I didn't even try to play a full game in the first beta, but I played around with the main UI window. Here are some thoughts:
1) I love the zoom in/zoom out on the mouse scroll button. It's completely intuitive and works great for "that planet just to the left" moments. The transition to the strategic map is very slick.
2) I was a bit put off by the default (top down) camera view. The biggest problem is that you're looking down on the rings of ringed planets, and they kinda look like they're selected. I manually dragged the view to a standard Civ II-style isomorphic perspective, and found that things looked much better. Maybe this should be the default perspective? It's instantly familiar to anyone who plays TBS games.
3) I expected the view to scroll when I moved my mouse to the edges of the main map, similar to GC1. It was kind of tedious to click & drag when I wanted to shift the view.
4) I couldn't figure out how to cancel a ship's autopilot instructions. In GC1, clicking on the ship would cancel its orders (removing the blue "target" from the map).
5) I couldn't figure out how to make all shjps execute their autopilot instructions at the beginning of a turn. In GC1, the space bar would trigger this. It's very tedious to move all your ships one square at a time!
6) Finally, let me be a bit controversial by questioning the movable camera. What real gameplay benefit is this going to provide? It looks cool, but I found two ways that it made things VERY confusing.
- First, it's easy to get the mini-map and view oriented quite differently. If I see a star to the "north" of my ship on the main map, where do I click on the mini map to center on it? I guess the white selection in the minimap is supposed to clue you in on your perspective, but this didn't seem clear at all.
- Second, the movable camera obscures the fact that you're really moving your ships on a rectangular 2-D grid. There's no Z-movement in the game, right? And you can't move just anywhere, you must move to one of the 2-D grid squares. Since there's no visual grid on screen, from some perspectives it's really hard to figure out, e.g., where do I click to move diagonally.
Maybe these things get easier as you work with the game more, or maybe there's some gameplay benefit to the movable camera that I haven't experienced yet. But from my current perspective, I imagine I'd set the camera once to a Civ-II style perspective and never change it..
Anyhow, the game looks really good, and ran quite quickly on my system. I'm looking forward to playing it as the product matures over coming months.
