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Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

Author Topic: This game is getting awesome  (Read 2111 times)

xor0

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This game is getting awesome
« on: January 22, 2019, 11:08:13 AM »

Last time I played this it was a great extended arcade game. Now with all the planets, surveying and colonizing it has the ingredients for something much deeper while still being great, maybe awesome.

It seems to me the next stage is to tie all the pieces together into a functioning whole that gives replayability beyond the arcade action or that first ironman run through.

I should have done that this time, but thought "I'll just check out what changed since last time, go surveying and test making a colony" and suddenly I have this unassailable powerhouse base and infinite money.

Last time I played scanning was just in and it was dangerous to try and smuggle something to sell to the pirates cos they might just decide to kill you, it was awesome dodging around looking for faint question mark flashes that spelt the difference between riches and ruin, now you can sustain burn right up to every pirate station, flip off the transponder as you ring their bell and make your fortune with one load of armaments. It's quicker to fly through a system you're at war with cos the customs don't bug you as you happily trade. Yeah needs more nasties.

I made a colony on a planet cos it had widespread ruins and some resources but no volatiles or transplutonics. I'll need to do some more colonies before the global empire stage, right? Nope, because people bring everything you need for free. My single colony rules the galaxy.

Maybe those are just balancing issues, but if the economy was connected to the shipbuilding then you could easily make a 4X (its basically built, just give each faction a low resource base to start and the instruction to go forth!) that would blow away what's on the market today in terms of depth and replayability in a decent looking and smooth package.

Does the AI really not work if they need to use their own resources to build ships, even when multiplying them by large numbers? With a constant ship demand and the commodity demand tied into the populations and industries (like it is now) (should add some higher level ones (social? or maybe the lobsters?) for higher level colonies) it should be possible to make a simple but real economy function.

Anyway I'm sure Alex has ideas about this, congrats on what's been achieved so far.

 
« Last Edit: January 22, 2019, 11:19:20 AM by xor0 »
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Euphytose

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Re: This game is getting awesome
« Reply #1 on: January 22, 2019, 01:21:11 PM »

Alex has said that 4X is out of the question. There's a mod that does that. Personally after having finally played a modded game (started adding mods like a week ago), I'm never playing vanilla again.

But yeah, in vanilla there's no end game, and it's way, way too easy to just go from space peasant to spacelord in a few in-game months.

Even with mods, the game has an end, I'd like to see infinite gameplay in the same savefile.
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Steven Shi

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Re: This game is getting awesome
« Reply #2 on: January 22, 2019, 03:17:38 PM »

Which 4X mod are you referring to?
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Euphytose

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xor0

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Re: This game is getting awesome
« Reply #4 on: January 23, 2019, 09:30:26 AM »

Yeah Nexerelin is the best mod I've played but it's not a 4X. Too bad Alex isn't interested, it has all the ingredients just missing a (more) real economy.
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