Just to clarify; the game being sold at gogamer called ‘Space Rangers’ is in fact Space Rangers 2, the game we’re discussing in this thread, yeah?
It’s top down, and it zooms into a 3rd person behind the back when you take control.
Some thoughts I forgot to add about the RTS sections:
It seems kinda tacked-on. I’m not sure if the RTS segments can be used to actually take over a planet that has been occupied by the enemy yet… the one I did was more of a sub-quest mission.
It’s just that it’s such different experience from playing the rest of the game it’s somewhat jarring.
At first I hated it, as I normally don’t like RTS games. But once i realized you could pause and give orders to some effect, it became somewhat fun.
It’s just so bizarre that you’re playing an RTS game for an hour, then suddenly you’re back in this totally different game.
I believe, though, that the RTS sections are optional. You can get money and rare items for completing them though. I really hope they can be used to gain back planets… I’ll have to look into that.
Yes. That’s the english version of Space Rangers 2, which also includes the full version of Space Rangers 1.
As stated before, thanks for taking the time here, fly-j. Sounds like a bit of a diamond in the rough.
100,000 Russians can’t be wrong!
Yes. That’s the english version of Space Rangers 2, which also includes the full version of Space Rangers 1.[/quote]
Woah. It includes the full first game? I didn’t realize that…that’s a nice bargain then.
I just want to confirm that this game is a lot of fun, and I’m surprised nobody’s talking about it. Anyone know exactly what the different classes do? Not races, but classes as in Pirate, Corsair, Merchant, etc?
And the English translation is fine.
Just ordered this on gogamer. Hope it doesn’t suck.
Damn you Qt3! I just ordered it too! I can’t help myself. A space RPG-RTS-quest-money-turn-based-combat-thingy? You betcha!
I’ve done half of the tutorial many times while I try to figure out exactly what kind of character I want. I think I’ve finally settled on human mercenary and will actually start playing. Anyway, one time when I was doing this, my character was apparently a wanted man on one of the planets you have to land on during the tutorial (bad luck). So I land there, and am immediately arrested and sentenced to 97 days in jail. The game goes into a text based choose your own adventure gamebook kind of thing, with its own stats and rules. There’s your health, intellect, reputation with the guards, reputation with the other criminals, and another stat that I didn’t catch the name of, but seems to measure how close you are to being paroled. It starts off as “you are on the right path”, but can move up or down to things like “you are turning over a new leaf” or “you are a hardened criminal”. Sometimes the guards approach you and ask you to be an informant. If you accept, your work schedule gets easier and your reputation with the guards goes up. If you refuse, the guards beat you, reputation with them goes down, and reputation with the other prisoners goes up. I imagine you can get out early by taking either path, either getting released early with a high guard reputation or participating in an escape with a high prisoner reputation.
You also have an inventory, and can pick up things like a rubic’s cube, or a cockroach that you can train to race against other prisoners cockroaches. The cockroach’s current top speed is tracked.
The prison has its own schedule when different things are open, such as the library (for increasing intellect), or the gym (for increasing health), or when different events occur such as cockroach races.
I only played it for about twenty turns before deciding to start a new game and not get arrested until I had at least finished the tutorial, but I’m amazed that this little throwaway incident of going to prison was so fleshed out. I hear the game is full of other stuff like that, too.
On the down side, I tried the RTS planet battle mode, and it wasn’t that great. It’s actually pretty fun customizing your robots and piloting one of them manually while your other robots stomp around ahead of and behind you, but it takes FOREVER to destroy the enemy buildings. I killed all the enemy robots, had a full force of robots with what I think was the best building-destroying weapons, and it still took like ten minutes to destroy their undefended base. At least the RTS missions are optional.
You know, I honestly can’t tell if you’re making all that prison shit up.
Which means if you’re not, I’m gonna have to buy this game, because that much detail into something that seems incidental would be tremendously impressive.
I’m sold. First game I’ve ever bought because it has cockroach races, but there you go.
Unless you count Bad Mojo.
On the RTS thing:
Why are you destroying their bases? You should be capturing them. It takes about 10 seconds to capture them. Once you have them, you can build defensive turrets, as well as reap more resources… and your robot cap goes up.
If you capture an enemy factory, you can produce your own units there.
The point of the RTS segments are to capture as many bases as you can. I couldn’t imagine winning without doing that.
