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Discussions / I'm replaying SPAZ, the game I blame for falling in love with Starsector
« on: August 16, 2021, 07:04:11 AM »
Sace Pirates And Zombies is why I found Starsector; I played it, and it set my brain on fire with how much potential the concept had, and I googled games like it & got SS and the rest is history.
For those who haven't played or heard of this game, get this gameplay synopsis up on you;
So, I decided to replay the darn thing, and list here things about it that I liked, things about it that I appreciate having spent the better part of the decade playing SS, & whatever else I feel like pointing out.
PS, I'm playing the modded version. There's basically only 4 mods for the game, & they can't be loaded together (it turns out mod support matters*), but I consider the balance & content overhaul mod fight for big beef (supermod combining the two good ones) to be so important for the game's quality that effectively in my head that version of the game is The version of the game & the unmodded version of the game is basically a beta of fight for big beef. This isn't a, "I can't play skyrim anymore without 400 mods installed bc I've played it too much" situation, this is a, "I don't think anyone should play this game without this 1 mod, it is the objectively superior version in all but exactly 1 way". In my 30 years of gaming I haven't felt this way about any game b4 & likely never will, so take that for what you will, but when I talk about SPAZ I am talking about this modded version. This game came out in 2011, there's a lot I'm pretty sure came from the mod but gun to my head I could not even hope to start telling the two apart so I won't even try. F4BB = SPAZ AFAIC & I wont be differentiating.
ANYWAY, in no particular order as they come to me;
A) *MOD SUPPORT. OH MY GOD playing games with such close gameplay loops to SS makes me recoil in agony like I've been touched with a live wire every time I'm forced to play them without SS's targeting reticle mod. I always forget how much it's going to hurt me to have to do without it. Thank you Alex so much for the mod support, it is like sweet sweet morphine flowing through the veins of a burn victim
2) I forgot how ssssssssssssslow this game's start is. I feel bad starting with two not-positive notes but the moment I start this game & am getting back into the saddle I am immediately reminded of something I was forced to learn the first two times I played it; this game has an INCREDIBLY WEIRD pacing problem. And that problem is that the first 1/3rd of the game is a static open world sandbox with no time pressure (think Assassins Creed) where the primary drive of your gameplay loop is trawling from system to system finding blueprints to unlock, until you progress the story far enough to trigger the Actual Game which is NOT a static open world sandbox but a dynamic one with active time pressure & a galactical war which forces the player forward with what they have, damn the torpedoes, picking up what they can but making do. And it is not a kind transition; bc of how familiar we are with the AC format it is extremely easy to slip into the rut of mindlessly trawling the open world for side content, assured that the critical story path is largely unconnected to it -- assured that it doesn't matter which order you do it in, that if you spend 20 hours doing side content & 20 hours doing story content. Oh no no no, not here. If you play the side content before you trigger the Actual Game you will burn yourself out on this game before you reach the end. Doing so makes it overstay its welcome by a long shot -- it feels like the game is 3x as long as it should be, unless you take what you have and plow yourself through the story content as deep as you can until you hit a roadblock, then do a little bit of grinding to get through that roadblock until you reach The Turn. It's very important for the grinding & unlocks to be something you do on the fly as-needed to progress the story, and not something you pre-load your campaign with and then play the whole story with everything unlocked. Do not grind. Do not grind. Do not grind. A lot of open world games it is important for you to manage the game's pacing, this one will absolutely allow you to ruin it for yourself if you don't resist the urge to grind.
3) This one is a negative note on the mod; the one area where the mod is not a pure, unadulterated improvement is that it adds 3 ships of all but the largest size class, which are the strongest ships in their class with a stupid quantity of mounts, unlocked from the start. I... hate, these ships. I really wish they weren't there. This time as well as the first time I played this mod I took 1 look at them at the start of the campaign, and mentally through them in the trash. Wish I wasn't too lazy to remove them. The game is a lot of fun because you're forced to wage war with a bus & a tug boat
4) OKAY, on to the positives. I love that you get to fly fighters in this game, and that they aren't just the second smallest size class but smaller -- you can pick what armor to bolt onto which sides of your ship, & they drastically affect your ship's speed & maneuverability, but the smallest size class can't mount any armor, forcing them to be drastically faster than anything larger regardless of how you build them. It's a really clever way of pigeonholing them into their role & preventing them from being just a tiny capital ship (EXCEPT FOR THE MOD FIGHTER THAT I DONT USE). Theres more to this Im gonna circle back around to later
5) I forgot how neat I find the way the game handles the energy draw of your beam (1/2 of them) weapons. When you fire a cannon, it instantly draws energy, but a beam also then after its beam dies out gradually draws energy as it's reloading (but hopefully slower than your reactor can replenish it) & if you are sustaining fire the burst draw of the beam firing comes right at the tail-end of the gradual draw of the beam reloading. It's hard to explain why but I find this extremely satisfying. There's an... organicness... to the way this works. The energy bar is really conveying the feeling of your beam coils having to be cooled off between bursts. There's always this sense of why do burst beams not just fire indefinitely and the extremely specific way that beam weapons in this game handle energy draw kind of intrinsically solves that question for me -- it feels like your beams need time to cool off & if you did jury-rig it to fire nonstop it'd melt itself immediately. Not just that the game says that's why, but that it feels like that's why. It's very hard to describe but it's a sort of very good tactile sense to the system
