trouble distinguishing my units (other than having not yet memorized the icons) until the moment before the planet and gravity well becomes the planet icon when viewing the interplanetary routes. Again, grouping is your friend, as it will highlight the ships and allow you to see where each group is at.
So maybe I'm a little biased from actually playing the Homeworld series... so sue me.
