wow, new cruisers too. so I guess those guys fulfill more or less the role of artillery, which the old lrms did partially do in vanilla. good, I always thought a unit along those lines would be cool, but the lack of hard defenses would have made it fairly useless. wonder if there are any race differences here to speak of.

did anyones else get the stats of that starbase? seems pretty hefty, I read over 15.000 hull points, 7000 shield points, 6 squadrons and a combined dmg output of over 200. I also like what they mention in the preview that players have the option to chose between military, manufacturing and trade upgrades for starbases. reminds me a bit of gal civ 2, which had a solid concept in that respect.

one slight question: with so many weapons facing so many directions and an immobile structure, is there a way to tell a starbase to split its firepower to a handful of distinct targets? if the base is swarmed at all sides with enemies, I may want to dedicate the starboard side weapons the one enemy capships and port weapons to another. but if I picked just one target, then all weapons with appropriate arcs and range would fire and the rest of the weapns would be outside of my direct command. which would be a pity.

other than that, good to see a quality preview by gamespot, helps them rebuild credibility.

two further comments: I like the bit where it says that scouts are basically the only ships capable of detecting mines. as such, it could be viable defensive strategy to mine a grav well and take out the enemy scouts before the field is cleared. at least it sounds like providing a few more choices in the mix.

lastly: do any of you developpers have connections to eastern europe? a lot of tec units names sounds like slavic words, at least from what I could tell.ogrov, askev, krosov and several capship and planet names. just a point of interest, could just as well be random or what not.

wants to play that baby.

Looks nice.

Video following fighters is always pretty. Reminds me of that video I posted once in beta 3, wonder if that is still on youtube.

Oh, and the explosions still look nice.

Though I wonder why the circle like explosion shockwave still is used... does a spherical shockwave just look bad? (Nitpicking )

Btw. that ohh, ohh sound of the nukes should really get a lower priority, it covers almost all other sound effects.

Edit: Oh and this artwork is awesome:

When I read them this morning they were pretty positive on the game, but started going off on a tangent of physics in space, not that that's too surprising I guess

Perhaps they will orbit?

Minefields and subspace inhibitors will help. Starbases will have very long range as well, so unless you do a poor job of placing one, it should be able to deal with incoming fleets pretty well.

how do you kill minefields? it was said that scouts can locate them, but what can you do to still go through that area? otherwise the defending player can just mine the whole area, provided that is not cost prohibitive of course. but with the monsters called starbases in the fray, those expenses should be quite negligible.

I'm just speculating, but that's how I would make them work.

They are invisible. If you've a scout in the same grav field (though I would prefer if you would need a scout near it, ie. a dedection radius on scouts) you can see them and thus attack them like everything else.

Probably best against them would be defense vessels/flakk frigates, guardian push ability.

or maybe fighters/ squads? fast and maneuverable enough to evade the mines.

You've still got the regular defenses. A starbase alone would be good, but probably not good enough.

As for entry points on opposite sides, (depending on the range os the SB) it may be better to place it somwhere in between.

TEC got the Planet Shell thingy so they shouldn't be worried about fleets sneaking behind their starbase.  But I am not sure about the other two.