Sup guys, after listening to Blair on the Gamers with Jobs podcast I decided to pony up 10 bucks (that was $12.34CAN, no joke!) and get back into Sins. I first bought Sins a little while after visiting PAX and the Stardock booth. When I heard Entrenchment was coming around I dropped the game in favour of others because I knew I would be relearning all over again with the updated mechanics.

Well about a week has gone by and I have been having a blast. The game has huge potential and there are many areas left to expand into. I figured I would drop by and share my feedback.

--- Menus:

• - When I start up the game it normally displays the Ironclad logo, then the Stardock logo, and the Entrenchment cinematic. If you go into the options and tick the opening cinematic box then before the entrenchment cinematic it will play the original Sins one. The problem is, the next time I start entrenchment the tick box will revert back to empty. I have no idea what causes this but every time I check the box I come back and find it changed.
• - It would be very nice if we could disable each of the opening cinematics individually. I didn't mind watching them the first time and I don't mind watching them again. But having to watch them the next 200 times I boot up Sins is a waste of my time. Yes I know you can skip them but time spent loading those movies into memory is time I could be using to load up my savegames.
• - The game settings section (all of them even) of the Options menu where you set things like tactical grid and the like desperatly need tooltips. I STILL don't know what half of those setting do. Better yet, render the actual in game interface while you are setting the options so you can see what things look like (for example) with and without the tactical grid.
• - The Effects tab should be moved so that it is beside the Video settings tab.
• - When changing the visual effects we must be able to see the difference between graphical levels. If I am changing "planet quality" from high to low then zoom my view over to a planet so I can watch the difference. The same goes for ships and buildings. I want to know the difference between highest and low ship extras, so show me a Marza guns blazing and update the textures in realtime.
• - When customizing your player portrait, empire symbol and name how come you can only pick avatars in sets of 3? It would be better if you could scroll through the selection of pictures from each empire seperately.
  

--- Map Selection:

• - When picking map size it would be nice to have the game remember what page I was looking at. If I played a huge game the last time I brought up this menu, start me on the huge game page, not the small games page. Small gripe but every bit counts towards player statisfaction. Also if the custom map tab is empty then skip it.
• - It would be nice if random maps were more customizeable. Creating your own is possible I know but why bother with the map builder when you could plug in the same numbers directly into the random map generator?
• - When setting options like Culture rate, Locked teams and such the game usually remembers your previous settings. But for some reason whenever I set fleet sizes to Huge it always reverts to Normal when I go to start another game.
• - When setting up teams and AI difficulties the game should remember your custom settings. If you want to set up very specific custom teams it gets tedious to do so over and over again. There are two ways you can do this, add a "remember" button that locks the current settings in place, or remember all changes and add a "default" button that reverts team settings to the original. Having both would work too. Being able to save team setting profiles globally and for specific maps would be an awesome bonus.
• - There doesn't seem to be a way to adjust starting resources, accelerated start doesn't count as it affects other things
• - The difference between normal and accelerated starts could be bigger. Accelerated start just does things I would have done anyway, build scouts, cap ship factory etc. It doesn't change the gameplay so much as save me some time. Instead you could add a third level called "Advanced" that starts you with multiple colonized planets.

--- Loading Screens:

• - The concept art shown on loading screens is very cool. However I never get to enjoy any of it because my game loads in a snap unless I am starting a new one. So instead of starting the game immediatly upon complete load ask the player to click the mouse or hit a key or something. This gives us all the time in the world to enjoy the art and also lets us do something else (like get a snack) while the game is loading and not have it start without us. Now some players might find this annoying, but its easy enough to add an option to turn it on and off.
• - I don't remember but I think vanilla Sins had different load screens than Entrenchment. Why not allow the loading screens to display all of them? You could even add custom settings like "randomize" (display a random image from the library) and "repeat" (disable this and no image will be repeated until they have all been displayed once).

--- Interface:

Construction:

• - When placing structures the interface will tell you where you can and can't place structures. However the "footprints" of other buildings are invisible, this makes placing structures in crowded locations difficult. I sometimes resort to "sweeping" the cursor around like a minesweeper hoping for the circle to turn green. To solve this problem you could display the real "footprint" of structures instead of thier unit circle which does not match up. This would make placing structures as close as possible and in even rows much easier. It would be even better if all structures could move, but thats an essay for another thread.
• - When a starbase is under construction you are allowed to pick its squadrons but not allowed to queue up station upgrades. That doesn't make sense at all. Currently you have to come back to the starbase later and that is a waste of time. Even better would be the ability to queue upgrades even before the ship arrives and begins construction. The resources would be reserved as normal but if you are building starbases 5 at a time just for the trade bonus that should not be a problem.
  
• - When constructing fighter hangars, its a pain in the ass to manually select which squadrons they should build every time. Why not allow us to set a default squadron configuration?
• - It is not possible to drag-select multiple units and scrap them all at once. This would be VERY helpful for getting rid of unused TEC minefields which are otherwise a pain in the ass to clean up. A simple improvement would be to add a second "scuttle" button, one scuttles the selected unit, the other scuttles all selected units. (or shift click the scuttle button to scuttle all, etc)
  
• Since it takes time for defense structures like the beam turret to turn around (time that could be spent shooting), we should be able to point them in any directions. For example if I leave one gap in a minefield its logical to assume that all enemies will funnel through this bottleneck. So by selecting all of my turrets and right clicking on the gap I could get them all pointed the right way and ready to blast the enemy the moment he shows up.
  
• - The AI that controls Autoplace Structures is a bit stupid. The computer tends to put everything in very random (sometimes useless) places. For example if I have a starbase and 4 gauss turrets defending one phase lane and queue up two repair bays, the computer will put both of them way on the other side of the planet. To far away to repair any of the other structures! I can think of ways to solve this but thats another essay for another day.
• - When autoplacing mines we should be able to designate which phase lanes must be protected. The AI tends to spread mines all over the gravity well rim and not clustered around phase lanes that actually lead to enemies. This is especially apparent around stars.
  
• - When you press ALT it shows among other things the firing arc of defensive structures. Mousing over one will highlight that particular structure's attack radius. However if you select one specific structure and mouse over its attack button no radius is displayed. I know you could simply press ALT to show it but that shows ALL of them at once and it can get very confusing when lots of structures are packed together.
• - Since starbases have multiple weapons it would be nice if the interface displayed multiple attack radii for each weapon at once when the starbase is selected.

Empire tree:

• - Ships in phase space should go in a different column altogether. When lots of ships are jumping around they make the empire tree jump up and down and even "jerk" the scroll bar out of the players hand!
• - A better tooltip for Pinning would be nice. I still don't know or have noticed what it does.
• - When stacking units you should be able to hit the button again and collapse them into even more condensed stacks than 10. 42 frigates take up a lot of room, but so does condesing them into 4 stacks and change. A single stack of 42 would be more practical in some situations.

Black market

• - When buying and selling and queing up ships for construction you can shift click to queue 5 at once. For large amounts of resources this is not enough and in some situations you are still forced to clickspam. How about adding ctrl-click to queue up 10 at a time? That seems simple enough to me but you guys might think of a better solution.
• - The AI players never seem to buy any of the resources I put up for sale. Ever.

And thats all I got for now.