Curse you for igniting my brain into one of these essay posts. Oh well. I have to fair....I was also thinking "lets not give too much hype here, I just wasn't going to be the one to pull the trigger. So I give Steven credit for having the courage to make the accusation everyone is sucking off a bit here. It's conversation that kind of short comment is normal, but it's still a saturation point of complimenting without much more to say. I was going to just leave it at that and let someone have their feelings shown and not rain on it. But the conversation has been detailed since so, *** it. Life story over, onto the post.
The exploration is quite solid. Planning the resources you need, reacting to what's in the sector and managing salvage and information, using it to plan your own colonization, seems all fine to me. It's a fairly small title and this isnt the kind of thing that's easy to write, especially with the current system. Hell the new personal contacts blog discussed in some detail the new functions and the like that would make modding a lot easier. I'm only an amateur at programming code, but the example he gave was far from minor if he's doing this for multiple kinds of missions. In fact with the new system it be easier than ever to make missions in such detail that even -I- could do it. The economic system is excellent with a lot of factors in place and the entire colonization system is quite strong.
What Starsector lacks is an outside context variable to make the sector change in form over time. Nothing is taking planets or moving fleets around en mass. To make the market adaptable to the player several planets make several things, or the economy would be so heavily exploitable and fragile that, say, killing Sindra would destroy the fuel economy and leave it open for the player to use or ruin things forever. There's a lot going on under the hood and addressing the verb choice of his paragraphs is far from a small change, it just isn't highlighting the hard strengths that Starsector could have, it's only setting them up for use later. Right now it be too hard to find jobs and missions to make significant profit if an outside context threat was able to toy with the economy, or war was significant enough to alter the station of each faction so that anything not their home-world could switch around and leave planets in a state they suddenly lack certain products. Once the new system addresses that, war or an outside context threat changing economics sufficiently would highlight whats already there.
And what I just wrote is just the economy. The skill system isn't lacking, it's just not balanced enough. Without re-spec options it cant be too specialized and anything too strong is jus an easy pick that makes the whole choice useless, not eve including the issue of some trees being bigger than others not helping. The new system would encourage specialization and even alteration as your fleet evolves and grows to new flagships and systems. It's going to be much better assuming it's balanced. If it's not even I could mod it personally without needing a direct mod. The contacts system will make jobs a lot easier and more diverse, as well as hiding greater challenge behind walls that keep you from being ambushed by them or leaving you unable to scale down from them(a current problem with the bounty system as it stands). Kitsune is right: Right now it's framework and we're playing a beta.
But before I defend Kitsune too much, Steven is right and a point needs to be addressed. Staying in Beta with only minor updates again and again isn't a good thing. going back and forth isn't helpful at all. But....I don't think what's been added is small. Most them are fairly significant, especially in the modding section. Think of how much needs to be added and tested in the one example about missing editing Alex put in the personal contacts blog post? It's entire function libraries being added, with staggering numbers being added in the notes with quite a few content additions and bug fixes. and none of it is working against itself or being scrapped besides fleet composition rules for spawning AI fleets.
As a final, I'm reminded a lot of Stellaris in the question steven posted: Is it time to refine "that" right now? Yes, yes it is. Steven said it himself: It's not flushed out enough. And every problem in it, and some I didn't even think of, are being handled by the new upset. Re-specing allows for more specialized builds to be possible as mistakes can be adjusted. New players are more able to go insane specializing for craft since they can now change over and will feel worth not putting points into things they may not use. The inability to make skills truely powerful and one-sided is not handled by the limits it places. If I'm reading screenshots right then the skill for the number of colonies and the skill improving colony production, will now compete with one-another(damn you Alex! I hate that and approve it at the same time!) meaning they can be made several times more powerful since there is a price to compete with. Imagine what huge damage bonus at sub 1k range(capping at 600) could do to a proper Aurora build like what I did for my last campaign. But if you could put that alongside say, a general buff to damage, it have issues.
Stellaris had similar complaints with colony development. The new job system did amazing work in fixing the issue and more, while only really causing lag issues as a result because the engine wasn't made for that much data on each planet. An issue they're talking about fixing right now. By re-designing they made a framework that is much easier to work with, like what the skill system is going to be in the next issue. People may complain, but re-writing it offers more options then "tweeking" it forever. As long as it doesn't start going back on itself, why not. The skill system is old enough that altering it this way without throwing out the entire menu is a good move.
I think I've rambled enough: That's my take on it. Hope it isn't too much of a spaghetti post.