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[joey4track]

Space Rangers HD

I've been just recently trying to get into this one. I must admit, I'm a little overwhelmed lol. Is there any good way to get a nice start? I don't know where to begin, haha.

[cpmartins]

I always start by doing a few of the text quests first, but you could try your luck and go into a contested territory and try some smash'n'grab using the neutrals as shields.

[Histidine]

I'd personally avoid the Dominators and the pirate army early on.

• Stick to the courier and text adventure quests at first, they're a straightforward source of money and XP. (Trade is also an option, but it's pretty dull)
• You probably don't want to do the assassination missions, following a ship all over the place (even with the search function to help if you lose the trail) is pretty annoying. Then once you reach them, you have to kill them before they can duck for cover at a planet/station. And then there are targets who can regenerate their hulls faster than you can kill them. Ugh!
  (One solution is to recruit random people into helping you kill your victim)
• Then there are the escort and security missions. I like to accept them and just fly away to do my own thing, you can get away with it half the time and if you don't there's no real penalty other than the reputation loss (which is easily made up for), heh.

Early game, I just pick up any new ships and parts I see in the store that are good. Later, you'll want to use the search function to find something that meets your needs.

Other random protips:

• The manual contains some useful information (like how the damage variation works), consider taking some time to look it up.
• Your ship goes slower the more stuff you put on it, even if it hasn't exceeded the weight limit yet. It's also slower the more module/cargo space it has. Invest in a good engine (preferably one that has an afterburner, for emergency escapes).
• Don't land on a planet that's hostile to you! They'll send you straight to jail (you'll get out after two months, but you still have to play an annoying text quest first, and you can miss mission deadlines).
• When selling Dominator parts to the science lab for Ranger credits, military-type parts (i.e. not nodes or cisterns) that belong to the same faction as the research project you're selling them to are worth double.

[Serenitis]

Another series of games you might want to look at for building your own fleet are those set in the X Universe.
And when I say build, I mean build. You buy/capture hulls and then must equip them yourself either by buying stuff from AI factories which takes forever, or more likely building your own factories and making all the equipment yourself.
This is lots more fun than it sounds.

X is a one player one ship affair. You can assemble a swarm of fighters from factories you own, but that's it.
X-Tension is the earliest game where you can command any class of ship and build an actual fleet. It is rare as rocking horse s*** so good luck trying to find a copy.
X2: The Threat is the first "all in" fleet simulator with a decent command system and (somewhat) competent AI. I have spend an inordinate amount of my time playing this game and filling the universe with factories.  It is a little quirky due to the auto installer refusing to work on anything past XP. You can just drag everything off the CD patch it up and it works fine though.
X3 and it's many variants/spinoffs are not something I have any experience with, but they look like they are more polished versions of X2. Presumably with actual working installers.

[Cyan Leader]

As far as gameplay goes SPAZ is pretty much the closest you are going to get I feel. The ships have energy mechanics like in Starsector, you play top down, you run a small fleet with AI companions which gradually gets bigger as you advance and it has a similar artstyle. Not as complex or as good as SS I might add but it is still a great game.

Bonus mention to Flatspace. It plays quite differently and there are no fleets there but it is on the same ballpark.

[Megas]

I will admit that years ago, when deciding to buy SPAZ or Starfarer (now Starsector), SPAZ won out... or would have until I saw internet connect required to activate.  Starsector uses old-fashioned key like older games, meaning once I download the game, I can set it up offline to play like various classic games I enjoy.  (I play games offline.)  For that alone, Starsector beats SPAZ.

[SleepingDragon]

Battleships forever? Anyone?

[Gothars]

Battleships forever? Anyone?

That's where I came from.

[Cycerin]

Battleships forever? Anyone?

That's where I came from.

That's kind of a surprise, same here.

[Gothars]

That's kind of a surprise, same here.

Was just lurking on the forum and building awesome armadas in secret I remember building ships with all kinds of movable parts and "mode change" ability, shame it's not that easy for Sector.

I just remembered, the game was actually one of the main motivations to buy my current computer, since my old one just couldn't handle the super dense torpedoes made from a thousand parts  

[Cycerin]

Huh, I just assumed everyone who was big on BSF participated in the community. That's cool though. *** that was one game being ran waaay out of scope for what it was designed for. I remember when big ships died the game would crawl down to 1-2 fps for at least 10 seconds on my old PC as the sections broke apart with this insane distorted grinding noise.

[Doogie]

Huh, Gothars you came from BSF? Didn't expect that.

[Harmful Mechanic]

I played BSF a bit here and there, but I was big into Escape Velocity back in the day. I think I still have my cartoony facelift plug-in for EVO.

(Unfortunately I can't really recommend it to the modern player - Starsector does most of what EV did well better, and dodges some of the crappier design pitfalls it fell into very deftly. But if you want to hear the one about the crassworms and the Voinian barmaid...)

[nomadic_leader]

I played BSF a bit here and there, but I was big into Escape Velocity back in the day. I think I still have my cartoony facelift plug-in for EVO.

(Unfortunately I can't really recommend it to the modern player - Starsector does most of that EV did well better, and dodges some of the crappier design pitfalls it fell into very deftly. But if you want to hear the one about the crassworms and the Voinian barmaid...)

Escape Velocity is pretty great. The sense of humour, exploration, and discovery was really great. And so easy to make plugins for. If you can get it running on emulation it's worth checking out. (note, the company became really sleazy and I think they may still take 30bux for it, but I don't know if you'll even get any serial number for that. caveat emptor)

The modern successors to this are NAEV www.naev.org and Endless Sky https://endless-sky.github.io/. Both open source, both free. Note: both are more focused on adventure and exploration and less on fleet combat/tactics, though you can have other ships in your fleet.

NAEV has tonnes of stuff you can do with LUA scripting, but it doesn't have a lot of missions and it doesn't have some other basic stuff. The story/scenarios/writing is pretty meh. No plugin system, since the designers want to finish their scenario first... or something.

Endless Sky is a bit simpler, but feels more complete. Very easy to make plugins for, but no LUA scripting. Better writing. Overall I kind of like Endless Sky more. The developer is really active.

[Harmful Mechanic]

I played BSF a bit here and there, but I was big into Escape Velocity back in the day. I think I still have my cartoony facelift plug-in for EVO.

(Unfortunately I can't really recommend it to the modern player - Starsector does most of that EV did well better, and dodges some of the crappier design pitfalls it fell into very deftly. But if you want to hear the one about the crassworms and the Voinian barmaid...)

Escape Velocity is pretty great. The sense of humour, exploration, and discovery was really great. And so easy to make plugins for. If you can get it running on emulation it's worth checking out. (note, the company became really sleazy and I think they may still take 30bux for it, but I don't know if you'll even get any serial number for that. caveat emptor)

The modern successors to this are NAEV www.naev.org and Endless Sky https://endless-sky.github.io/. Both open source, both free. Note: both are more focused on adventure and exploration and less on fleet combat/tactics, though you can have other ships in your fleet.

NAEV has tonnes of stuff you can do with LUA scripting, but it doesn't have a lot of missions and it doesn't have some other basic stuff. The story/scenarios/writing is pretty meh. No plugin system, since the designers want to finish their scenario first... or something.

Endless Sky is a bit simpler, but feels more complete. Very easy to make plugins for, but no LUA scripting. Better writing. Overall I kind of like Endless Sky more. The developer is really active.

Yeah, I've taken a look at both - NAEV feels way too much like some pimply dork's first sci-fi novel and neither one is really visually appealing to me. I might give Endless Sky another shot - I wonder how easy it would be to fix the terrible UI?