I think I’m done. I’ve run into a wall where the game is just too fast for me, and I’m only doing as well as I did before, so I’m not scoring stars, and thus not unlocking anything more.
I like the concept, but it would be about 1000% better if you could pause and issue orders while paused, like FTL.
This game needs a pause.
Basically, during battle you need to constantly be changing the direction your guns are facing (changed by mouse wheel scrolling), building new blocks, repairing damaged blocks and using special abilities. Each of these are done on a per block basis. You can’t just have a bunch of lasers all go rapid fire without clicking through each one.
If you have a small ship with a few guns to rotate and a few other random things on it, this is fine, but when you start getting ships that have dozens of lasers and also other guns, it gets to be too much.
Imagine playing a game of starcraft where you can’t have more than one unit selected at a time. That is this game. It is a shame because i think there are some interesting concepts in this game and it could be quite fun if only it had a couple changes.
I also think the mouse over resources to get them is stupid. That is mobile bullshit. Just give me the resources automatically.
I took another run at this, both because I’m stubborn and because I’m feeling I’ve mined Factorio out.
I think the key is playing the same missions over and over again. For the Brown Beard boss battles, it’s possible to beat him normally, but in practice it works a lot better if you know precisely how he’s going to attack, and you’ve spent all your money beforehand on a design that can deal with that best.
Rotating laser turrets seems like a huge time suck, but for the most part you shouldn’t be relying on laser turrets against the harder stuff. You still need them against fighters and small asteroids, but heavier weapons do the majority of the damage against hard opponents.
One thing I didn’t realize at first is that missile launchers don’t need to be on the exterior of the ship. They can be anywhere. Since they can’t rotate, you really need to play a mission multiple times to figure out where they should face. Wide Angle helps a bit, but it costs money (unlike rotation) and it’s much more limited.
This is really more a game of preparation than reaction. Once you get past the first 6-10 missions and start hitting really nasty stuff, it’s better to watch what’s happening when things go south rather than try and fix it. So you know what you should do next time before combat starts.
Shields are absolutely essential. Your early ships don’t have the space for them, but once you get to the bigger hulls, they change how much damage you can absorb dramatically. One reason I was feeling like my Brown Beard battles were a hectic mess was that I was losing components right and left. The heavy-duty 2000 point shields change that, and slow the pace down considerably. Since the heavy-duty shields require power and 4 hexes, but cover a 2 hex radius, I found that I had to plan how I was going to lay out most everything before the mission started.
The game would still be 10x better if you could pause and evaluate what’s going on. I prefer games where you can make decisions as events unfold, rather than relying on the foreknowledge gained from try-fail-reload.
I find rapid-firing basic lasers very effective at certain tasks; they certainly overwhelm shields quickly. Mixing lasers and ions is obnoxious because the closer things are together, the more tedious it is to turn them. The entire reposition obnoxious, unfortunately; I wish there was some level abstraction because in principle it’s a nice idea. I agree, mostly missions are “how to best position hard hitting stuff to deal with big threats/reward generators”. I’ve unlocked the rocket launchers but I haven’t yet begun upgrading them. I think the 2-radius shield is a huge difference maker and would probably want to have it unlocked about the time ships are big enough to accommodate it (I can’t remember when that is either). I think it and missile launchers are the biggest difference makers so far. I just killed Brown Bunny or whomever again and finally beat the mission I was failing (due to not finishing in time). Earlier engines and lots of well positioned missile launchers were key.
Whuuuuuuuut
Do you get to design your own hulls at all? That would be dreamy.
Nope. Part of the mission constraints is the hull design, which is often quite limiting. Sometimes it’s just the limited space, sometimes it’s that the shape forces placement of some components.
For example, on the Falcon there, it’s impossible to shield the two leading hexes with a level-2 or 3 shield generator. which means you really need to drop a level-1 shield generator behind each one. Similarly, you can’t place any of the heavier laser cannons so they face directly forward. Since that mission has you flying through a steady stream of asteroids coming in from the front, you need missile weapons facing forward, plus some light lasers to clean up the small stuff.
I still haven’t 5-starred the first Brown Beard battle after 3 tries, but I somehow managed to 5-star the second Brown Beard battle on my first try, without knowing exactly what to expect. So it is definitely possible to not just beat them, but master them first time out.
The boss battles are rough to 5 star because they all have some sort of magical engine-disabling technology. So you can be well on track for a Lightning Delivery and miss out because you took too long to destroy the boss, and thus he delayed you for a long time. You have to have a substantial thrust surplus over and above the amount listed, since you’re going to lose time no matter what.
True, but after you kill the boss, should have some time to quickly build some engines and activate the overload thrust on them all. It’s not much time, but that was enough to kick me up to 5 stars on my attempt.
