Space Game General All-Platform Thready Discussy Thing :)

Hey guys, please enjoy my latest – and last – article covering Arvoch Alliance (spoiler - it didn’t end well):

Next up: Distant Worlds - Legends!

Who the fuck puts a mission in the middle of a piss colored cloud? “Hey spacebro, enjoy this flight through a world of piss!”

Hahahahaah

Brian, I see Space Ranger 2 : Reboot recommended on your page, I think I once played Space Ranger 2, is this the same game, or is there something new with the reboot?

Getting Nexus Jupiter Incident atleast ;)

Has anybody made a space game where you go around terraforming worlds and seeding them with life? I’d play that. If it’s good.

I THINK SR2: Reboot is the original game with the expansion, also called Reboot. At least I hope it is, Steam’s site isn’t entirely clear. I’d say snag it, it’s an amazing value.

The only one that comes to mind is Millennia: Altered Destinies, where you flew a time-traveling ship, seeded worlds with life and then visited them every so often to guide their progress. If more pop up in my head, I’ll let you know.

Was that one any good? I remember reading a preview of it in a magazine way back when, and thinking that the concept sounded great.

Twilight Imperium is a lot of fun, provided you’ve got a bunch of other friends with six hours to kill. I’m proud to say I once won a game without firing a single shot.

Oh yeah, I loved the game.

Imperium Galactica 2 is on your list of games, but not on your list of games to buy. Did you not play it?

Because every space 4x since (which is all of them) has basically stolen from it unashamedly.

IG2 is actually still my favorite 4X game, but since you can’t easily get it through a digital distribution site, and likely have to get a used copy through Amazon or Ebay – which I’m not keen on recommending – it’s not on the shopping guide.

“Why not Space Miner”?

Because I already fucking own it.

It was Galaxy On Fire 2. Thanks!

While when I played Subspace, I had downloaded the game. Years later I found a boxed copy in a store I had to buy because it was titled Subspace: The Internet Game. And to be fair, not much besides text based games really played over the internet when that came out. I’ve hung onto that retail copy as the interesting anachronism that it is.

I had a cool idea for a sorta Elite style game where you are a paper plane and you fly around the cosmos terraforming worlds and seeding them with origami animals and plants. Woulda been cool but I will never make it.

In SimEarth there were scenarios where you’d terraform Mars and Venus. They were very much fun and took a fairly realistic approach to terraforming (crashing comets for their water ice, placing carbon scrubbers etc.).

I’m always shocked that it gets so little coverage or discussion, but I guess that happens to a lot of fantastic late nineties games. More shocking is how many games are clearly following in its footsteps but don’t bother to acknowledge the fact.

Shit I wish someone would get around to stealing their spy system, that was fantastic.

Went and took a look at Starfarer for the first time in a while. Looks like .5a is shaping up to be really nice.

http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=323.0

Agreed on all counts. There were a TON of spacey 4X games in the mid-late 90’s, and it’s sad it got lost in the shuffle. Haegemonia: Legions of Iron was its spiritual successor, but I didn’t think it was anywhere near as good as IG2, sadly.

holy crap that looks awesome!

I wouldn’t know because the campaign is so fucking slow that I can’t proceed. I will give it credit for having the only campaign in a 4x that I’ve considered worth doing, so there’s that.

Actually there’s a lot to like about it, and I’m being unfair. But there’s also a lot to dislike.

It’s obvious that the developers were annoyed at the feature creep of the space 4x, so they shaved it down a bunch. Problem was they shaved it down too much and ended up with a system where only one of the four ship types is useful. Part of the problem is balance, part is lack of flash and polish, and part of it is really just being ahead of their time. They were cutting stuff out before players were willing to accept that that sort of cutting was the right thing to do, so they didn’t exactly know WHAT to cut.

I’ll give it a shot in skirmish and see how I feel about it.

http://fractalsoftworks.com/2011/11/22/crew-management-and-you/

This should be required reading for all devs at all companies.