Endless Sky has sucked up large chunks of time from me over the years! Definitely recommend it if anyone hasn’t tried it yet. I’ve worked on several mods for it over the years, and that’s lots of fun as well.
I can’t agree with your recommendations of Starbound and Starsector. I spent a lot of time with these games trying to figure out why I wasn’t having a good time, and I think in both cases it boils down to the fact their development didn’t fulfill the expectations that the early versions created.
Starbound has beautiful graphics and music and a charming atmosphere, but the gameplay is incredibly dull, the combat is awkward and clunky, your movement abilities are pathetic, etc., etc. For some reason the devs decided to implement a story, and it’s literally the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard. And even though this is a building game like Minecraft or Terraria, you can’t build your ship or any of the boss arenas, all bosses are fought in special levels that are protected from your mining/building tool with a magic forcefield. It’s like the devs didn’t even know what kind of game they were making.
Starsector has the opposite problem, the dev knows exactly how he wants his game to play and implements mechanics specifically to prohibit other playstyles. You want to spend all your skill points on buffs for your piloted ship and play this like a space shooter? Too bad, your single ship will run out of combat readiness and explode. You want to sit back and just command your fleet without getting directly engaged? Too bad, every command you issue consumes a command point, and once you run out, you can’t give any more orders. Unfortunately the playstyle the dev enforces results in the player’s role diminishing as the game progresses and their fleet grows, until eventually the game mostly plays itself. The game is overengineered, bloated, and the development drags on. I’ve lost count of how many skill system reworks there have been in the last decade. The dev is just fiddling at this point, and a lot of the systems he’s been trying to balance for years could just be removed entirely without anything of value being lost (ECM, capture points & command points, combat readiness, etc.).
Starbound is I think very much reliant on you wanting to play it as a sandbox. It definitely has a lot of shortcomings. It sounds like you didn’t play it with mods, or at least with Frackin’ Universe, because FU solves most of the QoL pain points from the vanilla game (like movement being slow). The boss arenas actually used to allow you to build in them, but it completely ruined the difficulty; you could go into any boss room, build a box around yourself, and just whittle them down imperviously. While that might be someone’s preference, I don’t fault the devs for not wanting that, and that’s pretty standard for games to remove ‘cheesing’ exploits for bosses.
Starsector is really interesting to me, because I don’t feel that way about it at all.
I almost never end up running out of command points, if only because I only need to re-task ships if something is going wrong. Usually if I’m running low on them, it’s because I’m trying to kill off incoming DPS by focusing fire on one ship at a time, and at that point I should probably be retreating anyways. I can’t speak to the skill tree changes in detail, because honestly I mostly rely on them for the larger fleet bonuses, or tech unlocks (e.g. AI). They never struck me as being impactful enough to make my ship into a ‘hero unit’, so I never tried to see if they could.
The combat is definitely (imho) about fleet composition rather than fleet control.
But really, combat is only one small part of the game to me. Exploration, missions, building up colonies, looting ruins, etc etc. That’s what I really love about Starsector, and what sets it apart to me.
I’d say that if preventing boss cheese requires turning off the most basic core gameplay mechanic that the game is built around, then the entire design of the boss fight needs to be thrown out and rethought. Boss fights should make use of basic gameplay mechanics, not conflict with them. It’s not like this would’ve been rocket science for the Starbound devs. Terraria does it right, building suitable boss arenas is a major part of that game (the golem being the only exception, and even then only the first time you fight it). They could’ve just copied that like they copied so many other things. The lead dev of Starbound was one half of the original two-man team that created Terraria before founding his own company, so I’m really not sure how he managed to screw this up. He of all people should’ve known better.
As for Starsector, I remember there was a back-and-forth between the players and the dev with respect to the solo playstyle. Some players liked to take a small, fast ship and just solo entire fleets by kiting them around, so the dev implemented combat readiness to put a stop to that, effectively putting a time limit on battles. Players responded by using larger ships with longer combat readiness and making them fast by stacking both speed-boosting hullmods (Unstable Injector and whatever the other one’s called), so the dev made those hullmods mutually exclusive. Every time players found a way to play the game in a way the dev didn’t like, he made changes to make such playstyles impossible, going so far as to implement entirely new systems and mechanics that serve no other purpose than to prevent playstyles he doens’t like. It’s become clear over the years that he simply doesn’t want players to be effective in the game in either combat or command capacity. He wants the game to be a tedious slog where you lose a chunk of your fleet in every battle without there being a damn thing you can do about it.
