Total War is liberating

I finally decided to do a "proper" campaign, after waiting for release and several false starts. I've been playing slowly, cautiously, and, for now, on forgiving - I'm the type that's easily overwhelmed, not to mention often quite tired. Still, I was really worried about total war. Anxiety does that to you, I guess.

And then I made some minor mistake and let it happen. And it was a breath of fresh air. I no longer need to worry about assaulting some fleet, capturing an alien operative or conducting a purge of Servant or Protectorate councilors. Protectorate Russia being a massive CO2 emitter? I'm just going to take it from them, not even to keep it - though I'm gonna chop off the bits that my PAC wants - and then hope someone less spoils-happy takes it.

And the evil alien fleets? Again, this is partly the lowered difficulty, but even on the higher ones a half-decently designed fleet that's defending a well-armed station will easily defeat a fairly scary alien assault. Just remember to switch away from pure missiles and do 60/5/5 armor at least. "Proper" space combat is still a bit of sensory overload, but turns out I can just leave half the fleet on auto, and use the preset maneuvers to pick off flankers and such. I could probably be more efficient, especially considering my fleet contain missile boats - but this is fine, and, as a bonus - sensory overload aside, it does look cool when a bc burns its entire dV doing high-G maneuvers and ends up on the back of the alien fleet pointing right at their engines.

So yeah, if, like me, you kinda "understand" the game but struggled with overload, give yourself a treat, go to forgiving and let the aliens eat it. Bonus? You're probably learning way more than just by reading, even if in the "proper" campaign you'll probably still going to get smacked hard. Once your fleet can resist a "retaliation" attack from the aliens and maybe you have battle stations with some decent gear on them, you probably turtled more than enough.

Oh, while at it - it wasn't clear what "forgiving" actually does besides setting cinematic combat. Some of the sliders don't move compared to "normal" difficulty. So, one obvious thing is that skill checks get +3, which is pretty significant (but also, if you save scum, inconsequential). AFAIK it also changes MC triggers for alien hate, but I'm not 100% sure of that.