Starsector: Best space combat 13 years in the making - 0.96 out (2023 update)

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Well, obviously there is outdated information that will have to be updated on the next weeks.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.

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?