So, I got back into Starsector after many years, and wew! So many improvements!
Thing is, though, I noticed that I ended up in a routine. It's just too effective to grab a Dram, give it SO/Injector/cargo and tag derelicts for obscene cash right out of Ancyra. Get millions, build colony, set up battlestation, buy Tempest, nab ruins until Paragon/Astral blueprints, and boom that's the endgame.
Now, obviously that's a perfectly valid way to play, but I found that I simply never used
anything other than the Tempest/Paragon/Astral in combat,
ever.After watching some Nuzlocke pokemon runs, I got the idea that I could challenge myself with a ruleset that prevented me from just going straight for the cheese. With that in mind, I think I'd like to share my 'challenge run' idea here.
Starsector "Scarflocke" rules:
- Legitimate ironman, backups only acceptable in case of unintended out-of-game failures like a power outage or something.
- The only things you can buy outside of your own colonies are supplies, fuel, and crew.
- You are not allowed to buy anything else, including commodities other than the 3 staples, weapons, blueprints, ships, etc.
- You are not allowed to sell anything at all outside of your own colonies.
- You are not allowed to refit or repair outside of your own colonies.
- Abandoned stations are considered your own colonies for the purposes of the above rules, and are totally unrestricted.
- You are allowed to interact with worlds in any other way. Bar events, decivilized world interactions, delivery contracts, raids, bombardments, aid packages etc. are all acceptable.
- If using Nexerelin, agents are not allowed to procure ships, but otherwise their functionality is unrestricted.
That way, you can only use ships that you outright start with, scavenge, or build from blueprints. I'm having a lot of fun with this, and it's showing me a
lot of the game that I was otherwise quite ignorant of. Pirates are still fodder of course, but they're a source of ships that you need, and aren't
that bad if you're smart with using them. Meanwhile the Path could be absolute
monsters if they had the sense to play their mobility to the hilt and withdraw when necessary, and with the player's engineering (read: remove those 'ill-advised modifications' via a restoration) their ships can be just incredibly dangerous. I'm sure you all knew that before, but if I hadn't pushed myself with this ruleset I honestly would never have figured it out and just kept bullying them with hard-counters and never found out their real strengths.
Has anyone else done something similar? Are there better challenge rulesets that I should know about? I'd enjoy learning some other players' playstyles
Incidentally, I originally tried to run a ruleset that just said "no docking at colonies that aren't yours, keep your starter ship alive", but pulling together 1000 crew with that restriction in ironman was just beyond my abilities. I spent a solid
week of runs desperately gathering up crew from garbage fights and decivilized worlds... but my best run only ended up with 300 before I finally derped into a Hammer and lost. Still, that was a fun challenge in its own right, and I might go back to it eventually.
