Looking forward to Space Exploration – Serpens Sector for more of that kind of gameplay though.

Gratuitous Space Battles mostly has my interest for the shipbuilding and fleet mechanics. The lack of control during the battle just keeps the focus purely on the preparation phase. If I could change the outcome of the fight by jumping in and giving out orders, then I could fail for no fault of my designing and preparation phase. If, instead, victory or defeat comes from the design of the fleet, then I’ll just back into the fleet design step every single time, tweaking and refining it, and each attempt will start with something new.

In other words, I think it could be more repetitive to have to go through the motions during the fight, herding cats as RTSes usually amount to, just to have a chance of winning, even /after/ putting together the right fleet.

It’s kind of like how in Rainbow Six (the original PC version), you’d need to set up these complicated tactical plans before getting into the action. Even if you designed it perfectly, you could come around a corner and die because you didn’t click the fire button fast enough. That’s why it was a tactical FPS, not a tactical planning game.

The whole thing just looks amazing, the different weapons and fighters with capital ships. Kind of like the battle at Endor…or when they have those big battles in star wars.

The only thing that bothers me (kinda), if I’ve read correctly, is the lack of sandbox/galaxy domination gameplay involved? It’s just the battles? No tech-tree advantages to be had or ship building priorities?

(I know these would add to the development time, and I’m not expecting them to be in. But after initially watching the videos I was suprised to learn those elements were not in a game like this.)

Aside from that though, I’m sure this will knock mine and everyone elses socks off once we get a go!

Diziet Sma is a character in a book. I’m not. :o)

It’s Diziet not Dizet.

Enough people have mentioned the red flashing that I need to fix it. Basically that is armour absorbing impacts, as opposed to the explosions, which indicate actual hull damage (after the armour is blasted-through).

I’ll come up with something better for the armour effect…

If I could make a suggestion, I think a round gradient (red at the edges, yellow-orange at the center) emanating from the point of impact that quickly shrinks would work. It should give the impression of a piece of metal being heated up and then quickly cooling down.

Game looks smashing, BTW. :)