longtime listener, first time caller. here's my thoughts on chapter one, piece by piece.
fighters - one of the strongest features of the mod. enemy fighter designs are well correlated to faction and function, and GTVA fighters are restrained enough (ie, nobody got too giddy with the "well what if it NEVER RAN OUT OF WEAPON ENERGY" or whatnot) to make the player's choice of ships subtle and complicated.
weapons - one of the weakest features of the mod. there is far too little deviation from the original fs2 weapons. the only original one is the hammer, which is a singularly useless waste of a hardpoint.
capships - good. the larger turrets that visibly rotate are nice. other posters have mentioned the cavalier attitude you guys have towards nuking capships. bigger is *not* always better, but on balance i think the bigger capship battles are an improvement, and the only reason we didn't see more of that in fs2 was a concern over framerates that's not really relavent a few years after it's release. that said, though, perhaps more could be done to explain the shift plotwise. if, as is said in one mission, there's still "10,000 vasudans" on a cruiser, more melodrama should accompany their deployment...but it's quite possible that crews are smaller, automation is more widespread, and, say, mobile robot shipyards (a hook for mission backdrops) are the norm.
mission design - pretty quality, although not perfect. the tactical flow (if that makes any sense) of the missions is always spot on, and some of the new elements (like the sol gate and associated ship parking lot) are quite interesting. the difficulty levels of the missions are wildly erratic, though. many were simple enough to beat the first time through, but 13 and 14 each took me multiple days of effort...and i'm unemployed.
you can imagine my surprise, then, when 15 turned out to be a cakewalk...
animations, music, briefings, etc - totally good enough. i can't believe other posters complain about the lack of voice acting (very difficult to get right). this is all more professional then i had hoped; i'd much rather play something where the extra effort went into the missions. i suppose my only complaint here is that the tech gazeteer is spotty. the stilletto, for instance, doesn't seem to be in there, and it would be nice to have some solid gameplay specs about the ranges of weapons and such.
thanks for all the hard work, i'm very much looking forward to the next chapters!
