You have brought up 2 very important issues for this poll
1. "Freespace can be seen as mostly about the fighters/bombers and how they can make or break a battle, plus the player is flying and fighting on that level already. This would generally make for a faster, more active game. On the other hand, I'm sure a lot of people would love to see and co-ordinate battles with masses of capital ships and beams and explosions."
By choosing capital ship play it does NOT exclude large fighter invovlement, but may limit the type of fighters one can produce to say only the Herc II, Myrmadorm, and say 2 or 3 more, as well as 3 bombers. Destroyers can launch these fighters and Ganymedes can build them...
2. "Scale also has to be taken into account - how easy will tiny little fighters be to control if it's based on cap ship warfare? Conversely, if you were to focus on fighters how would those (relatively) great big ships handle. I still don't have Armada 2, only the first game, so I don't know for sure how things are set out with it normally (e.g. are there more small, fighter-like craft or is it still in the realm of the starships?). "
Unlike Armada 1 with its use of a directors cut window and main view, the second view of the armada 2 is called a realistic view, in overhead normal view the fighters will not be scale, thats unrealistic with the usage of big ships it makes the fighters say twice as big and stuff. The new battle view or directors view can and could show scale and would be great for ingame renders since it shows a 3d view...
