Free Stars: Children of Infinity (née, Ur-Quan Masters 2) -- The Official Follow-up to the Best Game of All Time

I don’t see how SPAZ combat is worse than SC2 melee. Or Starcom Nexus combat.

SPAZ combat pretty much played itself, way less fiddly than SC2. Maybe it’s different on higher difficulties.

SPAZ uses the mouse I believe, and I hate using the mouse in space combat. Even pure keyboard bothers me less. So I can’t really judge it, as it’s a non-starter for me. I have never heard of Starcom Nexus before.

Edit: Wow, looked at the steam page for Starcom Nexus. This looks really neat.

However the combat turns out I’d be very surprised if there wasn’t an easy mode. It’s so common now in games to have a “meh, I just want to follow the story” mode.

Uses mouse in combat, maybe you can configure it so it doesn’t but I played with mouse.

I’d call it a modern SC2, but the story / the aliens aren’t as memorable. Pretty great though, for someone who liked SC2.

Sounds like we have a bunch of folks here who want Disco Elysium: UQM Edition.

Which is not necessarily a bad thing.

Register me in the “loved the SC2 combat both single player AND multiplayer” camp. So many ships that played so differently, it was a fun challenge to see if you could win the counter-match. I’d still totally be down for that sort of pew-pew - it’s been a few years since I last played Ur-Quan Masters, but only a few years and I definitely still enjoyed the combat. Calling out to sailors with the Syreen somehow never got old.

In my 2D space combat these days I do prefer using the mouse for orientation, which frees up a and d for lateral thrusters.

While part of me fears the potentially negative effect of too much fan feedback on a game, there are asking some interesting questions and getting some good discussion going on in the reddit forum. Like this one on retro fixed angle facings vs smooth rotation. I’m decidedly in the modern camp on this one.

Fixed orientations seemed like more of a technical limitation that had interesting side effects. I’m with you on the modern camp.

The variety of ships and asymmetrical nature of each battle is for me the big thing that made the combat compelling.

In the stories of SC1&2’s creation what stands out most if the experimentation and playtesting, and more playtesting. Whatever the technical details of the systems they implement I’m expecting them to hammer on them in a similar fashion.

Speaking for SC1, absolutely. My brother really didn’t like it when I beat his Dreadnaught with an Arilou.

Ha! I love Arilou ships so much - inertialess drives FTW (usually literally).

This is like wishing for an X-COM but without those darn combat missions.

A huge part of SC2 is upgrading your ship, and acquiring allied ships, and mining resources to build more ships, specifically so you can be more effective in combat. And in turn, defeating enemies in combat is a major aspect of moving the plot forward. Even upgrading your stardrive to get around the galaxy quickly, thus avoiding some random combat encounters, emphasizes the important role combat plays.

The SC universe is a hostile universe. You need combat. Without it, all you’re left with is a simplistic choose-your-own-adventure diplomacy simulator.

Yes exactly that’s what’s I’m looking for.

Well that’s just sad.

I believe Star Control 2 is the greatest game of all time, but I also never played it “as intended.” My friend had the starmap from the hint guide (photocopied onto about 20 sheets of letter paper and taped together) and copied one for me. By itself, it didn’t tell you what was where, but it simply highlighted systems that had something interesting on them, including rainbow worlds. So I still took notes during conversations about whose homeworld is on Delta Draconis and where the crashed Ur-Quan ship was, but when I went out exploring, it wasn’t blindly among hundreds of star systems.

While I think it’s totally possible for anyone to just miss the window for when a certain game will appeal to them, I think SC2 is also a case where the unalloyed experience isn’t actually ideal. Outside social or situational factors are sometimes part of the formula that makes a game great. Arguably that’s true of the original Zelda, or Quake (finding the right multiplayer community), or playing Death Stranding during the pandemic.

So if you ever want to give it a try again, Armando, grab this and this and turn on the cyborg and ask for tips here on Qt3 and (hopefully) enjoy! I want this for you!

I don’t see it that way. You don’t actually spend a whole lot of time fighting in the SC2 campaign, relatively speaking. At least, I don’t.

I think of SC2 as a “kitchen sink” game–in the sense that it has a bit of everything (well, lots of things) at its core, with none of them dominating over the other. Sid Meier claims this is a bad idea–it’s his “Covert Action rule.” What makes it work in SC2, I think, is that each individual thing–combat, exploration, resource gathering–is very simple. This is one reason I think they’ll be smart to keep the game 2D (at least in terms of gameplay, not necessarily art).

I don’t think combat is the heart, the heart is the story, the characters, if you ask me if Mass Effect is in the same family tree of Star Control, I’d say, yes, very much so, even though the gameplay isn’t at all similar.

I get the distinct sense that SC2 was, for many people, what Starflight was for me. I can certainly understand wanting to recapture that experience!

Pretty sure SC2 was a big influence on the first Mass Effect.

I think a lot of my favorite CRPGs are also kitchen sink games (indeed I daresay it is rather a kitchen-sink genre, although combat is typically at its core) and I love that about them. I think obsessive focus on the ‘core gameplay loop’ is a good basic rule for design but a rule that masters can break.