I loved designing ships in Galactic Civ II and what I loaded up today in galactic civ III today brought back all the memories of my previous exploits. Some bad, but most good.
Here are the main things that came to mind after an hour of messing around with the new shipyard.
The Good:
- I am glad to see all the old features of scaling and fine rotation controls.
- Awesome looking parts I actually want to put on my ship.
- More Hard points to place parts!
- Previous Galactic Civ II players will feel right at home.
The Needs work:
- It can be very frustrating trying to get the part on the hard point you want.
- Would be nice for a way to rotate parts with keyboard as well as having the fine adjustment dial on the bottom. Maybe just basic rotation with keyboard and finer control with the dial.
- A more intuitive layout overall. For a gal civ 2 vet it only took me a minute to figure out how to use, I don't think new players will have as much luck. Should spend time enjoying game, not figuring out how to play game, or skipping features due to not understanding how they work.
- A better way to rotate and move camera in ship build screen. Way it is now feels clunky.
- Symmetry mode definitely a good addition, just couldn't figure out how to use it. Maybe this is just me.
- Possibly more subcategories to help see what parts were intended for. I love being able to place them wherever and however I want, but sometimes it can be hard to tell what they were actually intended to be.
That's all I can think of for now, might add a few more here soon after I design another ship or two. Designing ships is probably one of my favorite aspects of games like this, I can easily spend a quarter or more of the total time I play the game designing and testing ships.