I made it over the 15 minute mark! That didn't at all happen because I didn't realise the time. Not at all.

This game again isn't the best thing in the universe to attempt to show over a short period of time because it really is a whole lot more complicated than that. There are unit formations to think about, how ships should cover each other, maybe have one ship as your command ship to paint targets for your back, set fighters to retreat back to carriers so they can repair themselves instead of just going to their doom. And then you have the whole other complicated side of it of setting up each ship type to work in battle, do you make a powerful all round ship or do you get different ships to specialise in different tasks.

I personally have a pretty min-max design to my fleet, so everything is setup to do one individual task. Which unforutunately for me makes it rather vulnerable once the main ships are destroyed. If my anti-shield ships are taken out and the enemy still has strong shields on half it's fleet the rest of my guys are pretty dead. And that's one thing that I actually rather enjoy about the game, it really makes you think about how to setup your fleet and how it works, and if it doesn't work you generally get a feel over what you should be tweaking in order to defeat the enemy.

Unfortunately this trial and error approach doesn't work for the campaign mode simply because the penalties for losing your fleet in that are just super harsh. you generally don't get enough income to replenish your forces after a major defeat and even if you do win and if you've taken significant losses it's pretty much just as bad. While it's somewhat realistic I guess, I really don't think that it plays to the strength of what the game as a whole is. And that is striving for fleet perfection against an enemy.

One last thing is that Positech's next game Gratuitous Tank Battles has just opened up a paid beta at http://www.gratuitoustankbattles.com/ so go check that out if this game has interested you at all.