OK, this is my not-so-hot take; how things felt like after I settled in, migrated my private build of Rebal forward, etc. Here's a critique after seeing a lot of what 0.95 offered; I have millions of credits and a Zig and I beat the [SUPER-REDACTED].
1. The quest-lines, especially the "main quest" via Galatia, added a lot of nice warm RPG talking to the universe, and, for anybody new to the Sector, surely helped explain the lore a bit better. By the time I got done reading all the verbiage I was like, "OK, now I know why this release took two years", lol. That was a lot of writing!
I now feel like the game should have a proper intro, where a brief explanation is given about How We Got Here; most new players, diving right in, are going to find things... confusing, I suspect. For all these years, we just kind of skated by on what scraps were in the Codex and a few other places; adding all these fancy Fedex quests to fetch McGuffins suddenly means that a lot of players are going to be like, "uh, what's the Sector, what's the Domain, who am I and why do I care about any of this, and why the heck am I dumped into the Tutorial Adventure without context?"
It's the problem with a project that's been going on this long, I think; sometimes you need to dial the perspective way, way back and see it with new eyes again. When the game was almost solely about "build fleet, bash fleet against other fleets" it didn't need much explanation; now that it has something like a small novella's-worth of verbiage, most of it pretty good... but new players are dumped in without all the context the oldies already know, because we've been speculating about Codex entries for almost a decade. Before this hits Steam or any other major platform, this is a real need.
2. The quest-lines felt great, in terms of writing; mechanically, they're serviceable, but might want more polish when more important things aren't looming.
There are a few important variations, like, "go here, but do it on the sly" but... strangely, for a combat-centric game, there weren't any real combat challenges- no forced arena battles, no bosses other than the AI Uber Zig. That part might need work. I noticed, a couple of times, that Huge Fleets With Hostile Intent showed up after a story mission, but they were easily avoided, so they didn't matter. I never felt threatened or actually concerned I couldn't complete a mission.
3. I'm (unfortunately) going to have to stand by my first critique of the Skills system. It's a class system with pretty rocky balance issues disguised as a progressive system, and the roll-over mechanic isn't fun, it's punishing; having to pick irrelevant Skills to get to relevant Skills doesn't feel good; in some ways, it's even worse than "burn 3 levels to begin getting Skills here" was in the previous iteration.
I feel that, in the end, it's trying to do too much with too few choices, now that it's become clearer what buffs / mechanics add Fun. A pure class system that offered clean, distinctive, useful buffs for specific playstyles would have worked here, and frankly, with slightly more tuning, I think the old system would have worked better. I agree that it wasn't perfect, either, but this felt like an experiment that went awry somewhere between, "hey, that looks like a good UI flow" and "wow, returning players are going to expect a lot of these buffs to return because it's part of the standard progression of play".
I just never warmed to it, even when I took out the level cap. I really wanted to like it, but it was even rockier than the first stab at Skills was, and the small number of choices available, plus the way progression works, means that either they need to get watered down and avoid the really important things, or all try desperately to be equally valid, which is, frankly, impossible.
4. I really liked how the Perseans at least got mentioned in the story, but I felt like they could have contributed more. The characters in Tritachyan and Hegemony space fit their memes well.
The treatment of the Luddites fell somewhat flat; they just seemed rather dull and unsympathetic, rather than people who (rationally or not) fear the consequences of... something. Like, I enjoyed the Shrine where you can donate; that gave them a bit of humanity and an insight into their thought; but in the main storyline, they're just kind of ham-fisted.
I guess that's the issue with the Luddites, in the writing; what they should be afraid of is another AI War, or some post-Collapse event of techno-heresy that nearly destroyed humanity's foothold in the Sector. They just came across as vaguely Catholic, though, including that one terrorist who sounded like he'd stepped out of a character drama about The Troubles, which didn't serve them well.
The Path, in particular, should probably play out more like Al Qaeda; religious, yes, but really, they're hardcore geopolitical revolutionaries with a pretty specific endgame in mind (in their case, given the lore, demolishing the Hegemony through proxy wars, using planet-crackers to finish of Tritach, etc. might all fit). They wouldn't think small; sabotaging Industries is just work for the minor players and training for the next wave of leaders. Their endgame should be big and properly scary (or properly justified, depending on your POV).
