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Question, how micro/detail focused is this? I haven't had a lot of love for the Space 4X Genre, as it were, for a while because it tends to boil down to an extreme level of possible customization. I know a lot of people like this! That's cool! But I'm not a fan, especially when it feels like 'build the mining things on the mining planet. hard decision' as it often does. To give some comparison, I really liked Sword of the Stars (1, of course) because it abstracted a lot of that and made for focus on more interesting elements, rather than the individual structures on each of 20 planets; basically, the game flowed really well. Is this game more about the aforementioned kind of hard-core micro or does it try to keep turns flowing? EDIT: to clarify, it doesn't have to be AS abstracted as SotS; I also liked Endless Space, at least until it became clear it was a mess in other ways. BlondRobin fucked around with this message at 03:08 on Mar 28, 2015 |
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Mar 28, 2015 03:03
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 18:49 |
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Bremen posted:Hey BR! Hi!  I guess I'll give it a shot. Some of the races sound fun and I'm quite interested in a game where the races actually change up the basis of the game- that's one of the things I really liked about both the games I mentioned! Thanks for the feedback.
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Mar 28, 2015 03:55
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Hey, so this game is pretty okay. I'm a big fan of the pressure system and letting that do your infrastructure for you- you can still customize it by choosing what resources/pressures go where, and it's clear that there's benefit do doing so (like the resource that makes labor points count as defense points), but it's very smooth. In general setting up resource chains can be somewhat intricate, but it's smooth and fun to do, I really like it. I haven't figured out how to make ships that are good yet, but in general the interface is nice- I like the way that you 'paint' your ship's subsystems, and it makes everything make sense (and quite easy to figure out at a glance.) Diplomacy is p. fun- actual diplomacy between races seems a bit bare-bones, but I also had a small galaxy with just two other races, which was quickly reduced to one after the person in third place decided to pick a fight with me shortly after we met. However, the 'senate' as it were got a lot of use in my most recent game, including some very heated attempts to push bills through, like trying to take advantage of a Defense zeitgeist when I got war declared on me and having to engage in influence yelling with the Hoonans. Military command is simple, but the FTL system makes a lot of neat plays possible, and I was super appreciative of the fact that I'd decided on a whim to level the FTL crystals resource planet- there's something to be said for being able to rally your entire fleet nearly instantly to any fight the enemy picks. Actual command is 'go fight that thing,' but a lot of it seems to be how you set up your fleet, giving different parts of the support fleet different AI packages etc. and positioning your fleets so you don't get picked off independently, which is pretty interesting. In general the game feels streamlined, but not to the point of dullness- all the decisions you make are important, instead. I like the variety and importance of the resources. I like the movement and direction of fleets (and the idea of master ship with a fleet, instead of a million units to move.) I'm pretty happy with this! Anyone on the sidelines should definitely give it a shot. It does not play like MoO or anything though if that's what you were hoping for. For me, that's a good thing! A very good thing. Now, with all those good things out of the way, since there's a member of the dev team in the thread, I had a couple comments/questions: 1: It's crashed a few times. It seems to autosave... aggressively, to say the least, so it isn't a problem, but does it produce an error log or something I could send in? 2: Waging war seems a little overly simple for all the other politicking and such. Given the nature of resources, I'd like to see something like border skirmishes- when you go to War-War, most people seem unwilling to yield easily. It'd be nice to trade a planet or two and sign for peace- especially with the way the resources work. Maybe that's in the game- admittedly my wars to date haven't even tried to be like that. 3: On that note, going to full war with intent to win the game against an enormous empire can be an... extremely painful process. There doesn't seem to be a way to 'hold' a planet without just taking it over, which means you disassemble their resource chains often in an extremely un-useful manner. This has two side effects; if you win, you have a bunch of planets you might not need and your new vassal definitely needed, and now they're probably useless to you because their economy is a disaster. (I saw this myself- it took many, many budget cycles before my new vassals were able to establish even one fleet.) Two, disassembling a huge empire essentially has to be done all at once and prepared for in advance because you'll end up with a billion useless planets that you have to pay for- and often it'll be hard or impossible to assemble a resource chain without doing weird deep-strikes. This may be intentional, but it makes big empires disproportionately a PITR to handle. The Hoonans in my game have huge numbers, but almost no ships... however, my budget is a disaster so I'm basically unable to do anything but shuffle ships around and slowly conquer worlds because I can't build anything new. I know this is true for them as they can't seem to build any new fleets, either. I could abandon the planets, but... 4: please, please, please, please, please make some kind of ban on colonizing new worlds in territory held by people you are at war with. I cannot seriously believe any empire anywhere could convince a billion civilians to load up and decide to live behind enemy lines, and it is incredibly frustrating to watch the AI decide that planet in one of my systems way behind the line of conflict is definitely the planet they want to live on- and now I have to send a fleet back to deal with it, wasting my time and losing more money holding a planet I had no use for just so they can't take it again and make me play this irritating game of Whack-A-Mole. It hasn't even created interesting openings where one of my fleets is occupied, either; it usually just wastes time. Financially it's a wash, as they have to pay to colonize it and I have to pay to prevent them from doing it again. Aside from those irritants, I'm having a ton of fun. Get a copy!
