When I checked this website yesterday evening and realized Beta was out I put away my work and began dowloading instantly with an increasing excitement. I´ve been playing Since for a realy long time now, and of course preordered Rebellion as a huge fan of the game. Now I want to share the experince of my first game:

Ok, so let me begin with the most exiting thing in Rebellion: Titans. I was only abled to test the TEC-Loyalist Titan up to Level 6(I will explain later why. Performance, just saying...), so here we go:

1)Titan Look or "Are you fucking kidding me?"

The textures are kinda ok and the effects of the abilties are fine too, but what realy bugs me is the size. It´s supposed to be like this:

But ingame it´s only slightly larger than the Kol(I would add a screenshot, but since Sins keeps crashing with 1-2 FPS I cant. Check 7. for more information). I hope it´s only a scaling error in the current version, otherwise it would be ridiculous small for something supposed to be a supercaptial with epic propotions. Not epic, not big, not frightening in any way. With the small size, it just looks like sh*t.

2) Titan-Balance/ -power

Titans are absolutely devasting against hostile ships, and that´s the way they should be right? So nothing realy wrong here. The abilty numbers look fine too, nothing to complain here. In an Interview, a developer said, that a Titan would be easily abled to destroy even a fully upgraded starbase. Well, I released my LVL6 Loyalist Titans onto a hostile starbase. Sh*t happened. Both the starbase and the Titan didn´t took any significant damage. In the long-run the Titan would´ve of course destroyed the starbase, but noway would have been it "easy" or fast. It would´ve taken ages for the Titan to chew threw the Starbase. I would love to see a strong Anti-Structure for the Titan.

3) Titan Costs

Titans are waaaaaays to cheap and easy to build. With only 6 or 7 planets, I was easily abled to build a titan. Titans should be an endgame superweapon and only large empires should be abled to afford and build one. The construction time of a Titan is only 220 or 300 seconds iirc. I took a third of a huge solar system and on that point I could´ve easily build several Titans.
So please make titans ways more expensive and increase the buildtime to at least 7, better 10 minutes.

4) Corvettes

Didn´t build any of those yet, might be usefull to tackle hostile capitals(preventing them from phase-jumping).

5) Tech

I was realy dissappointed when I looked at the Tech-Tree, realising that everything still was Diplomacy like, with just a handfull of special Loyalist-Research options added.

6) New, exciting stuff or "Where is it?"

After a few minutes of playing, I asked myself: "Is this realy Rebellion I am playing? Or did I accidently launcher Diplomacy?" I had to look realy close to find any differences: 1 new frigate(Corvette), 1 new Capital, a handfull of new Techs and the yellow Titan-Button. It still was like Diplomacy. No new exciting feeling, just the excitement of an old, still very good game. I bought the game because Sins was such a great game, and I don´t regret pre-ordering Rebellion, but if a friend would ask me if it´s worth to pay the price for Rebellion or if he should stick with Diplomacy, I could´t tell him that Rebellion is worth its money with a good conscience.
Of course it´s still Beta, but I doubt that there will be any changes to Tech, Ships and Abilities in the final release. Please, make Rebellion worth it´s money, CHANGE the game, don´t just add Titans and a handfull of new research to Diplomacy. Don´t create "Diplomacy 2.0", create "Rebellion"!

7) Performance

I meantioned earlier that I wasn´t abled to test my Titan beyond Level 6, and this is what happened: After 3hours50minutes of game time, the FPS suddenly dropped dramaticly, down to 1 or 2. The game became unplayable. I saved the game and the game crashed. I restarted and loaded the save. No change, the game still was unplayable and after a few seconds it crashed again. I heared that the performance compared to diplomacy was improved. It wasn´t. It´s waaaaaaays worse now. Looking forward to future updates, fixing it, so that I can continue playing.
If it´s helpfull and you tell me where to find them, I will upload the crash-reports. Oh, and my PC should be good enough to handle the game easily.

8) My questions

With the dropping exitement and realising that Rebellion isn´t as awesome as I thought and as it sounded/looked from what I saw, the answer to the question why nearly no information were released until now became clear: Because there wasn´t anything to show. Nothing awesome new what could´ve been shown, except from Titans and maybe the new Graphics.
Now I´m asking myself the question: What the hell did the developers do during all that developement time? Playing cards?

Summary

I know, it´s still Beta, blablabla.... Currently the game looks decent. Nothing more, nothing less. Currently it´s Diplomacy 2.0. It still has the awesome Sins feeling, but I would have expected much more new features and changes. Looking forward to the Advent and Vasari and hopefully further content and improvements, especially performance wise.