About the aesthetics of TEC ships and some feedback about performance.

So I know everything is subject to change at this point but I just wanted to try and explain how I feel about the current aesthetics of the TEC ships.

The first word that comes to mind is boxy, the ships have a very square, but also bloated look to them, instead of having the cool sleek aesthetics of vehicles created for battle, they have a more practical, functional form like a garbage truck or city bus. Their designs in many cases look Civilian and not Military in nature, and its not hard to imagine some no name wage jockey driving around in a Heavy Cruiser or Shriken Corvette eating a bag of cheetos, waiting for their shift to end.

The second word that comes to mind is platform. While I understand the need to "orient" an object so you know which side is the top and which is the bottom, I feel like the design of the ships reflect more of a watercraft construction, where you have one side floating above the water, and the other side is under the water. Obviously the way we build ships like platforms makes sense on water because only the topside will ever need to fire weapons systems, but in Sins the design of ships almost follow the same principle. I understand that for gameplay reasons even though its 3D in space, all the units still just travel on a flat "map" like any other RTS game so seeing the way bigger ships line up to broadside each other all makes sense. It would be nice though if ship designs were crafted with the theory of engaging in real space combat which would happen literally everywhere, at every angle, with ships upside down, rightside up, inside out and no way to tell in what way they should be "orienting" themselves in the midst of battle to unleash a salvo of destruction on their enemies.

To try and describe what I mean, I will attempt to explain what I see and how I would rather see it.

Imagine in Sins, Tec ships are big rectangles flying around in space. Right now the design philosophy for the rectangle is that the ship flies with the bottom on one of its flat sides, and turrets on the other sides. In my mind I feel that orienting the ship in such a way wouldnt make much sense. Instead of flying the rectangle on one of its side, you would rotate the rectangle so it flies on one of its edges. I wish I were an artist so I could draw an example of what I'm trying to say. The ships don't look "bad" as they are now, but the way gun placements look feels bad to watch sometimes. There is a lot of structure to everything that could have you believing some of these ships are for floating on water where attack from below isn't much of an issue and therefore design and function should be the same way you build a battleship or aircraft carrier.

 

Thats just some bit of feedback based on my own preference and thoughts about the game. I like seeing the gun turrets spinning around shooting at enemies, but at the same time with everything sitting on a "platform" sometimes literally just a platform jutting out from the structure of the ship, it can also look "hokey". 

I7-13700k, 32gb ddr5-6200, 2tb SSD, RTX4090

The game plays great at 4k, but the engine doesn't seem to like 2d menu overlays. My PSU draw goes from ~370 to ~230 depending on what menus I got open. In the main menu its ramped right up to ~370 watts, and then once it loads and settles it goes down, and then seems to just go up and down depending on what menus I have open and how fast I have the game speed set to.  4vs4 6 hours of in-game time and lots of ships everywhere and things still ran smoothly at 10x game speed, which says a lot since Sins 1 would chug and hitch at normal speed once you hit late game with lots of ships. 

 

Just my thoughts for now, I don't hate the way TEC look, but if you asked me honestly which I prefer it would be the Sins 1 ships.