Been enjoying the game; am now level thirty, and have a few observations.

Skillpoints aren't terribly important, because the powerups just don't last that long. I tend to forget about them, and if the help they provide would have been critical, I probably shouldn't have been in that fight anyhow. That's a little disappointing; I wish skillpoints at least felt more valuable.

Perks, however, are hugely important, because they can be easily respecced, either to make money or get experience, and respeccing perk points is cheap, since you don't get many perk points.

With just three perk points, I can do the following:

- If want to make money, I respec three points into Field Commander and capture ships (doesn't take too much work to get a ship capable of capturing the trivial gunships with 15 troopers: netting you anywhere from 150,000 to 250,000 credits on average, and you can tow gunships under PTE!). Frigates are worth 500,000 to 800,000, destroyers between one to two million, and I just captured my first cruiser for three million or so. (Transport capacity from ships, enhancements, and officers, plus total number of troopers, plus trooper strength from officers, are what matter here. Transport range and grappler range seem to be irrelevant, at least in comparison.)
- If I want experience (to rank up every fifth level so I can command bigger ships and get more perks), I respec three perk points into Student and do missions. (I'm assuming that helps; seems to.) Missions provide a -lot- of experience, more so than anything else I've encountered in-game (especially convoy missions). Not so many credits, but if you have twenty million credits in the bank from capturing ships and just need a higher rank to command a new battleship, well. :) I tried fighting ships at first, but that's just not worth it just to get experience.

Scavenger swarms were great at the beginning for getting equipment from derelicts to sell (and upgrade), by the way, but once the capturing machine kicked in, nothing seemed to beat it for getting credits.

On combat, lasers seem useless, both when I'm using them and when the enemy uses them on me. No idea why. Hasn't changed as I've leveled up. Railguns rock (range matters), and so do heavy weapons. The plasma guns I tried were somewhere inbetween lasers and railguns in overall effectiveness. Railguns just seem to get a lot of lead in the air (or would that be mass into space?). :)

The point was to give players choices. And you have many options. I've seen Engineers that can one shot an enemy just with nice skills build, and we have players that made precise mathematic calculations and became almost invincible with the right combinations of skills, enhancements, perks and officers. Some people use railguns, some use plasma, some use beams and some found a working combination of all three so they are deadly from all ranges.

I hope you like the game so far. There will be more things to do soon. :)

I do like the game. :) If I could change one thing about it, I'd make the solar system faction layout dynamic: "Mount & Blade in Space", or something. :)

We heard a similar thing a while ago about Mount & Blade in space. And every suggestion is good. We are sorting them down into a community wishlist.

It's nearly impossible to change the game concept in SPG2 now, but many suggestions will make their way into SPG3. :)

Oh, 6 minutes dev response! It's like I'm living here!

Well, I do. Seriously. :D

LOL! Thanks for the response.

Looking forward to seeing what you all come up with for SPG3. :)

I believe SPG3 will be much different from SPG2 in terms of mechanics, even concept. Time will tell though, cause we still have plans for SPG2 in terms of new content, cosmetic changes and some mechanics. :)

Not for now, Judas. We have so much new content planned, DLC and expansion later, and since there are 10 of us, making a Linux version would be just too time consuming at the moment. We are aware that many people would be happy with it, but we are not able to do it currently.