Thank you so much for listening!
Yeah, two points here I agree with so much. First those battles. I used to put everything on auto-resolve at first, but once I discovered that all the various technologies you researched made such a big difference on how the battles played out, I was completely hooked on the combat. Mass drivers damage doesn’t go down over distance like the laser does? So you can start plunking away at the enemy even from far away? Nice! So many little things like that made a big difference in the combat. And you could even get the AI to take over, and the AI was actually really good.
The other thing about the early game being more interesting: that’s so much more important to me. Don’t get me wrong, the late game getting bogged down is a concern, but that can be overcome by making your own rules about how much you interfere and how much is pretty much on autopilot. But the early game? Man, the early game’s interesting decisions is the most important element in a 4x for me. Turning that one guy into a scientists or a worker, doing that sort of tinkering in the early game makes for a game that’s so much more interesting.
Act Raiser, and the rest of Quintet’s catalog, are cult classics now, FYI.
Yeah, he/she was describing this obscure game and I thought, “It’s ActRaiser. That’s not obscure at all!” :P
Djscman
5073
I remember playing the demo for Spaceward Ho! on the family Macintosh. Was that it?
There was a Star Trek:Next Gen shareware game for the Mac I was never able to find. You play a top-down Enterprise-D as you warp from colony to colony, beaming up colonists until the ship is full, then warping to the closest starbase to drop them off. All the while, Romulan ships are trying to wipe out colonies and your ship. I can’t find that game in lists of Trek games, though.
vyshka
5074
That wasn’t a interstellar brothel simulator?
For the star trek game did VGA planets do something like that?
Djscman
5075
[quote=“vyshka, post:5074, topic:67658, full:true”]
That wasn’t a interstellar brothel simulator?[/quote]
Spaceward Har!
I haven’t played VGA Planets, but I was under the impression all the action was on spreadsheets. This was more like Choplifter, if Choplifter was on one big single map and looked more like the Super-Melee in Star Control 2.
Guys, this game just scared the begeezus out of me, in the best possible way.
A quick Wikipedia search suggests Pax Imperia.
Pax Imperia was serious. I think I also played a sequel.
BTW notwithstanding all the great 4x space games I bet I’ve spent only 10 percent of my time in two years playing a space strategy game. They all keep bouncing.
Before I blame a whole genre on my ineptitude I may go back and try some good ones. I think I have Stars in the Shadow somewhere…
Neither Pax Imperia game was very good, in my opinion.
This really looks like it. The gameplay looks nearly identical on the surface. However, the cowboy hats are throwing me off. I don’t remember cowboy hats.
It could have been an uncredited rip off of Spaceward Ho! There were different races you could choose with different bonuses; one were the “Simians” which had some good combat bonuses I think? Another were an insectoid race with increased production. The “Terrans” (natch) had good diplomacy skills.
One neat feature was that in multiplayer hot seat you could “scramble” the map so that stars appeared to be random with your homeworld in the center. When I discovered a star my map might generate a name for it; on your map that same star could appear but under a different name. It wasn’t until our two races met that the maps would “join”. It was a really neat and simple ‘fog of war’ feature that I don’t recall any other game doing off the top of my head. It’s like: ‘oh yeah, what we are calling Rigel you’ve been calling Deneb (bad example), but really it’s the same star’.
There was a Star Trek:Next Gen shareware game for the Mac I was never able to find. You play a top-down Enterprise-D as you warp from colony to colony, beaming up colonists until the ship is full, then warping to the closest starbase to drop them off. All the while, Romulan ships are trying to wipe out colonies and your ship. I can’t find that game in lists of Trek games, though.
Sounds sort of like Net Trek. This other game definitely wasn’t Trek, though.
orald
5081
Speaking of [quote=“BrianRubin, post:5008, topic:67658”]
a boring, abandoned game
[/quote]
There are some interesting concepts in Stardrive 2 Sector Zero. I like the special resources on some planets and asteroid belts and how if you collect four of them your faction receives a boost though having less than four can enhance your faction in other ways. It adds an extra element to colonization, may determine your research priorities and enhances interaction with other races and trading for those resources.
The diplomacy part has a twist in that your faction only has so much tolerance for cutting deals with other factions. Maybe it is too limiting as implemented but it is an attempt to mix up diplomacy which I find the weak link in the space 4x chain.
I also like that when you hire a hero, over time you learn their back story and that some of them carry baggage which may become your problem. Like the Owl Rambo dude who it turns out crossed a powerful bad guy and eventually will ask you to help get him out of a jam which involves fighting.
Some of these things are better executed than others, like the Owl Rambo quest directions for where to go aren’t persistent and once the screen that explains all that is gone I couldn’t remember where I had to go to take out said bad guy.
I did encounter a crash that froze up my computer and I had to reboot it, so I probably won’t play this too much longer, but there are some interesting ideas in here that I hope a dev will scavenge and incorporate into a finished, more stable game. I don’t regret buying this on sale.
I agree. That’s why to me it’s such a tragedy. If it didn’t have so much potential, it would have been lost in the sea of countless games that never rise to my notice.
Yeah, that’s really the worst part about it all. It had a ton of potential – I mean come on, samurai space bears – but it was just so…middling in it’s execution.
What engine did they use?
It was developed on Unity, according to this.
