Space Pirates and Zombies 2, now with more neon!

Welcome to the glorious SPAZ2 thread. :p

LINKS:
http://minmax-games.com/SpacePiratesAndZombies/

Early Access TRAILER:

INFO:

Design and then improve the ultimate mothership. Explore a persistent living galaxy populated by 200 unique captains that can do everything you can do. Survive the zombie infection and then fight them back. Make allies and start your own faction. Build your empire. Also includes Sandbox Mode.

FYI: EARLY ACCESS GAME

What the developers have to say:

Why Early Access?

“We have been working on SPAZ 2 full time for over 3.5 years. The single player campaign and sandbox modes are highly functional and ready to play. SPAZ 2 is built on an emergent living galaxy with 200 persistent captains, and the two of us here at MinMax just cannot explore all the dark corners of a galaxy on our own. SPAZ 2 is ready and it is time to play.” [B]

Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?[/B]

"We estimate between 6 and 12 months, but we won’t mark SPAZ 2 as released until we feel that it is a complete game that we can be proud of. We are excited to see what players think of SPAZ 2 and to hear their ideas for improvements.” [B]

How is the full version planned to differ from the Early Access version?[/B]

“Right now, the main cast voices are all synthesized. We expect to hire voice acting talent for most of the main cast for final, though if everyone loves the synthesized voices, this may change.

Throughout Early Access we will also be working on localization and will attempt to bring the game to Mac and Linux.

A vs. mode multiplayer. The ship to ship combat side of SPAZ 2 is just begging for multiplayer, and the preliminary work is done. We will spend time coming up with multiplayer modes with the community and a matchmaking solution. We will also likely have to rewrite the current multiplayer back end so expect this to take some time. Please do not purchase for multiplayer until multiplayer is ready.

Achievements and Trading Cards will come on line throughout Early Access.

Tuning, Tuning, Optimization, Tuning.

Stretch goals: VR and local coop. We have done a huge amount of multi layer gfx compositing that MAY make double camera rendering impossible now, but we will investigate solutions near the end of Early Access.”

What is the current state of the Early Access version?

“SPAZ 2 already has an ocean of depth and content. The combat mode and starmap mode are fully functional games in their own right, and all the systems are interacting with one another.

There are over 90 ship and station parts as well as over 30 weapons.

There are 200 persistent and unique AI captains.

The AI captains remember, make friends and enemies, join and leave factions and do just about everything the player can. The AI captains already have over 90 relations events that they can monitor on the starmap.

There is a full levelup perk system that is unlimited at the top end.

There is a lore system that bridges the gap between SPAZ 1 and SPAZ 2.

You can join a faction, build your own, or just remain a filthy neutral.” [B]

Will the game be priced differently during and after Early Access?[/B]

“The price may be increased on release from early access.” [B]

How are you planning on involving the Community in your development process?[/B]

“As with SPAZ 1, the community will be a vital part of the completion process for SPAZ 2. We at MinMax do not have a monopoly on good ideas and had a great experience upgrading SPAZ 1 with community ideas and support.

We have maintained and active forum presence over the last two years while SPAZ 2 has been on the coming soon list. As we have brought new features online, we have discussed them with the community and have gotten their input. Some suggestions have even already made it into the game. We have tried to be as open as possible with our ideas and progress and will continue to do so throughout Early Access and beyond.”

Visually Stunning Neon Eye Candy:

KEY FEATURES (A lot of stuff has changed from the first game!):

[ul]
[li]Two hundred persistent Captains that are able to do everything the player can, including forming dynamic factions, building structures, controlling territory, and going to War. [/li]> [li]A true living galaxy that is not player centric. It will develop differently each game through the interactions of the agents. [/li]> [li]Build your own faction from nothing. [/li]> [li]Randomly generated modular parts. Build the mothership that suits your play style, on the fly, in seconds. Every part has its own unique stats that contribute to the mothership. Every part has its own hull integrity and damage states. Every part is a real, working, ship component. [/li]> [li]Strategic ship building. The mass, location and shape of parts all matter. If a part blocks a turret, it will not fire. If a ship is too long, it will turn slowly. Too many engines will mean too little power for weapons. Every design choice counts. [/li]> [li]A fully physics based 3d environment where everything is destructible, takes damage from impacts, can be grabbed and even thrown at enemies with the tractor beam. [/li]> [li]Natural movement and controls. Movement is on a 2d plane and screen relative, much like an FPS. The combat feels like huge pirate ships battling on an ocean. Focus on tactical positioning and manage system power to unleash hell at the right moment. [/li]> [li]Epic ship to ship battles. Tear the enemy apart piece by piece over minutes, instead of seconds. [/li]> [/ul]

YESSSSS

Boughted! Even if it’s windows only, this will be worth the hassle of running a virtual Windows 10 machine!