This is the problem with Ludd in general; they don't appear to have a real goal, other than, "don't use AIs". The Hegemony and Tritachyon have specific goals and motivations; what was done with the Perseans fleshed them out a bit, but left me wanting to see more (which is a good thing in an Alpha, heh). But the Luddites didn't quite gel; Catholicism In Space, from 40K, is great, but Herbert's Jihad was a lot more interesting- the great sweep of a Violent Idea.
Ludd's death in the Gate Collapse, for example, or the hinted-at razing of colonies, nanotech outbreaks, etc. that is all darkly painted into the corners of the lore is treated a bit too hazily; the Hammers of Ludd would make great antagonists or allies if why they believe that Tech (or, at least, Some Tech) is Evil were more clear and less couched in vague religiosity. That's why I liked the Persean you interacted with; he shed some light on them as a faction and gave a bit of context for their history.
I really wanted there to be a branch early where the player could side with the Pirates, flat-out, no stopping. There was pretty much no way to take that route, ever. I do like that there are plenty of Missions available for players who want to roleplay that out, but for a game set in a universe where, to paraphrase Dan Abnett, "everybody has a headache" your character essentially works the lines of Neutral Good. I'm not a big fan of being evil in games, but it's always kind of strange when you have a universe where most of the players are, at best, shades of gray, you're allowed to commit genocide, but you can't decide to raise the Jolly Roger very easily (and, frankly, it still doesn't pay well enough to bother).
I do hope that Sindria gets a major side-quest line at some point. In the unreleased version of Rebal I have sitting on my hard-drive, the Sindrians have a unique fleet and lots of cutesy Codex entries where I tried to write Andrada-like sentences. I feel like their weird position as the Oil Barons of the Sector would mean they'd be real, real interested in the [SUPER-REDACTED], if nothing else.
5. In-system Bounties are worthwhile now. Out-system ones still don't quite pay their freight.
6. I super-approve of the occasional Actually Scary Pirate Armadas that show up.
7. I'm generally not going to comment on most of the specific buff / nerfs on Skills, except for the one involving Militarized Subsystems. That one ... if there were a few ships that fit into the super-narrow window of requirements and could become deadly-serious, I'd have bothered. It felt too fiddly, though.
Honestly, with most of the "limited to X DP" skills, I just ignored their existence; if I got them along the way, fine, if not, oh well; they just weren't worth building an endgame fleet around.
I also ignored all of the Frigate / Destroyer specific buffs. I wanted other things early, and by midgame, no amount of buffing was going to make Frigate-only fleets viable. I know that's going to cue somebody to show off their "I defeated X in Sim with Y" but that's not how the game actually works; in campaign, you're not taking down mid-game Bounties with 20 Frigates, leveled Officers, and 4+ Cruisers with a Frigate swarm on Normal without frequent fleet-wipes; it's not sensible. Don't get me wrong- I think those buffs were a Good Idea, especially for players who like smaller ships. They just weren't tempting ideas, when you're used to hand-piloting some Glass Cannon Assassin and using a fleet as a survivable hammer and anvil.
8. Maybe I just haven't stumbled upon it, but the sudden end of the Galatia quests after you fire up the [REDACTED] felt a bit disappointing. Shouldn't I be flogging the [REDACTED] to the highest bidder after discovering that all the precious research has been mysteriously destroyed, or something? It felt like when you think you're stepping off the last step in a staircase, but there's really two, if that makes sense.
9. The new SRM is cool because of the specifics of its mechanics. In certain situations, it's more efficient than a Reaper. I mean, I'm cool with that- in Rebal, even Reapers get a little terminal guidance, because they're just so bloody prone to bad AI use otherwise, and honestly, they don't feel OP. I feel like maybe the issue's with the Reapers; maybe they need to sometimes detonate if intercepted by PD or have bigger AOEs or... something. I can't figure out a single good use for even the Medium-mount version that isn't solved with something else better, though.
10. I don't think any of the [SUPER-REDACTED] stuff should be ever available to players.
11. I liked the [REDACTED] fleet option. By the time I saw that, I was playing Rebal again, so my opinion of balance was that they're really quite nice, despite all their obvious problems. IIRC in Vanilla they felt a bit too easy but it's been a long time since I've played a game out that far in pure Vanilla.
Well, this is long enough. Overall, this build gave the game a true story structure to hang the player's actions upon- and that's good; I think that if there's some explanation at the beginning to set the stage, it'll really work, and if there are several ways in which that "last step" can be inserted into the player's story, it'll be pretty darn good.
