I’ve already written a preview, but now that I have my hands on the final version I can begin forming ideas that mean something.<\/p>\n
1) The interface has gotten more than a polish from the beta that I played. A lot of the screens have been redone from scratch, and are much improved. The research screens for example, are now clearly divided by purpose and the techs are described in great detail. The left hand planet flyouts still get very crowded.<\/p>\n
2) In single player, the AI will ask you to take out hits on your mutual enemies. Success nets you better relations, failure hurts. Sometimes they just ask for money or minerals, but the “kill 10 of Bob’s Ships” missions are the win-win ones. One problem is that they sometimes ask for the impossible, like destroying ten civilian structures when the enemy only has five because you wiped out three of his planets already. So you take the relationship hit.<\/p>\n
3) Pirates are a serious, serious pain in the ass.<\/p>\n
4) Cash is like wood in Age of Empires III<\/em>; you really need it in the early game but it increases too slowly. One you build trade outposts, though, the money just flows in like water. You’ll spend a lot of time near the beginning of the game selling minerals and crystal on the black market.<\/p>\n 5) If you have two more capital ships than your opponent in a system, you will have a hard time losing. The trick is forcing a decisive battle since the AI is perfectly happy to warp out of trouble.<\/p>\n 6) Timewise, it’s much more 4x than RTS. I played a “medium map” game last night for over three hours and had still only eliminated one of my three opponents.<\/p>\n 7) I can’t wait for modders to get their hands on this.<\/p>\n 8 ) Every good thing you have read about this game is absolutely true.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve already written a preview, but now that I have my hands on the final version I can begin forming ideas that mean something. 1) The interface has gotten more than a polish from the beta that I played. A lot of the screens have been redone from scratch, and are much improved. The research […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[116,41,71],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-dN","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/855"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=855"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/855\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}