Impressions:
So I played my first game of B3 with Egable. We did a random galaxy (now we know better) on medium… locked teams, the 2 of us versus 4 comps.
First the game seemed to balance resources so that we could claim as much territory as the other 4 players… I kind of liked this. The AI however suffered from never researching culture, ice-colonization, or long range jumps.
We were all in one system, but then when I actually realized there were 4 other stars, I sent an Akkan and found my first Gas Giant. Notably Egable found out the hard-way that certain nebulas restrict anti-matter use!
So terrain is much better, the dead asteroids seem to be gone and replaced by fields, the fields and nebulas need to be more visually impressive though. I cannot stress enough how important having some empty space is! It stretches your supply lines so that you can be over extended which is a very good thing! Nebulas were quite nice, I like the effects they have on battles and some ambushes could be planned.
Gas Giants while very pretty is a big disappointment, I was really hoping for moons. We really should have moons, even if all you get is a 0 population world that cannot be upgraded in any fashion! That would let me build a couple of gauss turrets…. If your afraid of having 5 moons on a Gas Giant allowing fortresses just restrict their individual tactical placement to the area around the moon…. This would give you 5 very weak outposts, but would slow the enemy. That being said thank you for having the Gassers because it does add a very large no-man’s land that is nice.
The new logistics was fine, but it was sad that I wasted two slots on every asteroid if I had a trade station! A building that takes up 2 slots would be nice… like an outpost structure, which simply increases population by say 5…. Overall not very useful lol… but would be pretty.
The AI had some troubles with bounty; it eradicated the pirate sector in our home-star and then put 20K bounty on me and eventually 65K of bounty on Egable. The AI only attacked once, they killed an over-extended ice colony of mine… but they never colonized it. In fact the fleets that killed it stayed there the entire game! The AI is too happy blocking only one entrance to systems with Gauss Cannons… which by the way seem to have had a range increase? Perhaps not, perhaps the radius you’re allowed to place structures in was increased. Either way I found myself moving on the map more to avoid these nasty fortifications… they don’t stop us from attacking but they do make us maneuver… a good thing.
The new mouse is just not for me, perhaps for other people, but I just didn’t like it. I also wish the game had higher starting resources, as this makes the game go faster, also the colonization frigate could be allot better… I think you might want to consider making a somewhat viable combat ship, to counteract its utter uselessness compared to taking an Akkan. Why would you ever not choose an Akkan? You don’t need to buy colony frigates, and you will get new territories much faster, it’s great! If the colony frigate had say enough guns and armor that it could clear an asteroid with say 3 frigates (though with losses), then this would quicken the pace of the game quite a bit.
Pirates were fine, Egable will say otherwise, but one should take into consideration that if the AI wasn’t wasting so many credits on a bounty then the Pirates would not have been such a problem, also Egable never built more than a couple of light carriers and I don’t think they were ever engaged with Pirates, the single most important ship class against Pirates IMO.
