Reviews - manty5

Beautiful mod, interesting era, would love to give this a 10, but some glaring issues.

First and worst, the author put in a anti-murderball mechanic into the game whereby clustering 20 ships together results in such incredible penalties to accuracy that 2 fleets of 5-6 ships will pretty easily destroy the larger fleet provided you swap ships out.

That's actually wonderful design... except he forgot to tell the AI about the change, which results in them fighting you with 100% or more accuracy penalties until you slaughter the AI's fleet to a more reasonable size. It is very, very difficult to play a challenging game against AI... either they slaughter you early game before you and they have enough ships to seriously trigger the mechanic, or they lose.

Unless they're Romulan. Plasma torpedo burn damage doesn't get reduced, so their murderballs actually murder. And since you're facing their murderball with your 6-ship fleets so that you can actually hit something...

Second, a lot of the capitals are near-clones of each other compared to original sins. The carrier ships are 100% identical across factions, the "defense" capitals are as well, and most of the others share most of the abilities. The biggest difference is in the titans, and the fact that the Klingons split their Fleet mobility/accuracy/debuff enemy accuracy across 2 capitals instead of 1.

However the truth is that no matter how unplayable the single-player mode has been made to be, you still WANT to love this game. If the ships are somewhat clone-ish of each other, it's because that's the easiest way to balance factions. The anti-murderballing idea is great... if only its first victim wasn't single-player playability.

Note: The actual difficulty sliders mean almost nothing now. Because of the game mechanics, map selection is the primary determinant of difficulty. Like Armada, the AI simply is too incompetent to colonize, and a major reason is because there are so many colonization techs and the AI has to pay attention to getting them and it doesn't, in Armada it'll throw down 5 military labs and run out of spaces to put down civilian ones so it can colonize its nearest planets, which denies the extra slots needed for more labs, etc. In this game it likes to put up culture buildings instead of science labs.