I played the whole day yesterday (german version). Despite the great concept and the initial excitement I had, I would recommend to stay away from this game in it's present state.
It was fun for the first few hours when I started to build up my bases and develop my forces, but everything becomes a chore very quickly. There is too much of everything, and many things don't work. My transport fleet got grounded quickly because the AI is not able to supply the bases with fuel, so I had to do everything manually. The tactical battle was so bad that I almost smashed my mouse in anger. I had spent the whole day micromanaging to build up these forces and all I got as a reward was a huge mess of ships running into each other, planes not attacking and getting shot down entirely by enemy flak.
The guys who designed the user interface should be sent to the quarry for life. I am designing software myself and this is just a good example of how not to do it. Even people with great patience, eagle eyes, supreme cognition and reading skills will give up on this quickly. The average user will be completely repelled.
Needless to say that there are lots of technical problems as well. For instance, a whole week I couldn't play because the mouse would jump erratically whenever the game was paused, but everything was fine in real time (!). I had to enable VSYNC and make changes to the mouse driver to solve this.
All I want to do now is get over the game and forget it quickly. I hope I will not make the mistake of wasting another weekend with it. I might come back in a year or two to check if the sequel+mods have changed the situation.
GE
P.S. If the game would come with 1/10 of the current number of units, (much) less workload in managing the strategic part, a working AI and less technical glitches, it could be immense fun (look at the TW series for how to achieve good balance). But my advice would be to start all over with this game, because the current code has too many design defects imo.
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