Highfleet (Microprose!) has a super cool interface

Yeah, I think this true, but I don’t like it. Then again I haven’t been using strike fleets for anything but sudden strikes. I sent one ship off against what I thought was a transport and instead found that it had bitten off waaay more than it could chew.

I don’t know about bugs, but this reminds me of another “why”: when I did stick a new gun or even just put a missile into an existing hardpoint, the game prompted me to save it as a new design. For missiles this is dumb, but anyway you can give them new names, however whenever I went to repair that ship it would pop up two cards, both identical, which I assumed were the two “versions” of the ship but it was impossible to distinguish between them because they had no names or any other identifying info.

I couldn’t agree more, and it especially sucks because you just know you’re not going to be able to win a good campaign without getting balls deep in this crap.

Heh, I’ve made that mistake a couple of times too. Seems transports are always well protected. And since they always seem to see me coming somehow (I keep radar switched off), I’m thinking next time I may as well just hit them with everything I’ve got.

Not only do I love this game, I love the soundtrack, which is available in the files in a mix of MP3s and WAV and is also in this YouTube playlist right here (for my money the action starts at track 4; the first three tracks are just kind of drones):

I just had a campaign end because I got attacked by a plane and my flagship started, for reasons that remain unclear, in the air but close to the ground, and I didn’t realize it because the screen is very dark and it’s hard to see where exactly the ground is because of the background, and so it just sort of crashed and blew up because I didn’t fly it, game over.

That sucks!

I’m pretty confident in saying that in the future when I buy this on sale I will rage quit.

The combat is still the biggest sticking point for me. I’m getting a bit fed up of a newly-arrived ship instantly being pummelled by shots from three different enemies (so no hope of avoiding all of it), especially when inertia is such a huge factor. Hell, even when an enemy volley is clearly telegraphed you can often only just get out of the line of fire using afterburners. I’m not usually the type to complain about difficulty but I really feel like they need to tone it down a bit.

It’s probably the case that the developer expects you to spend a lot of time and money upgrading your ships, but that’s where the other major failing comes into play - the utterly woeful shipyard interface. I don’t know what to buy, I don’t know how to compare what I’ve got to what’s available, and I am increasingly of the opinion that @Kolbex is correct that the looted weapons thing is a nasty bug.

I still feel like this is a really good game, but I’m starting to get the nagging feeling that I’m being too generous toward it. Hmm. Like Shadow Empire before it, I will continue to plug away at it long past the point I’d usually give up, because I want to love Highfleet.

I think the shipyard interface definitely leaves a lot to be desired in general- no ability to for example repeatedly place the same piece without going back and forth to the tool to pick is rough.

Also no way to easily replace consumable weapons at the shipworks.

I think this, at least, is by design. When you’re somewhere that has missiles to sell there’s a little missile icon next to the shipworks label, and when you’re not you’re shit out of luck. Use them wisely!

Oh, i’m not referring to scarcity, but if i have enough missiles sitting in my ship holds, it’s a pain to get them on board.

Oh, I see. The sad thing for me was stumbling on a cache of nuclear missiles and realizing that they wouldn’t fit on any of my ships. :(

After being hunted down and killed once again by strike groups I decided to pop into the shipworks in the main menu to see about building some ships to…I don’t know, because I don’t really know what if any drawbacks the prebuilt ships have.

But hooooo, boy, this ship builder thing is yet another thing my teenage MechWarrior 2-loving self would have been waaay into. Aw, yeah, let’s slap some big guns on there. What, ammo? Power?! I didn’t even get around to putting crew modules or anything else on. This is gonna be A Project.

I’ve joined a conversation on Steam about the cost of installing looted items. One or two people there seem to think that it’s a bug that the cost is added to the bill, but the money is never actually deducted. I’ll have to keep a look out for that next time I play.

I wish the dev was more active there.

There’s definitely some things you can do- it’s pretty easy to build far more specialized ships than what’s available, and then there’s also the possibility of building heavily armored death cubes for combat.

…ok

Also, in what way are the two fire control radars differentiated? I assume one is “better” than the other because it costs twice as much and takes more power, but what do they even do? I’ve seen guns that say they require FCR, but why choose the more expensive one?

I’ve watched a couple let’s plays, and I love the look of the submarine-style navigation and search bits. But the combat looks like very twitchy mousing/keyboarding. My hands tire easily. Is it constant hammering away during combat, or more intermittent? I don’t mind losing, but I don’t want pain in my hands.

It is not twitchy; there’s no hammering. You hold down the mouse button and the guns discharge until they’ve used their stored ammo and then you generally let up for a few seconds while they reload, as continuing to fire is not very productive. Nor is it really what I’d call “sedate” as you’re always outnumbered and better be on the move, but the navigation is standard WSAD and smooth. Mostly the ships I use are not terribly fast, but even the quicker ones I wouldn’t call twitchy. What is your standard for that? I’d call Hades or Dead Cells twitchy. I would not call Dark Souls twitchy.

The unnamed piece is a jammer- it can throw off incoming cruise missiles but will light you up on everyone’s radar detectors(the dome)

Oh, sweet. How did you know this?

Despite the seeming emphasis on the combat, I am starting to come around to the idea that a run is made or broken not in combat at all (which ought, I suppose, to be a foregone conclusion by the time you engage in it) but entirely in the strategic map and choices you make there and perhaps even before the game in the shipworks.

I read it in the manual.

But yeah, in general most of the stuff you’ll be doing in the campaign has nothing to do with gunning it out- it’s more about setting yourself up to kill the strike groups, hopefully by ambushing them. Beating the town garrisons is a task that needs doing and you get more loot fighting an enemy fleet directly but if you want to be safe, use your cruise missiles.

It’s important to note that ELINT(your radar detector) has a much greater range than radar and is a better bet for finding enemy strike forces than radar- radar is more useful for hunting merchants who are not usually emitting. If you’re trying to tango with the enemy strike forces, i strongly recommend turning off your radar if they haven’t seen you some other way.