|
Lormax and I picked up the game last Sunday. So far it's fun (and I really don't like real time games). The races are designed to be very similar to eachother (at least in function) so things are balanced but it can make things feel a little bland. On the outside the asthetics of each race is rather uniquie so you can kind of forget that the stats for them are very similar. Defending planets with built planatary structures is very viable so you don't always have to pay attention to battles going on in your systems (although it's always good to take a quick look). There are lots of things to research and planets have limited numbers of slots for military and civil instillations so what you build at each planet matters (although you can always scrap things that are no longer useful). You have a limited number of fleet points to build units with. Once you are out, you can't build any more ships till some of the ones you have are destoyed or you get more points. You can do research to raise the cap. You can also get capital ships which are basically hero units that gain experience and skills (very much like warcraft 3).
Multi player works out well. You can put in human or computer controlled players, set up teams, and other such things. The number of player slots is determined by the map. You can generate random maps as well as preset ones. In premade maps, you can use settings to alter the resources from fixed to random.
The game is not very computer intensive unless you zoom in on the combats. For the most part, when you are looking at things from a zoomed out stance, it uses little icons rather than nicely rendered models. You can zoom in and rotate 360 if you want a close up view of battles though and this is where the graphics requirements start kicking in. I notice significant slowdown when I zoom in on very large battles, but my graphics card is on it's way out so that is probably why.
Managing your empire is fairly stretegic since you have to cordinate your research with your empire's needs. You need to avoid expanding too fast or your planets won't have proper defense vs other players or pirates (and the pirates play a significant part in the game). You also have to avoid expanding too slowly or you'll get swamped by a more agressive empire that secured more resorces than you did. The AI for the game is fairly good and I can't think of any times that I sat there screaming at my units "Why are you stupid?" unlike a lot of other games.
|
