Hey Frogboy,
Y'know, I'm kind of ticked off at you guys. I was planning on going to bed early and getting up at a reasonable hour. Instead what am I doing? That's right, clicking away during that "last turn" trying out the beta. Anyway, I decided to write up a few of my observations, what I liked, what I didn't like, and what needs fixing. Remember, I'm just one player, so it's just one player's opinion.
1. Blind exploration makes the game interesting, but things seem lonely, expecially on the larger galaxies. Realistically, it makes sense. Why should I know if a civilization is being mauled on the other side of the galaxy? Well, because I can plan my long term strategy around that. It's more realistic, but boy, seeing two or three civilizations for a while really gets lonely.
2. No tech trading.. Hrmm, well, I thought this would be good. My opinion? Awesome in theory, pretty poor in practice. Every civilization just seems backwards. Trade, for instance, is something that became extremely rare. So rare that by the time I was getitng medium hulled ships there were only two trades routes established. One by the Altarians and one by me. Not sure I like that.
3. Well, I've seen something interesting. An unescorted swarm of Torian transports just bum rush the Drengin. I'm talking fleets of 3 and about 5 or 6 of these just flying unescorted (from what my intel scouts reported) just swooping in. Hey, on the bright side, at least they had a 4 speed which, while could have been better, was acceptable for the tech levels.
4. AI.. Listen, I don't know where the AI is supposed to make mistakes, but on Bright, the AI really doesn't like strategic resources. I'm able to send colony ships deep into their territory and snag these puppies up. Not a bad deal half the time.
5. AI really likes to be aggressive. I've had war declared on me before the colony rush is over. I like that. Though, I'm not sure they could invade my planets with their techs. It's good tho that I can't just focus completely on colony ships.
6. I noticed there is a soft cap on how much you can expand due to homeworld population going down so quickly and not repopping fast enough. It's good, I guess, but I never had economy suffer because of this. Just population really. Either way, my econ bonuses ate all what was supposed to hurt me, I suppose.
7. The ship building is incredible. I spent about 45 minutes building a custom colony ship.
8. The bugs.. Well, they are there. Never will I build a planetery improvement? I THINK NOT! It's small, it's silly, I'm not worried. The game is stable.. so far!
These are just my impressions from what I've played. The game type?
1. Blind exploration.
2. No tech sharing.
3. Bright difficulty on ALL AIs.
5. Huge map
6. Scattered stars
7. Common planets/Common habitable planets.
9. Uncommon anomolies.
Either way, I agree, something seems "missing" without tech sharing. It also feels like I can sometimes cheat the AI by bum rushing military techs and just outright declaring war, since they didn't seem to be all about that. Then again it is just "Bright", so the full AI isn't in effect, but it's close. Good work. Very good work, but I can't say I'm a fan of blind exploration.
Thanks for the patch. I'm off for bed.
- Arkans