Quite often, I found that when I was done with the boss, the Lightning time limit had already expired. There’s very little distance left after the boss, so you have to be right on the edge for building additional drives to help at that point.
Here’s my vid of some gameplay if y’all want another idea of how it plays. :) Hope this is okay to share. :)
I streamed some the other day on Twitch, but Twitch didn’t know what the game was, so I had to list myself as “Not Playing”.
I love symmetry, therefore I hate this game >:(
There’s a dearth of good information on how to play this game successfully without going frantic, and I kinda-sorta am thinking I should make some example videos. Except that I haven’t the slightest how to record a video of a Steam game like this, and I’m not sure I have the patience to run through the missions I’ve mastered. To do it really properly would involve starting over with a new profile. It’d be bad to demonstrate how to 5-star a mission using equipment that you can’t use before you’ve beaten it.
It turns out the free software that Twitch.tv recommends for streaming also does local recording, though I haven’t personally used it for that. It doesn’t look like much from a UI perspective, but is fairly easy to use and surprisingly competent and well-featured. (You can easily record game + webcam, for example.)
You can find it here: Open Broadcast Software
OBS is almost all I use for recording, and it’s awesome. I sometimes use Nvidia Shadowplay on older games, but that’s rare thankfully. OBS is great.
I just finished the game - 5 stars in every mission. I used the Escape key as a pause key quite often. You can’t do anything while the menus are up, not even scroll the map, but you can at least see what’s going on, think about the current threat, and plan out layouts.
If you’re going to think of this as a tower defense game, it’s really a quantum leap beyond most of them. Including my favorite Defense Grid.
In most tower defense games, enemies are essentially big blobs of hit points, Fast, slow, armored or fragile, they’re fairly generic. Mostly they effect what weapons are optimal against a particular set of stats, but it’s often the case that you spam a particular tower type because all towers will eventually target all enemies, and the one that is most broadly effective works best. With Defense Grid for example you can beat most maps with gun tower spam.
Asteroids and the smaller ships retain that flavor in Space Run, but knowing the bigger ships matters. Putting up anti-missile defenses is important against ships with rockets or better. If the enemy has ion cannons, you must be fully shielded, because the disabling effect on unshielded components is absolutely devastating. If the ship has anti-missile defenses of its own, you need serious laser firepower.
It’s unfortunate that the built-in enemy database is vague about enemy ship designs. The color coded diagrams don’t tell you what you need to know. You need to eyeball the ship thumbnails, and those are usually at an angle that makes it hard to make out details of the ship design. It can be worth it to pause the game just to examine a particular enemy design in detail as it comes in range, particularly the bosses.
Most tower defense are about layout, but not to this degree. Firing arcs, power requirements, and shield coverage all combine to make this game heavily about careful ship design. By mid-game you simply cannot afford to be sloppy about placement, since a one hex error makes a huge difference.
Since enemies don’t pass by everything, matching weapons and defenses in a segment to incoming threats matters. If you have fighters or small asteroids incoming, you must have lasers. If there are big ships coming without anti-missile defenses, you can use missiles instead. Your own anti-missile defenses need to face enemy missile threats.
Generally speaking, you can’t afford to shield your engines. If you’re careful about putting them under shield umbrellas, you probably can’t make enough total thrust to 5-star the mission. In the late game, the most efficient layout is generally a couple of fusion generators powering banks of level-2 thrusters, which takes so much space that even the radius-3 shields can’t cover them.
The only components I didn’t end up having much use for are the Space Folder (level-3 drive) and Defense Complex (advanced anti-missile / ion cannon combo).
The problem is that the Space Folder takes up 3 rear spots and only generates 350 thrust, and 3 level-2 thrusters generate 600. Plus bonuses if you have extra power, of course. The Space Folder’s Hyperspace special ability can shave time, but it’s also a huge headache because it can dump you right next to enemy ships. I found that just being fast with regular thrusters worked better.
The problem with the Defense Complex is simpler: it’s big, it’s an awkward shape, and it needs an outer hex. Shoehorning it in is tough.
While all those special actions make the game look hectic, in practice you usually don’t want to activate any ability that costs nuts. It’s better to build something instead. The special abilities mostly come into play against bosses, since you usually have a big nut surplus by the time you face one.
The exception is Materialization on the level-3 power generator, since it’s a discount to building cost. If you have 300+ to spend at once, Materialization saves you money as well as time.
It’s better to think of the biggest weapons and bigger shields as requiring 1 more power than listed, because it’s so cost effective to gain the power bonuses once you’ve unlocked them. Going from 2 power to 3 is a minor increase in cost for a big increase in firepower for the level-3 laser and level-3 missile launcher. Similarly, an extra point of power makes the level-2 and 3 shields much more durable.
HAh, nice work using ESC as a jury-rigged pause button. Also glad to hear you liked the game. :)
