We had a badly name thread where it was talked about but a lot of people probably didn't look so good to see a proper thread (thought about making one myself).
I bought it a few days ago and put around 30 hours into the beta before its release today.
My only problem I had in the beta was performance late game when you had large fleets, your fps would tank. Thankfully the last patch before it released seem to fix that and I had multiple large fleets and lots of combat against other large fleets with no problems at all.
The dev (one guy made the game, he outsourced the art) is awesome. He is very active on the games forums and takes feedback and fixes stuff quickly when reported.
My breakdown of the game:
Graphics are good. Nothing fancy but they look nice and each race has their own distinct look.
Audio is good too, the background music never annoyed me and just melds into the background and you don't even notice it. I like the sound effects, especially when your ships enter and leave FTL.
Gameplay wise it is great. It is very much like MoO2. The 8 races are inspired by it and each is very different from the next. Samurai bears that live by a code of honor and speak in poetry is always win in my book.
It plays like your normal 4x game mostly. The game has some automation built in you can choose to enable or not. The automation is actually very well done, because it takes away just enough of the tediousness that you can get from things but it never takes control away from you and you can choose what you want automated and what not and turn it on/off whenever you please.
You can customize what each planet specializes in with preset Governor automation (can select from like 5 different specializations like Industry, Military, Agriculture, Research, etc) and it will build things on the planet for those speciality and will import/export industry/food as well. You can also choose to control the planets yourself where you queue up everything you want built and how you want things import/export/store things yourself. The automation is nice in many ways because when your empire starts to become large and you are gaining new tech you can start to spend a lot of time just keeping everything up to date.
You can also build subspace projectors that will increase yours ships traveling speed which is very helpful for connecting your empire together. You can automate this as well. When you colonize a new system, it will queue up a series of projectors from the nearest system of your empire to the one you just colonized and will queue up the construction freighters to actually build the projectors to the nearest systems so get it built quickly. It will spread the workload out amongst planets instead of queuing up 10x of the freighters on one planet. You can also build your own projectors wherever you want and it will automatically queue up the freighters nearest planets to get it built. Same goes for when you are doing the actually colonization, whichever planet is near that can it will build a colonizing ship and sent it to the planet you selected. It also does this auto queuing system with anything you build in deep space. So listening posts, space stations, shipyards, etc will be built wherever they can be done the quickest. The system isn't perfect but it is pretty damn good.
You can automate the transportation of goods to and from planets. I highly suggest doing so. The game will automatically build shipping freighters to move food/goods/people to and from planets that require whatever you set.
Ship building is great. There are lots of premade designs that you will unlock as you gain more tech. But the fun part is, you can build custom ships however you want. It is module based and you drag and drop various parts to build the ships and it gives you a stats feedback for all important things of the ship from cost to how much power is being used and how quickly it replaces said power. You also have to point where you want your arcs of fire to be facing for weapons that are now on swivels or only can fire straight ahead.
You can spend tons of time doing this and it is a lot of fun. Want to build a pure fleet of support ships that come in after the battle is done with your combat fleet? Design and build ships with drones to repair other ships, have ships replicating and shuttling ordinance to to resupply ammo so you don't need to head back to another system to resupply/repair. I tend to make a fleet of these ships that also have a lot of bombers and/or troopships and tanks with them so that when I come in I can clear the new planet of occupants after destroying their ships thus removing the danger to these more vulnerable ships. You can also take over the planet with a ground invasion if you want and preserve the population and what they have built.
You can save your design of these ships as well and the cool part? The AI will use them when you play in other games. So after a little bit of playing as various races you will start to see lots of your ship designs being used as well as default ones. This is a double edge sword. On one hand, your first designs will probably suck and the AI will have some crappy ships they are using lol, but you will also have to start facing off against your good stuff and that can make things much more difficult. The last game I was playing the AI was using a cruiser design (it keeps the name of whatever name you save it as so you know) I made which was heavy on armor and weapons and when I used it it performed very well. Well it performed well against me too and was nice to see that its intended task worked well (which was take lots of damage and dish it out lol). So things will get more difficult if you design your own ships. You will need to design a little bit as there isn't a ship for everything template but there are a lot of ship designs already in the game.
One of my fav features is the fleet one. You open up the fleet screen and can design/build your fleet. You drag and drop ships from the menu depending on their class. Once you are done you hit requisition and the requisition screen comes up telling you if you have any ships in your empire that can be used in that fleet design that are not currently assigned to another fleet, if you do you can hit a button and they are now assigned to the new fleet and then you can hit the build button and it will send out the build orders across all your planets to get the ships made and have the fleet up and going as quick as possible. When you lose ships in a battle you can hit the requisition button to auto build the lost ships right away. Each fleet is selectable by whatever number you choose and has its own icon as well to see things quick and clear. When you select the fleet it highlights all the ships and draws a light to the fleet icon so you know how far away ships are from meeting up. Oh, also when you design your fleet you design what formation you want them in, what radius you want each individual ship to have for things (like covering another ship to repair and supply it will only work with in its area of operation in the fleet).
Ship combat is neat in that you can tell your ships to always face enemy head on or only try and show one side or another. You can take control of any ship and manually do combat if you like. Say you have a fancy expensive ship and are in a battle and one side of the ship has really taken a pounding, you can have it try and keep its other side face towards the enemy where the armor is still there and you can last long enough to take them out or for reinforcements to arrive.
Research is simple, there is like 6-7 tech trees and various stuff to upgrade and/or unlock each has their own speciality. You'll unlock an additional experimental tech tree when you discover alien artifacts. There is some tiny quest like stuff that will come up this stuff as you find it.
There are some hostiles that have ships. From drones to xenos and pirates as well which will have their own planet.
Diplomacy is nice. Each race has their own way of thinking. The AI/Robot race acts like you would expect, it doesn't do anything it finds mutually beneficial to both of you unless you make it worth their while to do so. While the samurai space bears are all about honor and respect and you can anger them very quickly by doing something dishonorable. The one race Corozaine (sp?) and Owlwoks is great. The Corozain enslave this owl looking race called owlwoks and it is humorous.
You can train spys/agents and level them up. You can have them steal technology from other races, to assassinating one of their spys, and can even send them to cause a rebel rebellion on another races planet and other things as well. It is essential to at least have 1 agent though and train them up to lvl 10 (max level) simply so you can stop other spy/agent attempts towards your empire from the other races. Sometimes your agent will fail and if they do they might get lucky and escape with their life other times they may die (dying is rare when they are high lvl), the race you sent them against usually gets a bit pissed obviously. Also when they succeed there is a chance they can do the mission just not successfully but undetected so the other race has no idea you did it at all.
This is probably longer than I intended but oh well. There are some things that need to be polished up some and such (most notably when building ships the module placement can get wonky at times and sometimes the movement of which direction a turret points can be hard to change). Anyways, the game is done well and is really good in its current stage and I feel it will only get better as the dev (goes by the name Zero) continues to improve the game. Also one item of note that is nice, it has mod support built right in as well to the main menu so it should be nice to see what the community comes up with as well.
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