I played this game in standard and experienced difficulty, and the shortcomings were not so obvious on the standard playthrough, but became very anoying on higher difficulty settings. The graphics and the whole setting is (STILL!) BEAUTIFUL. Voice acting is fine, sounds are good too. The story is nice, but that's not the main point of the game. It is fleet battle. This game got so MANY THINGS RIGHT in fleet battle tactics, I loved it on the standard playthrough, with all the meaningful ship control options and ship outfitting decisions. The bad things start to show on higher difficulty levels where you need to squeeze out all the performance you can get from your ships. It begins with some anoying BUGS, (fort shield not deploying, ships get "stuck" and refuses to shoot, or same happens to the enemy, allied ships refuse to shoot etc) It continues with the anoying AI of your ships. Since its tactical fleet sim, the individual ships sould be responding well to your commands. For instance if you set them on aggressive, they just shoot at the closest enemy, ignoring your specific command to attack another enemy. Of course you can set the behaviour fo the ship to focused manual, but then you need to set EVERYTHING (speed, subsystems, energy, weapons) manually, which is not necessary, and needs constant micromanagement adjustment during battle, otherwise you run out of energy etc. So there is NO MIDDLE GROUND between extreme micro or senselessly shooting what's closest. The other problem is the cluttered UI which exacerbates the constant need for micromanagement on higher difficulty. There are differen energy systems on the ships, but some are linked, and that's no aparent at all. The diffiult battles you face would need better control over your fleet but with these flaws that can be achieved through extreme micro only. A shame, since this game got so much RIGHT! With a bit more polishing it could have been the greatest. It is still good, but extremely frustrating.