6) cannons. cannons feel like god slamming a car door. Not on their own purely by their gamefeel design like a Nuclear Throne gun having lots of juice, but in their balance. After the start when you've got enough of a fleet to specialize your ships but before you're deep enough into ruining the game by grinding to break it so badly that you don't need to specialize ships, you have to start dedicating your fleet to combat roles & having 1 ship as a ship-breaker, with one or two of the best cannons you have and nothing else, held in reserve because it will red-line its reactor in a heartbeat, until the enemy's shields are defeated & you've got it lined up and then you split the thing in half with a single volley slamming through it. It feels good. It feels good in a way that a sim game like SS can't allow bc it'd be unfair for the enemy who are in finite numbers and it'd be unfair for the player for the same reason. Speaking of
7) this game isnt a hardcore sim game. All of your ships are, to compare to SS, fighters coming out of a carrier's hanger bays, but instead of the carrier going into battle it sends a warp beacon to a map & it warps its "fighters" (ur ships) to that beacon. Forever as long as you have the resources to keep replacing them, and as long as the beacon hasnt been killed. I... like this system. This is not intended as a dig to SS in any way but after having played a hardcore sim game where lost ships are lost lost & can't just have replacements ordered as long as u have the cash & think its a good idea is really nice. Like sliding into a hot bath at the end of a long day, I can just build the fleet I feel like flying and then fly around being an idiot letting them get fed through a woodchipper if the enemy counters it & I don't have to stress about it unless the beacon is threatened, at which point Real Gamer Hours is on
speaking of cash on hand; bc this game doesn't game-over you when your fleet wipes & bc ur mothership isnt going into battle, it means that (except in the very unlikely scenario that your mothership gets attacked while ur broke) there is no game-over state. You just, run out of money, then belly-crawl your way to an asteroid field & mine your way painfully & slowly back up. Thankfully this game has a finite amount of money u can hold. my ex wife always got upset zelda for having their rupee limited by wallets & always tried to point out that it'd make the game worse if they werent like that, they wouldnt be able to throw infinitely replenishing rupees at you if they werent. And the same thing applies here. Your punishment for failure is the time it takes you to replenish your stockpiles, and it is suffering. That suffering is largely mitigated by the existence of infinite asteroids that can be busted apart infinitely by the largest slot size of mining laser, but in the early game you have to rely on NPC factions to have a mining station on one to do it and at that you have to hope its from a friendly faction. If those conditions are met you can pick at their scraps like a seagull. Which is helpfully helped along by your AI being capable of more or less competently running a mining operation on their own without your help, but it is still agonizingly slow and this game has the same problem SS does of not being able to handle multi-tasking. If you minimize it to let your subordinates do the dirty job for you the game pauses. I find this to be charming. You HAVE to SIT and WATCH the agonizingly slow process of your fleet slowly undoing your screw-ups. I'm... glad it's like this. Obviously the easy solution is to read a book or watch something on your phone -- but! That's a good thing IMO, it gives natural break points for you to do something else built into the game's structure, and in doing so it is making you feel your punishment. This is not a "your character goes to jail, press 1 to be out of jail" punishment, this is actual honest-to-god sit & think about what you've done. Also it helps to add onto fixing the problem fixed by the zelda wallet system, of using the player's impatience to prevent the player from accruing infinite wealth -- if you aren't patient enough you won't even fill your ship's hull, you'll get bored & figure screw it that's good enough & move on with your day at 1/5th fleet capacity -- which is a catalyst for fun! It's fun to be forced to make due with darts & grasshoppers, not bc the game contrived an excuse for why you have to but bc it has this system built to naturally be fueled by your lack of discipline.
10/10, this system feels terrible and I think it's great. I'm not gonna make this sort of comparison often & I don't think SS would necessarily benefit from having it but I do think the emotional rollercoaster that this inflicts on the player makes this system better than SS's. Consider this as a mark of quality; I've put easily more than 200 hours (according to steam, compared to games I've purchased legally that makes it my 4th most-played game ever) into this game and I have never save-scummed, despite the fact that the punishment for failure is having to spend an hour watching rocks get moved back & forth and not being allowed to minimize my game to skip it. Any game that can make me stick razor blades under my finger nails and keep coming back for more has something going for it.
9) i like that cloaks are an inferior version of shields that you stick on ships that don't need shields. Have a missile boat that shouldn't be in a fight? Cloak it. Have a cargo freighter to drag behind your warfleet grabbing cash as it goes so you don't have to come back for it or make a pit stop at an asteroid? Cloak it. Have a command fighter for you to switch to & sit in while u IRL read a book? Cloak it.
I also like that cloaks cripple your ship's movespeed, giving you a reason not to use them on most non-combat ships (as usually their #1 stat is speed), so there's an intrinsic choice being presented. It's fun to have a datarunner fighter that you use to race around maps popping doodads & grabbing datacore & racing objectives, that you have a cloak on bc it makes it less likely to eat a torpedo while ur fleet is in battle, that in order to use for its intended purpose you have to switch its only form of defense off. It feels exhilarating to have this little dart that you slip around a warzone in & you have your finger hovering over the cloak button as you dip & juke your way around enemy ships
10) the maps arent combat maps. I think, gun to my head, if I had to pick something on this list I think SS would be the most improved by having (not that I think it should include it. try to rotate that, siri keaton), it's this; when you warp into a map there's stuff often unrelated to your mission spawned on the map, sometimes out on the outskirts, sometimes way out there, sometimes in the way. A lot of the maps dont even have any objective! I love this feature. I don't think the game would hold up at all if it had SS's pure & utilitarian combat maps with nothing but u & the enemy & the terrain. Going to do a battle & running into a civilian traffic jam while ur clashing with the enemy, or discovering someone's blueprints stash (AND THE MINEFIELD HE GUARDED IT WITH) while ur in the middle of a cobra knife fight is something else. Heck -- I enjoy just going to a sector marked with nothing with only my command shuttle, turning the cloak off & just going around popping stuff with my laser. Having to physically dock your ships with stations, & seeing the traffic coming & going as you do it. It all makes the game feel really alive -- which is something since unlike SS it isn't a sim game.
