Comments - Darvin3

The readme is the closest thing to a manual. Figuring the game out is part of the fun. As for colonization, most planets begin inhabited by space monsters so you'll need to blast them first with fighters. If an enemy gets to the planet first, you'll need to siege him with bombers.

This game is an elegant fusion of simple design and implementation with some deep strategic consequences. It's got some balance issues and a couple exploits that need to be addressed, but for all its rough edges there's a lot to love here.

I totally agree with the others that I'd love to see some multiplayer. Hotseat is nice, and I've had the luxury of being able to play against a human opponent in this fashion, but hotseat is inconvenient at the best of times and you just don't get the same variety of ideas and strategies between two people as you would with a broader multiplayer community. Be sure to add a turn timer; there's nothing more infuriating than people who just refuse to take their turn.

I do have a UI gripe with regards to building structures. To build a structure, I need to select a build slot (this is somewhat redundant to begin with), which opens a sub-menu, then I need to select my chosen building from the sub-menu. Filling out 4 build slots on a large planet requires eight button clicks (each one on separate menus) and about 6-8 seconds since the sub-menu has to open and close repeatedly. With hotkeys (for instance, type "F" to build a factory in the first available build slot) this should take only four keystrokes which could be done in less than a second. In a game where entire turns can take as little as 10 seconds if you know what you're doing, building structures is unnecessarily time consuming.