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[landryraccoon]

One reason I love Starsector is that it feels like the natural evolution of games that I enjoyed playing as a kid, but the genre feels like it's been abandoned by AAA studios.

Games that Starsector reminds me of:

Star Control
Wing Commander : Privateer
Starflight
Sundog (this one dates me quite a bit)


They all have in common the top down, 2-d action space combat gameplay originated in Asteroids, with roleplaying, exploration and economy building slowly added later.

I don't know why the genre isn't more popular, but I hope when Starsector goes on Steam it makes a comeback.

Edit: I just remembered Privateer isn't top down at all. My bad.

[Alex]

Hi!

Star Control is a big one, both 1 and 2. Wing Commander: Privateer is a game I love (in fact, it's installed on my PC right now!), though I wouldn't necessarily call it a direct inspiration? But it's fair to say I've played it enough that it's kind of formative in what kind of space games I like.

Mech Warrior (4, specifically) is very much an inspiration as far as ship loadouts go. Not actually as far as the flux mechanic, though it's similar to heat - IIRC it evolved into a similar thing separately, originally starting out as "energy" before being inverted to make the concept of "venting" to reset make more sense.

Master of Orion 2 is a big one, too; just... so many cool concepts jam-packed into that amazing game.

Solar Winds, if you've played it! Not so much for any mechanics, but just for how it made me feel way back when, with its exploration. I still remember using hyperdrive to get to a new star system, that was a mind-blowing moment for me.

[Grievous69]

Mech Warrior (4, specifically) is very much an inspiration as far as ship loadouts go. Not actually as far as the flux mechanic, though it's similar to heat - IIRC it evolved into a similar thing separately, originally starting out as "energy" before being inverted to make the concept of "venting" to reset make more sense.

I feel like I massively overestimate how known Mech Warrior games were. Usually to my friends, I try to compare Starsector's flux mechanics to the heat mechanic over there, but so far no one has heard of it. And it's not like they played a couple of games in childhood, so I'm puzzled how that missed almost everyone. Only places I hear Mech warrior mentioned are ancient forums.

Also played 4 a lot, that game would've been more popular if people knew it existed.

[David]

Ooh, can I do this too?

Master of Orion 1 & 2 are the biggest influences for me. The ship sprites, the weapon loadouts - but maybe a lot of Ascendancy too because that involved actual visuals for the ship loadouts.

Before those, definitely played Asteroids in various iterations, including Maelstrom, the clone on Macintosh.

(And I have to mention Spacewar! 'cause that game turned 60 recently - my dad won a competition playing it in 1972 and made his own clone of the game on his workstation in the garage at some point in the early 90's; I forget why exactly. I thought it was _pretty_ cool, but I had better games to play, so it wasn't _that_ cool. Shows what I knew.)

[intrinsic_parity]

I found this game searching for something similar to escape velocity nova.

[David]

I found this game searching for something similar to escape velocity nova.

Aaaa, I played a bunch of that too! Or like, the demo version of it where Captain whats-his-name would come and shoot you if you played too long.

(... and Subspace, if anyone remembers that one!)

[Dri]

Hah, that is pretty cool about your dad!

Looks like I need to check out the Master of Orion series. Wonder if they still hold up.

[Thaago]

Master of Orion II is fantastic - the graphics are 'retro' but everything else about it is still solid. The diplomatic system is somewhat primitive and spying is weird/clunky, but the colonies, tech tree, and ship design/combat are all well done. I haven't played 1 or 3 nearly as much, partially because 2 was the one I started on, but also just because I think its the best one.

[Radicaljack]

Escape Velocity and EV:Nova for me are the games that made this feel so appealing. Similar premise but Starsector does everything 10x better.

[David]

Master of Orion II is fantastic - the graphics are 'retro' but everything else about it is still solid. The diplomatic system is somewhat primitive and spying is weird/clunky, but the colonies, tech tree, and ship design/combat are all well done. I haven't played 1 or 3 nearly as much, partially because 2 was the one I started on, but also just because I think its the best one.

MoO 3 is bad and .. you know what, it doesn't exist. Weird how they stopped making this series after 2. Cough, cough.

