Urgh, this game...
I can't recommend to anyone
.
Trax, Nanor, Bambi, DocBot and I have bought it and played it over the last few days, and it doesn't get any better. Only worse.
An example; yesterday we all had a monster battle, it ended up with Trax and I against each other, my 150 ships versus his 40ish, and this climactic scrap was reduced to a farce by one unit. ONE UNIT!!! A repel ability, for a unit called the Iconus Guardian. Game breaker. It repels units around it, no matter their mass, speedily away. And it regains or is able to recoup enough energy to keep on doing it! Fleets tend to group together, ONE Guardian breaks them up. Okay, fine, I'll just destroy the Guardian. But no. NO WAY JOSE! Ships take so long to turn and aim, that not even with my entire fleet can I get in range and pop one. Trax had at least 8. I had to use fighters. This cheap ass unit reducing my entire armada to a shambles is a joke. And that’s just one of the dull and idiotic decisions the game makes.
The more I play the less inventive the game becomes. Planet development is a nothing addition, there is no planning of buildings surface side of balance of factories and population. All you can do is spend money to arbitrarily increase the population for tax purposes. In orbit, there are only two defensive structures, which leaves no defensive escalation! 1 turret and 1 hanger. A game with research this slow and expensive should have a range of defences, making your defensive solutions evolve, and provide a tangible research affect in the form of biggerfatterturrets/missilelaunchers/asteroidthrowers/lasercannonblasters/daisycutters. Almost all military researches give only percentage buffs... yay.
Ship battles have no tactical grounding either. It's purely mass affairs where your options are based around which ship you want to aim at first and fleet composition. I find ships themselves have too many abilities to activate with many of them having little obvious graphical representation anyway. All I'm left with is a game which is about expanding as fast as possible to get the resources. With little balancing of expansion to infrastructure construction.
There are other gripes, including the appearance of only 1 victory condition, the lack of some sort of map and no apparent strategic difference between races.
It’s billed as a 4x game, eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate. Sure there is exploring, with my one type of scout, no probes or sneaky cloaking units, no sensor ranges, no flexibility allowing concealment of any kind. Just hopping from one gravity well to another. Expand, sure, placement of new colonies is easy, costing only 2 credits a second upon establishment until population is upgraded, and you can build everything immediately meaning you can obliterate a system, pop along to the next, and by the time you turn around 5 minutes later everything has been replaced. Exploit? What? Your enemies’ stupidity? All I seem to be able to do is build 250 credits worth of mining equipment on the 2-3 asteroids in a system… I have no choice in this you understand, I’m not exploiting anything, all I’m doing following the one cruddy option I have… Exterminate. Sure, that is essentially what the game is about. Having a game dedicated to combat YOU THINK THEY’D MAKE IT MORE FUN!
Still, at least it passes the time, and helped me decide uninspired game design makes me sick.
/endmoan
