Stardock owns Star Control and is planning an "XCOM-like" reboot

Per Brad’s post on Steam, this Thursday’s update improves load times for non-SSD users.

Ages since I\ve posted here.
Got the game from Toms Patron, played it a few hours now.

Short points.

Its a mess, a lovable mess, but really…a mess.

Storyline is okay, I’m partially enjoying the fun, altough the main badguys are a bit ‘duh’ and I guess I’ll have their motives in a while …but right now…its just weird.

Few things
1)I can’t see what I’ve scanned or where I have been, this is a bit bothersome…an overlay map would be nice, I need to see what I’ve done…

  1. Gathering minerals is nice, a fun little game for a while, but djiz, you can’t leave us with doing it for hours and hours…I’ts not fleshed out for that kind of thing, it WILL wear out is welcome very fast.
    I meet some enemies, but my basic lander is just chugging along.

  2. Tech, I don’t find much on the planets exept reseources, but I in my homebase tech is popping up from time to time, okay, but that means I have to pay attention to EVERY single bay and check whats new for each…people WILL miss this…and not understand why that tech is there…

  3. Why am I keeping some resources and not others? My ship is half full with stuff I don’t know what is…will I suffer from selling it…or ? I have to return all the time to sell now because of this.

Some storage on home planet would be nice or something…

Combat is spot on from the original series, and feels nice and fluid, I approve…but honestly, that was the easy part.

Anyone else ever think the Menckmak are being voiced by Triumph the insult comic dog?

Yeah, I don’t get why the thought for so long was people would go old school and be writing everything down. People did it back then because they had no choice due to the technical limitations imposed. It will be interesting to see what changes are made to the sector map as Brad has already mentioned work is coming on that. Right now I’m searching for some Francium [sic?]. Just mistakenly overlooking a star system means you could go quite a while missing something like a Scryve Battlecruiser in your fleet.

I have to admit I’m coming around on the combat a little. What I’m doing differently is just to try to stay close to the enemy. When the view is more zoomed in, the combat isn’t bad, it’s pretty decent. It’s only when it’s completely zoomed out, it’s tough to judge which direction you’re going because your ship is so tiny on the screen and you’re trying to judge your momentum from the little tiny trail behind your ship. Also, if I stay away from the edges, then I don’t have to put up with collision annoyances with asteroids as such as much.

My go to in combat is the Mu’Kay ship. Just fly around, dodge the enemy and spam the secondary attack. The enemy chases you and gets damaged by the ink. So far only a few battles I could not handle this way. Playing on normal that is.

Yeah, that is nice if you can get a good spread of them out. I’m interested to see how my ship does since I got some nice upgrades late last night. A subspace drive that gives a +50% speed boost, and a fleet targeting module that improves the attack of all ships in the fleet. I found a Scryve battlecruiser as well, which has that nasty death ray it can shoot which will tear things up. Has anyone come across a module that goes in the sensor slot?

That was the enemy I practiced against in Fleet-battles, with the ships that I currently have access to (basically just the Tywom and Earth ships). And basically I found it impossible to beat these things. That main death ray has got to be the most devastating weapon in the Star Control series so far that I can think of. The Ur-Quan vessel’s main attack didn’t do as much damage per second, and neither did the Kohr-Ah Blades, and the Chmmr ship’s main laser battery fire didn’t do this much damage in this short a time either.

Basically if an Earth or Tywom ships gets within range, it’s instant death even with a full crew.

So I thought maybe if I can get momentum to do a fast fly-by, a Tywom ship could strafe fire as it flies by?

Nope, the Scryve ship has a powerful secondary attack too, some kind of proximity flak fire that kills a Tywom ship pretty fast.

So yeah, pretty much the most powerful ship in Star Control I think.

Yeah, when I’ve faced them it involves some attrition and doing everything possible to not get caught in front of them. Most ship will just die if they get hit. The Terran ship is the only one, and maybe my Scryve battlecruiser but I wouldn’t want to waste it on that fight, that can survive and that is only if it quickly gets out of the firing line. Phamyst have been somewhat annoying as well, since they have an ability that lets them regen. So I end up beating them, but they wear down the crews of my ships, and there seem to be so many of them that I ended up with 4 or 5 engagements trying to get to the homeworld once in system.

I finally got my toxic defenses to a level where I can survive on some really nasty planets, which has helped with raising money to buy improvements. I haven’t really received that much money from missions outside of 2 instances I think.

Another quick patch as we work on the bigger update coming soon. :)

  • The Alien Contact achievements now work as intended. We’ll have another soon patch that will immediately retroactively award to it existing games so you don’t have to re-visit everyone. But they should unlock now when you visit an alien.
  • Made a small graphics adjustment to improve stability on higher end graphics cards.

Yes, I noticed those started working last night. It looks like a number of the others are working now as well. One I can see that looks like maybe it still isn’t working is Ovoid Egg, if the trigger is what I think it is anyways, Or maybe it has been fixed as well, and just no one has done it since the patch.

“You are even worse than I heard.”

I was worried about the Drenkend. Then they started attacking me. Now they are a regular source of RU.

That reminds me. Is there a way to increase the value or amount of salvage obtained at the end of a fight? I experimented with the “salvage” weapon at one point, but didn’t notice it doing anything special in that regard.

It’s an AoE crew vampire, nothing to do with RU

Wow, that’s a strange name for that weapon. I’ll have to check it out again sometime. Thanks!

You should post more.

Is it just for balance reasons that the crews of ships you find on planets don’t get replenished?

@Brad_Wardell something to look at with the ai module. I have the hyper nuke on my ship, but with phasers installed the ai won’t fire any nukes, and just waits until it is close enough at some point then fires off the phasers. It was just going around in circles with a radiant angel ship, getting wore down, and finally died in the nebula. At distance and with full energy I don’t see why it wouldn’t be firing the nukes.

One QoL thing that might be nice is the ability to buyback something during the same trade session, in case “hypothetically” you accidentally sell the 70 Francium you were storing. :/

Question, if humans colonize another system, can you visit the colony? wondering if the 1st colony disappeared as I didn’t find them on any planet in the system.

Oh crap. I knew I should have played this game with a notebook handy beside me. I’ve found three or four worlds now that my first officer said I should keep in mind because they would make good worlds to colonize. But they don’t show in the Captain’s Log. And I sure as heck don’t remember which ones they were anymore.