You can pre-order this baby now and get a downloadable beta version to play with, until the release version becomes available. Its a bit of a scenario based spaceship designer and tweaker, that then pits your fleet loadout against an enemy and you can watch it in glorious 2d. Its more polished graphically than AI War (at the moment), but its limited to smaller skirmishes and gives you a more fleet based customiser than any resource collection or planetary conquest game. I'm not entirely sure it will match the replayability nor the AI quality of AI War, but it does seem to give you a ship building scenario based tweaker to play with. Worthwhile supporting if you're a space strategy fan methinks.I've bought it, but I've not given it much time to be honest. Its definitely a game that needs some reading around the types of weapons and what not, because the first mission cannot be done with the default ship loadouts. I haven't quite fathomed out what I want, and what I don't want in my fleet yet. I've played the first scenario about 5 times now, with different types of ships, and all have failed abysmally. You have no idea what the enemy/alien ships are made up of, so its more of a case of learning what works, with trial and error, and sifting through the info on offer.
Theres no direct control of the fleet once you start a battle, you sit back and watch, but there are quite complex orders that can be given, setting target priority percentages, and range max and mins. So its all about the setup. Then its watch and re-assess your setup.Its interesting, but I think it needs some time to set aside and digest all the information and setup options, before you're going to get any reward/payback from it. The battles are very nice to watch, nice missile/beam effects kicking off, ships on fire, fighter squadrons swirling in for an attack, shields pulsing etc. The trick is deciphering the battles progress into changes you need to make to the setup to be more successful next time.
Worth a punt if you are into space battles and tweaking spaceship loadouts. Like Nexus: The Jupiter Incident, without the storyline, or the 3d. Big space fleets in epic combat. It contrasts nicely with the 4X/RTS style of AI War, you're getting two different mechanisms to play around the space battle arena.
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