I tried it and it's not bad, in fact it's pretty good even for a beta, but there wasn't really something that made me go "oh that's new".
It might still be the best modern 4X, even if it's not inventing anything, it seems really polished in all aspects (maybe just missing some content, since it's still not the final release). The research tree is fairly large and you don't burn through it too fast. Instead of going the route of "more advanced is better", it simply gives you more toys to play with. The ships and parts get larger but the old ones are still relevant. For instance you can unlock an antimatter power core for your ships, but it's too large to fit on your small/medium hulls, and even on the larger ones it might still be more efficient to use old nuclear reactors, depending on how you build your ship.
Similarly, you can unlock a terraformer building, but the biospheres are still useful because there are always a number of tiles that will remain uncolonizable even on a Terran planet (things like deserts and oceans i guess).
I think that the best thing in this game is the real-time element. In-game mechanics still rely on some sort of tick/turn that occurs every 5 seconds, but since you don't click on an "End turn" button you don't get that feeling that you must check on every little thing every turn, and since you can still pause/slow/accelerate the game, you can still micromanage or fast forward to your heart's content.
So, yeah, definitely check it out if you like 4X games, this one gets it right (at least in my opinion). Also noteworthy, after a couple games, I tried the "cybernetic" option in the race creation (for my humans), and it's really interesting to play. It may be overpowered, i'm not sure, but it's definitely game-changing while retaining most of the original balance (basically it means that you don't need nor care about food and fertility on your planets, only about production). Maybe one of the only bad elements that I noticed, was that your success depends a lot on your luck in the random map generation. You can end up close to a dozen of lush, rich terran planets, and find useful artifacts at your doorstep, or end up surrounded by useless gas giants, volcanic planets and empty systems, and find only crappy stuff when you investigate an anomaly.
A small begginer's tip : refit your ships to use warp drives as soon as you start a game. The normal drives still have a warp factor, but much less, and most of the time, your transports, explorers and colony ships will be in warp. You can also make more efficient versions of all the base designs, so don't neglect that. Also, something that i learned : if your "power recharge" (from nuclear reactors and such) is too low, your ship will have to stop to recharge during long warps, which totally sucks, but on the other hand, if it has green "recharge at warp", you can totally scrap fuel cells from your design -unless it's a military ship with specific types of energy weapons.
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Topic: StarDrive - a space 4x that is looking very promising (Read 28894 times)