EDIT: And another thing. I believe your class choice does indeed effect how people view you everywhere. I’m a pirate… and even though I don’t do any pirate-y things, people just generally hate me. Systems that are friendly eventually start to hate me as well.
I’ve gone to prison about 4 times now. It gets to be kind of a pain in the ass. One time I was even murdered in a prison for sucking up to the guards too much to get out early (I had a package I needed to deliver in 40 days, and my sentence was 60).
Ironically enough, the package I was delivering was a planetary shield module to help the planet against a rash of meteor showers. I landed on the planet, and they immediately tossed me in jail for being a criminal (I didn’t even do bad stuff to them!). After I got murdered, I reloaded a savegame and landed on a neighboring planet. Luckily they didn’t toss me in the slammer, but allowed me to bribe them to get better relations. This made them a step below neutral towards me. Then I flew over to the planet that needed the shield, delivered it, now they’re completely friendly to me.
If only they knew what I was there for initially before throwing me in the can.
I picked this up as well. I’m astonished at the production values.
This looks like what I wanted from X2 (galactic freedom, pretty much), except with an interface that’s designed for it, and without that pesky 3D combat that I suck at.
Only had time to play 15-20 mins of this last night, but so far I love what I see! Took me a bit to realize the ship movement was turn-based, not real time.
It’s sitting at home waiting to be installed on my shiny new computer - it really does sound like a fantastic game.
Is it playable in a window? I’m back in an Eve-Online groove and wouldn’t mind playing both at the same time!
Sweet, my game should be arriving today from gogamer. Looks like I made a good purchase. :D
Got this last night (gogamer) and played it for several hours. Put me inthe “This game is really good” camp also.
Some things people haven’t mentioned that I’d like to add:
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You do have stats. This wasn’t obvious to me until I played because no one directly mentioned it. There are 6 stats, you gain experience, and spend it upping them. They are Comabt (+dmg), piloting (-enemy dmg), Leadership (num of ships you can control), Charisma (affects dialog I beleive), Trade (sell modifier), and, uh…, I forgot the 6th.
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You can customize all the components on your ship. Components are Diablo-ish in that there are base classes (“Hydro Feul Cells”) that have varying statistics (Space, Size, Fuel amount, etc.) They don’t have Diablo names, though (no “Godly Hydro Cells of the Whale!”) which is good in my opinion. There are 18 “slots” for ship components.
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You can research to improve your ship components. Consider it analagous to enchanting them.
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In turn-based combat, you pre-plot each days movement and can scan enemy ships to see what their plotted movement is. This makes it very tactical without bogging down.
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You can recruit/hire “party members” up to your Leadership stat. I use a wingman in a decently armed combat ship to escort me since I’m a merchant and have no guns on my ship whatsoever.
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You can hail basically any ship in the game and the amount of stuff you can ask them is pretty good, ranging from trying to recruit them to trying to get their help attacking something to just chatting aobut the local news.
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Speaking of the local news, there is a news station with reports of whats going on in the galaxy. There is also a “google-ish” search engine you can use to dig through archives to learn more about planets, races, and older news reports rather then dig through help files. It’s all done in-game and is very elegant rather then an obvious “reference to the manual”
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The game is challenging on normal mode. (speaking from someone who plays a ton of Strategy games) I’ve died several times not because I was “new”, but simply because I tried to run cargo without protection, etc. and the pirates aren’t very forgiving. You can plead for your life and pay them off in credits to have them break the attack and that regurarly works, but is far to expensive to be reasonable compared to having a wingman.
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The game autosaves every time you take off a planet, thank God.
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The difficulty settings are very, very detailed. You can just choose “Easy” “Normal” “Hard” or can fine tune it, setting “Pirates” to “Weak”, “Player Luck” to “Bad”, etc. There are something like 16 catagories you can use to fine tune difficulty.
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You can smuggle. The money is awesome.
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Finally, the production values for all this stuff are really good. And the translation is fine, except the opening movie which is really fun to laugh at. Don’t let it fool you, though. I have had 0 problems with “stupid dialog” or “bad translations” in the actual game.
Really, pony up and pay your gamer tax if you like RPGs or Space Sims. It’s worth it.
Chris Woods
Is that a good game, BTW?
I loved it, but I’m not sure how well it holds up (it’s been some ten or twelve years since I’ve played it).