Thank you so much for not letting Brian name this thread. :P

So, this seems to be quite different from the original in terms of play structure (yes I know the graphics too). Before you had the fairly tame section where you become strong enough to transition into the second half of the game (sort of like the gatekeeper in Talisman). Here, I gather it is more like 7 days to die where you have a time limit to improve before there’s an invasion? What happens at that point? After that?

I recommend watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34G6moZ1BBg to get a better introduction than the tutorial.

Also, holy shit is the screen noise annoying. The amount of glitches, noise, scan lines, jitter and other random effects need to be killed instead of just decreased 10x like the devs are currently thinking. I can’t even read the help without wanting to punch somebody.

With that said, there seems to be quite a bit to like but right now I am just flailing around.

So I kind of went in blind, I didn’t know how much they had changed the controls/playstyle! I think I might have to plug in my Steam controller and play this on the big screen!

Does anyone know how to defend a target? It says to press “E” but cant seem to trigger it.

EDIT: Nvm, just target some ship with the aiming receptacle and hit “E”.

Ha! I think Spazy spacey zombie threadie thingie thing would have been a great title!

I hatelove you guys.

To be honest, my initial impressions are mostly negative.

Combat was pretty fun, but i HATE how the ship auto turns towards the mouse. I really hope there is a way to turn this off as it is beyond stupid in a space ship game. Especially since (early at least) ship design seems to encourage broadsiding.

The ship building system seems very rough so far. Hopefully it expands later in the game. I’m very early in the game so i won’t condemn the game for the options available at start, but i can hope it changes. The ship editor is also very awkward to use currently. For example, as far i can tell you can’t tell what a part that is currently connected to your ship does. You have to disconnect it and THEN mouse over it. This can be a huge pain if the mystery part is in the center of your ship.

Hopefully you can customize more than just the mothership. I will be extremely disappointed if you can’t customize your fleet like you could in the previous game.

Hopefully everyone is wrong about the research system being totally gutted from the previous game and just being bonuses now.

I’m kind of fearing that this is a HUGE step backwards from the previous game, but still early.

Go into Options->Gameplay and turn off the “Relative control” option (or something similar). Then control becomes a tank-like thing (W is forward thrusters, S is back thrusters, A turn left, D turn left, independently of the camera position). I much prefer it this way.

You can buy strike craft, which are in fact the craft you used to control in SPAZ 1 (and you can control them, too). While you can’t customize each individual strike craft directly (AFAIK), you can buy strike craft with different rarities, bonuses and weapons, so there is some degree of customization available.

Data is tied to level up now, which is mostly about bonuses, but that was pretty much the case in SPAZ 1 as well (along with being prerequisites for certain weapons/tech - not sure if that still applies in SPAZ 2).

While some people might see SPAZ 2 as a step back, I personally LOVE the starmap approach in SPAZ 2. It gives me this “Mount & Blade in space” feel, which is exactly what I want.

I can’t recreate this, just hovering over any part will show me what it is, connected or not.

My issue with the shipbuilding is how if you want to swap out a core you have to disconnect everything connected to it. This means you are always disconnecting everything since your oldest part, the one you would want to replace, is likely buried underneath everything else.

As advised by Brian in his reply, turn off the default control option. The default WASD control scheme does not work like you expect it to. “W” in the defaults acts like move in to forward direction (no matter where you cursor is), it just makes the ship go “NORTH” in the direction your camera is facing.

Turn it off in the options and W works like the thrusters, moving in the direction the ship is facing.

Wait! What was wrong with my title?? j/k

Might need to watch some let’s play vids on this. No idea what i’m doing… except for getting blown to bits all the time.

If you are in the story mode, in the first battle you will surely die. Because that it is an ingame computer game. Die once and the story proceeds.

Yeah past that. In tactical mode flying around collecting things. Whenever I engage an enemy I die. Doesn’t seem to be anything more to do yet - or I’m just confused. Seems like it could be alright though.

Strange that, because unless you actively piss off a faction, most interactions can be just peaceful. Dont have to click attack.

I spend my time exploring the entire map collecting lore and leveling up that way.

Also, participate in ongoing battles and siding with the higher level ships.

The customization screen could use a rework. the 3d engine only serves to detract from a straightforward and simple task, making it unnecessarily complicated. Switching cores is horrible. Hope they improve this.

Starsector does mount and blade in space , in the style of the first spaz game, just better in every way, as for this incarnation it smells like Rebel galaxy so it’s only saving graze will be the ship builder imho