Some observations

[Phoenix-D]

Uh, jimbob..the game does auto-save when you go through warp points. Check the Last game in the list. Note that it only saves one auto-save though.

[Ed Kolis]

Originally posted by Wydraz:
It would be nice (and somewhat more realistic) if planets had atmospheric halos so you could pick them out a bit better. (!)

You can put "engine glows" on ship models, so it seems feasible that you could put a bunch of them in a spherical grid about a planet to create a halo effect. Not sure how realistic it would look, though. You can also put blinking lights on models (look at the floating cargo crates)... it might be kind of cheesy to have a planet surrounded with a grid of blinking lights, but consider it a computer navigational aid

[Captain Kwok]

You can increase the in-game lighting to avoid crashing into dark planets etc.

Check the hotkeys in the options menu to find what keys do that as I can't remember off-hand.

[Ed Kolis]

I had another idea about the halo; there's a field in StellarObjects_XFiles.txt called "Star Glow Color"; presumably setting this to some RGB value other than 0,0,0 would make the planet glow faintly. I tried this, though, and it doesn't seem to be working; I posted in the beta forum about it so we'll see if anyone figures it out...

[General Woundwort]

Originally posted by jpowell:
I was more than a little underwhelmed by the demo. Dated (crude?) graphics in a strategy game are acceptable because much of the game occurs in your mind and imagination.

OTOH, the simpler the graphics, the easier it is to mod. And the hallmark of the whole Space Empires line is not high-end graphics, but playability and modability. That's what most of us here are looking for. And MM/Aaron usually delivers.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

i can say for certain that you can't give yourself 2000000 by messing with the starting character file. but gamehack took care of that.

oh, and on a side note, the difficulty scales based on your ship and i'm pretty sure, characteristics like armor regen.

[Phoenix-D]

You can also turn on the grid (press G) I find it makes objects much easier to see because of the contrast.

Oh, and while you can't give yourself a million credits to start, you CAN lower the ship costs.