In fact, I've got a gameplaye experience from 10 years ago burned into my brain of going to dock with a station to bribe some guards, taking my cloaked command shuttle, being too lazy to toggle the cloak off so it took me longer than it could have to get there, seeing that there was this game's version of an Atlas (which I had never seen before & likely wouldnt again for a long time) & panickedly ordering my fleet to come join me as I opened fire on a friendly faction who I was trying to engage in trade with that requires good standing trying to pop the ship for its schematics while it tried to warp away, and just barely not getting it & kicking myself for having been lazy with my docking routine. That happened 10 years ago & I still remember that bright as day. There's stuff happening in this game that you can miss out on for a long time if u arent scrounging hard enough & thats pretty cool
11) I like how you pick your reactor (and shield and cloak and engines). This is the one feature I know for the most certain is modded content bc I remember falling in love with the Zero Point Reactor, which is an end-game reactor that unlike the other end-games which have huge energy capacity & proportionally huge detonations (oh yeah, how hard your ship blows up when it dies is a reactor stat. isnt that cool?), the ZPR has almost no capacity but incredibly good dissipation (the starship reactor equivalent of a tankless water heater), and also, the smallest reactor detonation in the game -- it is effectively completely harmless to lose a ZPR ship in your battle line, as opposed to the gigantic fusion reactors you'd stick on your capital ships that turn them into gigantic fusion bombs that will annihilate your whole fleet if they can't get away from it -- and there are weapons that will drag your fleet into the explosion if you're unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end of it at the wrong time, which is a pretty amusing way to lose your entire fleet
12) station sieges are cool. Obviously SS would never traffic in such grim & senseless violence but, the way that stations will slew people out of them like something punctured while taking hull damage, just *** spraying a hundred screaming souls into the void in a single stream, and the way that they jettison hundreds of escape pods in a flurry as it dies and then when the reactor goes it explodes so horribly that most of those escape pods are pulverized into dust (& ur fleet if they dont run away). It is phenomenally close to what fighting a station should feel like. It feels like you're annihilating a city -- a militarized one that ur only attacking bc it has a military base in it & ur shooting at its guns but at the end of the day it is still full of almost entirely civilians, and the station has a reactor you have to destroy to end the fight and destroying that reactor is going to kill everyone. And the game doesn't beat around the bush about it!
13) picking up escape pods sometimes causes your ship to fire a person out of itself a few seconds later, sometimes accompanied with voice chatter about it. "Hostages that don't cooperate go out the airlock with the rest of the trash." "I wonder if their eyes really do pop in space." I'm not a sociopath but it really sells the setting
14) it's actually very important that the game has this & these last few features -- it seems gratuitous & unnecessary that it does this but it turns out to actually be really mechanically important. but, even if it didn't, the fact that people who've been spaced remain on the map as a form of debris, who will splatter across your bow as you fly through them or who get vaporized by the hundreds as you fire your beams through them at your enemy on the other side. it REALLY sells the setting. It feels, moreso than basically any other space game I can think of, exactly like how it probably would be to have a space battle. Any space war game that doesn't include the possibility of a person's thrashing body slamming against the window of your command deck as you pursue your foe, startling everyone & giving them an uncomfortable reminder of how many dying souls have been ejected screaming into the void. There's an inherent dishonesty to any space war game that doesn't have that. Obviously not every game has to be that honest, it's fine for games like SS to be a little abstracted, a little scrubbed for the history books, but war is hideous. Imagine a WW2 game where shooting an enemy in the face makes them vanish. It would feel like lying.
Destroying a vessel of war necessarily involves murdering (almost) everyone inside of it. Making a game entirely about doing it for hundreds of hours means there's gonna be a huge body count. There are the bodies. When they're yours you feel bad, when they're theirs you sometimes can't resist the urge to sweep the sky with a laser beam out of spite for the ship they came out of. They thrash for a bit, and then they don't. They go splat when you hit them
15) BOARDING. Boarding. Boarding is good. This game's boarding being good demonstrates why SS shouldn't have boarding; it requires a lot of groundwork to make it the kind of game that boarding works for, and SS hasn't have that groundwork. I'm not gonna bother talking about any of it except for this; suicide cannons. Suicide cannons. You're firing escape pods equipped with magnetic clamps & a breaching charge, out of miniguns on your ship at a rate of fire that is STUPIDLY high. You're spraying escape pods at your enemy. Every one that misses winds up stranded on the battlefield, awaiting pickup, but most likely getting blasted apart by crossfire because -- again, in the middle of a battlefield. Your enemy doesn't care about your well being, and they're in between you and a ship you're trying to kill
Suicide cannons. Who comes up with that? A genius is who. suicide cannons
16) The way that missiles do bonus dmg versus unarmored hull & the smallest class of ships have no armor, juxtoposed against missile slots having the strongest hitters against large ships creates a very neat dichotomy. Micromissiles will massacre fighters, but torpedoes are incredible against capital ships. Which do you need? All of them. No weapon becomes obscolete. You upgrade your starting micromissiles into larger missiles but you still need the tiny boys bc they fire faster (& farther) ((& more manueverably)) (((& more frequently)))) and bc you can leave a ship's rear unarmored to free up weight for frontal armor having something to clear the sky of grasshoppers firing torpedoes into your capital ship's backside can be a big deal.
