Alright, just for educational value, I'll answer the two my riddles that went (and no doubt would have went forever) unanswered.
The gliders one is Mechanoids, known in your West as A.I.M. More specifically, A.I.M. 2, because the first part probably was not released outside of Russia.
The one with the Sharatar heavy cruiser, a thousand fighters, and an orbital base is Remember Tomorrow. It has an english name, despite never being released in any english-speaking country. Even though it's been, quite ironically, mostly forgotten, it still stands out as a game posessing two features hardly ever repeated in any global space RTS.
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The game's first innovative feature, though not the most praised, was the nonlinear research akin to real-life research, where you could assign scientists to theoretical sciences like maths, physics, biology, and chemistry, and through them open up applied sciences like cold fusion, element particles, subspace, automatization, etc, that will, given enough scientist-hours, will lead to certain items becoming available. I think Space Empires 5 (or was it GalCiv2?) came pretty close to that.
The second feature, and the most unique of the game, was the ship designer. You would never expect an action-RTS (I didn't mention the global scale part of he game went in realtime?) to throw puzzles at you, but in the ship designer, you were thrown against one of those. The entire ship's profile is marked with a grid of small cells, with various large and narrow spaces, and areas specific for certain parts like engines and weapon mounts, that were still available for any fitting part. The puzzle in this case is trying to maximize the ship's effectiveness by balancing weapon power, speed, range, sensors, special abilities, shields, spacecraft hangar space, and some more, against total required power and the generators that are required for it, ship mass, and resources required, all crammed into the space limited by the ship. Some of the components you acquire through research posess exactly the same (sometimes even worse) parameters as those you already have by the time, but are aligned and shaped differently, allowing you to stick more of them into the ship, making you spend quite some time in the shipyards' design module, maximizing your ships' effectiveness. An example is the mark two fuel tank, that uses more energy while storing the same amount of fuel, but is a 4x6 rectangle instead of the normal 5x5, allowing to place it in the bow of the Vagalar corvette, for example, where no other components could be placed before. With 6 races to play with, and 4 capital, 5 fighter, and 2 satellite class hulls available for each, the battles in the game are won and lost in the design module.
However, no matter how I advertise it here, nobody will play it, alas, because it is only in Russian. If you were looking for a reason to learn Russian though... 
The only place I can think of where the game can be downloaded (legally, I must add, since it's 10+ years old by now and the developer is long gone) is here.
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Topic: Engraving Game (Read 10395 times)