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[Stardrive Beta] Contains poem reciting samurai bears and mollusc-enslaved owlmen!
Todesbart
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Release Date: April 19th 2013
Platform: PC - Steam
What is Stardrive? (taken from the official site)
StarDrive is a 4X Action-Strategy game where the goal is to build a space empire.
Starting with a single planet and a small number of space-worthy vessels, you forge out into the galaxy, exploring new worlds, building new colonies, and discovering the StarDrive universe.
The heart of StarDrive is its ship design and combat engine.
StarDrive takes a module-based approach to ship design, allowing the player to create custom ship designs where the composition and placement of ship modules really matters to the performance of a ship in combat. In combat, if your portside armor is taking a beating, then rotate around and show them the starboard side! Hide behind a friendly capital ship's shields, warp into and out of the fray, launch fighters, lay mines, and so much more.
What sets Stardrive apart from all the other 4X games?
The difference between Stardrive and other 4X games is that it's combat heavy without being too shallow in the diplomacy, economic and building sections. "Well, that doesn't sound too fancy" you might say, but here's the deal: Ship building and ship designing is intuitive, quick to learn, but also very deep and engaging. You can create new designs in minutes but you can also spend quite some time creating your laser blasting, rocket shooting mega fighter with a bazillion guns and no armor.
Here's what the ship design screen looks like:
There are 4 different kind of slots: I, O, IO and E. E slots may only be fitted with engines. O slots are usually for weapons and armor, while I slots are for internal components such as power reactors. IO slots are a mix of both.
Did I mention that the design of the 8 races in this game is absolutely awesome? Don't believe me?
Come and see for yourself - I hope you notice those bears rocking a katana on their backs:
Cordrazine:
Draylok:
Humans: (obviously!)
Kulrathi:
Opteris:
Pollops:
Ralyeh:
Vulfen:
Draylok:
Humans: (obviously!)
Kulrathi:
Opteris:
Pollops:
Ralyeh:
Vulfen:
Let's play videos! So you folks get a vague idea how awesome it is to play this game:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTGAxaAkOsk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rez2rjiZrs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkZI4S-uWCwThere's also a trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=lw9h_5hOiyY
Stardrive is currently in Beta and set to be released on April 19th. You get access to the Beta as soon as you preorder it from Steam! It's fully functional and the patches that get put out mostly deal with some balancing issues and usability tweaks.
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I'll bite in a week or two.
Currently playing: GW2 and TSW
Pros-
Shipbuilding is tons of fun
Race interactions are cool (if the animations don't play in the Diplomacy screen download the standard k-lite codec pack)
Exploring is neat
There are artifacts on worlds and you can land your troops on them and fight skeletons and stuff
Diplomacy is hilarious
Cons-
The UI is really clunky
Ship designs don't change outward appearance
It doesn't tell you how to do ANY of this
Did I mention that the UI is bad?
It's really fun once you get into it. I wish it was as pretty as SoaSE or Endless Space, but considering it got its start as a Kickstarter that can't be helped.
Feathersquid are almost as cool as the Trilarians, though. This is definitely on my radar.
... I may not be great at Endless Space.
I mean, I catch the sarcasm, but seriously, it's got enough drilling up and down that I feel like I'm playing Dig-Dug. Cool game though.
Someone should explain this amazing idea to MS's Windows 8 UI guys.
Also, this game interests me.
(Please do not gift. My game bank is already full.)
I think the game is promising you want all the help you can get to start however as its not gonna hold your had with the stupid kid tutorial.
Okay, so here's what happened: I sent my whole fleet to the homeplanet of the Vulfen only to be invaded by the Draylok about 20 seconds after I entered enemy space, far away from my homeworld.
Needless to say that you could hear the screams of my people echo through the galaxy as they were obliterated.
Oh, and the art is fantastic. Damn do I love those diplomacy screens and watching ships shoot and blow each other apart.
Be alerted about whorl.
Select Space Marines.
Move Space Marines to system.
(wait until Space Marines reach system)
Move Space Marines to planet.
(wait until Space Marines reach planet)
Select Planet.
Zoom in on planet.
