Hi again,

I didn't play for more than a year now, but the feeling is coming back and with a lot of spare time in January the release of Twilight of the Arnor would just perfectly fit in.

Unfortunately, the balance between Defense and Attack in ship combat was the most annoying part of Dread Lords to me and it seems, things got even worse with Dark Avatar: galciv.wikia.com

The end result is:

* While you can match your defenses on a single ship with about 75% firepower of the AIs fleet, is that ship nearly indestructible. That's usually until the late game.
* Game experience: ships from races with Luck do more damage than they should.
* When the firepower of the fleet becomes too great for the defenses, the rule of the day becomes all-attack single suicidal ship (firepower several hundred points), that destroys many of the opponent's ships in the first round of the combat, and by the "tie rule" maybe even survives.
* In mid and late game using fleets became conter-productive, because destroyed ships still fire back and destroy your ships in a fleet that never fired.
* Game experience: AIs don't cope well with those changes. Probably because they can't read this


I read about unique weapons for races in TA (still based on the well known laser, missile and mass driver weapons system), but I couldn't find any information if ship combat was rebalanced again. So for my decision to buy, would someone please help:

1) How will ship combat work in TA? More like Dread Lords (bad), Dark Avatar (worse) or something new?

2) I only own Dread Lords but I read Dark Avatar will be reqired to play Twilight of the Arnor. Will there be expansion bundles?

Thanks
puntarenas