Its like Mount and Blade in space, just with top down space shooting. You can create your own empire or something. Tons of mods.
It’s fascinating how differently the game plays when you’re running colonies.
I took the fast start option (a cruiser, a destroyer, and a few frigates) to get into the meat of things, and pretty quickly found a star system worth putting down some roots in.
A few thousand crew and a few hundred supplies later, the outposts of Shangri-La and Xanadu came to be.
Shangri-La is a jungle world with good farmland, mineral deposits, and a biosphere actively trying to kill my colonists. So it goes.
Xanadu is an airless, irradiated rock, notable mainly for its large supply of rare and transplutonic ores, an area where Shangri-La is notably lacking.
After a few years of hard work and development, the two worlds hosted populations in the tens of thousands, and developed some decent local industries.
In exploration deeper into the sector, I’d come across a few synchrotron cores, pieces of lost technology which permit easy manufacturing of antimatter fuel for starships. Foolishly, I installed two of them, one in each of my two colonies.
So began what I’m going to refer to as the Fuel Wars. The Sindrian Diktat and the Persean League, the two major fuel producers in the sector, took exception to some upstart newcomer horning in on their markets. They proceeded to dispatch a number of expeditionary forces which easily overwhelmed the meager defensive fleets organized by fewer than 100,000 residents and the battlestation in orbit.
So, for some three or four years, Shangri-La did not live up to its name, spending most of its time being pounded into dust or recovering from being pounded into dust.
This was not only hard on the residents, but also hard on my finances. Paying for my fleet and for food for the temporarily port-free colonies led to not really being able to pay for either, which led to rapidly-mounting debts, which led to crew abandoning ship in droves whenever I touched down at a port.
So it goes. Happily, my third colony, Shambhala, was coming up to speed at about this time, and growing quickly in both population and profit, enough to offset my losses. By doing odd jobs over in the core, I was able to get back on my feet, build up enough of a fleet to fight off incursions from the major powers, and get back to using the colonies as a base to explore further.
In doing so, I came across another world fit for a colony: a water world with extensive ruins from the Domain era, which can be mined for old blueprints to feed Shangri-La’s heavy industry. In anticipation of such finds, I named it El Dorado.
Notably, I spend most of my time now outside the core systems, venturing there only when I need to hire officers or administrators, or pick up weapons or items I can’t produce at home yet. It’s distinctly different from playing as a bounty hunter or trader in the core, in that I don’t have to worry too much about how the core factions feel about me as long as they aren’t in a war-waging mood. On the other hand, I do have to worry about pirates and Luddic Path terrorists, which is new to me.
All told, an excellent update.
Wow, that’s an amazing story.
The entire game outside of the core sector seems “unbalanced” its way too easy to make money out of there than in the core itself.
Also my one and only colony in the fringes is so sucesful that the core nations are attacking it to damage my industry.
I’m pretty sure James Cameron did a film about that :P
The scavenging/salvaging game has always seemed a bit much, but it’s also time-limited. There’s only so much to find.
I think the colony game is fine, though, at least at the number of colonies I have. For every month I make 150,000 credits, there are two or three where I lose 50,000 or more, while my planets recover from the raids. Colonies with no industry attract less attention, but don’t make nearly as much money.
I think it’s a bit easy to build a self-sustaining polity, though. With El Dorado making volatiles, I’m pretty sure I have access to every resource with only four colonies. Granted, they’re very spread out by the standard of the core because they’re four of the best worlds I’ve found, but still.
Somebody should tell the developers they forgot to add a third dimension. Or is it a stretch goal?
I’m not convinced a third dimension is necessary in a game like this. In fact, I think it’s a nice simplification.
Besides, our galaxy is a big disc anyway…
Is there a maintenance cost for the fleets your colonies start to produce once you have the required Infrastructure?
I think that’s a problem. There should be a maintenance cost that serves as soft-cap, it would help to offset the great profits won with the colonies, and it would make the endgame less silly, as there are dozens of big fleets everywhere, and they are disposable, the AI throw them against your colonies one after another.
Is there any info regarding when there will be a 1.0? This is another game where at this stage I want to wait for release as to not burn out beforehand, but the temptation to try the latest version is strong.
Feels like it’s around a year between major releases, so maybe late 2019 or sometime in 2020?
I picked this up after seeing it played by Beaglerush on twitch. There’s a lot of dig into with this combat system and it helped to watch someone play first, especially as he was explaining fighter screens and various other mechanics.
Seems polished enough for Steam to me. Although I also ran into that same hotkey bug in the tutorial…
The game still has to improve to reach the final version. Right now the colony version doesn’t mesh well with the diplomacy/faction system. You will be attacked by huge fleets even when you have a friendly status with a faction, for example.
You still can’t conquer other planets/faction territory doesn’t change.
The game economy is now pretty unintuitive, since he abstracted it more in this version. Example:
You don’t produce 5 units of food, you produce level 5 food in infinite amounts, basically. Which means you can satisfy as many level 5 food demands as you want. There is literally no concept of quantity whatsoever in the production chain and it leads to incredibly bizzare situations where one planet could supply the entire sector for everything perfectly.
Yeah the absolute mindfuck for me was the realization that gamma cores lowering demand is BAD. I had stopped putting them in as I noticed my profitability for that system go down - it’s worse than that.
Putting in a gamma core in 1 system lowers the profitability of all colonies that supply demand of that industry.
This is really fucked up as it makes zero sense. My orbital works needing less to produce should give my mine more ore to export - instead it results in the mines being less profitable as the value of their product tanks…
Arise thread!
Since we had the developer on our podcast, I figured I had to finally dive into the sandbox and try to grok this thing. After several failed attempts (WAT R SUPPLIES O NO) I finally began to click with it, and holy cats you guys, once this hits 1.0, it might dethrone Drox as best space game of the last ten years, in my mind.
I still have a lot to learn too, as the folks watching my pre-recorded video the other night during the interview will gladly tell you. ;) Such an amazing thing, this game.
I hope they don’t get too comfortable there, since Star Citizen is getting ready to blow the doors off the space gaming industry any day now.
I’ve been patiently waiting on this one for some time. Any day now, guys!
All the pictures of this look very busy, like there’s a ton of stuff reporting out information and well, just an entire screen of stuff. Is the tutorial going to be done well? Because otherwise this looks like I’d be bogged down almost immediately trying to sort what the hell is going on.
The tutorial is incomplete, the developer admits, but he knows that and plans to have it ready by 1.0.
Any idea when 1.0 will come? This has been on my radar for a long time, but always felt 3 years away.