Just had this review published on TheMittani.com, was wondering what thoughts the community had about my review (and the expansion in general). I wrote the review for the game at large with a focus more on appealing to people who had never played ES and were just now seeing on the Steam sale.



I was playing ES a lot at launch (and during alpha) but drifted off after a while. Disharmony has me back into the game, and fixes most of my complaints. I didn't run into any major bugs in my quick playthroughs with Disharmony, but it sounds like a lot of people are having problems?

Well, if you compare it to ES-Vanilla shortly after release, it's absolutely no miracle, that Disharmony appears in much better light.

Many people have either forgotten or never known how flawed it was back then. ^^



Most of the complaints come from people comparing it to ES 1.0.65 after 4 free content-patches and a lot of fixes.



Another big chunk of complaints come from people playing the pre 1.1.9-version, which was a lot worse still with massive performance-issues due to the "AI-Scout-Spam-Bug".



The remaining bugs after 1.1.9 are relatively minor and no real game-breakers. So most of the remaining complaints are about new mechanics and balance changes like the reduction of weapon-tiers, the new ship-editor, the strange tonnage-cost-scaling and the new invasion-mechanics.

That's why I am waiting until the end of the year to decide how I feel about Disharmony.

I don't agree with most of your review.



That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with it. Well, except trade routes. Those weren't added in Disharmony, they were already there. We're just not getting the same things out of what Disharmony offers.



For example - I don't like the new weapon system. While the old one had its own problems, the weapons all worked with different mechanics and it was interesting. Now they all work pretty much the same way. Defenses all work the same way, meaning there's three of the same thing that adds nothing except occasionally having to refit to deal with which one the other guy is using. Setting your weapon range is a false choice, since one is strictly better than the others. Unfortunately the math on that is complicated and the game doesn't do a good job of telling you what's going on, but in the end if your goal is to do damage there's a right choice and two wrong choices. Having the ability to set the other ranges is just visual fluff that doesn't add anything. (It can take stuff away though: if you use long range weapons they take so long to hit a target that the retreat battle action lets people flee without getting touched. It's cheesy and doesn't make sense, since short range weapons WOULD hit even if you're retreating during the long range phase.)



Ship design got less interesting, for a number of reasons. They removed a ton of tiers of weapons, and now you'll spend more than half the game at the same tier (along with everybody else). The ship design screen right now won't let you use an old tier of equipment, so if you lose a resource needed for a new one (or research a new one you don't yet have a resource for), you can't build ANY of that type of module. Researching new shields means they throw away the plans for the old shields. It's crazy that it was allowed to ship like that.



At release, Fighters & Bombers were so weak as to be pointless except for eye candy. Apparently patches have improved that some. Speaking of those, fighter hangars get bigger on larger ships and take up more space, but you get the same amount and firepower of fighters. Same thing with engines, sensors, and invasion modules. Why do 10 troops weigh twice as much on a bigger ship than on a smaller one? It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever and in some cases makes large ships striclty worse than small ones, since the limiting factor in a fleet is command points.



There was also a problem with the AI creating a zillion scout fleets, and the game still doesn't give me a good way to say "my one huge fleet could wipe out these 20 tiny ones easily, let me fight them all in a single battle." No, instead I get to either fight 20 battles over 20 turns, or disband my fleet and fight 20 battles in fewer turns.



I could go on, but you get the idea. In theory this stuff should all be fixable in patches, so I've been sticking around to see what happens. But I'm not playing Disharmony anymore, I've gone back to vanilla.

I haven't tried the new expansion yet, but I kinda liked the way weapons and defense worked before, at least at their core. A small adjustment here and there would have been perfect, but with all of these complaints, I am keeping my fingers crossed that by the end of the year they will have it all sorted out.

I wont be playing Disharmony unless they put combat back the way it was in Vanilla ,that's the games i bought and its the game I want to play!!!!!!!!!!!!

If you wanted to make a new game go ahead but please don't break the old one!!!!!!!!!!!

....They didn't, vanilla ES still works fine to my knowledge, and the expansion is completely optional.

For example - I don't like the new weapon system. While the old one had its own problems, the weapons all worked with different mechanics and it was interesting. Now they all work pretty much the same way. Defenses all work the same way, meaning there's three of the same thing that adds nothing except occasionally having to refit to deal with which one the other guy is using. Setting your weapon range is a false choice, since one is strictly better than the others. Unfortunately the math on that is complicated and the game doesn't do a good job of telling you what's going on, but in the end if your goal is to do damage there's a right choice and two wrong choices. Having the ability to set the other ranges is just visual fluff that doesn't add anything. (It can take stuff away though: if you use long range weapons they take so long to hit a target that the retreat battle action lets people flee without getting touched. It's cheesy and doesn't make sense, since short range weapons WOULD hit even if you're retreating during the long range phase.)

I think the current set-up is a little weak and definitely needs some patching, but I like the core of the idea of selecting ranges (though there's better ways to do it than making lasers travel slower than ships, obvious). I also like the "tiericide" of the weapon tiers, which I believe will ultimately work to improve the tactics of the battle system.

I wont be playing Disharmony unless they put combat back the way it was in Vanilla ,that's the games i bought and its the game I want to play!!!!!!!!!!!!

You can still play Vanilla, no one's stopping you. Have a little faith in the devs, though -- if anything's been proven by Amplitude in the past year, it's that they know how to patch.