Select Troops.
Drag Space Marines onto artifact.
Close spoils window.
Click Launch to leave.
Just... far far far too much clicking (and waiting, which is especially egregious) involved for what is, essentially, a Goodie Hut, which in the recent Civ games are even collected automatically by scouts set to auto-explore.
Is there something I missed about them from the video I watched (except for the skeletons popping up, which apparently could just be avoided by launching your space marines immediately, and so only had to be dealt with if you wanted to colonize the planet)?
Unfortunately, that means that the skeletons popping up event then occurs when you have a colony on the planet (build troops, and if you accidentally build on the goodie hut...) I've lost planets to it.
Fun game, but the UI definitely needs work.
In my current game, the mind-controlling polyps and the space wolves formed a "peaceful federation" with the Cthulu worshipers, and they're coming to kill me.
Very different games.
If you accept the comparison between Endless Space and Civilization, then the only game that Stardrive kinda resembles is Supreme Commander. But with a tech tree. And customized units. And spying, diplomacy, supply lines, random events, and some lingering performance issues. On second thought, it's nothing like Supreme Commander, except for the ridiculously huge battles.
Put another way, when I played it for the first time my first thought was "This is what MOO3 could have been - no, make that SHOULD have been".
It's very combat oriented. Each of the races has their own distinct behavior, and the warlike ones don't play around if you haven't got the military force to keep them off your back.
But this UI hurts! I sure hope I am just overlooking how to give group orders, because one by one ordering frigates to get to trading is painful. And units don't auto-select when you click them from the list menu, which seems silly.
I will get used to it, and its pretty much par for the course in space 4x, but Endless Space kind of spoiled me.
That said, that ship builder sort of makes up for everything. Made my first prototype, The Sitting Duck: a pair of railguns on a freighter with a medium reactor, medium ordinance storage, 4 engines, and two machine guns on the nose. Its a flying death trap that handles about as well as a three legged elephant and can only shoot things directly in front of it (missing half the time). Good times.
I'm sure some quality time with a wiki will get me straightened out.
And then there's ground combat. Eeeerg.
The one silly thing about it is that it seems as though ground combat becomes ridiculously overpowered. I pumped out dozens of space-bears, and at a certain point I would just hurl them at 6 planets at once, land all of them, and suddenly control 15% of the enemy systems.
Absolutely the most satisfying space combat in a 4X/space RTS game. Putting together designs take time, and the power/fuel supply thing still confuses me (my best ship which tore it up in combat could barely leap frog through warp drive, which was a bit sad to watch), but once you get a build that works and you see the individual guns/missiles/thrusters/etc. in action it is absolutely worth it.
Another strong point is that technology does not become useless with new research. Even in the end game, incorporating early weapons in to ship builds is absolutely a valid approach. I always hate when Laser I was replaced with Laser II and there was never a reason to bring up Laser I again, though a few more weapons/options would be nice.
But great gods of gaming, the freighter system needs love. Particularly, I need to be able to give these bastards group commands and I need to be able to select/interact with them from the ship list. The current implementation is silly.
Oh, and its still in beta, so some stuff is incomplete, but the taste of both random and interactive events it gives is very nice. Not to spoil anything, but you even get events that can release technology specific to other races. Actual example in spoilers for those who want to find it on their own:
Anyone spent some time with the release version? Worth getting?
edit; Never mind, figured it out, although it wasn't exactly intuitive. Cool game though.
I should watch a walkthrough video...I think that'll help me get my head wrapped around a few concepts.
Picture this. It's the late game and I've just conquered someone, losing most of my fleets doing so. I immediately manage to secure to allies into a federation and now that I have all their research and Ships and hull designs I'm faced with the challenge of incorporating it all...and it seems so overwhelming.
This is difficult to explain, but...Example, I want to build a few fleets based on all the new ships I have, but I don't know how many I already have available and what they all do, so I spend a loooooong time forming a new fleet and I'm still not sure I'm getting maximum value for it.
