Every map is constructed with soaring, titan-scaled asteroids and alien ruins. The missing polish in both the story and mechanics felt like a shame, considering the imaginative and consistently beautiful level art and ship designs seemed to hint at what could have been a much more epic and satisfying tale. These situations weren’t difficult because I made bad decisions they were difficult because I didn’t have the patience to continually redirect and otherwise babysit all of my cannon fodder for the duration of a long fight. The fragility of many of my fleet’s core units, and the sluggish pace at which I could replace them, meant I was spending most offensive missions prodding the enemy installation, losing all of my fighters in the first 30 seconds (in spite of healing abilities), and being forced to gun my impulse engines in full reverse and repopulate. On the other hand, missions that required me to assault a fortified position quickly became frustrating, drawn-out slugfests until I unlocked the late-campaign tech needed to take down buildings and capital ships quickly. Things came right down to the wire, with all of my units battered or destroyed, plugging a bottleneck in a desperate final stand as the last civilian ship made its getaway. One such scenario involved covering a transport evacuation, Battlestar Galactica-style, while under heavy fire from all directions. In particular, missions that charged me with defending a static point or running an enemy blockade required quick thinking, good unit synergy, and smart use of capital ship abilities in order to come out victorious. No two in the campaign had me facing the exact same objectives, and some of them were genuinely tense and rewarding experiences. This isn’t to say that the missions aren’t enjoyable. This removed all considerations related to map control that may have made certain missions more interesting, and my only real concern outside of combat was determining which units to bring to a fight. I could certainly plop down buildings as I went along, but doing so only ever seemed to drag out the mission length for very little economic reward. My resource counters ticked up at such a generous rate that I rarely needed to build a structure to keep my fleet at the population cap. There are resource-generating nodes on each map that can be tapped with space stations and upgraded with static defenses, but in most missions, they were simply unnecessary. The strategic side is relatively shallow in comparison. Control groups can alleviate this problem somewhat, but those with an allergy to intense micromanagement shouldn’t even enter the kitchen where Ancient Space has been cooking. The really cool clickable abilities (like cloaking and EMP missiles) that differentiate each ship type qualitatively take a back seat to this constant target management. Even on the lowest difficulty, manual target selection seemed mandatory. I spent most of the larger battles with the action paused, calling out individual targets for each ship, since the unit AI isn’t smart enough to prioritize foes its guns can actually make a dent in. While this encouraged fleet diversity, it also had the unpleasant side-effect of forcing me to micromanage every single one of my units almost constantly. I could have 12 ships with no damage bonus against Medium targets, and they would take far longer to kill a single Medium enemy than one friendly ship that did have such a bonus. There are no generalists, and upgrades only play to bolstering the strengths of a given ship type-never shoring up its weaknesses. Most ships’ weapons can only damage two or three of these, and plink almost entirely harmlessly off of all others. Combat uses a rigid rock-paper-scissors formula based on the type of a ship’s hull-Small, Medium, Large, Extra Large, and Buildings. Unfortunately, these choices didn’t have much of an impact in the inconsistently paced real-time battles ahead of me. Each ship type has three upgrade slots for damage, armor, and speed, and my primary carrier was eventually able to earn several tiers of progressively powerful perks, adding up to a satisfying supply of fleet customization. Joining them along the way were just over a dozen gradually-unlocked constructible ships, ranging from small, scrappy fighter squadrons to impressive, photon cannon-equipped bruisers that stood as near equals with my heroes. The fleet I was to command through this narrative was anchored by persistent hero-unit capital ships, complete with voice-acted captains (including those mentioned above) and a host of potent special abilities.
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