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[GreatJustice]

From my knowledge, these games are rather heavy on realistic portrayal of space, factions and so on. It's nice to have a game that's more showy with bright colours, large explosions and an exaggerated feel to things. Accurate simulations are fun and all but you need the more light hearted games to provide a good contrast.

Yeah. I'd actually like to see what's basically a Diablo or Skyrim in Space. More or less 3D open space, powerful player ship with unique abilities for use in combat (works better 2D than 3D), ridiculous oodles of lootwhoring/gear drops, but most importantly: claustrophobic areas that basically act like dungeons that you can explore and get rewards from. These dungeons would be Descent-like levels; but this doesn't work quite well with an isometric perspective and combat-as-skillbutton-mashing.

Make the setting some kind of weird half-tech/half-"it's not magic but it is" like Sacred, or just a ridiculous variety of space-inhabiting semi-intelligent aliens, to act as monsters to populate the "dungeons." Don't explain how they are able to persist in space, they're just a fact of life in the setting.

The game you're looking for is Drox Operative.

[Gabeux]

The economic model and system events being in place, makes for a 'background alive universe'. One of the random system events might be a trader convoy that, once it reaches a station, will raise the station supplies and drop prices.
But..by flying around, that's not what you see - even if there's ships pretty much every where (rather cramped universe!).
If they were to balance out the "background" life with the "foreground" life, it probably would feel much better already.

To be honest you see ships mostly in tune with the events.  You will often see miners flying to a station experiencing a mining rush for example. And of course intercepting the trade convoy and taking its swag before it unleashes its price wrecking powers on the station its going to is also an option.

In general the universe feels more alive than in Starpoint Gemini 2 (Altho SG2 has a far broader scope) and the economy actually works (unlike SG2 where the entire economy is whack) so if you dump a load of diamonds on a station the price will plummet.

Of course neither come even close to X3:TC AP or even Space Rangers.
The last one especially because the game is squeamish about spawning new ships out of nowhere and opts for simulating everything right down to Governor rivalry.

Yep, I probably expressed myself poorly. What I mean is that those "meaningful" ships (or targets) are directly tied to the events system - other than that, they are all random spawns with no goal (I believe, since I never saw a random Trader entering warp and heading to a station).
Still, if they made a sequel with more similarities to Space Rangers (talking solely about space - text-adventures and RTS battles would get too weird)...that would be so good.
But I guess that's just my everlasting wish for a Space Only Real-Time Space Rangers talking. 

[thegoatgod_pan]

I have been really enjoying this. I hate realistic space sims and 3d flying gives me a figurative headache, but I love Firefly, so I may be the target audience for this game.

I've just gotten out of the newbie galaxy, but even it felt nicely big and I spent a good several hours smuggling and exploiting the random market events (mostly running whiskey and drug cola to places having world-wide holidays). Bought a new ship, upgraded my guns to full, did some main story quests  and realized the next galaxy had me outgunned and gave me new toys to aspire to.

It feels like a bit of Firefly and a bit of Eve Nova and a lot like Sid Meir's Pirate and the graphics are pleasantly shiny and the music is great. The main storyline is nothing new, but involves some choice (I ended up helping the pirates), and otherwise it is a pure sandbox. Also, no bugs so far.

I like how attacking and destroying a peace delegation to one of the worlds in the midst of an arms race causes war to break out, and war is good for arms dealing and biological waste dumping.

I don't mind that the merchant ships you meet don't seem to be actually participating in the trade system: I think it is a balance thing to not have them carrying massive loads for the players to loot, creating too much incentive for piracy.

TL:DR I like it a lot, even if it is not the hardcore space sim a lot of people want.

[Niveras]

The game you're looking for is Drox Operative.

It technically meets loot-whoring and space-alien criteria, but implementation is poor and shallow. And it certainly doesn't have dungeons.

[Sonlirain]

I don't mind that the merchant ships you meet don't seem to be actually participating in the trade system: I think it is a balance thing to not have them carrying massive loads for the players to loot, creating too much incentive for piracy.

Well the notable convoys have a load of things on board. And i think the only use normal traders are is Peddling them your stuff on the go. It's generally pretty profitable and convenient if you can find one in a mining system while hauling a load of expensive minerals (Salt, diamonds maybe gold).

