General thoughts on the game thus far - from a true TA fan....

I am very glad that somebody went back for another shot at making a sequel for TA. While SupCom had its moments, some unfortunate decisions made that game feel like less than a true sequel to TA.... Before I offer any criticism, I want to say that it was a lot of fun playing a game that almost immediately felt like playing an updated TA. Lots of good work went into the game thus far and there are some very interesting ideas expanding the TA base. The developers should be proud to have expanded the TA set in the right way. Now with those complements said, let me comment on the things that I really feel need to be addressed for this game to be the success it should be.

1) The AI copies TA almost to a fault. I was building missile ships and the missiles were circling certain targets for way too long. The AI still relies on a kind of macro strategy in order to be successful and more attention needs to be spent on giving the AI intelligence for specific situations that require "micro." For example, on one tropical map I was picking off clumps of 50+ bots stuck in a big and useless balls. I literally just let a single leviathan sit for 20 minutes killing hundreds of bots. Fun to watch but lame AI. In one match I spent 50 minutes getting my economy ready to explore the space side of the game. That match ended prematurely because the enemy AI commander walked into a few torpedo launchers sitting on the edge of my resource sprawl. That was not the kind of victory I wanted. Truth be told, most of these issues could be found in the original TA but 19 years later I would hope to see something a little better from the AI.

2) The map controls and camera angles are not quite as easy to control as I would hope for. I really feel that players should have more options to rotate their N-S view orientation while zoomed in. Zooming out to the planetary scale to control certain angles is rather irritating.

3) The curvature of some planets can become rather grating to navigate and view effectively at times. Obviously we cannot expect the developers to make planets large enough to have small curvatures and still run smoothly but perhaps an alternate "force flat" view would be helpful. At least a toggle version of a minimap that works like the flattened globe version of a map.

4) Unit balance needs quite a bit of work but I assume that will come eventually. For now I would settle for longer ranged AA and more resistant air units. It doesn't feel especially epic to have air units have to be on top of an AA placement to actually be hit and then get insta-pwned when they do fly in such an area. Perhaps consider aircraft anti-missile countermeasures. (Think Raven defense drone from SCII or other point defense.)

5) Unit animations look like TA. This is a good thing. Unfortunately, they also look like TA. This is a bad thing. Please give the skins a bit more detail. Spare just a few more polygons and vertices in your polygon budget. There is a difference between nostalgic and archaic. Same goes for more terrain detail. This is a beta though so I won't gripe too much.

I see you're new to the forums, welcome!

You should do a search before posting, in accordance to the forum rules as much of this has been discussed.

The game is in Beta and still needs a lot of work.

The AI is being worked on and is far from done. It doesn't even build naval units yet.

There are ways to rotate the camera. I can't remember the hotkey off the top of my head. You can also tap "n" to orientate to the north. Uber is also working on UI improvements. Much is still to be done.

Force flat? How would that work? We're playing on a sphere. I guess I can kinda see how it would work, but even then, it wouldn't really quite work... You should do a search. There are pages upon pages of discussion about a mini map. Since we're playing on a sphere, a traditional mini map is simply impossible. Uber is exploring ways to have a mini map. However, PA will support multiple windows. So in the future you'll be able to set up multiple windows to seamlessly control multiple planets. Which will be awesome.

There's no point in talking about unit balance right now. We have an incredibly small unit roster right now. They plan on adding 100+ units before launch, so balance is far from done.

Uber is also working hard on graphics and animations. Many additions and optimizations are to be made.

Like you said, the game is in beta. Lots of work still to be done.

Again, welcome to the PA community! Hope you enjoy your time here.

From what I remember, some of the forum members confirmed that the poly count is actually really high on the models.

But it's the textures, lighting and particle effects that might be putting you off.
I think these are all still coming in a future graphics update.

Don

't pollute your perspective by doing searches on this forum everytime you want to say something

Doing a search before posting is in accordance with forum rules. 9 out of 10 posts on the forums are people asking questions that have already been answered and making suggestions that already have dozens of pages of discussion on.

You would think, but if you read the forum first you have a much higher chance of regurgitating the often useless information that is already on there. My way you will know that your giving an honest opinion.