I've seen a lot of comparisons made between Starsector and
Space Pirates and Zombies, but I hadn't played it, so I thought that I'd buy it (it's cheap now on Steam) and do a writeup, comparing the two titles, in terms of areas where I feel that they're weak / strong. The below is a mini-review; all of this is my personal opinion, of course, but I feel I'm being fair.
For those who haven't played SPAZ, it's a title that has a lot of superficial resemblance to Starsector.
You play as the commander of a giant pirate ship, whose attempt to find a mother-lode of "Rez", the most important commodity in the universe, leads you into dangerous territory.
Gameplay consists of real-time battles where you lead a small fleet of warships into battle with various other ships, using a vast panoply of special weapons and power-ups. Characters level up, and gain power that applies to all members of the fleet, as well as unlocking access to specific technologies. Instead of Supplies, the amount of Rez and "goons" are the primary spendable tokens- Rez serves both as a form of supply and as the primary currency, "goons" serve as a secondary currency.
There is a fairly superficial plot, with multiple plot-points unlocked as the player progresses, that basically consists of excuses to force players to do long FedEx quests interspersed with the occasional Boss Fight. It's nicely-done, though, and well-written.
So, on a lot of levels, these two titles are superficially similar. Where they differ at this point of development is pretty important. So here's a comparison, showing where each title is, imho, superior / inferior, and a little discussion of why that's important.
SPAZ's Strengths
1. Visuals. SPAZ is visually stronger than Starsector in a lot of ways, which was, for me at least, the biggest surprise.
Starsector has better
art and a better
user interface; David's sense of design is excellent, Alex's work on the UIs has been consistently clean and clear (if a little dense) and the ships, weapons and so forth are stronger and more memorable in Starsector.
However, an aesthetic is not just the playing pieces, and SPAZ's creators did a lot of cool things.
SPAZ is much, much stronger, in terms of creating a sense of "unique places", through some pretty clever use of layered backgrounds. With a few small changes, all of which are procedurally-driven but make use of handmade artwork, the randomly-generated SPAZ systems all feel surprisingly unique and interesting, with wreckage, debris, drifting asteroids, planets and astral features in the background, etc., etc. It's a considerably more interesting world, visually, than Starsector's very plain backgrounds, same-looking clouds and same-looking asteroids.
The main thing that this artwork does, besides creating a really nicely-dense feeling and giving the title a unique feel, is that it creates a very strong sense of parallax; one doesn't have the occasionally-uncomfortable feeling of not-moving that one has with Starsector at times.
2. Audio: particularly, audio of voices playing, both as background and in response to game events, makes SPAZ a much more human place. It's probably the one thing SPAZ and Freelancer have in common, besides both being games set in space.
The other cool thing they did was that each "flavor" of star system has its own music, both for resting and in battles. Oh, and real battle music, not just a background that's barely-there. While that got old for me after a while (I am one of those people who turns music off pretty fast in games) it was nicely done.
3. Little extras: things like collecting from dead ships, lifepods floating through space after a battle, real-time execution of capturing enemy ships, etc.
SPAZ has a very heavy emphasis on doing everything in-game; while there are RNG-driven mechanics, such as how much loot a given ship gives when it dies, it's all done right there and then on the battlefield, and it has to be collected in real-time. While this has some tiresome moments, which I'll get to in my final analysis, it's quite a bit nicer than the current system in Starsector, where battles are a series of set-piece affairs.
4. Plenty of stuff to do. SPAZ is chock-full of mini-games that are interesting and range widely in difficulty. Everything from the dreaded Escort Mission to assassination missions using stealthed ships.
5. A much,
much better cloaking mechanic. It's really quite superior to how "cloaking" works in SS presently.
It's not abusive, it's not too hard to grasp, it can be countered... and it's pretty well balanced, so far as I could tell- making it a dangerous option but one with a lot of pitfalls. TBH, after seeing it, I honestly think that if it's not
that interesting, it shouldn't be in the game at all. SPAZ made "space subs" fun and interesting and hard to fight against, without them feeling abusive or too hard to counter.
6. A lot of attention to making human interactions interesting, and cute details. Things like the sarcastic advertisements at Science Stations, who will trade Goons for Research Points (the experience-points in this RPG)- "We're always looking for new guinea-pigs!" to the various conversations that occur with your crew during the plot, to the funny bits dealing with the Bounty Hunters... there's a lot more life and polish there.
This is something where SS could probably be spruced up pretty easily; things like having multiple greetings, different pre-battle hails from fleets depending on who they are and what they want, etc., would be cool.