17) some of the ships have their missile mounts pointed backwards in angles that are useless for torpedoes & very bad for antiship missiles. It's genius how simply pointing mounts in a certain way dedicates that missile mount to micromissiles
18) the hound looks like if you split the buffalo in half & bolted its halves onto the front of an enforcer, with two oversized turrets right where the cargo runs meet the ship's hull. I love it, it looks great.
19) the raven, which looks like a space ship (IE non-aerodynamic) version of the b-2 stealth bomber, with a cloak & top of the line engines & fighters strapped to its underbelly used to stealth through a mission & strike at the heart of objectives that you can strike & retreat from, is one of my favorite things to play as in my life. Idk why but the concept of, effectively a very large kite, cloaked, fighters strapped to its belly, floating invisible through space ready to drop out of cloak & release fighters & make its kill before recalling its fighters & cloaking away, really just sparks something in my brain. Just 10/10
20) the gull looks like if you took the two wings of the falcon, removed everything else, then bolted a salvage gantry between them & used it as a mount for a tactical bomb slot. also great. this is the part of the review where I just list ships that I like.
21) the part where I just list ships I like is over. I like how the slots work in this game. You have gun slots, missile slots, utility slots and turret slots (the last one im p sure is modded in), and then a 5th kind of slotless component called boosters. Utility slots & booster components fill the role hullmods in SS do, gun & missile slots should come to you naturally, except they're all hardmounts. Turret slots in basegame im p sure are just gunslots but on a swiveling mount, but in the mod the turret itself is something you select. Baseline you can put a gun on it, which makes it drastically more useful in a dogfight but tends to be undersized. You can also unlock the ability to put a split turret on that slot, reducing the mount size but mounting two guns instead, or mounting even smaller guns but 3 or 4 of them. The ability to turn a huge turret mounting a doom cannon into the same turret with 4 machineguns on it is great, i love it -- it also feels more honest to how naval ships work bc they definitely do do that
you also can mount on a missile or utility turret that gives it a larger mount than it would a gun, in exchange for -- well, not being guns where there could be guns. You also get the option of, instead of placing a turret in the turret slot, build a hardmount turret slot there which gives you a larger gun but now you dont get the advantage of a turret.
I love this system. It gives so much flexibility. You can take a fighter I like (OH NO WERE BACK TO SHIPS I LIKE) that's just a tiny falcon with 2 small forward facing turrets at the back of the ship that's meant for dogfighting, put medium missiles on it instead with a cloak & huge engines and convert it into a close support gunship -- either for running torpedoes down a capital ship's backside or for nuking other fighters with micromissiles so your capital ships dont need point defenses. Theres also a fighter with 1 medium turret mount in the middle that you can install a hardmount to stick a large gun on and -- oh look its the mudskipper m2
22) boosters being mountagnostic means if a ship has mounts you don't like you can stick [hullmods] in them instead. They also allow you to hyperspecialize your ships. Have a ship that's mean to end another ship's life once its shields are broken by slamming cannons through them? Take a utility ship with lots & lots of non-weapon mounts, put cannon boosters on them, then put ur biggest cannons in its 2 gun mounts that are supposed to be an afterthought for the ship's role but are now back-breakers. Take a fighter & stick engine boosters in every slot including gun slots -- now you've got a blockade runner. Take a fighter with a decent hold & stick engine boosters in every slot including gun slots, with 1 tractor beam, and mark one of your larger ships with a decent hull as a mule & now you've got a mining drone whose only purpose is to grab stuff & throw it at your freighter so your freighter doesn't need to haul its big body over to every $1 pickup
it also allows you to balance your power supply by replacing mounts with reactor boosters until you have your ship's guns tuned the way you want
23) the ability to save up to 3 loadouts for your ship that u can hotswap in the middle of combat. 10/10
24) the fact that it takes so long & so many clicks to hotswap a loadout when it could have had hotkeys on the tactical screen. 0/10
25) I like how you buy or find blueprints to ship components, but each component has a level requirement in a certain skill to use it, AND ON TOP OF THAT each skill increases the effectiveness of all of its assiated components, so there is both a reason to hold onto skill points to use for blueprints you find, but also a reason not to horde them as having 48 skillpoints sitting around is 48 skillpoints that could be making your guns hit harder & ur ships live longer
26) the way that XP is a physical object you have to pick up in the gameworld is neat. the fact that your ships tractor them in regardless of whether they have a tractor is 10/10
27) theres 7 audio sliders, 3 of them being different sources of speech. I play the game with sound affects & music at half & speech, unit chatter & radio chatter turned all the way up. I don't want the sound of combat to get in the way of "Hostages that don't cooperate go out the airlike like the rest of the trash"
28) theres a "vent ship" button that kills all your crew & it is important
29) theres a button that makes your fleet fire escape pods at your ship until they're back to the # of crew you told them to spawn with
30) u can jettison armor. its finite & it weighs your ship down so theres no combat reason to keep it on, but it costs money to replace. so u have to weigh economic concerns against combat concerns, even in the middle of combat
31) theres a self destruct button, AND IT IS IMPORTANT
32) the game spoils for you which system has which blueprints, but the systems also have levels so you are being encouraged to try your hand at a system twice what you should reasonably be trying in exchange for getting that nuke blueprint early
im running out of Impressions so Im gonna go trim my cat's nails
For those who haven't played or heard of this game, get this gameplay synopsis up on you;
Quote
S.P.A.Z. integrates top down shooter gameplay with role-playing video game and real-time strategy elements within a futuristic space setting. The game also features large-scale randomly generated galaxies to explore. Players command a fleet of ships, and may control any one of their ships individually at a time. The galaxy is organized into systems, each system containing a star and a set of planet bodies and areas which may be "warped" to via an in-game map. These areas may contain faction stations where trade, missions, or sieges may take place. The player's standing with the faction affects what services the station will give you. Players can improve their faction standings through missions and level up their fleet through missions and combat.It's uncanny, isn't it? lol
Spoiler
not that either of these two games copied eachother, they're both just ripping off the same old games, for the record
[close]
So, I decided to replay the darn thing, and list here things about it that I liked, things about it that I appreciate having spent the better part of the decade playing SS, & whatever else I feel like pointing out.
