Putting together your battlewagon of destruction is as simple as dragging and dropping parts from a variety of categories (weapons, defense, engines, etc.) onto your ship, but immerse yourself too deeply in dreams of strapping sixteen Heavy Plasma Launchers to a hull and going gung-ho; careful considerations must first be made for weight, crew capacity, and power output. Adding more guns means adding additional power plants and crew modules to actually make them function, which in turn increases the weight of your ship, reducing its speed.
Equipment slots used for basic support equipment also means fewer slots are available for things like shield generators, anti-missile defense systems, tractor beams, or other cool gadgets to help you gain an edge. As an interesting twist, you also don't have immediate access to all of the game's equipment, but instead need to spend 'honor' gained in battle to purchase some of the more exotic components.
The customization options overall are pretty verbose and friendly to use, but I do have a couple of concerns. First, weapon ranges are specified in raw numerical values which are a little hard at first to mentally translate; it's a little tricky to gauge exactly what sort of difference an optimum range of '500' versus a range of '750' actually means until you've fought a few battles. Some additional 'helper' graphics when viewing weapon statistics might be useful here. Furthermore, I was hoping for the ability to visually pimp out the ship designs a little more; the only real visual impact you can make is by changing which turrets are present.
There's no flexibility for swapping out things like engine modules or hull segments for a different look, or even setting up your own personal color schemes. It's entirely possible that I'm just being nit-picky, but I was left hoping for a bit more from the amount of 'starship building' action that is being promoted for the game. The developer is very receptive to feedback however, so we'll have to see how things proceed from now into the future.
Simply putting ships together isn't enough, however - you have to figure out what they'll actually do as well. This is where the game's strategic layer comes into play. Before each battle, you're issued a stock number of 'pilots' and credits you can use to deploy the ships you've designed into a fleet. This is where the real tricky questions come in: do you cram all of your ships together into a tight formation and try to smash through anything that gets in your way, or spread yourself out across an array of smaller ships, keeping your heavy hitters in reserve until the enemy forces have been softened up a bit? The key point to bear in mind with all of this is that you don't actually directly control the battle itself - rather, you lay down advance orders for your ship captains, and then watch as they carry them out.
