Papageno
6470
I just found this rather cool video essay about Space Beast Terror Fright from over a year ago on YouTube:
Alas, it looks like the channel’s been dead for a while.
So I played the retail version of Crying Suns today and wow, it’s so much better. It has all kinds of stuff, like fighters and what not, so you feel like you’re actually in charge of a big ship. Neat events too, and fun combat. I’ll be doing a vid next week if y’all wanna wait, but so far initial impressions are very positive.
orald
6472
That is good to hear. The demo was frustratingly punishing. Eager to hear more of your impressions.
Yeah, I bet they heard that a lot because this was far gentler, at least in the beginning.
vinraith
6474
Been playing a little SPG Warlords but I’m rapidly losing interest because the combat seems to be the genre standard “circle-athon” turn and burn stuff, which I have little patience for (and which is a large part of the reason I rarely play space sims anymore). Are there any good fly-fight-trade space games that don’t fall into that pattern? Rebel Galaxy (the first one) was largely free of it thanks to the whole broadside combat conceit, but it looks like the new one regressed.
That’s kinda every space game. I guess you can go top-down like the amazing 3030 Deathwar.
vinraith
6476
That’s a pity.
Maybe I just need to wait for Star Sector to be finished, that looks like it’s got potential.
vinraith
6478
Right, top down stuff is definitely less annoying. :)
I’m kind of baffled that no one has tried to break out of the circling thing. I can’t be the only one that wore out on that ~20 years ago.
What other option do you think there is? Broadsides has been tried a couple times and in every instance I’ve seen it just means that you do a really slow version of circle strafing like an old-school shooter in molasses.
vinraith
6480
Slower is definitely better, in that the entire game isn’t just a frantic attempt to get the target in front of you at all. That a broadside based combat system naturally comes with a much more free camera and the ability to shoot at angle beyond straight forward helps a lot too.
But there have to be other options. Considering the infinite clarity of space it seems like some sort of long range sniping/salvo thing should have been done ages ago, for just one example.
Papageno
6481
Hey, speaking of that, you mentioned on the podcast that you might be streaming that soon. Next week sometime?
I played some last night and I’m torn. I’ve got such a nice ship, but if I stream it, I wanna do it from the beginning.
And as always, you can see what’s coming up on our Calendar.
vinraith
6483
On further play, it looks like SPG Warlords isn’t really a victim of the dreaded endless circling after all, since both the weapons and the camera can operate independent of ship facing. In principle this is great and solves my problem, and indeed I’ve had much more combat success ever since I discovered the “fire at will” function which takes full advantage of the weapon arcs rather than relying on my manual targetting. In practice, at least right now, it means I spend 90% of the fight never seeing my opponent, because the ship is never facing them (so chase cam doesn’t work) and I can’t seem to find them on free cam with any reliability. I’m… not sure what to do about that.
Are there any good SPG Warlords guides? I seem to need some help figuring out the best way to use the camera modes/UI.
Well, I decided that I love 3030 so much, I’m willing to start it from the beginning. So that’ll be next Friday’s stream. ;)
In IWar 2 you kind of slide around/drift like a hockey player. Combat is also slower.
In the SPG series once you discover the auto-fire ability of turrets the combat gets kind of boring and repetitive in its own way. In a game where you’re controlling capital ships I prefer Homeworld/Nexus-style combat.
TurinTur
6486
Any opinions for Crying Suns?
So after finally having some time with Crying Suns, I’ve come to a conclusion. It’s not good. It’s not bad.
It’s boring.
After maybe 30-40 minutes, I felt like I’d seen everything, and for the rest of my time with it, I WAS SO BORED. Like, I was so excited to be done with it, that’s how bored I was. It’s a shame, it’s pretty, well-written and has some fun gameplay elements. BUT IT IS SO BORING. Ugh.
Thank you for your service.
I didn’t want to be the downer in the thread, but yeah that was my experience from playing the demo ~4 months ago. The combat was both simple and and unenjoyable and difficult to parse, while the away missions took about 10x longer to resolve than they should have.
