1.) I do not wish to sacrifice balance or fun in the name of complexity and realism. A lot of what I see debated on these forums is placing a heavy emphasis on "realism," which makes me slightly worried that the end result will be less fun. There is a balance to be struck here, but first and foremost this is a "game."
For instance, I find the idea of sleek, fast, yet devastating vaguely plane-shaped space fighters to be "fun," opening up new strategies and avenues of attack while making people make loadout decisions to deal with them. Yet, these fighters are hardly "realistic." Also, I enjoy the possibility that, for instance, low-tech ships would be balanced and able to stand up to high-tech ones, even though this doesn't always work out in the real world. It makes for good gameplay.
People's discussion in the absence of new developments, blogposts or releases aside, there seems to be around zero basis to believe that Alex and co. are about to start making Starfarer more complex than it needs to, rife with micro-management or purposefully unbalanced. If anything, the reverse seems to be true: while the game doesn't have a tongue-in-cheek tone (thank potential deity, since I tend to find it annoying and more often than not, seems to be used as an excuse by the devs not to have to polish their game) and it aims for an atmosphere of general plausibility, that doesn't ever seem to override issues of balance or fun.
As for the low-tech versus high-tech ships, I do think there is a legitimate reason to have high-tech ships be generally superior - it gives the player the choice whether to have a larger fleet of cheaper but individually less capable ships or take the relatively high-risk-high-payoff way of individually more capable ships that, if lost, are costlier to replace. What's more, it gives different factions a different character in combat through their different ship designs and weapon load-outs. So long as the high-tech ships aren't too much better - and I think the last release addressed some of the outstanding issues in that regard - having different tech levels available is a net benefit or the game.
(More personally: all else being equal, I prefer plausibility. However, while there are things in Starfarer that, looked at more closely, fail a reality check, the bottom line is that the game is awesome and the combination of genre and feel of the game make me more than happy with the balance they've struck. And so far as I can tell, it boils down to "design a great game, then rationalise the design choices in terms of lore afterwards where practical" most of the time. The carrier mechanics are an example of where they've explicitly stated that yeah, the way it works in the game doesn't make sense in-character but provides the best gameplay they've managed to come up with. And besides, I don't think space combat being a matter of autonomous kill drones and relativistic kinetic projectiles launched from a distance calculated in AUs would make for a particularly interesting game despite being probably the most realistic scenario.)
2.) This gets into my second point. Too many rules and too many systems can get in the way of enjoyment of the gameplay. I've played a few tabletop wargames and more than a few indie games that fell off the deep end in this regard.
It creates a fantastically steep learning curve that makes it very difficult for people to get into the game, and (more importantly right now) can divide up development time. Plus, it can be just unwieldy.
Really, I'm not "against" ground combat. I just think it's hardly a priority in a game that's so heavily based on space combat, and I would much rather see said space combat be the absolute best and most fun it can be before tacking on additional systems and complexity.
Seriously, I don't think you need to be worried about this. Alex and co. have, if anything, a record of streamlining absolutely everything they can so long as it doesn't result in shallow gameplay. For instance, the abstraction of all the ammo, repair materials and so on into a generic "supplies" cargo type, the way carriers work in the game at the moment, the standardisation of weapons into four damage types (kinetic, high explosive, energy and fragmentation) each with significant differences rather than a collection of slightly different unique weapon effects, the way weapon and engine damage works in the game and so on. I think you need not worry that Starfarer is going to go the Dwarf Fortress here. If anything, I'd compare it to World of Tanks - extremely simple to pick up, but with plenty of stuff going on beneath the surface so that there's room to improve and the game isn't too shallow. It's a great balance for this kind of action game.
Given the game has troop transports, I'm sure Alex has some plans for some kind of conquest being included. Whether that includes planetary invasion or only taking over space stations remains to be seen.
P.S. I don't think this has anything to do with the 0.51a release anymore and might be better off in a new thread in the General Discussion area.
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Topic: Starfarer 0.51a (Released) - Live Patch Notes (Read 236610 times)