So - some thoughts from someone who got the game relatively recently, and so am mainly comparing 0.95a with 0.9.1a, not anything before that. I bought Starsector and ended up playing a fair bit on 0.9.1a, and really enjoyed it. Then work happened, and I had to drop it for a while. I've finally had some free time recently and realized "oh hey, there's a new patch I should try". Started playing 0.95a. And then... gave up and went back to 0.9.1a, for several reasons. I've been debating making this post (showing up with negative feedback is iffy at the best of times); as you can see I did indeed decide to post this rather than just having silence.
The main issue is this: from what I've played 0.95a feels like a more polished experience... focusing on emphasizing the components of 0.9.1a I liked the least at the expense of the components of 0.9.1a that I liked the most. (One exception, as nothing is ever black and white: from what I've seen the story and lore of 0.95a is great.)
(Fair warning: the below is a mix of the partial playthrough I did on 0.95a, reading the forum thread, and seeing the changelog. Some of the later game stuff in particular I have not personally experienced but am extrapolating from the thread/changelog and my experiences on 0.9.1a.)
Even on 0.9.1a the early-mid game (the 2-3 combat ship portion in particular) was kind of meh for me. I am not and likely never will be the person who enjoys individual control of a single unit in a larger engagement alongside non-human-controlled allies. (I'm decent at it; I just don't like it. Control of a lone ship? Sure. Guiding a bunch of semi-autonomous units? Sure. Fighting alongside allied artificial stupidity? Not so much. Fighting alongside allied artificial stupidity when I can do better magicially? No thank you.) In 0.9.1a I moved away from fleet compositions where I had to directly control the flagship ASAP in flavor of overall larger-scale tactics. Ditto, I find cases where things are obviously different for the player simply by virtue of the player being the player jarring, and I rather dislike hard caps/limits/'you can't do that' as opposed to 'it's likely a terrible idea to do that' approaches. (It's a bad idea to jump into a [REDACTED] fight with a bunch of tankers and nothing else... but you can try if you want. The game doesn't go 'you don't have X capital ships so you cannot jump into the system'.)
On the other hand: I rather enjoy the lore and story. (And from what I've seen, 0.95a improves on this. Kudos.) I really enjoyed the trading (/trading contract/black market/etc) aspects, as well as later-game colony development (from the first fledgling colony on up to becoming a fairly decent power). I also rather enjoyed the exploration aspects; I always ran a fast fleet and generally kited and picked my battles (or just avoided them), and I liked the tradeoffs of sustained burn / running dark / emergency burn / etc.
So, back to 0.9.1a and 0.95a. Much of this has been talked to death in this thread already; I'll mention those components that particularly stand out to me.
- 0.95a makes it apparent that the later-game largescale colony development and management I rather enjoyed is not an intended game feature, to the point of putting hard caps on player colony development (see above re: different for the player).
- 0.95a's revamped skill system is substantially less flexible. In 0.9.1a, there _were_ advantages to not taking own-ship-specific skills. In 0.95a things seem set up specifically so that you have to take a variety of skills, and as a result there isn't nearly as much of a countering upside to the disadvantages of going the e.g. 'no direct control' route. (Or any other specialized route, for that matter...). Which again, seems like it accurately accomplishes the intended result; the intended result makes the game less fun for me.
- Speaking of skills, the whole 'diminishing returns' skill amusements pushes towards relatively 'tight' fleets (well, when it doesn't simply end up with me disregarding the skill entirely)... which in turn pushes strongly for direct player control in engagements as doing slightly better than the AI improves outcomes substantially. I also find the 'I can find x% extra space on ship A or ship B, but if I put them in a fleet together suddenly I can't find x% extra space?' thing annoying in the player-is-special department.
- The deployment point changes... been talked about to death already, but adding my two cents: it makes it more important to directly control the flagship (and see above re: obviously different for the player), and is obviously different for the player directly (primarily due to officer limitations).
- 0.95a has made me completely disregard ECM and design things assuming the deck is stacked against me, compared to in 0.9.1a where it was a definite tradeoff and another set of decisions to be made. Retaining the changed mechanics and dropping to +-10% makes this even more the case.
- RIP carriers... which I used largely because I really didn't like the RNG of ship losses and D-mods (you overextend with a carrier fleet, you lose a bunch of supplies and crew, depending. Reasonably consistent. You overextend with a ship... salvage being salvage, not so much.) Ship loss RNG is still annoying, and the 'use carriers' workaround is no longer viable... and the improvement on that front (removing d-mods) is _itself_ RNG-based, and a (even more so with 0.95a) limited skill too. And meanwhile the balance changes seem to encourage non-AI-friendly designs.
- The battle objectives... I didn't particularly like them even in 0.9.1a, but there at least they were less likely to make-or-break the combat. I like juggling groups of ships against ships. Playing capture-the-flag... substantially less so.
- The combination of fleet caps, skills, and the changes to militarized subsystems makes high-speed trading/exploration fleets substantially less viable. Ditto for the changes to asteroids and emergency burn (as it means there are many more situations where you need/want to be slow... so 'move fast and don't be caught' is much more difficult and tedious.) Ditto for the sensor profile increase.
- I really don't like story points, in general. It moves away from 'player is different by virtue of being in the right place at the right time' or 'player is different by virtue of being skilled' to 'player is different by virtue of being the player'. And changes things from wandering around finding/exploring interesting things to "you require more
vespene gas story points". I could see it working in an ironman roguelike designed around it as a way of avoiding permadeath; by and large I don't like ironman roguelikes (save system of starsector is bad enough). Then again I'm the odd sort of person who generally doesn't like XP in games either for much the same reasons. - Gating things behind story points is not my cup of tea; gating things being story points and then hard-capping certain aspects (e.g. builtin hull mods... only then there's safety overrides) makes it worse.
Balancing this, we have things I found better about 0.95a:
- A fair number of QoL changes and other tweaks
- Better/more story. (Kudos, again.)
Many of these appear to be accomplishing their seemingly-intended effect; the intended effects of many of these end up making me like the game less to the point of abandoning the playthrough because I realized I wasn't enjoying it and was mainly slogging through so I could catch the story expansions/extensions. Which... fair enough; it's not my game. I'm just saddened.