Posting in the correct location this time I'm sorry.

After all of this fun I am beyond ecstatic to finally be playing this game; https://www.reddit.com/r/SoSE/comments/ppq0go/mr_fraser_is_actively_around_in_sins_content_an/

For starters, my system specifications is:
Windows 10 64-bit Home, Intel i9-10850K, 24GB DDR4 RAM, and NVIDIA RTX 3070.

Engine:
Thus far, absolutely outstanding. You can tell that the late game stutter of Sins 1 was something that was thoroughly considered and addressed in the new engine. I found myself amazed at how many strike craft I was able to have on-screen fighting with minimal frame rate loss. I experienced 0 crashes during my first play-through, and went through several attempts at trying to crash the game including ALT-tabbing out and into the game, running downloads in the background and even locking my PC and coming back to it, with the game still opening up to the pause menu. I feel like the fleet sizes were good, but I found myself wanting to set fleet limit to 4,000 supply and see how many ships I could get on screen but that's still a limit. Perhaps something that could be considered in later builds is a toggle/slider bar that maybe lets you select up to 200% fleet supply for a game if the player wants to really utilize their system to the fullest extent. Some games (that I will not mention) have modes that let you do everything from changing unit scale and size, would be a neat feature to see for Sins II, if anything.

Ships:
The icons (I anticipate) are placeholders for future icons, as well as the voice files. However, the ships themselves FEEL like the TEC. I appreciate the focus on kinetic weapons such as auto-cannons and missiles. They almost seem like they are how the TEC would have begun shifting ships as the conflict protracts. I will miss our friend the Kodiak dearly, but I will gladly accept another auto-cannon. I did notice that even after the final hull stability/repair upgrades, I did struggle to keep capital ships alive under focused, sustained fire. I do not recall hearing any warnings of critical damage or shields being down for either the Kol or Akkan, so that just may be a feature not present yet. I am -beyond- pleased with the removal of capital ship crews as a resource and feel the exotic resources are a good stop-gap from keeping someone from capital spamming early on. However, I did struggle to eventually get several more capital ships out based on the need to reach T9 research and exotic refineries, however I did feel the minor faction routinely offering random resources to bid on helped mitigate that. I was hoping that the capital ships were going to appropriately 'dwarf' cruisers and subsequently, titans absolutely dwarf everything, but felt like it was much like the first game. Yes the ship is larger, but a Kol is still roughly the size of 1.5 Orgrovs. Similar hopes exist for star-bases being immobile titans, but I will wait to see how that plays out.

Sub-note:
I love the weapons bank info you provide for the ships. Makes it easy to see where the guns are, and which side to point at the enemy. The ships path-finding routinely elected the best side for engagement based on what I expect the central mass of enemy ships was.

Research:
Not much to say here until we see more. I appreciate the simplicity of only having one research lab and find that will be very beginner friendly, but I struggled to understand initially if I needed to build planet-side labs in conjunction with orbital labs to receive credit (1 planet lab + 1 orbital lab = 1 research tier). Eventually figured out no. I like the fact that if you attempt to build a ship, it auto-queues it for research. Complaint here is it took a VERY long time to get through the later research. To the point there were instances I found myself waiting for a hull research to finish so I could continue pushing along. I'd be curious to see if there's a plan or intention to allow (1) research per 'tree' to occur simultaneously (you research 1 planet thing at a time, 1 economy thing, 1 ship, etc.) or perhaps find a way to incorporate more labs correlating to higher research speeds.

Combat:
This is likely my biggest 'complaint' and I still loved it. The combat, especially in larger engagements 'feels' very, very fast. To the point I found myself moving down to .25 and .50 speed to both monitor my capitals to make sure I wasn't losing them, and actually enjoy watching the turrets pick targets to engage. At 1x, I felt after I picked a ship to go watch get destroyed, the ship would be on its last 100 health or so and die as I got there. I'm not sure if this is intended based on actual DPS values set to weapons, but again, 'felt' fast (but I was also having fun). There was a pretty hiccup initially where none of the capital ships or Garda's were engaging the missiles. I reloaded the game and still couldn't get it to work, however at some point the turret gunners seemed to remember that they were in fact being paid to shoot that missile down, and did so forthwith. I also was a bit annoyed that the Percheron's (Yes I get it, they get lonely at the edge of the gravity well) kept deciding that they were going to charge into the fleet engagement and help. I found myself having to micro them back away to keep them alive on a few occasions.

Economy:
I love it. The trade. The exotics. The need to build up a planet before it's actually valuable incentivized me to figure out garrison fleets (one of my favorite things added in, to include the manual control) and plan my main fleets track, so I could go defend my new front-line while it becomes more valuable while still keeping attention towards other parts of my empire, because now there's suddenly a phase lane that let's the enemy leap right into my flank. The planets respective infrastructure still feels like I can focus a planet into what I need or will need in terms of resources. Excavating on planets is called out in the guide but it took me a bit to find the actual button on the UI. I couldn't figure out how to change or alter/scuttle the upgrades I placed on the planets (garrison, trade income boost). If that's something that you only get to elect on the initial colonization and first build-up, that makes sense. Otherwise I couldn't find a way to un-build (I was going to start placing tons of garrisons around my key shipyard worlds but was stuck with trade improvements). Trade ships carrying resources is going to inevitably lead me to making convoys to protect my most valuable trade routes, which I'm excited over.

Other Compliments/Complaints:
-Zoom to cursor. I could not turn it off for the life of me. There was no convenient button in the top-left part of the screen so I suffered. Please UI people, may I please have a button?

-Camera controls; if you would click a ships icon to focus on the ship and then mouse-wheel without de-selecting the ship, the camera would shake violently and end up on the underside of the galaxy and I'd have to zoom all the way out to regain my bearings and refocus on the planet/gravity well I was looking at.

-Soundtrack makes me want to sit there and listen to it. Kudos to the sound team!

But that about sums it up for Game #1, and will continue to provide feedback where it is requested!