Darkkeep

several hours into my first paddling pool game, and I still haven't the foggiest what I'm doing really. I seemed to run out of logistics points too quickly, and it says I have maximally upgraded my capacity on my capital, but I want space ports damn it! If I can research new techs, will i be able to further upgrade my points? I think my capital has only 24, and with 4 research stations costing 16, there's nothing left really! I could scrap the research stations and rebuild them somewhere else, but it seems a tragic waste.

I think I'll start again with what experience I have, the learning curve is pretty vertical IMO, what with all manner of techs to research, your first few minutes are a bit boggling, it seems there's a million choices and very limited resources, essentially 6 parallel tech trees, each with several possible options straight out of the traps. However, there's not so many buildings and ships that you lose a sense of purpose, which is what happened to me in GalCiv a lot. Setting up colonies is blissfully easy although I have not yet figured out how to defend them properly :(

There seems to be a good balance of depth and ease of use though, and you can pause and take stock issue orders so you're not too flushed. Combat is enjoyable so far, though it has been limited to defeating pirates. My fuck off big battleship gives me a decisive edge there, but it can only be in one place at once and a 2nd would cost me quite a lot of moola (I was excited when I got the first for free!!). The way the ships gain exp and level up is quite nice, though it was a while before I remembered how to actually assign the points I earned.

The ability to put bounties on other players heads is very cool. I could see a big MP match getting very ugly if several players agreed to pay the pirates to attack one player. Pity my poor explorer who stumbled on a pirate base, quite the eye opener in the early game when I had 3 light frigates defending my empire. Finding a veritable armada of pirates convinced me to blow my remaining reserves on all the ships I could support with disastrous results for my economy at large.

I like the way that, thus far anyway, you're limited to jump lanes, it was the only feature I liked in the disastrous moo3.

Did anybody play Pax Imperium or whatever it was called? I never had a chance to play it when it came out way back, but I would guess this is somewhat similar... that is real time, epic scale space opera.

This sounds very tempting indeed. Tell me is it a very large Digital Download, I notice it says it needs 3GB of free space.

Byzantine Bureaucracy wrote: This sounds very tempting indeed. Tell me is it a very large Digital Download, I notice it says it needs 3GB of free space.

Not huge. I think it took between 1-2 hours or something. I watch a 2 episodes of Spooks and it was done.

yippee. take that pirate scum. capital ships are fun, but its heavy cruisers that keep the smile on my face. played another game, increased the resources, bought off the pirates for the first 3 or 4 attacks and fortified the shit out out of a bottle neck (something I hadn't done in my first effort) And now with the help of many bombers squadrons and heavy cruisers, I've taken down the pirate base.

Just lost a game against the AI last night - how often does that happen with games these days! If you're up for it, we could try a multiplayer game next Sunday (assuming NTL doesn't throttle this game like it does others)

take that easy AI! The pirates were a far sterner challenge than the entry level AI player. Does this mean I have to play on normal now I love bombers, they seem a little uber powered, as the flak frigates the pirates and enemy had failed to destroy even one squadron.

I'm still finding my feet, but its easy enough once you get the hang of the buttons. The games not perfect, it suffers from the age old problem faced by inter genre titles: being good at aspects of both without excelling, thus SoaSE lacks the tactical nuances (battles seem a bit ham fisted, maybe i'm just a newb) of a proper modern RTS and doesn't have the strategic depth of a proper 4x.

The game I'm most put in mind of, is Rise of Empires or Rise of Nations or whatever it was called, the AoE/Civ 'em up.

Still, a good game, with plenty of scope for epicness (I was just playing an easy 1v1 to start)

MP?

Hmmmm. I'll play another game and see how I'm doing, the names of the ships and techs is still jibberish to me. :D