MoO1, on the other hand (incoming Take!): I think its game design is superior to MoO2. The game systems are abstracted enough that there's almost no bloat; it's parred down to almost a boardgame in ways that defeats the scaling problems of Civilization-style empire sprawl and unit micromanagement. The technology system is brilliant for making unique playthroughs and ensuring each species plays radically differently based on how the consequences of tech play out.

That said, MoO2 obviously looks way better and has more cool little things to do. And it's way more playable what with not being 320x200 or whatever. Although, I believe some crazy team of devs made a freeware MoO1 clone? ... Found it: Remnants of the Precursors (and I know how much you people like Remnants!)

[Harmful Mechanic]

MoO1, on the other hand (incoming Take!): I think its game design is superior to MoO2. The game systems are abstracted enough that there's almost no bloat; it's parred down to almost a boardgame in ways that defeats the scaling problems of Civilization-style empire sprawl and unit micromanagement.

(It will not surprise you to know that the guys who made MoO were heavily into the board-wargame scene and ported at least one Avalon Hill game to the PC.)

...I believe some crazy team of devs made a freeware MoO1 clone? ... Found it: Remnants of the Precursors (and I know how much you people like Remnants!)

(If you hadn't mentioned RotP, I was going to. It's really neat.)

[Thaago]

Oh cool, I didn't know about that! Gonna try that now...

[Ishman]

Other honorable games that led me to starsector are Ares, Flatspace, and (I know this one's more of a reach, but it's influence spread far and wide) Future Cop: LAPD.

[Serenitis]

Ascendancy was a good game in concept. But could have been a lot better than it was.
I still like that weird tangent of a game.

Star Control was great - especailly 2.
I remember when I used to have physical dexterity and was actually good at stuff like this.
Arilou Skiff was my perfect flawless child. It can beat (almost*) anything with enough patience (and holy hell will you need patience for some matchups).
Goddamn I miss working fingats.

Some novahot Orion takes:

MoO 3 is bad and .. you know what, it doesn't exist. Weird how they stopped making this series after 2. Cough, cough.

3

MoO3 was the first game I ever got hype-burned by.
All the magazines (yes, this was how you used to learn about things) were full of all the new stuff it was going it was going to do on top of all the old stuff that worked so well.
When it came out, it got jumped on. And it was such a disappointment because not only was most of the new stuff not in, but most of the old stuff wasn't either.
It was almost entirely different to what was expected.

The biggest failure was trying to go back to the MoO1 abstracted style, but somehow getting it entirely wrong so you had to micro literally everything otherwise your spacedudes would do nothing else other than build endless reams of transport ships.
And the espionage was hot garbage too - you have to queue spies to be trained manually, but you can only do (iirc) 5 at a time. And there's zero automation.
Oh, and your spies will 'die' of old age if they don't have accidents, so you best always be queuing!
And if that wasn't quite enough there were multiple types of spy, which one do you need? We'll tell you nothing besides thier class name, you decide if that sounds right or not.

3 did get some things right though.
The tech tree is one of the few things that got pulled from the first game, and it's much better than the fixed categories of the second. Solely for it's replay value as very few techs are guaranteed, the rest are RNG.

And the terraforming.
MoO3 has arguably the best terraforming mechanic in any game I've ever seen.
Planets are placed on a 2-D chart based on 2 variables; temperature & atmosphere pressure.
Every race has thier own 'sweet spot' that they like to live in, and around that spot are 'rings' of habitability, of decreasing value as you move away from that centre spot.
Unlocking tech allows you to terraform planets, but only up to a certain level. And the more of these techs you know, the further you can move the conditions toward the preference of whatever race lives on a given planet.
I belive Stars in Shadow is looking at doing something similar to this in thier next update.

[close]

MoO1, on the other hand (incoming Take!): I think its game design is superior to MoO2.

1 vs 2

Both are good. But differently.
1 is much more streamlined and minimalist, which works well for some things - in particular the overall management side.
2 had far too much micro, which could in theory be automated away. But in practice could not because the AI would try to build things in an unhelpful order like trying to build a huge starbase before factories to increase production etc. So you ended up having to micro all your build queues.

