Post
by ҉ » Fri Jul 12, 2013 9:14 pm
JEDI'S OFFICIAL FIRST THOUGHTS ON REBELLION POST
I've played 1 and a bit games of Rebellion so far, both 1v1s against Easy AIs on Small Random maps. The first game we were both TEC Rebels, and the second both Advent Rebels.
1. The new interface for deciding your faction is OK. It's a bit less convenient than Trinity's, but with six factions now they had to do something else with it.
2. Being able to choose Random maps that are balanced for each player is a nice feature. I'll use that.
3. The alternative victory conditions are cool. I haven't experimented with them yet, but they seem like they'd provide essentially alternate gamemodes, which is cool.
4. In Trinity, all your units are pinned to the Empire tree by default. That's not the case in Rebellion. I set the Options to pin as many of them by default as it could, but it still doesn't pin scout frigates. I mentioned that in my previous post. All it means is that I have to remember to pin scouts when I build them, but it's still annoying.
5. The whole interface seems smaller in Rebellion than in Trinity. In Trinity the bottom bar covered the whole bottom of the screen, and there are gaps on the side now. The icons that show in place of the ships when you zoom out seem smaller as well, and perhaps a bit more detailed. A few of them have changed, too, but they're all still completely recognizable.
6. I'm not loving the Corvettes. I've only built the TEC ones so far, but even aside from being useless as far as I can tell, their voices are inconsistent with the rest of the TEC's ships. I don't know whether that's specific to TEC Rebel ones or not. But, like I said, they also seem fairly useless. They're really cheap, but they also barely deal damage and have very low health. They try to dart around like strike craft but can't blaze past an enemy ship like strike craft can, so instead they stop in their tracks right next to their target and then speed away in the same direction they came from, which looks pretty awful.
7. The main interface changes depending on what faction you are. The TEC one seems to be pretty much the same as the one in Trinity, and the Advent one has green stuff and a sort of scale texture thing.
8. There have been some graphical changes. Planets all seem to have different skins, and some ships look a bit different. Phase space looks different too. You can easily see that the entering-Phase-space thingie that ships project when they're beginning a jump is two-dimensional.
9. The gravity wells aren't actually circular. They're close, but you can pretty easily tell that they're actually polygons with lots of sides. This might have been the case in Trinity too, but the new visuals for gravity wells makes it much more obvious.
10. Dwarf planets do not change the game in any way. They seem to be pretty common, though.
11. Titans are surprisingly easy to acquire given how powerful they are. The research doesn't take that long, and is pretty cheap, and you only need four labs to do it. The Titan itself takes about five minutes to construct if you're not waiting for research, which isn't that long. 9500 credits makes it the most expensive single thing in the game, but that's not going to bankrupt anyone. They take a very long time to level up but are massively powerful even before they do. The impression that I got from it was that it's intended to be a early to middle game sort of thing that you hang on to for a long time, not an end game weapon the way superweapons are.
12. Bloody hell are the Titans ever strong. My level 2 Ragnarov killed the pirate base almost by itself.
13. The pirate bases are stronger than in Trinity. They've got Repair Platforms and Hangar Defenses as well as the Gauss Turrets.
14. I only constructed 20 ships in the entire first game I played. I built the usual 2 scouts, 5 light frigates, colony frigate, and Sova pretty much as soon as the game started, and then 10 Corvettes later to see what they did, and then I had the Titan within about half an hour of the game starting, and that was all the ships I needed. I could have done it without the Corvettes, too. That feels wrong to me in a number of ways. Given how cheap they are compared to their cost, the feeling that you need to rush to get your Titan before the other guy does, and their detrimental effect on fleet composition (it's pretty much unnecessary; the Titan can kill everything), I'm not at all certain the Titans were a good addition to the game.
15. TEC Loyalists don't have to go through the whole missile tech tree to get Novas. It's on its own, like the Kostura Cannon.
16. I've seen ships appear to screw up their pathfinding when asked to travel from one gravity well to another non-adjacent one. I sent a scout over to the enemy's homeworld and he ended up at a dead-end dwarf planet right next to where he was built. I can't be certain that I'm not just crazy, though. I might have screwed up the orders.
17. Colony frigates seem to be faster than they were in Trinity.
18. When you select a bunch of ships at once and tell them to go somewhere, they all move at the same speed. I'm pretty sure they weren't doing that in Trinity.
I think that's it for now. I might have more once I've finished the second game. I'd be interested to know if these match up with what other people who have played both Trinity and Rebellion noticed.
;.'.;'::.;:".":;",,;':",;
(Kzinti script, as best as can be displayed in Human characters, translated roughly as "For the Patriarchy!")
I only built 20 ships over the course of the entire game.
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