The modular ship design system is nice and fun to experiment with. It does let you use one base frame and make it look very different over time. It even lets you decide to add more cargo, for miners or less for fighter pilots, and just move things around a lot. Thats a big plus from the older version I had before. They still don't make ships for each area or civilization, of course I haven't been everywhere yet but I'm sure that's a fair guess.
I have no idea how large their organization is...just seeing the games and how quickly they get a new one out, I'd say they balanced the team pretty well to stay within the niche they found for themselves years ago, small detailed games with little download time and lots of missions and things to do. Writing missions, newspaper articles and such takes no disk space compared to things like...detailed and high poly ships for each civilization, or good realistic backgrounds that show even one nebula or star system from different angles depending on where you are at the moment. Here its a copy and paste background that doesn't seem to change a bit no matter where you are on the map...so I assume they are going for the 'you aren't traveling far enough to see any changes' idea.
I did find a few small things that surprised me, like: on one mission the Navy loses something, you go find it..and bring it back. It says " get to the nav point and search it will show up on standard sensors'..well, it doesn't. Theres no place in the set up I found anywhere for 'target nearest object' so even when I did find one cargo box, it was by eye, it never was seen by the scanners or showed up on radar, not even sitting on the nose of my ship, and then got transported on board...it was still invisible to the ship, just not me, did the mission again some time later, different area of course very dark, behind a planet...never did find it, gave up and canceled the mission.
Starting out like I am now, missiles are absolutely essential. The guns we can get and use (I like cannons) wont bring down the enemies shields, fire until you drain your power completely then hit him with a missile for damage, because even with a Saber like I have now there's not enough energy to fire cannons long enough to take down his shields on one pass, even following him every step of the way at high speed, their shield recharge is equal to our power recharge. I did see a ship add on that seems to add more power to guns, or at least makes it seem it does, will try that later.
I am one of those rare people who likes mining in space. so My character is a miner/trader that just happens to do a few combat missions. And I was a little surprised to hear the same old 'ca-thunk!' when mining in the new game as when I mined several years ago.(If its not broke don't fix it) comes to mind and that's ok. But was really surprised to see that in all of the first system and on into Lamda where I am now...there exists 3 resources, just 3...and when you get into fights and gather after missions or fights around stations, that no weapons or shields or missiles drop...ever..only some odd machine parts and the 3 basic resources, some solar cells and cloth...are we fighting traders who carry this stuff between systems or Rebels and Guild members who hate us? Anyways, it makes no sense that ship components and weapons don't drop from ships, enough said.
Over all, I like the game. Its small but nicely done. The ship customization gives us something to do to make it look like we have a new ship...at a cheap cost. I have looked ahead on the shipyard list for my next ship...there's one there that's a fighter/small freighter it says so for me that should work. It should have decent cargo space and still be used in other missions...Panther I think, not sure looked at a lot. But ship sizes are about right as far as perspective goes. With that I mean seeing a battleship sitting out side the station looks small but fly up to it, and its much bigger. Perspective is one of the hardest things for games and this one seems pretty good at it. I've been doing a beta for a while for something not out yet, lets just say perspective there is no where near as good as here.
If they have freighters here that have lots of cargo space and a few weapons for defense, and look 2-3 times bigger than a fighter, then we're in business. The ones I have seen jumping in and out are the capitol ship design with a name hanging on them calling them freighters, hope that's not the only ones, saving DL time is a good thing, if you don't hurt the game details trying to save too much, that's what I'm saying I guess. We all have HD with 500 gig or more, laptops have that much easy, and new desktops have a terabyte or more...so saving space on the hard drives now isn't nearly as important as years ago. I have at this moment games on my hard drive using 5-12 gig each..and that's what I usually buy, on purpose, because smaller games don't have the detail I like to see.
This game is OK.not great but OK, because they tried very hard to keep the game size down, probably because they felt they lacked time or people to do better. They always have had a good plan for space games too bad they don't carry them out in more detail. I personally sent an email to Nasa, asking about Hubble pictures on public display and asked to use them for backgrounds for a space game...just for curiosity, they agreed, saying they wanted a copy of the finished game and mentioned in the credits....see how hard it is to get free space back grounds that have great detail??
Keeping in mind that pods only drift when you're in a sector where gravity is a factor.
It's been awhile since anyone has mentioned it but ... maybe it's time to "fix" at least the Quest for Peace so that the race is no longer a player. Especially now that other contracts (previously unavailable) can be substituted. For me, the race usually turns out to be a shooting gallery ... where I do the shooting and nobody wins the race.
