Forum Overview :: Gamerasutra :: Re: Questions about this series

[quote name="Fortinbras"][quote name="Mischief Maker"]It's amazing how little information professional reviewers manage to pack into 2-3 page reviews. [/quote] Tom Chick gave it a fucking brutal review when it first came out that I really disagreed with. I should really really write one for this place, I've been following it long enough. Half of this team, including their head writer Arinn Dembo came from Homeworld: Cataclysm. I'm also really excited about seeing what they'll do with North Star. [quote] Can you customize your ships? [/quote] Each ship is divided into three sections, Engine/Mission Profile/Combat (Front) Section. You can create any combination of three that you like. I usually have about 5 combat variations on my Cruisers, 6 Dreadnought variations, and 3-4 Destroyer variations. That's just how many variations I can come up with vis-a-vis their armaments. This isn't including special-purpose ships like Fuel Tankers, Colonization Ships, Recon Pickets, Further you can alter the armament on any ship turret. So that means 3 sections + however many turrets. On my Flagship Dreadnought this comes to 3 sections with about 5 choices for each. 30 hardpoints with about 4-6 choices for each except for the spinal-mounted beam cannons. The more mathematically inclined can come up with the number of total variations that will give you. Here's a picture of my Dreadnought selection screen with the pull-down menu for the Mission Section shown. Every icon on that Weapon Layout section is changeable. <img src="http://i306.photobucket.com/albums/nn259/fortincaltrops/designscreen.jpg"> [quote] Do you really have any choice in the designs? [/quote] Visual-wise every module looks slightly different. A Fusion Engine looks different than an Antimatter. A Command & Control Cruiser will have a different look than a Barrage-Section Cruiser. Each races ship usually follows the same design aesthetics, however. I.E. - a Terran Dreadnought is just a bigger looking version of a Terran Destroyer. You can customize them by setting yourself a decal logo for your ships and your faction "color" at the start, but other than the color stripe and the logo two Terran Dreadnoughts with the same ship sections are mostly indistinguishable. (In the included picture my faction color was set to red, so those are the areas it will palette-swap for whatever color you choose) [quote] Do you have control over fleet combat? Does having control really make any difference?[/quote] Yes. Sort of. There's a strategic turn-based round and then tactical battles over the planets that you have full real-time control over. The combat system meters out a certain amount of ships that can be on the field at once as long as you have a C&C ship in the battle. For a Flag Dreadnought this comes to about 4 Dreadnoughts (including the flag) as the maximum amount you can field. With a maximum of around 76 Command points total from a Flagship-class Dreadnought's C&C ability, a destroyer-class vessel is worth 2 command points, a Cruiser is worth 6 command points, and a Dreadnought is worth 18. So you could field 9 cruisers + Flagship, 4 Dreadnoughts including flagship, or Flagship + 27 destroyers. Or any mixture of these. During battle you can swap out ships that are damaged or perhaps useless against what you're up against and put them back into your reinforcement "queue", and the next ship in the list will come out of hyperspace to back you up assuming you have enough command points. You can shift-click and drag to move a group of ships around in this queue as well. Plus you can pre-arrange your queue and even the starting formation of your ships (though reinforcements always hyperspace in around the command ship whereever it is). As to whether it's a good idea to control them, it depends on the ship really. In vanilla Sword of the Stars, ships were terribly unresponsive to any command you gave and the most prudent choice unless you were just there to annihilate the planet from orbit using mass driver-hurled asteroids and needed your ships to hang back. (Siege Driver class Dreadnoughts are awesome, by the way. Think of that scene in Babylon 5 where Londo watched his fleet and it's the same thing) With Murder of Crows, ships are a lot more responsive. Aggressive mode is still the way to go if you just want to watch the epic visuals and not worry about command. I think it's worth it to position Dreadnoughts by yourself, and possibly Cruisers. Destroyers however I always set on aggressive and have them do their own thing. Special-purpose ships like Minelayers can and should be used manually. They've finally worked out the bugs in the pinpoint aiming system so now if you click on a ships drive section and command them to attack it they'll try to aim for the drive section, though in practice this is really useless and it's better to just destroy everything. Similarly, every single hardpoint is independently destroyable so you can disable a ship's weapons only if you really want to. Blowing out a ships drive does have serious consequences for them. You can't retreat an engineless ship to the end of your queue, and it has a tendency to go spinning out into deep space awful damn quick, basically depriving you of command points. And there's no self-destruct button that I know of. [/quote]