The campaign does not make a great first impression. First you must play the prologue (which is several missions and you can’t save during them). It walks you through all of the controls and goes over what most of tne numbers and symbols are, but it’s annoying that you can’t save. Fine, it’s just two missions. Although the game’s habit of throwing up 3 to 5 little windows with important information on the right side of the screen is a little annoying.
And then you start the campaign. The first 3 turns (well, the first stages of turn 3) are entirely scripted so far, with a single battle (turn 3 appears to turn control fully over to you after the scripted bits). I get it, there’s more tutorial stuff, but this is obnoxious and not how I want to play a “dynamic” campaign. It’s not until turn 3 that you can even look at your ships and figure out what they’re supposed to be good at. Don’t get me wrong, you can look at their abilities in battle (and you see arcs and ranges on abilities when you mouse over them). But the tutorial mentions you can see this information on regular weapons and I couldn’t figure out how to do it. It wasn’t until turn 3 that I could click on ships and even determine what the arcs for the basic weapons were (turns out I was using one ship wrong; it only has forward mounted weaponry so I need to switch it to engage from the front and not side or whatever). The ability to set engagement ranges and such isn’t helpful without knowing that e.g. the “munitions launching broadsides” fall off in accuracy at each range interval.
The tutorial aspect feels slapdash and not well put together.
I feel like maybe I’ve just outgrown realtime tactical games. I find this game to be really fiddly and an absolute chore to play. I think this is a “me” problem though, because I start to feel that way about Warhammer Total War battles as well, after the first 8 or so battles in a campaign.
I don’t want to have to do things like tell each ship when to go full burn to avoid a torpedo barrage. For fuck sake, that’s why there’s a captain on board! See that torpedo coming straight at you? Move, maybe? Oh, you need me to do it for you? Fine. Pause, issue order, resume, pause, tell him to turn off the full burn. None of this is interesting stuff to me, it’s just the tedium of moving around mindless drones that are too stupid to do much of anything on their own.
There’s just so many fiddly buttons everywhere, for nearly every ship. I find it far more obnoxious than I do interesting or engaging, let alone fun. And I’m having difficulty figuring out information I need. I started up a skirmish as the Tau, I choose a pre-built fleet that’s supposed to be pretty solid at all ranges. But in-game, there are options to choose stuff like whether the ship engages via broadsides or from the stern. But how I do tell where the weapon firing arcs are? I can see this for certain abilities like a torpedo launcher, but not for the main guns. I’m sure it’s there, but it wasn’t immediately obvious after spending a few minutes hunting for it.
I’m sure this kind of gameplay is fantastic for some people, but I’d only want this level of fiddling if I was commanding only the flagship in a larger battle. I don’t want to do have to do it for every ship in the field.
I’m pretty sure I didn’t like the super-clicky stuff even when I was 18. But I think in terms of preferences I was always old. There is a definite divide between people who want good unit AI and those who want it to be more about player micro skill.
