Drastic

Wasn't the station-frontend issue, I made sure to get that along with the main demo. That did happen back before I used the /d1 command line, however. It did lock up last time I played, after 90+ minutes in. Station defense mission, done without a single hitch. About an hour in, a much larger collection of hostiles came in, along with friendlies, and duked it out with some help. (Alpha One & Two bought it, sadly.) Intruders caused a bit of problem, killing one marine (four of the ten were offship at the time in shuttles, which didn't help), and one of the marines died. None available to replace him at either friendly starbase, so for revenge I went after the gammulan base. For a time was convinced I wasn't even going to get to my cannon range, as its turrets were really chewing up the shields, but once inside range and up close, they ceased to be able to touch me. Leaned missiles and IOD blasts into it till it went boom. Took on more intruders, and my grunts aren't doing too good, and started to hightail it back to friendlier space for stations to help me out--intruders are just fine camping in the shuttles (after destroying a weapons pod). Was in the process of hyperjumping at the wormhole out, while flipping back and forth in and out of Perscan, when it froze solid on me. But like I said, that was a tad over 90 minutes in. Good to hear flight dynamics maybe might get tweaked. Mostly I don't control speed with throttle any longer anyway, just leave it pegged forward and use the 1-9 keys with taps of the retros when I'm driving.

Random thoughts of mine after spending quite some time with Episode 1. I like how the cruiser & carrier handle, with some exceptions. It feels jarring to me that they decelerate slowly to a point, but when zeroing the throttle it stops dead in an instant. Hope that thing has airbags! Didn't care for how the fighters handled, seemed very twitchy to me. Didn't make any kills, which I suppose demonstrates why they put me behind the bridge. I didn't feel too badly, however, as once my pilots ran out of missiles, they engaged in a dogfight with guns with enemy fighters that lasted for fifteen minutes without anyone hitting each other, and seemed likely to last longer. I drove the carrier in there and the PTA took out the remaining bogey. (When I think about PTA turrets, I always picture them launching a stream of soccer moms at the opposition. Apropos of absolutely nothing but my own oddness.) I like the scale of ships & stations and little spacesuited me against them both. I was greatly amused the times I've ejected forgetting to tell my cruiser to stay put, and they instantly rocket away from me--makes me suspect there's morale problems on board. I would've liked to have been able to assign crew around the ship within Perscan without the need to drill down into tactical/crew, but no biggie. In differing sizes of ships available, do the crew move about the sections at varying rates? Also interface-related, I would've liked Fleet C&C to be able to select groups of ships at once rather than ordering one at a time. (If I had some ham, I could have ham and eggs, if I had some eggs.) I'm interested in seeing to what extent my people behave differently/more effectively with higher AI ratings--perhaps in a future demo episode, include the same IA mission but one with high ratings across board to demonstrate just that? One of the few crashes it suffered happened right when I was about to dock into the SOS'ing crippled Ter/Mil pigdog station. Definitely difficult to massage the damage just right to reduce it to a hair and not cinders. I recall reading that a plan was to implement a more real-time when-docked procedure, letting you wander down to one of the station's asset and cruise around with it, still order elements under your control via tacops and whatnot--hope that's still set to go into the final code. Looking forward to future episodes, particularly the ones involving planetary operations.