"Designing ships is made a lot hardware by the cumbersome UI." Can you elaborate?
By the way, hardware isn't an adjective.
"In a good game, the ship designer UI would have a list of the components that you can use, so that you can easily count how many you've used. "
It does.
I would love to elaborate, but unfortunately there is a 400 word limit to reviews. I posted a more thorough examination on a different site. If you want to read that, here's the URL: http://thatguywiththeglasses.com/blogs/bdash/entry/gaming-on-a-budget-gratuitous-space-battles
Oh, and the ship designer doesn't have the supply limit list. The ship deployment screen does, but not the ship designer. And since the designer is where you're actually adding components to ships, that's where you need the supply limit list.
I didn't find the UI at all cumbersome. I can think of a lot of games where it is, and some where it's cripplingly so, but not GPS. Why did you find it cumbersome?
I'll also note that the "Keep Moving" order does not have to make ships wander away from the fleet — there are at least two additional orders that can be used to chain the ships together.
Leave a Comment:
Gratuitously annoying
This game is fundamentally about designing a number of ships, giving them orders to prepare them for a particular battle, and then watching that battle play out with the AI. This is a good premise. Unfortunately, the execution leaves a lot to be desired.
The graphics look... dated. For a game who's attraction is supposed to be grand, epic, gratuitous fleets duking it out, it looks pretty underwhelming. But that's not its worst problem.
One big problem is the in-battle AI. Once you've assembled your fleet, you can give each ship a number of orders. And that's great; it's a way to affect the battle without having direct control. The problem is that finding the right AI commands to do what you need is almost impossible.
For example, weapons can miss, and miss rate is based on the speed of ships. But unless you give a ship the "keep moving" order, a ship will stop once it starts engaging the enemy. This wastes the evasion potential of fast, less shield-heavy ships. However, if you give a ship the "keep moving" order, you quickly realize that this really is the "wander away from the fleet like a drunken idiot" order. If you want a ship to actually use its evasive potential, it means accepting that some of these ships will wander into a cluster of enemy ships and get themselves killed to no useful effect.
Worse than that is the UI. You'd think in a game where you spend most of your time in the UI, the game developers would have put some effort into it. Not here.
Designing ships is made a lot hardware by the cumbersome UI. But worse than that are certain mission conditions.
Some missions have supply limits. This means that there are a certain number of certain components that your ships can use in that mission. So you must a fleet of design ships specifically for this mission. In a good game, the ship designer UI would have a list of the components that you can use, so that you can easily count how many you've used.
Not this game.
That was the point when I gave up. I'm not going to sit in their crappy ship design UI with a pen and paper so that I can keep track of what supplies I've used thus far.
It's $25 for the game plus all of its DLC. My advice: play the demo. If you think the demo was just OK, don't buy the game. I thought it would get better; it does not.