Hi,
I am the author of
Unending Galaxy. It's nice to see my game mentioned in DF's board (a game that I love and which is ideal to play during compiling and self-testing time). If you have any question feel free to ask, It'll be my pleasure to answer.
A few notes on previous posts:
Bugs/tooltips/autoupdateAbout the help tool-tips, yeah that's a bug I have a hard time getting rid of in all graphical settings and configs. They can be disabled in the control settings, though. The online manual, and especially the
getting started guide, has been rewritten recently and covers all of it accurately.
At the time of this post, it was between the last alpha and the first beta, and yes the game was fairly unstable to say the least. Right now, we have reached Beta 3 which is, so far, fairly crash-free. There's still a few oddballs being investigated, but nothing as annoying as before. And, most of the remaining issues can be fixed by save/quit/reload. The game doesn't auto update, it doesn't use or require internet and never will. No DRM either on the paid edition.
Most, if not all, of the bugs discussed here have been cleared. Starting scenarios have been made more comprehensive alongside the general game progression. It's now perfectly possible to progress from pilot to empire, and some of the starting scenarios offer enough initial resources to do so immediately.
Combat1-on-1 ship combat is fairly shallow indeed, well, interesting weapons have been added, but still. The meat of the game's combat mechanics is more in numbers. Once you grow strong enough (having a few shipyards and sectors of your own), battles with several dozens of capital and escort ships aren't uncommon and initial positioning of your ships become essential to reduce losses. An active pause has been added recently to help with that. Customizing weapon loadouts can also help a lot, but the UI to do so is still insufficient (profiles are being integrated right now).
Also the game is unusual in that there's no ammunition based weapons and no fuel. All weapons, missiles included, consume the ship's energy (right now ship batteries produce way too much of it, as the weapons have yet to be balanced properly). The game's equivalent of ammo are fighters. Carriers and military bases can even replenish them freely, if you don't count time as a currency.
All of this to say that the game, once you grow out of the 'single ship' phase, is more about preparations than about the combat itself. But it is still fun, and extremely efficient to hop in one of your battleships to help during a major fight.
The game doesn't, by design, approximate or extrapolate anything and handle around 15.000 ships and stations simultaneously, so sacrifices were made on the depth of small scale battles for performances' sack.
InfoUnending Galaxy can be downloaded from the
itch.io store or from
my website. There's a free and a paid version. They are both the same, except that the paid version includes the modding tools, additional starting scenarios and a ridiculously large hand-crafted map. It's a weird business model I am experimenting with where you can play the full game, and if you like it you can show support and receive nice bonuses in exchange. Even weirder (nowadays), the beta is cheaper than the final version will be.
The game is still in beta, but we are nearing 1.0 (next beta will be the last). Note that 1.0 is only a number meaning that the game is (mostly) bug free and that all existing features are complete. Development will still continue onward with no additional cost to the initial buyers.
Cheers,
SK