Four - No -Three X TBS Slipways Deserves Its Own Thread

I bankrupted the first time I think, but my first completion was around 6k. That 15k score is awesome @ooomalley. It sucks when a basically dead planet sits between 2 planets that could do a needed supply route otherwise. Definitely worth the $7.

There’s a tier 3 or 4 tech (I forget the name) that allows you to move planets within a certain diameter.

It’s a very expensive tier 2 baqar tech, but its incredible usefulness makes that race pretty much mandatory, doesn’t it?

I’m in love with this game. SO good. It’s all I played this weekend, pretty much. And I can’t wait to play more.

Disillusioned by Ghost in the machine in the campaign. Seems very heavily luck based depending on how quickly you find the thing.

The game overall is, which makes comparing score superfluous, excepting they included seed numbers, so we can compare them on equal grounds… excepting, then, the initial fog of war becomes an annoying liability in that context since, in a tourney for instance, participants who map out a sector — a very tedious process — would be advantaged over others.

It’s a really cool design, but there are things like this that kinda destroy some of it - well, at least to me, and my weird scoring obsessions.

I kinda wished it had benefitted from some Offworld Trading Company playtesters, who could have told them “hey, remove that fog of war as an option for competitive plays!”.

How can you forget the name of a gravitic tugboat? :) I do enjoy watching them latched onto the side of a planet pushing it through space.

Absolutely! Sadly, the same is true of every other council member’s tech. The mandatoriness corresponds to the tech’s level.

Unfortunately, scouting is its own gameplay system threaded into other systems. For instance, the perk that earns you money for discovering planets. Or techs like the long range scanning relay (which is a lot of fun until one of the relays gets in the way of your future expansion…grrrr). Simply turning off fog of war would throw some of the tuning off-kilter.

This is yet another game that doesn’t understand the point of scoring. What kind of score chase has a score than vanishes immediately after you finish a game? There are no leaderboards, and it doesn’t even track your best score except on the Ranked Run, which looks like it will only ever be a single map.

-Tom

I hadn’t thought about the cool little bonus tied to uncovering the map by some races… Designing games is too hard :(

When someone asked earlier about comparing scores, I wanted to check my own, but couldn’t find it and thought it might be tied to me having played on the EGS and the potential leaderboards being somehow tied to Steam (I know sometimes friends stuff doesn’t work outside of it).

That is incredibly disappointing to read.

Please, why bother moving planets when you can make slipways that can cross? (Tongue somewhat firmly in cheek)

Frankly, I never ever reached close to that level of technology, and I suspect it might be disappointing (I think one of the tooltips says it is very expensive as well as limited in range?).

Thank you! I checked my coupons first, and saw none, so I would never had tried this approach.

They should do something like the daily map in Offworld Trading Company

I think the ranked run has a new map every week, which is probably a more realistic option than a daily for indie strategy games.

This game sounds like it took the basic trade routes from Starr Ruler 2 and then added features to make a game out of just that part. Is that somewhat accurate?

Yeah, it’s about right.

Had a good run this morning.

One of the things i found is that moving planets around isn’t really necessary. It’s a nice ability but if you keep up in tech you can do things like get relays to go around pesky planets in the way or ways to produce energy on largely worthless planets. You just have to be good with leaving some planets laying around.

Pretty much, yeah, but the added features and changes do make a difference. And the fact that this is the game instead of a part in a larger game also allows the design to truly shine.

21518

Used the “get cash/research for scanning” perks to speed up the early game.

Slip relays + hyperdrive is incredible. Makes it very easy to push planets to prosperous.

The improved hyperspace range would be even better - I should have set up a second lab.

I think the biggest failing is that there is no record of my runs. I think it really needs a leaderboard of my runs.

Yes, there are a ton of alternative ways to deal with the end-game routing problems, like dismantling planets entirely (which gives you money!), limited teleporters, converting planets to relays, converting planets to Forge Worlds, the Micro-Forge buildings, the “produce one unit of anything you want” building, and hyperspace. My experience is that none of them are quite as effective at the endgame optimization as the tech for allowing overlapping slipways.

The biggest failing is that playing on a higher difficulty setting does not give a score bonus :-P

Interesting you high-scoring folks only seem to have 1 or 2 labs. I’ve been trying to make one of every type, but I suppose I could place well enough to import into one lab from 2-4 sources and save 45.