With the risk of comment hijacking, I too just jumped into the beta, especially after I've seen the video demo of it on Gamespot. I have to say that unlike "Steam", Stardock is a gem. Fast, easy, no bullshit, lots of independent developers.
My impressions/wishlist from the game:
- Battles are not exciting enough - sorry, but the ships are just standing there shooting at each other. The only thing a bit exciting is to follow bomber squads. Ships should slightly move, to give a sense that they're flying through space, when capital ships duke it out it should be more like Freespace or Galactica (slowly moving into range of each other and then opening fire like in sea battles). A camera that takes you into the heat of the action would also be nice.
I think this will change somewhat when you play vs a competent human player. usually there is quite a bit of movement during battles when players decide which targets to attack or when individual capital ships reatreat. the latter ones have multiple guns distributed either focused forwars or throughout the ship, depends.
- No control over ships - maybe I'm the one who is missing something here, but I sent a recon ship to an edge of a system to snoop on enemy movement and every time it decided to attack the enemies on its own. Setting the aggression levels of ships would be highly appreciated. This could also help build up new types of game play, such as electronic warefare ship, jamming communication between the ships and the home base (enemy loses control over ships until their AI is able to destroy the jammer). This is the type of "playing dirty" tactics I would love to see more from the game...
the feature is already in. when you right click on the attack button it will switch through stances.
- Login to Ironclad online - when registering it doesn't ask to confirm password. That will be a cause for issues... a "Remember me" option would also be nice.
not sure what your issue is here. what I do note that there is either no way or I just never figured it out, but everytime I want to log in I have to enter account name and pw, yes here a "remember me" option would be nice. but the tester in the gamespot video had something like that so ...
- Either more races or more *apparent* differences between the races - I guess there are subtle differences between the races but after a few days - I still don't see it.
trust me, there is a good amount of difference. its mainly in the techs and capship abilites, but thats enough anyways.
- A tech ability (relatively high on the tech tree) that would allow to build structures in the gravity wells of stars (not planets), gas giants and nebulas.. Like the jump gates, these kind of discoveries can really turn the game around, add interesting tactics and change the tide of war.
rather not, these things are MEANT to be neutral ground so that no one can have an advantage there. building stuff would just make them another type of the colonizable planets.
- A more interesting galaxy - Much like Gal Civ 2, have some global effects taking place sometimes, like all jump connections disappear for a few minutes, etc. (the player should also have an option to disable it). Also, some more independent factions (not only pirates and local militia) could also add to the "liveliness" of the galaxy - traders, bounty hunters, etc.
All in all, this game looks pretty good... haven't played it online yet.. looking forward to.
random events have been mentioned a couple of times, it may be in, I'm not sure. at least it was considered from what I hear.