The fact that combat is only a small part of the game and is all about fleet composition rather than fleet control is kinda the problem, that’s what I’m talking about when I say the game didn’t fulfill the expectations that its early versions created. Starfarer (as it was known back then before some copyright dispute) started out as just a list of battle scenarios, with no overworld map at all. It was all about ship and fleet control, fleet composition didn’t play a role at all because you couldn’t adjust it, you had to win each battle with whatever fleet the scenario gave you. Combat is what the game started with, it’s the core that everything else was built around. Unfortunately subsequent development saw basically no improvements to combat. Just about the only change I’d classify as an improvement was the command rework; in early versions you couldn’t even tell your ships where to move. Instead, the dev added more and more padding between battles, diluting the game to the point where combat is now only a small part of it and is mostly decided by fleet composition rather than the player’s piloting and tactics. The game has become the opposite of what it promised ten years ago.
I’m really surprised that neither of the 2019 “Outer” games with similar names showed up in any of your posts: The Outer Worlds and Outer Wilds.
Worlds because if we’re talking about Starfield, it’s something to consider as a smaller, more compact alternative (although I recently finished a playthrough and there’s actually very few comparisons to be made between the two), and Wilds because… well, it’s just straight up space archaeology that makes heavy use of travel and planet exploration. Also because it’s probably one of the most critically well-received space games.
Something else I wanna throw out there: Heaven’s Vault. Nice little narrative game which takes place in space and has quite a calming (even if completely unrealistic) method of space travel.
I actually enjoyed Outer Worlds a decent bit, but I would consider it much less of a space game than Starfield. For all that people rag on Starfield about the ships just being loading screens, you got to manually assemble spaceships, and then walk around inside of them. Outer Worlds was really just spaceships as loading screens.
I don’t really go in for Annapurna games, for a number of reasons.
I did mention it as a smaller, compact alternative, but I maybe wasn’t specific enough with regard to the scope of gameplay.
Probably should have specified that I meant Outer Worlds as an alternative to Starfield mainly for people interested in a game set in space with the familiar approach to worldbuilding that Bethesda and Obsidian seem to share a bit, and also because it’s not uncommon to hear either of them referred to (maybe a bit unfairly) as “Fallout, but in space”.
Then again, most people interested in that would probably already have played it by now (although lots of new Fallout fans this year, so maybe not).
Czy na Briar da się połączyć z innym użytkownikiem, jeśli ta osoba nie jest obok nas? Pamiętam, że któryś komunikator wymagał połączenia niczym przez Bluetooth i chyba to był Briar.
Z tego co widzę w aplikacji możesz włączyć po czym chcesz się łączyć, po wifi jako lokalnej sieci, po bluetooth, albo po internecie gdzie jest połączenie przez tor, ale mogę się mylić z torem, bo mało używałem, znalazłem ta alternatywę na jakiejś stronie z prywatnymi alternatywami
Chodzi o to, że ta osoba chciałaby żeby istniała alternatywna wersja aplikacji Session Messenger, która pozwalałaby korzystać z wielu serwerów (tak jak działa email: możemy ze sobą pisać korzystając z kont na różnych serwerach).
Fork to określenie oznaczające “rozwidlenie” projektu, gdzie oprócz oryginalnej jego wersji powstaje druga, z trochę innymi cechami / funkcjami.
Jestem ciamajdą której telefon upada przynajmniej raz w tygodniu więc od kiedy mam case z klapką częstotliwość zmiany szkła na ekranie zmniejszyła się kilkukrotnie :)
Star ruler as an disappointment is fair, but have you tried the totally different and now open sourced StarRuler2?
It’s a much better game, much tighter with a definite progress path for colonies shipping things to each other (later used by slipstream which is more pure management and might not fit your list)
It’s free, it’s worth a try I promise it’s very different to SR
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