I’ve recently bought the game, and so for played through to the first “Empire” challenge. These are a few things that didn’t work as I would have liked. Some are possibly bugs, most are probably feature requests.
Deployment:
Your deployment should save automatically every time you go to battle. In one case I spent 15 minutes deploying, went the battle, instantly realised I’d forgotten to give the correct attack orders to my leading cruisers and so ended the battle, then frustratingly had to start deploying from scratch.
Your last deployment should also carry over to the next battle. Having got a fleet that worked for the first battle, it continued to do so (with tweaks) for the next few, but required deploying from scratch each time. You can fiddle this by copying deployment files manually outside the game, but that’s not a good solution.
(Definitely a Bug) When a group of ships is selected by drag/outline, the orders displayed are for the last singly-selected ship. If the last singly-selected ship isn’t in the group, applying orders (such as “Escort)” to the selected group fail (when associating a target).
Shift-clicking an unselected ship adds it to a group. Shift-clicking a selected ship ought to deselect it, but doesn’t.
Orders:
Fighters tend to zoom ahead and get minced to little effect while the rest of the fleet is lumbering into range, whereas the very same bunch of fighters can be devasting when released by the destruction of their escortee. I found myself wanting some sort of delay order; either timed, or maybe “Pounce: delay/orbit until target vessel fires on enemy”.
As far as I can tell, ships close to the set range and stop, but do nothing more if the enemy keep coming. There doesn’t seem to be a “keep at long range” order, and thus no obvious way to exploit superior-ranged weaponry.
Battles:
Tracking a ship turns the screen into a blur (which could be to with the persistence/update rate of my monitor), and it’s not obvious how to turn it off.
I keep wanting to zoom out further.
The Victory box should be dissmissable. I want to glory in the destruction of the pathetic remnants my foes without a dialogue box in the middle of the screen.
Updates:
I can’t see a current game version number displayed anywhere.