PS, I'm playing the modded version. There's basically only 4 mods for the game, & they can't be loaded together (it turns out mod support matters*), but I consider the balance & content overhaul mod fight for big beef (supermod combining the two good ones) to be so important for the game's quality that effectively in my head that version of the game is The version of the game & the unmodded version of the game is basically a beta of fight for big beef. This isn't a, "I can't play skyrim anymore without 400 mods installed bc I've played it too much" situation, this is a, "I don't think anyone should play this game without this 1 mod, it is the objectively superior version in all but exactly 1 way". In my 30 years of gaming I haven't felt this way about any game b4 & likely never will, so take that for what you will, but when I talk about SPAZ I am talking about this modded version. This game came out in 2011, there's a lot I'm pretty sure came from the mod but gun to my head I could not even hope to start telling the two apart so I won't even try. F4BB = SPAZ AFAIC & I wont be differentiating.
ANYWAY, in no particular order as they come to me;
A) *MOD SUPPORT. OH MY GOD playing games with such close gameplay loops to SS makes me recoil in agony like I've been touched with a live wire every time I'm forced to play them without SS's targeting reticle mod. I always forget how much it's going to hurt me to have to do without it. Thank you Alex so much for the mod support, it is like sweet sweet morphine flowing through the veins of a burn victim
2) I forgot how ssssssssssssslow this game's start is. I feel bad starting with two not-positive notes but the moment I start this game & am getting back into the saddle I am immediately reminded of something I was forced to learn the first two times I played it; this game has an INCREDIBLY WEIRD pacing problem. And that problem is that the first 1/3rd of the game is a static open world sandbox with no time pressure (think Assassins Creed) where the primary drive of your gameplay loop is trawling from system to system finding blueprints to unlock, until you progress the story far enough to trigger the Actual Game which is NOT a static open world sandbox but a dynamic one with active time pressure & a galactical war which forces the player forward with what they have, damn the torpedoes, picking up what they can but making do. And it is not a kind transition; bc of how familiar we are with the AC format it is extremely easy to slip into the rut of mindlessly trawling the open world for side content, assured that the critical story path is largely unconnected to it -- assured that it doesn't matter which order you do it in, that if you spend 20 hours doing side content & 20 hours doing story content. Oh no no no, not here. If you play the side content before you trigger the Actual Game you will burn yourself out on this game before you reach the end. Doing so makes it overstay its welcome by a long shot -- it feels like the game is 3x as long as it should be, unless you take what you have and plow yourself through the story content as deep as you can until you hit a roadblock, then do a little bit of grinding to get through that roadblock until you reach The Turn. It's very important for the grinding & unlocks to be something you do on the fly as-needed to progress the story, and not something you pre-load your campaign with and then play the whole story with everything unlocked. Do not grind. Do not grind. Do not grind. A lot of open world games it is important for you to manage the game's pacing, this one will absolutely allow you to ruin it for yourself if you don't resist the urge to grind.
3) This one is a negative note on the mod; the one area where the mod is not a pure, unadulterated improvement is that it adds 3 ships of all but the largest size class, which are the strongest ships in their class with a stupid quantity of mounts, unlocked from the start. I... hate, these ships. I really wish they weren't there. This time as well as the first time I played this mod I took 1 look at them at the start of the campaign, and mentally through them in the trash. Wish I wasn't too lazy to remove them. The game is a lot of fun because you're forced to wage war with a bus & a tug boat
4) OKAY, on to the positives. I love that you get to fly fighters in this game, and that they aren't just the second smallest size class but smaller -- you can pick what armor to bolt onto which sides of your ship, & they drastically affect your ship's speed & maneuverability, but the smallest size class can't mount any armor, forcing them to be drastically faster than anything larger regardless of how you build them. It's a really clever way of pigeonholing them into their role & preventing them from being just a tiny capital ship (EXCEPT FOR THE MOD FIGHTER THAT I DONT USE). Theres more to this Im gonna circle back around to later
5) I forgot how neat I find the way the game handles the energy draw of your beam (1/2 of them) weapons. When you fire a cannon, it instantly draws energy, but a beam also then after its beam dies out gradually draws energy as it's reloading (but hopefully slower than your reactor can replenish it) & if you are sustaining fire the burst draw of the beam firing comes right at the tail-end of the gradual draw of the beam reloading. It's hard to explain why but I find this extremely satisfying. There's an... organicness... to the way this works. The energy bar is really conveying the feeling of your beam coils having to be cooled off between bursts. There's always this sense of why do burst beams not just fire indefinitely and the extremely specific way that beam weapons in this game handle energy draw kind of intrinsically solves that question for me -- it feels like your beams need time to cool off & if you did jury-rig it to fire nonstop it'd melt itself immediately. Not just that the game says that's why, but that it feels like that's why. It's very hard to describe but it's a sort of very good tactile sense to the system
6) cannons. cannons feel like god slamming a car door. Not on their own purely by their gamefeel design like a Nuclear Throne gun having lots of juice, but in their balance. After the start when you've got enough of a fleet to specialize your ships but before you're deep enough into ruining the game by grinding to break it so badly that you don't need to specialize ships, you have to start dedicating your fleet to combat roles & having 1 ship as a ship-breaker, with one or two of the best cannons you have and nothing else, held in reserve because it will red-line its reactor in a heartbeat, until the enemy's shields are defeated & you've got it lined up and then you split the thing in half with a single volley slamming through it. It feels good. It feels good in a way that a sim game like SS can't allow bc it'd be unfair for the enemy who are in finite numbers and it'd be unfair for the player for the same reason. Speaking of
