So how actiony is it? Are battles frantic, or more slow and thought out? WASD controls or some sort of K&M combo?
Suppose I should find a YouTube video…
Space bar pauses the game, I unwisely skipped the tutorial, so I am going to restart. I forget how to vent flux.
“V” key.
On the slower side, since there’s pause and you’re controlling a fleet of ships. You pause, give orders, etc, and can personally command a ship which uses WASD movement and mouse aiming.
I feel like the battles hit a very nice balance between action and strategy. They are slow paced enough to plan some things out, but then it gets easy to lose yourself in the moment to moment of managing your ship in combat. I think Flux management is the main thing that elevates the combat above mindless arcade action.
Turns out there’s a new thread. (Who knew? Not me.)
As I said in the other one, this version is so much better.
Ok, last question, how’s the tutorial? Watched a stream (they died a lot) and it looks kind of complicated. Probably going to get it, just really wish it was on Steam.
I would say it’s… incomplete. Game is still unfinished so it makes sense for the creator to not spend lots of time doing it, not until the game is done, otherwise he would have to redo it again.
Finally, Starsector feels more like a complete game than a tech demo. I think I described the previous version as ‘brutally hard’ in the general space game thread. This one is difficult, but much better balanced. Generally, you can find missions to do or fleets to fight from the very start, and the salvage from enemy fleets makes combat a lot less of a losing proposition. Battles leave drifting derelicts you can reactivate and debris fields you can scavenge. The core worlds–now a dozen or two systems instead of a mere four or five–are well-designed and fascinatingly written, and the procedural universe around it is expansive and explorable. There’s the hint of a story to be found, too. For instance…
I’m a scavenger and salvager by trade. My fleet is half reclaimed ships, free to obtain and cheap to run. Maybe a little less capable, but I have a solid set of four frigates and a combat shuttle. One of those frigates is an armed merchantman. Not only does it have some teeth, it’s hard to kill, and it has a big fuel tank. That means it can get the fleet out of the core worlds and into the outer sector. I’ve been taking a few scouting and exploration jobs on the side to pay the bills.
The one that landed on my desk last night was a run to Girardoum, a blue supergiant ten light-years from the nearest inhabited world, to scan a derelict ship in the system’s outer reaches. That’s on the edge of my fleet’s range. That shuttle in particular takes just as much fuel as a frigate, but carries less than a third as much as my armed freighter. I left it at Jangala, the world I started out at, along with my shortest-legged frigate.
We set out, stopping briefly to beat up on a pirate fleet which decided to run us down. A week and a half later, detouring around some tremendous hyperspace storms, we came up on Girardoum. By the inner system jump point was a flashing beacon. I brought us closer. It was a message from the Hegemony Navy:
“Warning. This system is known to contain automated weapons systems. Extreme caution is advised.”
Well that’s a little worrying. I turned away from the insystem jump point and headed for the fringe jump point. Hopefully that would drop me a little further from any potential nasties.
We came out of hyperspace in between a ring system and an asteroid belt at roughly a Saturn orbit distance. Turns out that the fringe of this system is really big. I went counterclockwise, finding an awful lot of nothing much for a month and a half. Around a gas giant inside the rings, our sensors found an old frigate carrying a single sleeper pod. Inside was a very confused lieutenant who agreed to join up with me and warned me about some dormant combat drones around the backside of a nearby moon. I kept my distance.
Finally, we found the derelict we were after, in a nebula out beyond the rings by the old hyperspace communication relay. An active drone flew a patrol pattern around it. I’m not averse to a scrap (or the scrap following a scrap), but nobody likes fighting combat AI. At my order, the fleet went dark, creeping through the nebula at low signature while the drone was on the far side of its orbit. We came up on the derelict, ran the scanner package the client gave us, and turned to run, just as the drone came back around. Between the nebula and the silent running, I made my escape. Fuel and supplies running low and money in hand, I set a course for the jump point. Time to head home.
Previously, I liked Starsector, but I couldn’t really recommend it as a game. Now, I think it’s one of the best space sandboxes you can buy today.
Good read, thanks for taking the time to describe that mission. I look forward to checking this out when it’s done.
At 15 clams this is tempting.
So how palpable are the personalities of the various ship captains?
Seconded. Last update not only turned it into a proper game (with so many HUGE improvements), but it makes it very clear that Starsector definitely has the potential to be the best space sandbox game ever made.
Each time I read about this game, I am reminded of something amazing: that playing only the minor battle scenarios is so compelling to me already, I actually forget there is a sandbox main game! I actually have never tried the main mode yet.
That wonderful post from Fishbreath is probably going to make me not forget about it anymore.
OK I’m sold. Really enjoying it so far.
My only hesitation is that my computer is oldish, and I’ve been burned before when buying an early access game that works on my computer, only to have the final release switch to a different engine that my computer can’t handle. So I wait for final release before buying.
But this game looks great and something that I would enjoy very much.
Alex is definitely not going to switch engines nor will the system requirements for the game change significantly. And, IIRC, he does test builds on some old laptop to make sure he’s not going to lose the people who bought it way back in the day and haven’t upgraded (much).
Heck, you don’t even need a video board that supports modern shaders, which have been pretty ubiquitous for the last few years. That said, memory requirements may have gone up a bit due to increase in number of assets and size of the game world. I think it even supports 1024x768 resolution, though that might have been upped to the next step in 0.8.
That said, waiting 'til final release is also just fine!
I ran it in 2011 on a Thinkpad T400p from 2008, and it like dbaum said, it hasn’t changed since.
He isn’t going to change engines at this point, but it’s a fair stance. The game has increased the universe size from 0.7 to 0.8 and I think now it needs more cpu, for example.