[Taqwus]

* On space combat, you have two options (and you can choose before each battle unless 'only strategic combat' is specified, at least in single-player. I haven't tried multi, but that's probably strategic only (at least for PBEM!).)

Option A is to choose 'tactical' combat. In this mode, you can control each of your ships, giving orders to fire, move, etc. You can control certain details like not using a particular weapon in a turn (i.e. if you have a weapon that needs to recharge for 2 turns afterwards, you probably don't want to take a bad shot at long range unless you have too), launching fighters, and so forth. But it ain't a full ship sim (e.g. no fussing about damage control, engineering, etc) and it ain't a grognard simfest (e.g. no firing arcs). It's pretty simple. In this mode, you can also let the AI finish it (e.g. if you just wiped out the Last enemy escort and you can't be bothered to manually attack the rest), etc.

Option B is 'strategic' combat, where it follows its standing orders (e.g. "Optimal Firing Range", "Don't Get Hurt", etc) and resolves the whole combat for you in a blaze of moving colored squares (minimap). This is faster, but less entertaining/informative, then choosing "tactical" but letting the AI handle it (in the latter case, you can observe the effectiveness of weapon fire, etc, instead of watching colored squares).

Ground combat is purely automated -- you move a transport close to the enemy plant, order it to drop troops, and a battle happens. Unfortunately, I don't know of any way to synchronize drops from multiple transports. I'm not sure what the rules are, but it looks pretty darn rough on the attacker...

Editing game files -- might be done for altering balance, or for total conVersions and the like, or simply replacing .bmps and using your own ship art. With so many techs and parameters, I'd be surprised if people don't find probable balance issues, like Crystalline being too powerful in the demo (0.56). I'd be surprised if folks don't come out with, say, B5, Trek, or Star Wars TCs eventually. MoO II (Antaran art! Using the Harbinger graphic for a warship might be fun ;-)) might be used by a nostalgic fan. And so forth.

But, FWIW, I've spent played the demo many a turn w/o editing, and much could be done with simply house rules (e.g. host stipulates 'no Crystalline', or so forth -- at least in a human-only game). In that case, folks can play with the standard files...

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-- The thing that goes bump in the night