7) this game isnt a hardcore sim game. All of your ships are, to compare to SS, fighters coming out of a carrier's hanger bays, but instead of the carrier going into battle it sends a warp beacon to a map & it warps its "fighters" (ur ships) to that beacon. Forever as long as you have the resources to keep replacing them, and as long as the beacon hasnt been killed. I... like this system. This is not intended as a dig to SS in any way but after having played a hardcore sim game where lost ships are lost lost & can't just have replacements ordered as long as u have the cash & think its a good idea is really nice. Like sliding into a hot bath at the end of a long day, I can just build the fleet I feel like flying and then fly around being an idiot letting them get fed through a woodchipper if the enemy counters it & I don't have to stress about it unless the beacon is threatened, at which point Real Gamer Hours is on
speaking of cash on hand; bc this game doesn't game-over you when your fleet wipes & bc ur mothership isnt going into battle, it means that (except in the very unlikely scenario that your mothership gets attacked while ur broke) there is no game-over state. You just, run out of money, then belly-crawl your way to an asteroid field & mine your way painfully & slowly back up. Thankfully this game has a finite amount of money u can hold. my ex wife always got upset zelda for having their rupee limited by wallets & always tried to point out that it'd make the game worse if they werent like that, they wouldnt be able to throw infinitely replenishing rupees at you if they werent. And the same thing applies here. Your punishment for failure is the time it takes you to replenish your stockpiles, and it is suffering. That suffering is largely mitigated by the existence of infinite asteroids that can be busted apart infinitely by the largest slot size of mining laser, but in the early game you have to rely on NPC factions to have a mining station on one to do it and at that you have to hope its from a friendly faction. If those conditions are met you can pick at their scraps like a seagull. Which is helpfully helped along by your AI being capable of more or less competently running a mining operation on their own without your help, but it is still agonizingly slow and this game has the same problem SS does of not being able to handle multi-tasking. If you minimize it to let your subordinates do the dirty job for you the game pauses. I find this to be charming. You HAVE to SIT and WATCH the agonizingly slow process of your fleet slowly undoing your screw-ups. I'm... glad it's like this. Obviously the easy solution is to read a book or watch something on your phone -- but! That's a good thing IMO, it gives natural break points for you to do something else built into the game's structure, and in doing so it is making you feel your punishment. This is not a "your character goes to jail, press 1 to be out of jail" punishment, this is actual honest-to-god sit & think about what you've done. Also it helps to add onto fixing the problem fixed by the zelda wallet system, of using the player's impatience to prevent the player from accruing infinite wealth -- if you aren't patient enough you won't even fill your ship's hull, you'll get bored & figure screw it that's good enough & move on with your day at 1/5th fleet capacity -- which is a catalyst for fun! It's fun to be forced to make due with darts & grasshoppers, not bc the game contrived an excuse for why you have to but bc it has this system built to naturally be fueled by your lack of discipline.10/10, this system feels terrible and I think it's great. I'm not gonna make this sort of comparison often & I don't think SS would necessarily benefit from having it but I do think the emotional rollercoaster that this inflicts on the player makes this system better than SS's. Consider this as a mark of quality; I've put easily more than 200 hours (according to steam, compared to games I've purchased legally that makes it my 4th most-played game ever) into this game and I have never save-scummed, despite the fact that the punishment for failure is having to spend an hour watching rocks get moved back & forth and not being allowed to minimize my game to skip it. Any game that can make me stick razor blades under my finger nails and keep coming back for more has something going for it.
9) i like that cloaks are an inferior version of shields that you stick on ships that don't need shields. Have a missile boat that shouldn't be in a fight? Cloak it. Have a cargo freighter to drag behind your warfleet grabbing cash as it goes so you don't have to come back for it or make a pit stop at an asteroid? Cloak it. Have a command fighter for you to switch to & sit in while u IRL read a book? Cloak it.
I also like that cloaks cripple your ship's movespeed, giving you a reason not to use them on most non-combat ships (as usually their #1 stat is speed), so there's an intrinsic choice being presented. It's fun to have a datarunner fighter that you use to race around maps popping doodads & grabbing datacore & racing objectives, that you have a cloak on bc it makes it less likely to eat a torpedo while ur fleet is in battle, that in order to use for its intended purpose you have to switch its only form of defense off. It feels exhilarating to have this little dart that you slip around a warzone in & you have your finger hovering over the cloak button as you dip & juke your way around enemy ships
10) the maps arent combat maps. I think, gun to my head, if I had to pick something on this list I think SS would be the most improved by having (not that I think it should include it. try to rotate that, siri keaton), it's this; when you warp into a map there's stuff often unrelated to your mission spawned on the map, sometimes out on the outskirts, sometimes way out there, sometimes in the way. A lot of the maps dont even have any objective! I love this feature. I don't think the game would hold up at all if it had SS's pure & utilitarian combat maps with nothing but u & the enemy & the terrain. Going to do a battle & running into a civilian traffic jam while ur clashing with the enemy, or discovering someone's blueprints stash (AND THE MINEFIELD HE GUARDED IT WITH) while ur in the middle of a cobra knife fight is something else. Heck -- I enjoy just going to a sector marked with nothing with only my command shuttle, turning the cloak off & just going around popping stuff with my laser. Having to physically dock your ships with stations, & seeing the traffic coming & going as you do it. It all makes the game feel really alive -- which is something since unlike SS it isn't a sim game.
