Hey guys I am new here, and I would like to share my experience in approximately the first 20 hours of gameplay.
The idea behind this game is really amazing. There are a lot of little things that are very well done. The universe feels alive and there is a lot to see and do. There are missions that take you places and abilities that allow you to take many pit stops along the way that can greatly reward you. The level of micro-management is just enough to give it that complex, tactical platformer feel, but doesn't cut into the flow of the game itself. You never spend too much time in a station staring at spreadsheets but what is there is enough to make you feel like you are armed with options. You can customize ships to your liking. You can build your fleet how you want. You can put your ships into specialized support roles, such as long range, short range, medium range, and other roles that offer diverse strategies in battle.
There is much more than just the combat though. There's a whole economy to tackle. There are deployable starbases in the works. This game is still in beta so who knows. We could see automated transport networks that supply stations and sell their goods. There could be player owned shipyards and manufacturing facilities. Starsector has a lot to offer, and for the most part, executes these things very well.
But no game is devoid of gripes. There are strengths and weaknesses to every game. My hope is that this is taken as constructive criticism. Because there is a couple of majour fundamental flaws here that made me put the game down for nearly 2 months after just 6 hours of gameplay.
The main motive that drives a gamer to continue playing a game is the sense of progression through the game. If a game doesn't capture you and make you feel like you are getting more powerful, you are getting those things that make life easy, like you are getting the tools you need to progress, then it's not worth playing. If you feel like it is crushing you at every step, and makes it feel utterly impossible to play, then a gamer will put it down and move on to something else. In a game, the thing that drives progression is for the player to make decisions based on available choices that offer a reward for the risk taken. When a player does something in a game, it's because he feels he can claim the reward without loosing more than the reward is worth. This is the single biggest reason to play a game. Everything else is flexible, but this one aspect is hard coded. So with this in mind, let's look at Starsector.
For starts, your default difficulty setting is normal (for veteran players). Literally. Why is this difficulty "normal" if it's for veterans. Why not make "easy" the normal difficulty, and "normal" a hard difficulty. When you first jump into the game, on normal difficulty mind you, you are hand held until it's time to take out the pirates. Well that won't work, because they will annihilate your fleet. So you need to bolster your fleet. You can only do so much scavaging because it costs you crew, fuel and supplies to do that. You can't take on any pirates because they are all rolling around in fleets that will destroy yours. So what do you do? You hit this wall and you either get destroyed or you can't get equipment to get ahead. Well for me, what I did, was shelved Starsector and went on to something else.
After about a month and a half of thinking I should try again, I finally did and put it on easy difficulty. You know, the one for newbs. Ok, I thought this would be a little easier. And yes I have to admit, it was. But then I hit another kind of wall. Combat in this game is horribly unrewarding unless they have bounties. When you win a battle you might get a handful of supplies and/or a derelict ship. The reward from combat does not outweigh the risk. And when they do have bounties, the only ones I can take on are the very minor ones, like $1500 bounty. The only other ones available are like $50-60,000. So they are rolling around in death fleets. No, combat is NOT a way to progress in this game. Combat is there if it's needed, but most of the time you will be loosing your resources, your troops, your ships, and god knows what else. Usually as soon as I get in combat I reload the game and try again.
But even worse than the unlucrative combat, are the scanning missions, in which you have to travel a REDICULOUSLY long way, in order to reach the system. I've now spent tens of thousands of credits worth of supplies getting there. Now I have to hope to God I don't get engaged in combat, and then I have to go there and spend a bunch of rescources doing these scans which costs even more money, and then I need to salvage which admittedly gives *some* of it back, but it hardly compensates for the hundreds of units of fuel you have to spend to get to another star system *and back*.
See the 3 ways the game works against you is this:
Fuel
Supplies
Crew
Now the thing that makes these required resources bad is not the resources themselves, not the concept of what they do, but rather, in the execution of how they integrate with the game. For example, why is there no skill on the commander that makes my fleet more fuel efficient and less demanding on supplies? Why are there no mining skills in which my crew nearly become immune to loss on difficult scavenging operations? Where are the things in the game that reduce the requirements of my fleet as my ship count goes up? Where are my social interaction skills that give me more of a certain type of mission, and make those missions more rewarding for the player? This is what I'm talking about here. I do have suggestions, which I will be posting in the suggestion forums, and they are minor tweaks at that. A person could almost build a mod, but this isn't just personal taste here. The game at its core needs to be fixed a little bit. This game is grueling to play and I am by no means a casual gamer.
I am toughing through it, but basically right now, I have a small fleet. My big ships are parked because I cannot afford to run a fleet with large ships. And it sucks, because my fuel and cargo capacity is much smaller and I don't have the fuel to travel way out and do something, then come back again. So I have to skip past most scan missions. Also, I feel forced to go down the industry line, because combat is so brutally unprofitable, it's not even worth doing. Avoiding most fights is the only way to keep the few hundred credits you've earned after you pretty much broke even just doing a mission.
Pros:
- For a top down, the graphics are awesome. The way planets move around stars, asteroid belts, lightning storms in nebula's, it all adds up to a pretty amazing experience
- The music is well chosen and well done. It doesn't play the same thing over and over and it doesn't intrude on gameplay
- The tactical feel of this game is top notch. Plenty of options, combat is fun
- The economy is deep and rich, and is only going to get better. Trading is definitely a challenge, a good challenge.
- The way the ships move and how you control your fleet while out in space is engaging. You actually have to make on-the-fly decisions on where your fleet is heading or you could end up loosing a LOT of resources flying through the wrong territory (read: nebula lightning storm)
- The line between hard fought and utterly impossible is a fine one in this game. The developers have taken great care in ensuring the game is balanced
Cons:
- A talent tree that forces you to waste 12 of 43 skill points on useless things, forcing players to build their character a certain way or they will loose the risk/reward battle
- The cost of resources is such that most mission payouts just barely cover the cost of flying out there. And this is if everything goes according to plan and you don't get attacked. The larger the mission reward, the farther the mission is from the station you are parked at. This will require a much larger fleet to hold the resources but the larger fleet will also burn double to triple the resources.
- No skills or talents that revolve around pricing of goods, fuel efficiency, mission payouts, etc.
- Constantly feeling like you are just breaking even and now you need resources for the little bit of flying around you do while checking for a mission that's close enough to actually run
Overall I would rate Starsector at a 7.5. And that's a solid review, coming from me
I will have my suggestions out soon. Sorry for the long read, and thanks, eh!
