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

It’s totally worth trying again unless the graphics put you off. There’s a script to roughly follow, so to speak, in order to get “optimal” endings and a looser one to manage to actually win the game but it’s filled with enough bread crumbs to guide you and still allows for some liberties. But yeah, don’t get caught up in the mining too much.

I would love there to be a mod that just removed the resource system entirely, or at least provided fuel for free, though I’m sure that might moderately mess with balance. . .

I am the weird guy who’s only “finished” StarCon 1 and 3, though.

In STO? All. All of Enterprise.

When it first launched, it had a bug in the game that everyone I knew had told me about in the college computer lab where we played it. I’m not sure if the version you played still had this bug. Basically when you first get setup with a base on Earth, you can go into the screen where you can buy more shuttle craft for your main ship, and sell your shuttle craft. And if you kept the button held down, it would keep selling shuttle craft until you got tired of having resources.

You can then buy back some shuttle craft because you’re now really rich and never have to go planet hunting for resources. You still need to go planet hunting for biological currency though.

So I really enjoyed that way to play the game, I never had to deal with resource collection except for biological things. So that aspect of the game was still there for me, but it wasn’t time consuming.

I just don’t even … lol

I know it makes me a bit of a pariah on this board, but I really like 3 for what it was. While it might have been a crappy sequel to 2, I found it to be a hilarious FMV adventure game with a simplistic but fun-enough 4x strategy strapped to the side of it.

We’ve even had this discussion before (that’s the royal we, not the you-and-me we, Dan):

Things that make me sad: only 7/16 posters in that old thread are still around :(

See my post above on the bug in the original. I never had to mess with resources for fuel, etc. It worked great. All the best parts of the game were still preserved. It didn’t mess with balance. You still had limited room on your ship for other ships, so being able to buy as many ships as you wanted didn’t matter. You still couldn’t soup up your main ship without first buying technology from the Melnorme, and he needed biological currency to give you tech. Balance was not a problem.

Nice thread. I liked reading that post written by me five years ago. I’d forgotten some of that stuff.

Is the 3DO version of Star Control 2 still the best version these days?

That’s the one they based The Ur-Quan Masters on right, because of the quality of the sound and music?

Stick to your guns, man. Outlier opinions are valuable because we know they’re earned, you wouldn’t stick your neck out if you didn’t mean it. I’ve avoided 3 partially because of general word of mouth and because I didn’t think 2 was as fantastic as everybody else does, though I do own it. Maybe I’ll toss it into the rotation.

I don’t like the 3DO version. For one thing, they added voice acting, and the voice acting is so different from what I pictured in my head.

Plus I like the music in the original slightly better.

Plus the original PC version has that bug I talked about above where you can sell infinite shuttle craft, which they got rid of in the 3DO version.

Yes. That’s the one.

Actually no, the Ur-Quan Masters gives you the option when you install it to go with the original PC version’s music or the 3DO version, whether to go with the voice acting from 3D0 version or not, etc. That’s how I tried the 3DO version enhancements and decided I didn’t like them and went back to the original PC version within Ur-Quan Masters.

I just went to the page and the source they used for that version is from the 3DO version.

The project started in August 2002, when Toys For Bob released the partially ported sources of Star Control 2 3DO version to the fan community. Our goal is to port this wonderful game to current personal computers and operating systems. It is and will remain 100% free of charge, and anyone can contribute to the project and thus help make it even better. For more information, look at our info page.

True, but a lot of the other stuff aside from the music and voice acting was pretty much identical. So you can make Ur-Quan Masters look and sound identical to the original PC version if you want, thanks to the options you get when installing.

One of the problems with SC3’s strategic level is it was all smoke and mirrors – nothing actually worked as intended, and there was no actual strategic game because the computer AI was incapable of responding (or taking any action at all). And I don’t mean incapable as in “ineffective” – I mean incapable as in it would not actually do anything ever because that part of the game either was never actually written or included with the released version. All the nonsense in the manual/in-game instructions about the AI attacking or responding was never included in the released game.

Shhhh. True, but the player doesn’t know that until later in the game. Until I realized that my colonies would never get attacked, I had a great time building them up to be excellent little colonies that could defend themselves and sustain themselves.

You have to remember SC3 came out before most people used internet for gaming hobbies. So the only way to know that it was all smoke and mirrors was to play far enough into the game to find that out. Until that point, you can be a happy little camper.

Honestly I kinda think an improved (read: functional) variant of the strategic metagame would be an awesome inclusion in any future StarCon-inspired work, esp. in terms of keeping it fairly light and abstracted. I kinda felt like Stardock’s Sorcerer King (which they’ve described as fantasy Star Control) erred a little too far on the side of 4X strategy and not enough on the side of humorous-questing-for-adventure-shenanigans, probably due to its roots in the Elemental franchise, but it could have been absolutely perfect.

I almost wanna become a game designer just because I’m so positive this combination could be made to work perfectly. Except, you know, game design is really fucking hard and I’m sort of an idiot.

I’m never a happy camper about finding out I’ve wasted my time because the developer fraudulently claimed features existed which never did. And these weren’t small features, such as “hey, you promised the turrets on the ships would rotate” - the core strategic game never existed - it was an empty shell with a UI.

It shows how poor game reviews were generally back then (despite our nostalgia for such things) that the fact that the entire strategic game was missing was not noted (or even likely noticed) by reviewers. There is no way that would happen today, at least not to such a consensus extent.

I did like some things in SC3 though - I thought the new ship designs were pretty good and consistent with the style of SC2. A lot of the best writing was recycled from SC2 (reiterating the same background, etc.) but the story/aliens and the combat (at least the flat, 2D version) was o.k. It might not have been such a disaster with more time in the development oven.