In fact, I've got a gameplaye experience from 10 years ago burned into my brain of going to dock with a station to bribe some guards, taking my cloaked command shuttle, being too lazy to toggle the cloak off so it took me longer than it could have to get there, seeing that there was this game's version of an Atlas (which I had never seen before & likely wouldnt again for a long time) & panickedly ordering my fleet to come join me as I opened fire on a friendly faction who I was trying to engage in trade with that requires good standing trying to pop the ship for its schematics while it tried to warp away, and just barely not getting it & kicking myself for having been lazy with my docking routine. That happened 10 years ago & I still remember that bright as day. There's stuff happening in this game that you can miss out on for a long time if u arent scrounging hard enough & thats pretty cool
11) I like how you pick your reactor (and shield and cloak and engines). This is the one feature I know for the most certain is modded content bc I remember falling in love with the Zero Point Reactor, which is an end-game reactor that unlike the other end-games which have huge energy capacity & proportionally huge detonations (oh yeah, how hard your ship blows up when it dies is a reactor stat. isnt that cool?), the ZPR has almost no capacity but incredibly good dissipation (the starship reactor equivalent of a tankless water heater), and also, the smallest reactor detonation in the game -- it is effectively completely harmless to lose a ZPR ship in your battle line, as opposed to the gigantic fusion reactors you'd stick on your capital ships that turn them into gigantic fusion bombs that will annihilate your whole fleet if they can't get away from it -- and there are weapons that will drag your fleet into the explosion if you're unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end of it at the wrong time, which is a pretty amusing way to lose your entire fleet
12) station sieges are cool. Obviously SS would never traffic in such grim & senseless violence but, the way that stations will slew people out of them like something punctured while taking hull damage, just *** spraying a hundred screaming souls into the void in a single stream, and the way that they jettison hundreds of escape pods in a flurry as it dies and then when the reactor goes it explodes so horribly that most of those escape pods are pulverized into dust (& ur fleet if they dont run away). It is phenomenally close to what fighting a station should feel like. It feels like you're annihilating a city -- a militarized one that ur only attacking bc it has a military base in it & ur shooting at its guns but at the end of the day it is still full of almost entirely civilians, and the station has a reactor you have to destroy to end the fight and destroying that reactor is going to kill everyone. And the game doesn't beat around the bush about it!
13) picking up escape pods sometimes causes your ship to fire a person out of itself a few seconds later, sometimes accompanied with voice chatter about it. "Hostages that don't cooperate go out the airlock with the rest of the trash." "I wonder if their eyes really do pop in space." I'm not a sociopath but it really sells the setting
14) it's actually very important that the game has this & these last few features -- it seems gratuitous & unnecessary that it does this but it turns out to actually be really mechanically important. but, even if it didn't, the fact that people who've been spaced remain on the map as a form of debris, who will splatter across your bow as you fly through them or who get vaporized by the hundreds as you fire your beams through them at your enemy on the other side. it REALLY sells the setting. It feels, moreso than basically any other space game I can think of, exactly like how it probably would be to have a space battle. Any space war game that doesn't include the possibility of a person's thrashing body slamming against the window of your command deck as you pursue your foe, startling everyone & giving them an uncomfortable reminder of how many dying souls have been ejected screaming into the void. There's an inherent dishonesty to any space war game that doesn't have that. Obviously not every game has to be that honest, it's fine for games like SS to be a little abstracted, a little scrubbed for the history books, but war is hideous. Imagine a WW2 game where shooting an enemy in the face makes them vanish. It would feel like lying.
Destroying a vessel of war necessarily involves murdering (almost) everyone inside of it. Making a game entirely about doing it for hundreds of hours means there's gonna be a huge body count. There are the bodies. When they're yours you feel bad, when they're theirs you sometimes can't resist the urge to sweep the sky with a laser beam out of spite for the ship they came out of. They thrash for a bit, and then they don't. They go splat when you hit them
15) BOARDING. Boarding. Boarding is good. This game's boarding being good demonstrates why SS shouldn't have boarding; it requires a lot of groundwork to make it the kind of game that boarding works for, and SS hasn't have that groundwork. I'm not gonna bother talking about any of it except for this; suicide cannons. Suicide cannons. You're firing escape pods equipped with magnetic clamps & a breaching charge, out of miniguns on your ship at a rate of fire that is STUPIDLY high. You're spraying escape pods at your enemy. Every one that misses winds up stranded on the battlefield, awaiting pickup, but most likely getting blasted apart by crossfire because -- again, in the middle of a battlefield. Your enemy doesn't care about your well being, and they're in between you and a ship you're trying to kill
Suicide cannons. Who comes up with that? A genius is who. suicide cannons
16) The way that missiles do bonus dmg versus unarmored hull & the smallest class of ships have no armor, juxtoposed against missile slots having the strongest hitters against large ships creates a very neat dichotomy. Micromissiles will massacre fighters, but torpedoes are incredible against capital ships. Which do you need? All of them. No weapon becomes obscolete. You upgrade your starting micromissiles into larger missiles but you still need the tiny boys bc they fire faster (& farther) ((& more manueverably)) (((& more frequently)))) and bc you can leave a ship's rear unarmored to free up weight for frontal armor having something to clear the sky of grasshoppers firing torpedoes into your capital ship's backside can be a big deal.
