When you strafe keep an eye on where your mouse is aiming, as you will strafe according to that (if you have the mouse pointing straight right you will strafe up/down on the screen.
While you’re strafing you can get closer/further with W and S .
It is a bit unintuitive how it works.
Right ok, so you have to keep tapping W to maintain the gap. I was keeping the mouse cursor on the enemy ship, but W tapping allows me to circle strafe. Probably a result of trying to follow the instructions a little too closely and not just go with the feel of it.
Spurred on by the Sseth review linked above, I gave this a try again. I’ve finally got into the game, and I’m really digging it.
The combat layer is brilliant, although difficult at first when you’re just getting started. After a few battles I have become a lot better at managing raising/lowering my shields and when to back off and vent flux.
I am also really enjoying the campaign. I started off doing the campaign tutorial, which I highly recommend you do your first time. It’s fairly well done and explains the basic concepts of how to play the campaign.
After doing the tutorial I started an ironman game. I started off by taking a mission that was a bounty on every pirate ship killed, slowly built up a tiny 3 ship fleet. Then I started investigating trade. I like how the trade screen will show you where the highest and lowest price for a commodity is.
This isn’t your typical space trucker simulation, because most trades will not be profitable. You will need to find a planet that is demanding a certain product, and you will be strongly persuaded into using the black market because there’s a 30% tarrif on normal market trade. However that means you need to either risk being caught or try to evade detection. That tradeoff and suspense makes the game much more exciting than if you were just space trucking some goods from point a to point b with nothing happening.
So far, I’ve executed some really good trade deals and have gotten to around 110,000 credits. I can’t wait to see what cool ship(s) I can buy now.
I have been stopped a couple times under suspicion of smuggling when I couldn’t manage to go in with my transponder off, but I was trading in legal goods so I got off the hook.
The game feels like there are many more playstyles you could take, so I’m looking forward to experiencing more of the game.
Not bad for a game I paid $10 for in 2011 :)
I’m going to need some practice with the combat. I’ve done the fleet tutorial one twice now, and died both times. I keep forgetting to use my shields, and juggle the flux, and swap to the right weapons, and trying to remember how to strafe properly… oh god, it’s like being thrown in at the deep end. Maybe the campaign will start off a little more gently. It doesn’t help that the tutorial basically says that the carrier is tough but relatively inoffensive. Well it certainly finds me objectionable! I do like being able to abandon ship and take command of other ships though. It all reminds me of Acornsoft’s Starship Command (that dates me).
x100
There’s some serious depth in this game, at least for the (reasonably) uninitiated Space Gamer.
You (and other people with DPI scaling use cases, like me on my 4K laptop) are in luck—he’s working on UI scaling now.
Evidently, it doesn’t work super-well with non-integer scaling—takes a lot of anti-aliasing for the text to be readable—but e.g. 200% on 4K should be fine.
KevinC
392
YES. Great news, thanks for the info!!
Kyle700
393
this is a crazy fun game. I haven’t been able to stop playing for 2 weeks. There are a bunch of very well implemented mods on the forums that really add a lot to the game. I’ve got 4 faction mods and the ship / weapon pack (which also gives special boss bounty system) and it is just jam packed with stuff to do. I’ve got a good system going for 3 colonies making about 400k every month and a bunch of capital ships. still can’t really get through some of the bigger bounties though
KevinC
394
That sounds great. I keep meaning to get into this, but the lack of UI scaling ends up killing me. Really excited to hear they’re looking into it.
I got around this some by installing “Lossless Scaling”, setting the Starsector resolution to 1770x720 (or half of whatever resolution you are natively running - http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=10245.0) and windowed mode, and firing up lossless scaling. It looks pretty good although the ships are somewhat blurry. If only this method worked on Distant Worlds…
I don’t survive long in the game though.
Won’t the new Nvidia integer scaling help? Assuming you have a Turing card.
The problem isn’t blurring, it’s literally a very small font. I can read it okay myself, but I can see where some folks might prefer a larger size.
Kyle700
398
by the way, if anyone wants to try this game, the sseth video above has an actual working full cd key.
Also it’s only fifteen dollars.
rei
400
US! That’s like a hundred of the multi-coloured Canadian funny money!
jpinard
401
Is a GTX 1080 a Turing card?
Bobtree
404
No. The recent Nvidia 9, 10, 20 series architectures are Maxwell, Pascal, and Turing.
Is any reason for the new drivers to only support integer scaling on Turing, other than favoring the newer hardware? Given that it’s dead simple, and these architectures can all do DSR, I’m skeptical.
KevinC
405
It hasn’t helped at all when I tried using it on my RTX card anyway. I might have to muck around with a bunch of settings (I just enabled it and tried a couple different resolutions, that was it), but it screwed things up in Starsector more than anything.
Hopefully the UI scaling work bears fruit and we don’t have to deal with any of this stuff anyway.