SPAZ's Weak Spots
1. The core mechanics of the combat are pretty shallow and superficial compared to Starsector. I've heard other people here who've played both titles call SPAZ's gameplay "arcade-like"; to be honest, I feel like that's the wrong way to describe it. SPAZ's combat is all about number-stacking, with very little player skill involved. Past the really early game, the ships you'll fly are slow and ponderous, and for the most part, your decisions will consist of how to stack your ships' equipment and basic decisions about whether to move closer or farther from the enemy and who to target.
Past that... well, there is no past that. Basically, it's all about stacking for the encounter type and the enemies you'll be facing. There are a lot of flat counters, so if you guess wrong, you're probably dead.
For example, past mid-game, if you don't have PD, which is a non-trivial choice to equip (unlike SS, PD weapons don't do double-duty as weak main guns and they take up a valuable slot) you're going to get slaughtered by missile-heavy enemies, since there are a lot of missiles that don't miss nearly often enough, and they don't run out of ammo and they're good enough at knocking down shields that it's a matter of when, not if.
This emphasis on stacking is interesting only if stacking is a novel concept to you as a player. Personally, I find that kind of mechanic very, very boring, because it's a substitute for building interesting movement mechanics and decent AI. Starsector's far stronger than SPAZ on both counts. But after I figured out that I could kite any of the Stations in the game with long-range laser beams, simply because the AI pilots could and would kite at perfect maximum range and wouldn't take enough hits to ever lose their shields, if I didn't equip them with close-range guns, it got pretty dull pretty fast.
2. While I think Starsector is currently relying on grinding more than it probably should in the final game, SPAZ makes it look really nice and gentle about grinding. There are quite literal walls of difficulty, where the game's difficulty jumps by 15 levels, the numbers of enemies (and their size) means that if you're not ready, you're dead. Not "dead if you aren't really skilled and lucky", like in Starsector, but just plain dead.
Because those walls take increasingly-higher amounts of XP to conquer, it gets very dull, very fast. I'm not sure I'll even bother finishing it, largely because of these mechanics; I really, really despise games that put such artificial walls in place. I'd rather be challenged a little more gradually. SPAZ seems to encourage players to take a completionist approach to things- if you aren't ready for the harder inner zone, then go around to the dozens (if not hundreds) of generated star systems and get all of the tech goodies you need to actually have the right stacks.
This emphasis on stacking that's derived from grind, rather than skill, really bothers me. It probably wasn't necessary to design it that way, and it's probably pretty easily fixed. But it never got fixed, despite a lot of updates post-release.
3. Too many things are obviously superior to other things. Balance is pretty darn bad.
There are maybe 1-2 ships in each size category that are fairly optimal for combat, given the mechanics, and what's more, until one is building Huge ships, they tend to be ships with a lot of cargo capacity (yup, the
freighters are generally superior to the dedicated combat vessels... sigh).
Same goes for the guns. You have lasers that are for kiting, and they pwn everything else at kiting, period. You have useful missiles, and a bunch of useless missiles that look cool but don't actually work all that well. There are cannons that are pretty powerful if the enemy's shields are down, but the balance is so starkly in favor of shield-killer weapons that it's not even funny. I've seen online comments about how the cannons eventually become OP, so I presume that they're eventually OP, but I can't see how having no-miss, instant-hit lasers be the kiting weapon par excellence is good balance.
4. All of the core mechanics used to determine
how to stack ships (i.e., how to win) are poorly explained, if they're explained at all.
There are BARS showing "relative" values for weapon power, range, etc., etc., but NOT ONE !@#!@# NUMBER.
That's right- no numbers. So, is that Huge Beam Booster worth installing, or not? Does it stack with a bunch of Small Beam Boosters, or is that a waste? I don't know, because the game doesn't tell me. At all. It's unbelievably frustrating.
If I want any numbers, I have to break open SPAZ's modding source and derive them, which is not straightforward. I decided, just for fun, to make the Torpedoes relevant, by buffing their DPS and range, and that turned out to involve hunting through inherited values and dependencies, because it wasn't done in a straightforward way- no neat-n-tidy CSV with clear values, nosiree.
This lack of numbers is just... ugh.
It's like they
had the numbers on display, but they were getting a lot of flack from early players, who were using the numbers to back up their (correct) arguments about how many of the ship designs were terrible and useless, and the developers, instead of fixing their balance, took the numbers away and claimed they'd buffed / nerfed things to shut people up.
Starsector's approach is, for all of its depth and density of presentation, far superior. Knowing that you've just boosted Flux Capacity or that you're getting a 10% buff to turret speeds, etc., etc.- these things may or may not be wonderful or even useful, but at least I have
something to compare and contrast with, other than stacking endlessly and hoping for the best.
5. Poorly-implemented control over your fleets. As much as I think that Starsector needs some improvements there (in particular, a "go here and stay in a very small radius" command and a "everybody kill THIS THING RIGHT NOW" command would be big improvements) it's a vastly-superior experience. One thing people here have noted before is that SPAZ allows for "custom AI behaviors", but I'd like to say that these "custom" behaviors are basically junk.
