Ancient Space Reviews

I don't know when i bought the game but i wanted to give it another try today and I think it is barely playable. Selecting units is pure horror or maybe I am missing something. It seems the game does not want me to split fleets and don't let me do selective attack orders. The list of ships in a sector (upper left corner) is useless except when double clicking. Not switching camera to the selected ships makes single ship selection a lottery especially if there is no indicator where the selected ship is if not in camera view. Moving damaged ships back while ordering the other ships to attack is frustrating stressed click-fest. No possibility to define and select groups of ships. No preferred targets for ship types makes my S fighters attack L ships while my L ships attack S. Again super click-fest when ships are difficult to click on anyways. Ships sometimes forget chained-orders. Ships are busy flying in circles instead of stopping at the intended spot making them too busy to fight or to repair other units. I stopped playing at the third mission or so, in the second sector when I have the possibility to take warehouses for the first time. I don't know if I missed something in the previous missions but this one is super imbalanced. 4 S and 2-3 L ships completely annihilate my 2 XL, 4 L and some S ships, while being constantly repaired. Maybe it is because of the paper-scissor mechanics but while my S ships to combat enemy S ships are destroyed in seconds or attack L ships, the enemy S ships take ages to be destroyed. Enemy L ships also tank significant more damage than my own ships. I have boarded an enemy L ship (not sure why this would be a thing as it takes ages and won't le me go above ship limit anyways) and as soon as it is on my side, it is destroyed in seconds while it takes me more time to destroy an enemy L ship than it takes the enemy to seriously damage my XL ship. Somehow the pace of the game doesn't fit. Everything is slow motion. Moving from one side of a sector (that is small anyways) to the other side of the sector takes minutes. Each order to take effect takes several seconds Destroying one my my S ships takes 3 seconds. Building a new S ship takes 15 seconds or so. Moving my fleet into battle takes several seconds. The battle itself takes also a few seconds. Moving my fleet out of battle takes longer than the battle itself. Several seconds doesn't sound much but in this time I just watch ships moving in slow motion to pass the few meters to the target location. My feeling when playing the game is it desperatly tries to cover it flaws and makes things even worse. The maps are tiny, so there are only a few ships and they move slowly. Commanding only few ships makes battles simple, so NPC are much stronger and all QoL for commanding are left out to add 'challenge'.