17) some of the ships have their missile mounts pointed backwards in angles that are useless for torpedoes & very bad for antiship missiles. It's genius how simply pointing mounts in a certain way dedicates that missile mount to micromissiles
18) the hound looks like if you split the buffalo in half & bolted its halves onto the front of an enforcer, with two oversized turrets right where the cargo runs meet the ship's hull. I love it, it looks great.
19) the raven, which looks like a space ship (IE non-aerodynamic) version of the b-2 stealth bomber, with a cloak & top of the line engines & fighters strapped to its underbelly used to stealth through a mission & strike at the heart of objectives that you can strike & retreat from, is one of my favorite things to play as in my life. Idk why but the concept of, effectively a very large kite, cloaked, fighters strapped to its belly, floating invisible through space ready to drop out of cloak & release fighters & make its kill before recalling its fighters & cloaking away, really just sparks something in my brain. Just 10/10
20) the gull looks like if you took the two wings of the falcon, removed everything else, then bolted a salvage gantry between them & used it as a mount for a tactical bomb slot. also great. this is the part of the review where I just list ships that I like.
21) the part where I just list ships I like is over. I like how the slots work in this game. You have gun slots, missile slots, utility slots and turret slots (the last one im p sure is modded in), and then a 5th kind of slotless component called boosters. Utility slots & booster components fill the role hullmods in SS do, gun & missile slots should come to you naturally, except they're all hardmounts. Turret slots in basegame im p sure are just gunslots but on a swiveling mount, but in the mod the turret itself is something you select. Baseline you can put a gun on it, which makes it drastically more useful in a dogfight but tends to be undersized. You can also unlock the ability to put a split turret on that slot, reducing the mount size but mounting two guns instead, or mounting even smaller guns but 3 or 4 of them. The ability to turn a huge turret mounting a doom cannon into the same turret with 4 machineguns on it is great, i love it -- it also feels more honest to how naval ships work bc they definitely do do that
Spoiler
(or at least did before dreadnought design, fun fact a dreadnought is a warship with all big guns of the same size meant to all fire at once, which gave them huge advantage in accuracy (since the ship won't be rocking from the fire of faster smaller cannons fouling your shots) & range (since there wont be spray from smaller closer-ranged guns making it harder to dial in your shots), and also they focused on putting bigger engines on them so they could kite a non-dreadnought warship forever -- which is the SS meta lol. There was a huge arms race to upgrade fleets to dreadnought design before WW1, & then they never actually saw combat until everyone abandoned warships for aircraft carriers after WW2)
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I love this system. It gives so much flexibility. You can take a fighter I like (OH NO WERE BACK TO SHIPS I LIKE) that's just a tiny falcon with 2 small forward facing turrets at the back of the ship that's meant for dogfighting, put medium missiles on it instead with a cloak & huge engines and convert it into a close support gunship -- either for running torpedoes down a capital ship's backside or for nuking other fighters with micromissiles so your capital ships dont need point defenses. Theres also a fighter with 1 medium turret mount in the middle that you can install a hardmount to stick a large gun on and -- oh look its the mudskipper m2
22) boosters being mountagnostic means if a ship has mounts you don't like you can stick [hullmods] in them instead. They also allow you to hyperspecialize your ships. Have a ship that's mean to end another ship's life once its shields are broken by slamming cannons through them? Take a utility ship with lots & lots of non-weapon mounts, put cannon boosters on them, then put ur biggest cannons in its 2 gun mounts that are supposed to be an afterthought for the ship's role but are now back-breakers. Take a fighter & stick engine boosters in every slot including gun slots -- now you've got a blockade runner. Take a fighter with a decent hold & stick engine boosters in every slot including gun slots, with 1 tractor beam, and mark one of your larger ships with a decent hull as a mule & now you've got a mining drone whose only purpose is to grab stuff & throw it at your freighter so your freighter doesn't need to haul its big body over to every $1 pickup
it also allows you to balance your power supply by replacing mounts with reactor boosters until you have your ship's guns tuned the way you want
23) the ability to save up to 3 loadouts for your ship that u can hotswap in the middle of combat. 10/10
24) the fact that it takes so long & so many clicks to hotswap a loadout when it could have had hotkeys on the tactical screen. 0/10
25) I like how you buy or find blueprints to ship components, but each component has a level requirement in a certain skill to use it, AND ON TOP OF THAT each skill increases the effectiveness of all of its assiated components, so there is both a reason to hold onto skill points to use for blueprints you find, but also a reason not to horde them as having 48 skillpoints sitting around is 48 skillpoints that could be making your guns hit harder & ur ships live longer
26) the way that XP is a physical object you have to pick up in the gameworld is neat. the fact that your ships tractor them in regardless of whether they have a tractor is 10/10
27) theres 7 audio sliders, 3 of them being different sources of speech. I play the game with sound affects & music at half & speech, unit chatter & radio chatter turned all the way up. I don't want the sound of combat to get in the way of "Hostages that don't cooperate go out the airlike like the rest of the trash"
28) theres a "vent ship" button that kills all your crew & it is important
29) theres a button that makes your fleet fire escape pods at your ship until they're back to the # of crew you told them to spawn with
30) u can jettison armor. its finite & it weighs your ship down so theres no combat reason to keep it on, but it costs money to replace. so u have to weigh economic concerns against combat concerns, even in the middle of combat
31) theres a self destruct button, AND IT IS IMPORTANT
32) the game spoils for you which system has which blueprints, but the systems also have levels so you are being encouraged to try your hand at a system twice what you should reasonably be trying in exchange for getting that nuke blueprint early
im running out of Impressions so Im gonna go trim my cat's nails
