I do wish there was some option, if there isn't already, to prevent annexation (IE: Full surrender) between AI, or in general. It gets a bit annoying in The Expanse map type (one of my preferred modes) to see two races that aren't even near each other and have never declared war, or really done much against one another, suddenly own half the map because of a quirk in programming that makes them immediately accept because of a few arbitrary numbers reaching a certain point. Stardrive had a similar issue, and it was poorly implemented to boot.
Having a bit of fun playing Normal bots again on my laptop, and stomping them to some extent with the Mechanoid race (absolutely the best race for my playstyle, and more than a bit overpowered once it gets rolling, but very weak in the early game.) The game actually ran very smooth despite the diminished specs of the machine, and the fact that I had built a 2048 size ship that ate through all the aged size 1-4 support ships with its 8k capacity... then proceeded to stomp a bunch of remnants with lasery death spewing from nearly a thousand ships at once with negligible framerate loss.
Still awaiting more subsystems that can make better use of the different unit orders/behaviors, though. It only makes so much sense to have artillery style ships that are limited to their (fairly effective, mind you) missiles, the only support weapon with a decent range, at least until you get the generic range upgrades and you're sniping enemies with lasers halfway across the solar system. Subsystem modifiers are good, but different base systems should have a different feel to start. Take EVE, for example; within each class of weapon (energy based, hybrid turrets, projectile based, missile based, drones) there are generally things on the scale of damage vs range vs rate of fire vs accuracy in general terms. Beams vs pulse lasers, railguns vs blasters, artillery vs autocannons, assault missiles/rockets vs generic missiles... the list goes on. Subsystems should build upon those further, allowing you to customize whether you want a case of Jack of All Stats or Crippling Overspecialization in your fleets.
Speaking of drones, I hope something like that comes into play later, either as defense (with repair or shield drones able to assist damaged ships launched from the flagship hangar, or even being fitted on support ships but with a cost similar to having supply on them) offense (direct attacks made independent of the carrier), or support (jamming enemy weaponry, negating enemy shields via EMP, etc).
My two cents on the whole "Is it good" debate that seems to have taken over the last few pages: Absolutely. It's a great game, and I've enjoyed sinking many hours into it. It does, in some ways lack the sense of scale that SR1 presented. SR1 had a bit more bare bones to it, but let the player fill in the abstracted systems with a bit of creativity. While I do wish that it had gone more along the lines of the Galactic Armory mod's additions as fully supported gameplay (more for the screwing around with stupid and crazy designs), I'm not disappointed in it being
a different game entirely. It stands up well in its own right as a space based 4x, and while it's currently considered "released" I feel like it still has a way to go to completion, and hope that modders don't have to fill in the gaps quite as much as in SR1. At the very least, it has been a fun and playable early access and release, which can't be said of many games in a similar state.
I'm amused by the continued use of Stardrive as a model for this genre. Stardrive was released in such a terribly incomplete state that some of the events didn't even have resolutions iirc, and the second iteration which was released recently is just a silly (though fun) recreation of master of orion 2.
I haven't had a chance to play much of Stardrive 2, but I can agree that I felt Stardrive was abandoned far too shortly after its creation. Modders have taken the game and run with it, but even then there's only so much they can do due to limitations of the engine. I've seen approved reverse engineering of the .exe for the game that enables them to modify things that were otherwise hard coded and unfixable previously. It's still ridiculous to have a game sell for $30 and then only release an incomplete mess of a game before starting work on version 2 while leaving other people, unpaid, to fix the game for you. I enjoyed the game, to be sure, but it could have been much more than it ended up being.
Stardrive 2's trait list immediately brought to mind MOO2, and if they managed to somehow screw MOO2 up I'm asking for a refund.
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Topic: Star Ruler 2 [7/24/2018 - Now Open Source!] (Read 85538 times)