[Thermodyne]

Well after quite a few hours of playing, I still have some doubts. I have yet to complete a game with out a memory error crash, so my observations are all from less than 50 turns in.

I find that the more eye candy I turn off, the less cluttered the UI feels. Big displays with 1400 settings helps too.
I also find that this game seems to want to be driven from the key board, way to many extra clicks in the mouse controls. It would be nice if the mouse’ing was cleaned up.
The way the game reports events is a disaster, nuff said. I really hope they fix this. I really do. Before they release the game. Seriously this needs to be fixed.
And while I have yet to get far enough along to have a large empire and fleet, I suspect that it will be somewhat more difficult to manage it.

Early on, most of the changes I have experienced are eye candy and FPS stuff. I can’t really say that I have found many improvements to the strategy part of the game. The UI seems to go out of its way to be less than useful. And there seem to be windows that are redundant, asking questions that could be answered in the next window. I also find that many of the windows are too much candy and too little information. I have yet to encounter an AI anywhere near as smart as a TDM-AI. And some are back to SE4 demodumbness. IIRC the SE4demo AI’s would also send ships through the warp points one at a time even after they knew the WP was defended by a fleet.

I have done some runs on several different systems, and so far all work equally well up to a point. (Same Memory exception on all three) I’ll give it a run on Vista next, and the perhaps XP64.

All in all the game is playable and being new, it holds my interest. Let’s hope for a demo patch in the near future.