Okay, so my biggest complaint so far -- and it's a testament to the great work you guys at Ironclad have done that this is my biggest complaint so far! -- is everything tucked behind the F3 key. Bounty and the black market are both really cool features. The black market is very much like the typical market function in other RTSs, but with the twist that you can put up resources for other players to buy. The bounty is a great bit of innovation, and I can't think of any counterpart in other RTSs.

However, both features are buried behind -- and I'm going to be candid here -- an absolutely wretched F3 screen. It's a big fat waste of screen real estate that gets all up in my face and shuts me out of the rest of the game. You guys at Ironclad have done a truly stellar job making use of the screen real estate, so what's the deal with this eyesore? I understand that the tech tree needs to jump out at me. That's a given. It's a big slab of techs and I need to see how they relate to each other. But the black market is a huge PITA when I can do nearly everything else -- build up a planets, divert my fleets, and even manage battles -- without pulling my focus from whatever I'm looking at.

The market stuff needs to sit discreetly on the main screen somewhere. A game like Age of Empires III has the exchange of goods tied to a building, so the interface sits in the main panel when you select that building. But you can hotkey the market and sell food and wood to your heart's content while managing a battle. Even better, Rise of Nations has the market stuff in the upper left hand corner. It's a set of simple buttons you press, each listing the price to buy or sell a given good.

I'm surprised Sins doesn't have some way to let me buy and sell goods without having to press F3 and then maybe tab past a giant useless picture of a scowling pirate. What's worse, I've totally lost track of whatever it is I need to buy or build, which is why I was going to the black market in the first place. While I'm in the F3 screen, I can't interact with the empire tree or the action panel. In fact, most of the time, I don't bother with the black market because I've forgotten about it. I haven't seen how the player-posted goods work, but I can't imagine it's a very effective game feature if it relies on us periodically leaving the game to visit the F3 screen. If metal or crystals have been posted for sale, that deserves some prominent placement on the game screen.

Similarly, I love the idea of last-minute bounty bidding, but it sucks that you have to leave the game and go to F3 to play. C'mon, Ironclad, you guys should know better. Sins shows every sign of being carefully streamlined and lovingly honed over the course of its long beta. The features tucked onto the F3 screen deserve better!

So there's my two peeved cents. But I only whinge because I care.

-Tom