v.009 Report

The new build is downloading in the background but I thought I'd share some thoughts with some testing I did over the past few days. I was experiencing crash dumps from time to time, I managed to eliminate these by running the game in maximized Windows mode which makes me suspect the beta nVidia driver (101.42). (Hmm the forum editor isn't letting me insert carriage returns so forgive the formatting) I played a mammoth 'large galaxy' game with only 2 computer AIs. I noticed *ALL* three teams had homeworlds in the first galaxy, the second and third were only inhabited by pirates. All in all it was a pretty good game, I did notice that the AI (set to normal) at times would suddenly get cold feet during a major assault... in fact if the AI had pressed it, it probably would've won but maybe the other AI was attacking it. On the realism vs fun subject, I'm confused that there is only one star per Galaxy ... The game was fun, I won in the end so that was nice , I do think that when there's more than one galaxy that the various NPC/PC empires would be spread out more among them. I also think there should be more stars in a galaxy. Random suggestions include: Being bble to 'Take Over' enemy units and structures (stolen shamelessly from CFW); gravity physics might be neat but also might not be fun, but the concept of being able to at least accelerate using a gravity well could be intersting; I continue to want to create more formal fleets (perhaps with admiral characters, also stolen from CFW ) with more options for general orders so I don't need to baby sit them; if a flagship is getting beaten up (perhaps when hull hits yellow) it should generate an alert; like to see more units and a larger tech tree but I know a lot of stuff isn't in yet. All in all I have to say I think this game is going to be a winner; it's already pretty fun and it's not even done yet.