Uranium - 235

This has seriously annoyed me to no end. Before an active space battle, the game randomly decides the units I want to bring into the fight. If I want to bring Y-Wings (always a good choice), I do NOT want my Y-Wings there at the beginning of the battle. Everyone knows what this is like. The game starts, send my bombers off to hide while I take down all the heavy anti-fighter weapons. Now, I know how this can be abused, IE: hypering in my bombers behind the enemy, but that's what Interdictors are for. Maybe give the AI something of an upgrade and have them keep Interdictors close at hand? The same goes for Fleet Commanders. It'd be nice to assign them to different ships so I can bring a handful in in case I loose one. Any chance we can see this? Sometimes I *DON'T* want my first forces in the system to be my silly weak ones... Also one this note, how about a feature that allows me to manually release my TIEs? I have no need whatsoever to release my bombers right when the battle begins.

http://img150.imageshack.us/img150/5853/untitled37iv.jpg http://img109.imageshack.us/img109/2884/untitled19tc.jpg http://img155.imageshack.us/img155/8586/untitled16op.jpg !!!! Notice how I have NO MonCal cruisers (Note that I'm using the Star Wars rebalance mod. The only notable changes is that Vics are tougher, Rebel fighters are a little tougher, and all carrier-craft have an infinite amount of TIE fighters. Destroy a wing, and a new one deploys). The most depressing part of this tale is how I lost. Everything was destroyed... almost everything. All that was left was a single Victory cruiser. I had lost my Hangar bay and my shields. The Victory kept pounding my almost-destroyed station, and it drifted close enough for my remaining guns to destroy both the Turbolasers on the vic. TWO SQUADRONS of TIE fighters finished off my station. So don't tell me fighters are worthless

Really, I don't see how hard it'd be to make the AI smarter. They don't need to be able to beat Gary Kasperov in chess, but there's just some basic tactics that we should see done that frankly aren't very hard to manage. For example, retreating damaged units. Part of what makes the player so effective in battle ( http://img150.imageshack.us/img150/5853/untitled37iv.jpg - In case you're wondering, the reason I lost was EVERYTHING WAS DEAD, except for ONE victory destroyer and a wing of TIE fighters. The Victory had no weapons at all, and the shields on my station were down and it was almost dead. The TIEs whittled me down and that was it) is that when my units are taking a pounding, I simply move them to the back of the line. The AI will stop firing on them and begin firing on something else, allowing me to bring my craft back into battle and continue attacking, but without the AI firing on them. They begin attacking new targets that are stronger. Not only does the AI *NOT* take action for this (for example, if an enemy player were retreating damaged units, I would focus fire on the engines to keep it in place, or send faster units after it while my big guns find a new target), but the AI doesn't actually do this themselves. A ship taking a beating will continue to fly to its doom instead of taking evasive action, hiding in nebulae, or calling out covering craft. Secondly, the AI needs to learn focus-fire tactics. In any fight, I first concentrate all guns on their Tartans / Corellian Corvettes. These guys are the most annoying and eat up my bomber wings which are lethally effective against capital ships. In most fights with the AI, they simply fire on anything near them. It'd be nice (and far more difficult) if the AI continuously targetted most of their guns on specific ships. Finally, the AI just needs to respond to threats better. I sent a handful of Y-wings to take apart an ISD, and the AI never sent a Tartan or an Acclamator, or even any of the endless TIE fighters over to take them off. I mean, really, how hard can this be?

Oh yeah? So how about when he absorbed Han's blaster shots through his robotic hands in Cloud City?

http://img150.imageshack.us/img150/5853/untitled37iv.jpg And yeah, I'm actually unable to steal it, and probably will be unable to until I take out the pirate guy, but I'm trying to get there now, slogging my way through ISDs. The point is that it won't LET me steal the technology. It capped me at 4 for the time being. By the way, there's a "bug" with Interdictors that make them more powerful then they should be - the hyperspace mass shadow remains even if the gravity well hardpoint has been destroyed. If you could fix this, you'd probably see them as far less useful.

You have to keep in mind that in Campaign, the AI tends to get ISDs before you get MonCals. At least, I haven't figured out how to get MonCals yet, and I just took Bothawui. I'm taking on 3 ISDs with a shitload of frigates, and frankly, it's not going well.

By the way, can you tell me how Interdictors are 'too useful'? This is more a general game question, but they barely have any guns, and the AI doesn't ever retreat, so that leaves the 'missile deterent'. Does the missile shield affect JUST the Interdictor, or everywhere around it, even if the missiles are just going through the field? I had an Interdictor all powered up with the missile deflector and some corvette just flew around shooting the hell out of it... Will we also ever see more epic-sized maps? The current space maps feel so cramped, too much shit and asteroids around.

Personally I like the way Homeworld 2 did unit caps - You had unit caps for each TYPE of craft instead of an all-encompassing cap. For example, I could only bring two battleships into the fray, but no matter how many corvettes, frigates, battleships, carriers, or whatever elses I had, I always had room for fighters. Which I should mention - Fighters in HW2 were a lot more useful then they are in EaW... even with Flak Frigates you had a use for bombers and fighters. Anyway, the real reason I was going to post here was to ask for something to be done about the asinine Tractor Beam on the Star Destroyers. For starters, every capital ship and even corvettes had tractor beams in lore. It'd be far more useful if tractoring a corvette-sized craft or so would capture it for your side, but it's understandable if that's not possible. I'd rather just have something better in lieu of a tractor beam though. Also, I'd like to see a change to space combat - unlimited viewing distance. I'm fairly sure this won't happen because LOS determines your hyperspace range (does it, or are they just 'the same', ie: two values govern where you can see and where you can hype to, and they just happen to be set to the same value?), but still, the fog of war in space is really stupid. It's freaking SPACE.