1 > 2 for espionage. 2 made a huge mistake by making spies singular entities rather than abstracted ones, which would go on to poison 3.
Personally, I super dislike espionage mechanics in any capacity.
Bearing this in mind, I consider MoO1 to be the 'correct' way to do this. MoO2 was tolerable but annoying.
Every 4x with spies should have a game-start option to just turn off spying altogether imo.

1 > 2 for research. The variable tech tree that 3 cribbed is far more interesting and replayable than the fixed categories of 2.
There's nothing quite like playing a game where the RNG stubbornly refuses to give you whatever <thing> you happen to like, and you have to figure out how to get around not having it.

2 > 1 for combat though. Singular ships (imo) work a lot better than stacks, plus the ability to refit ships was such a huge improvement by closing the gameplay hole of having 'useless' ships that you need to throw away as a thing that could exist.
Also boarding. Pirating other people's ships is never not cool and fun.
Ship initiative was something that got added by a later patch, which was also kinda fun and made battles a little more dynamic by basing turn order on the attack 'roll' of each ship, rather than side1 moves 1st etc.

2 > 1 for system representation. I know the '1 star, 1 planet' deal was an abstraction of an entire star system, but it just feels better to me when your star has actually defined and useable planets (etc) in it.

2 > 1 for race variety. Being able to customise races is huge. So much fun to be had trying various things / RP possibilities.
Everyone always goes right for 'creative', not realising that its just not that good because very few of those fixed tech categories actually have multiple things that are needed. So picking creative is a huge point-sink for not a huge gain in <useful> tech. Sure you pick up all the 'side' techs, but they're nice to have rather than nescessary.

One of my favourite RPs was 'dumb pirates'.
Good at combat, especially ground combat. But bad at science.
You learn by fightin', an' winnin'!

MoO2 > MoO1. Even though 1 is 'technically' better conceptually. 2 just plays better imo.
Also lmao @ the Mrrshan ambassador in MoO1. Thirsty artists.

[close]

*

Gorram Shofixti!

[close]

[Thaago]

MoO II appreciation

The customizable races, and the extreme changes they make to gameplay, are one of the things that kept me coming back to MoOII for so long. That there are so many different excellent combinations of traits is just fantastic. A few of my favorites that are still on the top of my head:

Inquisitive Burrow Turtles: Subterranean, Aquatic, Creative, Large homeworld, various penalties. The classic 'turtle' build to create mega colonies with all of the tech. The farming bonus from Aquatic goes a long way to making early game bearable if not nearly as fast as other races. The game really takes off once cloning centers are built as the homeworld is essentially a large subterranean gaia, though getting to that point can be a bit challenging if there's an aggressive neighbor.

Overlords: Telepathic, Unification, Warlord... The general strategy here is to take this race's governmental bonuses and slap them on top of the massive racial bonuses that the AI gets on the high difficulty! With Telepathic all it takes is a cruiser in order to instantly convert a population, no transports or very long unification waiting time required. That first cruiser is weird and special because it doesn't want battle pods. A lot of the power of this race depends on quickly locating a good enemy to harvest - Sakkra with their subterranean trait are fantastic and the goal - all it takes is one of them to raise a planet's population cap and with unification there is no morale penalty for mixed species. The rare game with an aquatic sakkra is just bonkers if you can manage to sneaky capture one of their worlds and then ship the population off.

Research on Amphetamines: +2 science, artifact homeworld, large homeworld, no creative, either aquatic or a farming bonus (aquatic is better value), some room for other bonuses. The idea is to have massive early game science (so bonuses and less farmers) and leverage that into fast growth and military power: oftentimes by getting both basic production/research buildings and then going down Chemistry in order to get armored MIRV nuclear missiles before anyone has decent defenses.

Variations on no science: -science, feudal, telepathic, spy boost, uncreative, various combat/production/farming bonuses. Uncreative adds a lot of potential variety to this build since it really wants a few specific techs (boarding shuttles) and not getting them is a wrinkle, but the basic idea is to not research anything yourself at all and capture anything techs instead, either through spies, ships, or colony captures.

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