I'm very impressed with the game overall, one of the best 4X's I've played. The combat can be too difficult to monitor since ships can be so small, and I find it next to I possible to guide a fight since it takes too long to figure out what all my ships do and what the enemy ships do. I prefer to throw a 2X size force at an enemy and hope he doesn't have a big enough tech advantage. Fleet battles are fun to watch, too.
Look for the AI button on the lower right, next to the minimap. Tell it to automate your freighters. I have no idea how efficient it is but c'mon, ain't nobody gots the time to build their own freighters and give them individual orders.
I also set all my planets to be auto governed except in a few special cases.
I personally prefer to manage at least one 'core' planet in each system, aka the system capital which is the focus point for that entire system. Especially if it's a good system with multiple planets with good sizes and resources. I've found that letting the AI manage everything runs my treasury dry since the damn AI doesn't take into account I want to stockpile cash for emergencies.
Ran in to a similar problem and honestly, I just blarged what ships were built all around the galaxy and stopped trying to keep it sorted out. I was lucky enough to be overwhelmingly powerful at the point my first ally joined my federation and shortly after the final three species united under the federation of my other ally, who promptly joined on with me and it was GG (which was pretty cool).
I like the overall Federation mechanic, but I really wish they would stay under AI control to be honest (or at least it was an option).
Fleet battles in this are great though, especially with real time weapon angles and the importance of ship maneuverability. Watching a fighter swarm take down a clunky ship ten times their size because it can't turn its mega lasers around fast enough is good times. The game does an excellent job of keep ship hulls and weapons relevant despite increasing tech levels.
Remember you can always pause real time to give orders. I kept running in to problem with my fleets not engaging and Leeroy Jenkins'ing in to the middle of an enemy fleet, leading even superior forces getting torn up, so I would have to pause and manually assign targets (super tedious). This only seems to happen on a specific stance (the "face the enemy at max distance" stance) in a fleet after just exiting warp, but oh man was it annoying. And once a fleet is out of position in this game, you may as well just book it out of there.
On the bright side, it did teach me how to draw out an enemy and flank them with multiple fleets.
They didn't pop up for me until late game, but I remember hitting them with one of my patrols of cannon/rocket fighters that couldn't have been more than 20 ships and tearing through them without much trouble. The only big difference I can think of between the late game fighters and early game (after researching rockets) is maybe the engines and a few bonuses from Physics research maybe.
It also helps to realize that, while helpful, the prototype ship isn't actually that good (at least from my time messing with it), which was counter-intuitive to me since I played a good bit of Sins of a Solar Empire.
Would you say that's a fair comparison point for the combat in this? Still trying to get the feel of this game by hearsay as I'm very much on the fence about it and don't have a ton of gaming time lately.
Actually, think Sins meets Fallen Enchantress. That's about as good an overview as I can give without you getting hands on.
Its got some clunky elements, like FE did, but the potential is right up there and the current core game is a whole lot of fun.
Played it for quite a long time yesterday. If it wasn't for @Corehealer messaging me on Steam about what I thought of it I probably would never have realized how late it was until I passed out at my desk. :P
That might be an issue. I'm on my first game. 10 hours in. It's like Civ but longer. This is not a complaint.
I'm managing to make Fallen Enchantress and Endless Space work. Some time in the last couple years I lost the ability to play strategy games nonstop anyhow.
I'm gonna keep my eye on this thing and you guys' commentary and leave it in my wishlist for now, I think, but I appreciate the info.
Is it just me or are the default designs pretty darn poor? Replacing the initial design for a freighter with one that uses nothing but warp engines, take out the fuel cells and slap in some more cargo holds, relocate the cockpit and strip out the power conduits results in a cheaper and far faster cargo ship, and the same goes for the colony ship and the unarmed scout.
Actually, energy conduits are an interesting way to reduce mass on a ship if you're going to load up the remaining slots with unnecessary fuel cells. They have half the cost and mass but have the same base HP, just so long as you're not riding that energy limit really finely.
Shields are really confusing me at the moment. They go on about range, but what is the scale for that range? I'm fairly certain that a single basic shield generator covers a frigate without any problems or unshielded spots. Is the range represented by that green circle in the shipyard design, or does it cover a bigger range out in the field?