Played my first game with 4a yesterday and the game worked fine on my laptop with only 32MB of graphic memory. Thank you! I settled for a small galaxy and it worked like a charm.
Not a single crash for me!
Some small bugs and glitches:
(1) Usually when a new ship is available a blue semitransparent icon drops on the right side. On occasion this icon did not drop but instead got stuck on the starting point. Still worked, though.
(2) The statistics and reports in the game are more or less completely untrustable. The graphs shown in the center seems to be correct, though. I always had military leadership and was always placed dead last in the reports. Seems like the other races acknowledged that i had leadership as no one tried any hostilities throughout the game.
Bigger concerns:
As this is the first time I really play the new game, I feel that I need to comment on two of the new improvements. For me they just add to the boring micromanagement part of the game.
(1) Shipyards. To me they are just boring and even though three new styles of weapons adds bigger depth to the game I just found it incredibly boring having to design new ships. Am I the only one feeling that way? I would prefer having some regular units available. They could become available with the technologies just as they used to. If that would not be possible, could perhaps template units be added in Shipyards? Like missile fighter, all-rounded defender, etc, etc.
(2) I also find the new micromanagement of planets to be quite boring. I like the system from a logical perspective, it is much more straight-forward than the old PQ-system. However, I would like to have smarter governors to whom I could leave the task of managing this. Predefined templates for reasearch planets, population planets, production planets and so on. Of course they would handle the resource bonuses in a smart way. I played a small galaxy and I was already bored with setting up my planets, it's is not more than lots of tedious clicking when you have decided what to do with a planet.
(3) The tech tree is a bit confusing. Could there be a way to zoom out? the minus key did not seem to work. There are a short list of techs to select from but there are many more available from the full map and navigating it was painfully slow on my system. Additionally I would like the feature to be able to click on a tech further down in the tech tree and to have the system automatically research the required techs to reach the desired tech.
Just the impressions I got after playing my first game. As it is now I think that the new beta is more work and less fun than the original game but still rather playable.
