I've been playing Crying Suns recently (it was one of the free giveaways from Epic) - it's a neat FTL-like with real-time (pauseable) tactical combat that takes place on a grid.
Main plot of the game is that you and your crew are newly grown clones from a super-secret facility in the far reaches of what used to be a galaxy-spanning star empire. However, all signals from the Empire shut off twenty years ago, and the robots in charge of the facility have finally decided that it's about time to check and see what's happened to everyone.
The main story of the game is broken up into five parts. And, as far as I've gotten (fourth part), each is further broken down into 3 sectors, with two mini bosses and a final boss; after which you start a new run in a new sector, with the option of using any of the previous bosses ships are your new flagship.
The main portion of the game uses a lot of FTL-like systems - you have your battleship, which has fuel (which lets you move both inside and between systems), scrap (which is used both to upgrade your ship and as the primary currency at trade stations), and marines (used in away missions and events). Generally speaking, you need to balance the expenditure of fuel and marines to try to maximize your acquisition of scrap.
In terms of combat; although your main battleship can have direct weapon systems, combat is primarily a rock-paper-scissors arrangement with fighters, drones, and frigates dueling in the space in-between the giant motherships. Each unit has a tech level (I-V), which affects HP and damage, and potentially an adjective (ex. Stealth, Teleporting, etc.) which gives a special ability. Destroyed units are automatically rebuilt on a timer during battle, but are forevermore (well, until you find a repair station and hand over a decent amount of scrap) marked as rebuilt, and only have 50% max health.
In a system similar to FTL's crew, your ship starts with two officers and can be grown to a total of five. Each has two or three of nine specialties, as well as a special ability, which usually affects a part of your ship (hull, fighters, weapons) to which they can be assigned to improve performance. Specialties come into play for two different systems - encounters and ground expeditions. Many events involve making hard choices, or choices that might only possibly succeed - having a commander with the right abilities will allow you to avoid that - just pick the blue-highlighted choice in the certainty that it'll succeed.
Expeditions are little mini-adventures for a commander and up to ten marines that take place on a planet's surface. When you get to an expedition planet, you'll get an overview of what's there (crashed ship, cryo pod, etc.), if there's any major negative events taking place (toxic environment, sandworms, or, oddly, ambushes "huh, that planet looks like the kind of place where you'd get ambushed"), as well as an overview of each of your commanders with stats showing roughly how the expedition will go if they take the lead - broken up into "is the commander likely to get shot up doing this?", "how much loot are they likely to get?", and "how many marines are going to die?"; so you'll end up results such as an expedition commander who is likely to avoid getting hurt, will get between 50-75% of the loot, and 2-8 marines will die during the mission.
After you pick your best option, your troops run into various dangers and loot opportunities, each marked with a specialty test. If your commander has that trait, you succeed, if not, you either fail to get the loot, or marines start dying. If you fail tests on a major negative event, a lot of marines start dying.
Anyway, getting up a full compliment of commanders - and commanders that have diverse traits - is 100% recommended for your continued survival.
This ran long. TL;DR: I've played for 11 1/2 hours, and am enjoying it. It's a solid upgrade / alternative to FTL.
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Topic: Blurb on Games that probably don't deserve their own threads. (Read 326609 times)