[ChairmanPoo]

How does it compare to Starpoint Gemini?

[Sonlirain]

Very similar. Main differences are.

1 - The events are more meaningful (Notable convoys like traders are shown on your map and their destruction/arrival has an actual impact on the local economy).
2 - The entire game is set on a 2d plane.
3 - The weapon variety is a bit larger as unlike SG you have not only turrets but also broadside batteries and secondary batteries like flak (that just fills the area with shrapnel rather than actually aiming at anything)
4 - The economy actually works.
5 - The game lacks leveling up and RPGlike skills instead your power and quest difficulty is rated by the net worth of your ship (and there is no dynamic scaling from what i can tell).
6 - You can't fly carriers but you can at least hire mercs in gunships who will work for you for a one time fee.
7 - Mining is more interesting with using your sensor pings in order to find minerals in the first place. Also minarals in asteroid fields seem to not replenish... there is a lot of fields to balance it out however.
8 - No boarding.

[debvon]

This game makes me want to drink.

[Majestic7]

This games makes me wish Starsector was finished or the next version at least came out.

[jhxmt]

TL:DR I like it a lot, even if it is not the hardcore space sim a lot of people want.

I'm in the same position as this - and I say that as someone who loves their background-artificial-life depth to be high, usually.  The X series (before Rebirth) were hugely appealing games to me, and X3:TC still holds highest playtime on my Steam account.  We'll ignore how much of that might've been due to misuse/abuse of SETA. 

So I bought Rebel Galaxy and started it up with medium-level hopes, having read some of the comments here about the limited depth on offer.  I figured it'd give me enough entertainment to make the £13 worth it.  I just wanted to recapture a bit of that old Freelancer feeling, to be honest, and while I've got and played Starpoint Gemini 2, it never gave me that same feeling.

Rebel Galaxy does.  I don't know if it's the graphics, the (yes, somewhat Firefly-like) music, or the more arcadey, less sim-like controls, but I've been having a blast both literally and figuratively.  I'm about five hours in and haven't left the first system yet (I think there are fourteen).  I've not felt any pressure to chase the main plot - I've been enjoying cruising around, picking up missions here and there, shooting up groups of baddies (and occasionally goodies because, hey, you're carrying stuff I want), and exploring the various nebulae and asteroid clusters that are scattered around.

I do run into groups of ships at quite regular intervals - and I'm not sure whether they're event spawned or not, because (at least on the surface) it does feel like there's quite a lot of life occurring.  I know some stations are in a state of war.  I know some are under siege.  I know some are experiencing a famine, or an economic boom, or a crime wave.  I don't think the simulation is deep enough to link these explicitly through cause and effect (they're random events, I believe), but at a player level I haven't felt that mattering to me.  I stumble across a big fleet of bad guy capital ships warping their way through space and it feels right, because I know there's a warzone not far away.  I find a trade convoy with a fighter escort and again it feels right, because they're the famine relief that set off not long ago.  I pick up a distress call and I know it's either a trap or someone in deep trouble - and either way, it doesn't matter to me whether that's as a result of a deeply simulated sequence of events or it's just the roll of a die...because it doesn't matter.  They're both in-character for the world and they're both fun.  And often !!FUN!!. 

As I say, this is coming from someone who used to love watching the trade convoys depart from stations in X3 and seeing them having an effect upon their arrival, seeing how embedded they are in the world.  Rebel Galaxy doesn't have that same degree of simulated life, it's true, but it has the right abstraction of it.  The game doesn't feel cold, grey, and dead...which is, sadly, how Starpoint Gemini 2 felt (to me).  It feels like Freelancer did - colourful, alive and dangerous.

The camera bugs me a bit when I'm aiming my broadsides, but once I learnt to check my heading before lining up my shots it became a lot easier. 

[Gabeux]

This games makes me wish Starsector was finished or the next version at least came out.

I've already been posting too much negative stuff here [in Other Games in general, but not really in this thread], but I'll just say...I was the first one to post about Starsector here years ago..and I don't really think I'll ever see a finished version.