For example, there isn't a "go out and mine all the Asteroids" button. So I'm forced to spend lots of time hunting down asteroids and leading my stupid AI pilots around, collecting loot, and then laboriously sending it back to the mothership. Boring, boring, boring. I want to give a command and see my ships go off and do something useful, not lead around simpletons in an inefficient way.
While we can put the AI on "aggressive" and "passive" modes, they're both useless. "Aggressive" basically makes the AI just go off and get ganged up on, which is useless, while "passive" makes it unable to defend itself. Same thing with taking it off "help the player" mode; it basically makes the AI run off and die. While Starsector has similar issues, it's not nearly as bad- I can send a task force to an area and expect it to at least vaguely attempt to hold it, whereas in SPAZ, it's a total waste of time.
6. Really low fleet sizes. I'm somewhere near halfway through, and I have three ships I can deploy... and not just three, but three that are artificially limited in terms of size, so I can't have three decent ships, but am stuck with one good ship and two that are only moderately useful.
Compared to Starsector, this sucks. It makes stacking an even more painful experience, because at certain points, the smallest of the three ships is pretty useless, but its just barely useful enough that not having that extra bit of firepower is necessary. So I'm going to bleed Rez fairly often, mainly because I can't build what I want, when I want it. There is nothing like the freedom of Starsector, at least in 0.6+, where if I'm patient, I can buy the perfect fleet for whatever level I'm at, balanced for my character's strengths and weaknesses. It's a really artificial way to ramp difficulty, and if I didn't think that I'd need the patience of the ancients to figure out how to mod it out of the game, I'd mod it out of SPAZ just so that it didn't irritate me.
7. Modding. Modding SPAZ is, from what I gathered, pretty difficult and overly complicated.
SPAZ's data structure is pretty ugly and hard to read, uses the concepts of dependency and inheritance to excess (imho, inheritance is not a good practice; sure, you waste a few hundred KB by
not using inheritance in data objects, but when it makes your code easier to read and maintain, let alone balance and mod, it's a no-brainer).
There is nothing like Starsector's API structure, Janino support, or the superlative support Alex has given the modders here. It's simply not comparable.
Summary
I think that Starsector, once it has an official Something To Do, will be a better game than SPAZ. It should borrow from the things SPAZ did that worked, though- mini-adventures and missions are really great and add a lot of purposeful fun, and the visuals were a big improvement, largely because they added so much real variety and unlike Starsector's static backgrounds, they made excellent use of parallax, producing a really slick feel.
That said, I don't think I'll even finish SPAZ. The core design issues, especially the really heavy-handed emphasis on grinding (and worse, having to search through countless low-level areas for Tech upgrades you'll desperately need later) really turn me off. It could have been a much, much better game than it actually is, with a few changes, most of them relatively high-level things.
For example, there is a "miner AI"- the AI ships sometimes have it turned on, in specific scenes- so tying that to a UI button wouldn't be too hard. Fixing the ships to be more balanced probably wouldn't be too bad, either; mainly, the combat-oriented vessels needed more slots, or bigger ones, to make up for their lack of Utility slots, and better armor / shields than they have now, so that for pure-combat purposes, they're more compelling choices, the weapons balance could be improved, etc., etc. This lack of polish on the fundamentals, which pushes players towards completionist gameplay (gotta check every last system and find Tech X that I need for Stack Y) is a pretty un-fun thing, when one realizes that it pushes the gameplay hours to huge numbers... without adding anything fun to do.
I mean, it's not all that fun, having to kill a bunch of Civilians in countless systems where I'm massively over-leveled, just to make a deal with the UTA to get Tech. It's not fun to have to then do the opposite to make nice with the civilians. Oh, and then fight a bunch of Bounty Hunters who are no longer challenging because they're leveled for the zone, not the player. Pretty dull, yo.
So, in my final analysis; while I don't play Starsector Vanilla, and haven't bothered other than briefly testing the new updates, since I have a mod that I think is more entertaining to play atm, I think it's largely doing the right things, and the areas where it's not quite as good are either easy to fix or will be worth the time. If there was only one thing that I'd port from SPAZ to Starsector, it would be the mini-game / missions; that alone adds an enormous amount of life to a title that would otherwise feel unspeakably boring and empty, even if there were plenty of places to go kill stuff.
I would even say that it's perhaps more important than an overall goal; having structured Things To Do that are mini-games with win / lose scenarios that have an impact on how the factions feel about one's character is a really nice structure. It worked really well in Freelancer and it worked really well in SPAZ. I just wish the rest of SPAZ didn't annoy me so deeply; I got done enjoying grinding for grinding's sake when Final Fantasy VII was the coolest thing ever made for the Playstation, and I never ever want to grind that much again, period.
