On a fit of irony, I'll revive this thread just to give an update. I think its fair.
As I'm a Hazeron orphan, I decided this was the closest I'd get to a Hazeron-like. Not really, but still.
So I've been playing it for 3 days now. I'm glad to see the game took some good turns and made some good progress.
The
bad news are:
= Regarding price, purchase, subscription:- The game is now B2P, I believe it's 20USD. (You can play the free version on the website, but I don't know what's the state of that version). Buying the game (from Steam) grants 3 months of premium.
- To do awesome things like colonizing outer planets and building huge Spacebases for manufacturing and shipbuilding, you need to also have a subscription, or buy 'Stellar Credits'. There's 3 "Premium" options (Planets, Industry, Combat), each option cost 1USD. Or you can have all 3 for 3 USD.
- Stellar Credits is a weird feature, which I figure is for balancing issues. Each Premium option grants 100 SC per month (so 300 SC per month 'full-premium'). You use SC to acquire deeds for colonies and starbases, and colonies have monthly SC upkeep cost. If you really wanna go overboard, you can purchase SC separately. Or you could simply buy enough SC to keep your colonies and disregard premium, etc.
A colony has a monthly 80 SC upkeep cost. It sounds weird, but I guess people would have thousands of colonies by now if this wasn't in place.
To be clear, premium is needed for Settlements, Colonization, big Starbases and more overpowered combat, but you can still get the biggest ships in the game without those.= Features and Mechanics- There's no PVP or any considerable PVE yet. Those seem to be coming on the next updates.
- UI is still bad. There's an UI rework planned, but no idea when that's coming.
- Grinding can still be bad, even with extremely profitable trade routes player markets generally provide. If someone helps you out, though, at least you'll be making the most out of your time.
- F2P Hazeron with a Bay12 empire would still be more dorfy.
The good news:- The dev seems to have connected better with the player base, and vice-versa, so most players know what's going on, what's coming, when and why.
- The community is really friendly, fun and helpful. It's a completely different experience than I had almost 3 years ago.
- The galaxy has been really well developed. Players explore and take notes of systems, and some build Star Gates to connect distant colonies back to the core 'NPC' system cluster. People can sell their goods in their own Stock Markets on their colonies and starbases. A lot of resources have crashed their prices down to 1-25 CR per ton, which means there's a decent amount of trade routes. And since some minerals can only be acquired by players asteroid mining, that can be really profitable and useful/helpful. I believe I made 50 million with just 250 minerals in my hold when I was re-learning how to mine.
- Community is nicely interdependant. If you need a module for cheap (for instance, a mining beam) and no one in chat can sell you or make you one, chances are they'll point you to the "mining beam guy". A 'shipbuilder guy' have queues even for ships that are yet to be released.
- You can explore, colonize, focus on manufacturing or shipbuilding..it's nice.
That said, it's an interesting refuge from the punishing and/or unforgiving nature of such games.
I'm not sure how frequent updates are, or how long it'll take for the game to have a bigger scope to satisfy most people, but I'm enjoying it.
Trying to play it completely alone without some community interaction might be a recipe for anger, though, unless you're into it.
Before I started making good deals ("I'll give you this huge mining beam for free if you bring me 2000 minerals!", "I'll lend you this ship, and if you make 4 billion with it then you can buy it from me!"), I was just grinding by exploiting player markets weird offers, and upgrading ships whenever possible, slowly but surely..Then I started talking to people and things went on overdrive, now I have the (current) biggest ship in the game.
That doesn't mean I can make infinite money instantly - it just means I'm making the most possible profit with my time.Anyways, it's a simple game that can be interesting if you're into that. But try the demo first, or watch videos, or..something. It's definitely not everyone's cup of tea.
PS: I'm not 100% positive about the game. I'm a bit wary.
I still worry if the dev takes ages to implement basic stuff like he used to. Couldn't find that out, yet.