18 NEW Screenshots

[MarkG]

[moomin]

Are these shots for real? Gee, I know it's a 4x game, but the graphics in the space battles really are bad. Look at the second screen shot (the space fight with a planet in the background) for instance: the jaggies are so bad they could probably be ported to the C64 without loss.

I really hope this is some kind of placeholder graphic.

[moomin]

And while I like the "managment screen" general look, it seems they've introduced major micromanagement with handholding the training of each and every one of your spies. Not good, not good at all.

[moomin]

But they get a golden star for having phonetic writing of the species' names in the catalogue. Hilarious!

[Xentax]

I'm pretty sure that's a loss of precision that's the fault of the screenshot, not the game engine that produced the shot.

As others have said before, try not to judge the eye-candy of the space battles by screenshots -- they just can't ever do it justice. Too much of what happens is animation and movement, which snapshots just can't capture.

[Xentax]

Originally posted by moomin
And while I like the "managment screen" general look, it seems they've introduced major micromanagement with handholding the training of each and every one of your spies. Not good, not good at all.

I'm wondering about that myself -- I certainly want at least the option of having lots of agents in the field without having to personally manage each of them.

The other possibility is that each agent has a larger impact than a single spy in the previous games. The game design certainly didn't suggest that sort of set-up to me initially, but things could have changed since then of course.

I'd certainly like to be able to have multiple agents within a single target empire, or within multiple empires working on the same sorts of things, without having to spend 10 minutes every couple of turns managing it.

Hopefully, there's a screen somewhere that we're not seeing, which allows some hands-off general espionage direction -- like "focus on stealing weapons technology" or "focus on causing Unrest in Empire X".

[Spaced Cowboy]

The space battle screens do look strange. I think that a 3d perspective will allow for a much deeper strategy.

I'm a little concerned about the spies as well. Maybe they will be like leaders and require very little MM. It's be cooler if you had spies (generic) and spy leaders to lead their efforts??

Overall the screens look good and I back on the please release a good game soon list.

[Hagbart]

So how do you control the battle, is it like realtime games like home-world?

[moomin]

According to what w heard, you set a plan beforehand and watch the real-time cinematics play out. Possibly there will be breakpoints where you cna change plans. Nobody outside QS knows for sure.

[Xentax]

Last I heard:

If you're commanding (which of course used to cost IFP, now that IFP got cut, I'm not sure if you would even bother to not command a battle):
1) You can set objectives for the battle in the pre-battle planning. I know what the set of objectives was (it could well have changed since), and I can't share it, but an example might be "capture planet X".

2) You can issue orders to individual task forces (or more than one at a time, I'm sure) during combat. Again, I can't share the list, and it may well have changed, but these are things like "move to here" -- that's actually more than one order, but you can specify HOW to move from here to there -- avoiding contact, retreating from contact, at all costs, etc.

Now, back in the day, you could choose to observe a combat, where commanding would cost 2 IFP and watching only 1 IFP (there was also talk of being able to "take over" during a watched combat if you wanted to, by spending the 2nd IFP). Now that IFP is gone, I suspect you command by default, but the AI will still *recommend* a course of action, so you can probably "observe" by simply leaving the recommended actions as they are. I'm not sure how that's realized at the unit-tactics level though -- that is, whether the AI will ever change initial unit tactics from the operational plan. The AI player empires will certainly need that ability, but I don't know how a player-run empire is setup to mix human and AI orders like that.