Nice game, but early game ...
Sins Forums
I've played the game for a while now and I think it's pretty good, at least when I play against an AI.
When I play online, it's just about spamming frigates, then corvettes, then bombers. And there's just nothing I can do about it, except to watch my smaller fleet get annihilated, and to see my capital ships get bombed to shit without any chance.
Can't you make the early game more interesting than this?
Take the weapon upgrades for example - you get a 5% boost and it costs you more than a frigate. So you need about 30 frigates before it becomes interesting to upgrade your ships. It takes a long time to build 30 frigates and in the meantime colonize your worlds and such. Why is that 5% boost so expensive ?! You can't upgrade your weapons all that time, it's just not worth it.
The guns for planetary defense are also pretty much useless. They too cost about as much as a frigate and against an AI player I suppose that's ok. But a human player can just ignore them because they have a short range and they are fixed to their position. Also, they are powerless against bomberspam. So what's the use of them in the early game? Basically none... and late in the game, when you can finally afford them, then you hit a brick wall - you can build about 20 of them in an average solar system ... that is 20 guns against a huge armade of hundreds of ships.
The figther bays are also kind of useless. For TEC at least. They do a bit of flack damage and give you 2 fighters, but you can only build about 6 of them. That hardly slows down a late game fleet.
Now the starbases on the other hand ... those are really, really powerful. And expensive. And again, limited range and they don't move (except the Vasari). So again, powerless against a bomber spam and also against long range torpedoe ships. Imagine what happens when the enemy attacks and your fleet is several jumps away? A good player willl just rape your planetary system. And why? Because the attacker has a longer range weapon than the defender.
What's the use of a capital ship? Basically none. It costs a lot of money and takes a long time to upgrade. And then it gets destroyed by a bomber spam... just useless.
There's also another way to reduce that "problem", namely to reduce additional damage if too many vessels target one ship. It's kind of an efficiency loss. In real life you also don't have hundreds of bombers targeting a single ship, it would just get too crowded and they would crash into each other or they would need to take evasive manouvers to avoid a crash. At the very least they come in waves and not all at once. Same goes for the corvettes of course, why would 100 corvettes be able to attack a capital ship all at once and each of them doing as much damage as if he were alone?
So if he is not in range of the Argonev, and never will be, your Red Button was just a waste of money that cannot be gained back.