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« on: September 07, 2019, 01:43:16 PM »
I'm a new player to Starsector and have now played about 100 hours of normal-difficulty campaign without mods. I learned about Starsector from Sseth's review although I'm pretty sure I have seen the game mentioned years ago but completely forgot about it until now.
First of all, I'd like to congratulate the devs for making such an excellent game. Rarely have I seen games of this scope with such thought through and consistent design that avoids both oversimplifying and needless bloating. I'm especially impressed by the countless pitfalls of similar games that Starsector avoids with innovative solutions and great balancing. Here are just few of the things I really like:
In strategic layer the economy and trade have enough complexity to keep the world lively and to give it depth, while not going overboard with detail which would make it harder to grasp. The rules of supply, demand, tariffs, black market and trade missions make the trading very enjoyable, dynamic and impactful. Very few games of this kind have ever enticed me to bother with trading or to learn about the overall economy of the world but Starsector succeeds in that by offering constantly changing opportunities for great profit and actually discourages monotonous grind on established trade routes.
At the same time the world is still predictable enough and I know that Askonia is a good place to sell metals, transplutonics and volatiles and to buy supplies while various Luddic Path and Pirate planets/stations are often great places to get more crew and for large amounts of cheap fuel there's no place like Nachiketa (as long as you don't eradicate the pirates who are the main reason for the oversupply).
The combat and ship equipping is similarly masterful concoction. Balancing with the ordnance point costs, maintenance/deployment cost, flux stats, shield stats, armour stats, hull mods and damage types makes the ship designing incredibly varied with countless viable possibilities and approaches for setting up both individual ships and the fleets. This variety elevates the very solid combat to whole another level and I think it's safe to say this is some of the best tactical space combat in any game.
I really enjoy the overall speed of progression in the game as well. It's not too fast so that it would take the player to endgame too fast but it's also not so slow and meticulous that it would become boring long before the endgame. For comparison, these both were major issues to me in Mount & Blade: Building a top tier military force and getting the best gear was pretty fast but going from there to building a kingdom or getting into position of power in some faction took several times that much time. I could never be bothered to play so long that I would have anything more than a village under my control. There never seemed to be a next interesting milestone waiting in the near future.
In Starsector these were never an issue, just when I was happy with my fleet composition I would be ready to mix it all up as I would be ready to advance from inner system mercenary work to exploration and long range bounties to building and expanding my colonies.
In my campaign I first ended up building a cheap mercenary fleet, made of affordable and damaged destroyers and frigates, range and utility was of little importance compared to best bang for the buck as I was purely operating in the inner systems.
When the money started pouring in my fleet slowly evolved into more focused and flexible fleet with cargo and fuel ships hosting sensors and surveying equipment. Being able to pick my fights and supply/fuel efficiency became extremely important so I maintained a burn level of 9 and insulated engines whenever necessary at the cost of combat performance.
After exploring the galaxy had made me incredibly rich, I colonized a good star system and soon after salvaged several XIV Legions I had found earlier (but left untouched because using them in my exploration fleet at the time was not viable). As the colonies grew and monthly expenses turned into monthly profits, the economy became less important factor so my fleet evolved into slower and far more maintenance heavy battle force that no longer really needed to be particularly stealthy or run from almost any threat in known space. I would still use that heavy fleet for exploration and long-distance military strikes because I now had the economical backing necessary for such expensive operations.
Through the campaign, the question was never what is the biggest and most expensive ship or best weapon that I could find and buy, but rather what served me best in the current situations and what I could actually afford to use. This gives the game so much more depth than just having to get the next better thing without any downsides to consider.
Looks like this is turning into really long post so I'm breaking it to multiple parts...
