I see that a lot of effort has gone into the game, so I hope my comments help you to make the game more popular.

I didn't play BotF, or long ago, so this is the impression of someone who comes into contact with BotE like anyone hunting for free games on the net.

I also didn't read the manual first, and many people won't, either.

First off, at 1280x1024, the font used for buttons looks awful.

Then, there is no indication on the system view (with the planets) that you have a fleet. A fleet icon that looks like a fleet would be nice.

When I found my fleet in the Imperium view, and clicked on a ship, it took me to the galaxy view, but the galaxy view was not centered on the ships sector (my home system), and the ship was not visible in the bottom panel.

Then, I only found out that the Saturn-like blue BotE-icon took me to the fleet view by accident. I suggest to use a fleet icon and maybe a mouseover text like "You have 3 ships in this system".

In the Imperium/Ships view, there is no way to tell whether a ship needs new orders. I imagine this can get tricky when managing a huge fleet.

In the research view, I failed to change the research allocation because clicking on the orange bars didn't change anything. The reason was, that strangely enough, I only clicked on bars where I had locked the research. Maybe clicking on the bar should unlock the research again and move the bar.

Another small thing that might or might not be a good idea would be to show the special commands available to a ship class that are not available in some greyed out manner. I was unsure with my colony ship how to colonize something until I finally found a system in my reach that was uninhabited and that allowed me to terraform.

Having 3 resources named D*nium also was a little bit confusing, till the system view showed me that this was ok.

An option to minimize the window in the top menu bar would be nice, since I don't know the windows hotkey for it by heart.

Keep up the good work,
RedAdder

Hi RedAdder,

Thanks for your feedback. Indead yet there isn't an easy way to get familiar with BotE very quickly. We're already thinking about a tutorial modus but it will last some time - don't know when it will be done.

Maybe a quick way is viewing a Gameplay-Video. Unfortunately only german one's are avaible http://birth-of-the-empires.de/wiki/ind ... lder-Serie "Videos im Internet" - I would be happy if somebody could do an English one (with English comments), even it's only the first 5 or 10 minutes.

Fonts: each major race has it's own font, for Humans it's "League Gothic" - you can change it in \Data\Races\MajorRaces.data..it's the last entry before new "MAJORx" - don't forget a backup copy of the file before changing :-)
Another way is de-installing "League Gothic" or just renaming the font file.

BotE is only fullscreen. But it's no problem for ALT+TAB going to windows and then coming back to BotE.

I hope you get more familar with BotE and have fun with it. Most of starting problems you already solved by yourself.
We are still improving the game, also with your feedbacks.