blackwater wrote:

Is there any way to completely skip the animation after each attack from your ships, or hit on your ships? I realize you can press enter to cut it off once it starts, but I really wish I could skip it altogether.

I'm having trouble figuring out what my options are between battles. Partly it's just that I really don't want to interact with the story based stuff at all. It kind of reminds me of Starcraft 2's single player campaign, where every level select screen came with cringe-inducing cinematics. At least SC2 let you see what the mission was going to be like (sort of) before clicking OK. And it was somehow more obvious what your choice were.

The UI is OK, I guess. They tell you a bit about how much damage each attack option might do, and where you can move, and so forth. But they really should spell out the "rules" more clearly (what weapons are good against what ships, etc.). Like if there was a card you could pull up that described it.

Maybe this is a bad comparison, but this kinda sorta reminds me of the combat in Master of Orion. I only ever played the first MOO (I heard the others were giant clusterfucks). Of course, that game had a square grid, not a hexagonal one. But still the biggest flaw with MOO's ship combat was that it was TOO SLOW! There was no good way to speed up the ship animations and the AI turn time. It got maddening after the thousandth ship battle waiting for your ship to crawl across the screen to engage the enemy. The animations went much faster when you pressed the AUTO button, but that button also made the AI control your side's ships. And the AI was super dumb and often managed to lose even with a big advantage. Also "huge" ships were super broken in MOO1...