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Mar 29, 2015 02:56
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OwlFancier posted:The whole game (and genre, honestly) has a lot of difficulty with the notion of territory control. It's sort of a thing with space games where realistically, you can't build a wall around your bit of the galaxy. Realistically, I can't build a wall in space. In practice, however, only the wildest of tyrannical dictatorships would be able to load up literally a billion people and send them to screaming death at will- which is exactly what will happen when they arrive in my space and I don't want them there. If you don't want to just say 'the people aren't stupid enough to fly there,' I'd settle for stacking penalties to future colonization efforts for every time you lose a colony shortly after it's established (and it was in enemy space) or get all your colony ships killed; something like that. If you're going to send fifteen billion people on an insane mission, you'd assume after the first few billion are never heard from again people are going to be non-plussed about this and it'll take more money to coerce them (by force of arms or by propaganda) to do it.
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Mar 29, 2015 09:36
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It also depends heavily on the race you're playing. The Feyh, for example, get a lot out of pushing their homeworld to 4-5 because the Homeworld altar comes with free food/water, which while easily replicable is still free resources on a world type that would normally have zero no matter what. In lieu of better options, the homeworld is usually a good choice, in fact, because it's generally an exceptionally large world, even if it has no other resource benefits. Level 3 resource worlds are also decent candidates, if for no other reason you're going to get it to level 3 anyway so you might as well keep going.
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Apr 24, 2015 20:07
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OwlFancier posted:I am again probably spoiled by galactic armory, but I liked getting new subsystems quite regularly in that. With things seeming rather more expensive now (or it being harder to sidestep expensive things) I'm finding I go quite a while between getting new things to play with, and the game doesn't have a huge number of them to begin with. Just as a counter-point, I love that there's not lots of pointless subsystems that serve only as 'thing 2.0' or 'thing but worse' or 'weapon but slightly higher rof/slightly lower damage'. I don't have to constantly upgrade and rebuild everything every time I get Gun 2.0, and it takes out some of the fussy micromanagement to not have a ton of worthless bits. Keep it the way it is- if you want more fiddly bits, mods can cover that, but it's hard to mod that kind of thing OUT in a clean way.
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May 15, 2015 20:30
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I actually really love Fling Beacons- they have a plenty wide range, but their biggest advantages aren't ones anyone's mentioned. 1: No ship component. 2: No cost for range. 1 is really nice, if only from a convenience perspective, but 2 changes empire management massively. You don't need easily accessed manufactory sectors for repairs and resupply- build one super awesome planet, and you can have all your ships rally there between operations. You can do that with Hyperspace, but it'll cost a LOT of FTL to mobilize your fleet from there in case something unexpected happens. You can do it with Gates, but Fling Beacons have much better offensive possibilities than Hyperspace- you can fling your fleet from resupply to the front lines instantly, even if it's way outside your gate range. Fling beacons are great and all the real races that are not sentient plants with them, so basically Religion Birds, are amazing.
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Jun 30, 2015 07:10
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 18:49 |
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Hey, I got the expansion to support you guys. Liking it so far; not a fan of the new races (Ancients return all the micromanagement i'm not a fan of to the planets and heralds are too random/force you to spend all your budget on making colonizing work; too many tradeoffs for me to feel comfortable with), but it's been a blast. This isn't about that, though. Playing as the Feyh and kicking everyone's rear end all over the galaxy as normal, but I got the warmongering attitude because I was going to conquer everyone anyway and uh well, you know how they say war makes us all less safe?  THEY AREN'T KIDDING. tl;dr: the level 5 bonus for Warmongering is bugged. I can upload a save if it'd help. The energy is not permanently fixed to that; it will rapidly oscillate between some normal generation number, and then the moment I have any amount of energy it will flip back to the insane opposite number. Defense meanwhile is constantly decreasing. I assume at this point our entire civilization has entered a state of ever-expanding hot civil war, using our super-refined war techniques to pitch things to an ever higher and more ridiculous level of conflict. The greatest enemy and the only foe capable of satisfying our lust for ever greater, ever madder wars... lies within.
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Apr 25, 2016 04:15
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