Back to RG, is trading and mining more interesting than flying around doing absolutely everything combat (checking all distress calls, scanning and going after bounties)?
I really tried mining, but I think it's too slow and boring for me. The most valuable thing I found was 1x Gold Ingots after flying around 3 belts. Maybe higher difficulty areas have better stuff?

And I usually don't have patience to do manual trading - yet I remember when I was ~15 years old doing manual trades in my Mercury in X²:The Threat for two whole days until I realized the game was about automation - I tried the most basic stuff one can try: finding 3 or more close-by stations, and running a circuit buying low and selling high.
I run it for a while until I was barely making profit, and I don't think it beat my Rush-Exploration-Destroy-Dem-Pirates mode.

The game also didn't give me any reason to side with the pirates (and the Militia didn't seem to be like the stupid Alliance from Firefly), so for now I've been siding with "the good guys". I'd rather be a psychopath who kills both sides since the only people doing real work is the civilians, though. Everyone else is just trying to push each other around.

I can't say I'm having a blast with it [yet], but I'm definitely having good fun. I also finally started bumping into traders, miners, pirates and patrols flying around in warp, which means there's *some* 'natural' life going on beside the events system. Traders and Miners were definitely heading to stations (or, in case of miners, asteroid fields and the like), I didn't follow them all the way to their destination though, and I've never seen anyone else dock.
I also noticed some enemies like to have a decently sized fleet between certain 'routes', and until you kill them, they are always there. Which also means there's some persistence, and stuff just don't pop up from nowhere all the time (IIRC in Freelancer there was a lot of obvious spawns right in your face. I loved Freelancer to death, and that's an old game, but that used to be really weird).

I'm still on the second system and sometimes I go to the third to buy stuff. First thing I did was to buy a better warp drive.

Sorry for the long random post, space games put me on overdrive. 

[debvon]

Anyone else get regularly blown up by Murath dart swarms? I swear that shit is the only reason I ever die and for some reason I still keep trying to handle them. They've got extremely long attack range but if you're close they evade your broadside cannons like crazy. The only way I've been able to deal with small groups of them is to drag them out (while losing my aft shields), turn around and fire my broadsides on them as they fly in. Even with that method my port shields get torn apart rather quickly and my hull plating takes a beating.

Against large groups of them though? I can't do that. I either get destroyed trying to drag them out (I can't get out of their range quickly enough if things are going bad, if I turn around to mitigate damage they just get closer) or get destroyed by getting into broadside range.

I'm flying a Tennhausen with mk3 pulse cannon broadsides, two mk2 pulse turrets, an mk2 ion turret and an mk2 flak turret. Obvious solution is to just equip a bunch of long range turrets but I don't like them, wouldn't want them for anything else. So I just need to suck it up until I get a bigger ship or what?

[Gabeux]

I haven't been forced to fight those yet, usually they just pull me out of warp. But I don't fight anything unless it has a bounty.
Usually what I did was really turn tail and scramjet away then warp off. Now, if you really have to kill them for a mission, the only thing I can recommend is kiting them and taking manual control of your flak turrets (turrets seem to fire better/faster when manned).

I'm going for a complete stupid close-range Tachyon/Ramming deflector now. Half my stuff is MK3, other half is MK4.
Ramming deflectors are...crazy. You can just "pull away" the ships like a space-bulldozer. If you get in a good angle, you can kill a ship really quickly - but in bigger battles that could mean suicide.

I used to have the second "normal" ship, now I have the Icarus (I think?) from the Mercenary guild. A bit faster and only has +1 turret slot.

[Sonlirain]

I made a quick mining tutorial.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoGOFCeV_6k

Mining is IMHO more fun than in Starpoint Gemini where it basically translated into turning into a bagger 288 and mincing every asteroid you see without thinking.
Meanwhile here you have to think for a second and ask yourself if its even worth it as basic ore is... well almost worthless.

Also Neutron beams are where its at.
Seriously neutron beam broadsides wreck things can kill strike craft with a bit of efficiency and they have decent range as well.

[Dostoevsky]

Neutron beams are indeed where it's at. Just make sure to fully lock your aim (or whatever the orange point stands for) before firing at anything not a capital ship or you'll pretty much miss entirely.