I almost forgot the headaches this game gave me when I played it for the first time, but now the memory comes back.
After Star Treak Armada 1 - which was a bit on the short side - I was really looking forward to this game.
I can't say that I like all the changes tho.
In STA1 every a of 8 ships was a force to be reckoned, one would position his ships strategically, repair them when they got damaged.
STA2 has a whle new approach. Ships can't take by far as many hits as they used to, you can easily loose several of your biggest ships when going against one single stationary cannon, if you didn't research enhanced shields yet (ship enhanncements are a very unnecessary technology tree). There are a LOT more units on a map as in STA1 and they just keep dying. Now one might enjoy that or he won't. The game also has some advancements, like the use of the z-position, even if stationary objects can still not occupy the same 2D location.
What really causes headaches and one to yell at the computer is the AI.
Even with low movement autonomy parked units keep rushing across haf the map (at least if feels like that) to throw themselves into a battle where they have no chance to survive. It happened all too often that I resolved a conflict, then wanted to get my long range ships to take out a base or a cannon and they were all gone, even if they were positioned behind a base cluster. At some point they decided it would be fun to jump over a cliff as a group.
Also if a ship is in combat it's very hard to reposition it and let it recover behind its companions. Movement autonomy causes it to ignore commands and let the AI do what it thinks is right. If you are lucky it will at least fly to the location you told him to go, but most of the time it will just stand still and get massacred. The only real solution to this is to command it to fly home and repair.
I still gave the game 3 stars because it's a nice old fashionet RTS and these are hard too find these days.
