Greetings,

I've very much enjoyed putting some hours into Sins, but I wasn't really a member of the community. I wonder if I'll change that for Sins 2, regardless I'm happy to provide my meager assistance for the development of an excellent game.

So far I've played a 1v1 on the test map, it lasted about 4 hours as I tried to clear out the research tree and snowball the enemy. I'll go ahead and list as many thoughts as I can regarding the game as is and its performance.

Performance

I'm on a high powered rig, Nvidia 3080. There was no stuttering of note, and even when I struck at the enemy homeworld with over 1300 supply in my fleet, I could zoom into the world without a single stutter, for now I have nothing negative to say about the engine and game performance.

Ship designs

Exceptional, each of them were very well designed and I quite liked looking at them. I was an Advent fan in Sins so I look forward to seeing how those go.

The Map

The changing map, especially around the planets orbiting the star was extremely engaging. However I wonder why planets especially in the mid rim only sometimes had paths to their moons open. I often found myself blinking as I found a new moon out of nowhere deep in my territory.

Economy

Credits are king, but in a bad way. I never found myself wanting for Crystals or Metal throughout the entirety of the game outside for MAYBE the first 5 minutes in order to build research stations. However Credits? I could find an effective way to spend each and every one of them at any point in the game. Honestly trading posts were mandatory and every single planet needed one. And we were playing as the TEC which are known to have greater credit gains. I believe the economy is going to need a lot of work, especially when it comes to the other factions.

Next was the exotic materials, personally making something that maybe important in the meta either RNG or costing big resources might be dangerous. From my first reaction, those seem to be only used to build and empower capital ships and titans. But from my perspective the finding and the added costs of further upgrades, on top of the fact I feel Capships currently have a lot less value when compared to Sins 1 made me question why I ought to put so many resources into them. In the end, I didn't build a single module on either of the capships I created.

Planet Development

There were a lot of interesting ideas here. Passive mining on the planet needing to be upgraded to full before mining asteroids could be built was an alright hurdle. I wonder if we can consider adjusting the penalty for planets that are under leveled a bit, especially since a lot of advanced research is needed to make oceanic planets viable for example. I don't need an ocean planet way in my backline to have unneeded defense upgrades just to stop the credit bleed for example.

The Most interesting part of this system from my POV was the Garrison system, and while it IS an expensive upgrade, for 2K credits (Again I didn't think of metal and crystals at all past 5 minutes in my game) a pop 100-200 free supply and free ship construction I feel like can turn the tide in a lot of battles in a bad way. Suppose you have the max Garrison upgrades, and most planets have a warp lane to 1-2 other planets at any given time. So, with the garrison system as is. If two-three adjacent planets have it. You have an entire fortress of up to 600 supply of ships guarding all three planets at any one time for a mere token 6000 credits, and as ships fall more are produced. That's ON TOP of defensive systems! If you ask me to stop a massive enemy fleet in its tracks for a while for 6K credits while mine races back to defend, I'd have no problem with this. Now I just imagine what 1-2 starbases in the system would do, would you need to have a nearly maxed out fleet to take out a single planet? Even if you had one, would it not come to the point where Defenders could simply leave their own primary supply using ships in a choke point and it would be nearly impossible for an attacker to crack through using ships alone?

Research

I know this is just a first pass, so I won't harp on this much. I think I prefer not having to make the choice of building Military and Civ research posts overall however and just build two research posts. The fact they're the engine producing PSIDAR makes it an important structure outside of your coreworlds as well, so, kudos on that.

Capships

I think they're tuned to an appropriate power level compared to their supply cost at this point. Other then my criticism above regarding the exotic resources that I found too cumbersome to worry about, the capships as they are fine, no battle regen is probably better for the game overall I feel at least for the hull, I still think maybe shield regen should still be in play. But I only felt the desire to build the two available ones and no more with this current build. Part of that maybe due to the fact the AI either couldn't or didn't want to build one either?

AI

The AI was... pretty bad. I had one fleet to fleet engagement with them and after I destroyed the captial ship and that fleet. I wondered around their system until I found one of their planets. Once getting to them the AI started building ship after ship and constantly sending them to their doom on one of my now garrisoned planets. Adjustments to that behavior sooner or later would be appreciated.

Minor Factions

An interesting idea, I wonder how the balance of Minor factions will go though after Culture is added? My concern is the Advent, who excels in using culture, will overall sweep up the minor factions and will control the pirates on top of that as well as getting that further econ boost from the mining coalitions. As I didn't have any issues with metal and crystal, and the pirates weren't ready to go play yet, I didn't really engage with them in my first game.

Final thoughts

In my first experience with this first iteration, I think we're on our way to making a fitting successor to Sins. Please keep up the good work and I hope to become a familiar face around the board. Thank you for the opportunity.