I will draw your attention to the “Features” page on fractalsoftworks.com, and in particular is this line:
Upcoming Features
- Determine the fate of the Sector by your actions
That’s the public-facing Party Line you’re going to get out of me!
Tsk… it was worth a try. But yeah, I can imagine where the game will go…
Should I be waiting for 1.0 to play this? It feels really… rough.
Selected the Scavenger as my starting role and opted in on the tutorial. It told me to fly up to a debris field and press 6 to scavenge. Pressing 6 did nothing. It took some poking around before I figured out that there’s supposed to be a hotbar with abilities on it. I was able to right-click on the 6 slot and add the Scavenge ability which allowed me to proceed.
Next up in the tutorial, a pirate attacks. Don’t worry, the tutorial says, it’s a rusty bucket. The battle starts with no instruction on what I’m supposed to do, and the pirate just flies up to my ship and blows it up. No biggie, I can load the quicksave, but I still have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing in the fight. I don’t really feel like I have a lot of options to handle it better either? Pirate ship just flies up to my face and blows me up. I tried “transferring command” on the third attempt to see if the AI would control it for me and maybe I would learn something, but it just resulted in the pirate flying up to me and blowing up my ship.
Am I missing something obvious?
The tutorial is clearly insufficient for a game of this complexity, and in fact I don’t think it has been updated to the new version. It kind of makes sense to wait until the game is almost finish it to revamp it, as otherwise it can be outdated if you change some other features of the game.
In my case, pressing 6 worked fine, once I was on top of the debris field.
About the combat, there is a separate tutorial combat not integrated in the campaign. You can find it in the main menu.
The missions then are an interesting training course. The first one, you can win by looking at it, but things get complicated right with the second one.
Yeah, I really recommend doing the combat tutorial before anything else, it’ll introduce the essential concepts of combat. Also absolutely select “easy” difficulty on game start, it’ll make life much better.
(It’s quite possible you hit a button that scrolled the abilities hotbar to another sub-hotbar - you can have multiple of these. This can happen accidentally and it’s … probably not good for it to happen during the initial tutorial when players aren’t at all familiar with the UI. I’ll suggest to Alex we lock it 'til the tutorial advances. Edit: Yeah, checked, and the hotkey to swap ability bars in the campaign map is “W”, the same as moving forward in combat. This is definitely an easy trap to hit.)
Good tutorials and “playing the player in” (vs. the current curve of death) are really important points we’ve discussed and want to hit for 1.0
Can old farts lacking pew pew shooty reflexes play this game?
As someone who fits into that category I can say yes, absolutely. The pace of combat isn’t twitchy at all.
That must have been it. I tried using WASD initially to move around and that must have been where my hotbar got swapped.
I didn’t realize there was a separate combat tutorial, I assumed that’s what the pirate fight at the start of the main tutorial was. I’ll go check that out.
Whoa. @dbaum is that guy? Plus the @BrianRubin endorsement? Sold. Will buy today when I get home.
…and I was going to try out Armored Brigade…
You flatter me, sir.
I bought Drox Operative on your rec which is a game I would have scrolled by without noticing otherwise, isn’t even really my kind of game, and it turned out to be super. You know your genre, dude. That’s harder than it sounds.
WHOA HARD FLUX OMG
Well I’m still really flattered, and I’m so glad I helped you find Drox. This is the only game that really comes close to dethroning it, in my mind.
Well thanks guys, you just made me buy this as well.
Weaksauce, should have bought it 6+ years ago like us space game vets. ;)
People interested in the game but confused because the hard start should check the wiki, which is pretty good
It has complete useful ‘lists’, which is what you would expect of a wiki, like
http://starsector.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Ships
http://starsector.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Ship_Systems
http://starsector.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Weapons
http://starsector.wikia.com/wiki/Category%3AHullmods
http://starsector.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Skills
But in addition it has useful general information, which is great as still there isn’t an official manual
http://starsector.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Game_concepts
Some important concepts
http://starsector.wikia.com/wiki/Flux
http://starsector.wikia.com/wiki/Damage_Types
http://starsector.wikia.com/wiki/Combat_readiness
http://starsector.wikia.com/wiki/Trade
http://starsector.wikia.com/wiki/Market_conditions
http://starsector.wikia.com/wiki/Sensors
Well, obviously there is outdated information that will have to be updated on the next weeks.
I’m really confused by this. What is it, exactly? Is it one of those games that is 70% of the way there, but is only fun to play if you like sort of aimless sandboxes, and it is questionable when he’ll actually get it done?
Or is it from one of those individual developers who essentially completed a game three years ago, but has a hard time pulling the trigger and calling it finished, so that you are actually getting a good, solid, complete game if you buy it right now?
I’m very leery of early access, but sometimes with early access it is clear the game is done, they just can’t stop adding little buttons and bells. I don’t want to buy something that isn’t really finished, but I also don’t need to wait on something that is finished, but just hasn’t been officially called feature complete.
Just got the 0.9a announcement in my email this morning.
Starsector version 0.9a is now out! Here are some of the new things you can do in this release:
- Establish colonies! Build up industrial production to make a profit, improve your colonies, and protect them from many dangers
- Visit a portside bar to find missions and other opportunities
- Fight alongside - or against - massive orbital stations
- Create your own faction and set up its military doctrine
- Find blueprints and use them to let your colonies produce ships, weapons, and fighters
- Face enemy ships with dynamically generated weapon loadouts
- Discover new dangers and derelicts on the fringes of the Sector
- Explore planetary ruins
- Raid core worlds for plunder or to disrupt your competition
In addition, there are a ton of UI improvements, improvements to ship AI, combat balance changes, and all sorts of miscellaneous fixes, improvements, and bits of new content.