Internal components and systems can be customised on every vessel if you want, and the systems allow for some reckless behaviour, especially getting into and out of trouble. Ships can turn off transponders and run silent to avoid being detected by enemies, or crank engines to full and put themselves at risk of interdiction by pirates. The game goes into a huge amount of detail on every level. The few ships that could, retreated.īig, messy space battles. Rushing into a battle, my heaviest ship's engines crapped out, while my carrier was struggling to get fighters off its crumbling decks. Not wanting to waste time, I did it with too few crew, and didn't give them long enough to bring the mothballed ships back online. The tutorial story mission asked me to reclaim a ship graveyard's worth of wrecked hulls, and see what I could get moving again. My first session with version 0.9a was an embarrassing failure, but in a way that highlights the interplay between its strategic and tactical layers. I've not had a chance to fight any orbital platforms yet, but they look impressive and very menacing, bristling with guns that can flatten anything short of super-capital class, and heavily shielded. I've seen enemy frigates use my own transport ships as cover from my cruiser's slowly arcing main cannons, darting in the moment they see a chance to cut a hole in my battered flank armour. Privateers can now chat to characters in bars, getting side missions including cargo delivery, salvage and more direct combat runs.Ī very outdated trailer, admittedly, but it still looks nice.Ĭombat still plays like a bit like a 2D, more complex version of Mechwarrior (with full fleet command), but there's been a lot of tuning done this update - the AI continues to be shockingly clever. Whether you play as a bounty hunter in a lone hyper-optimised custom craft, or an admiral hanging back and giving orders to a massive fleet produced by your own shipyards, it's all possible now. NPC empires poke and prod at each other, while you play your role as a freelance captain. While there's still no official 'endgame' to it, I'm not sure it even needs one. While Starsector is still a work-in-progress, today's version feels like a major milestone. The excellent real-time tactical combat has been improved too, including new battles against enormous orbital platforms. Today's update ( patch notes here) is over a year in the works, and vastly broadens the scope of involvement you can have in its still-expanding procedural space sandbox, including colony management. High praise at the time, but as of today's version 0.9a release, I feel it might be selling it short. I've previously described Fractal Softworks's space sim Starsector (primarily the work of solo dev Alexander Mosolov) as ' Mount & Blade: Warband in space'.
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