What are the best SP space games?
Shill your favorites here.
 Thalidomide Vintage Ad Shirt $22.14 |
 Nothing Ever Happens Shirt $21.68 |
Thalidomide Vintage Ad Shirt $22.14 |
What are the best SP space games? Shill your favorites here.
What are the best SP space games?
Shill your favorites here.
Thalidomide Vintage Ad Shirt $22.14 |
Nothing Ever Happens Shirt $21.68 |
Thalidomide Vintage Ad Shirt $22.14 |
Empire at War
GalCiv2/4
X3/4 if you can stand the controls.
I played xbtf,x2 and x3. x4 seems kinda bad because everything is DLC
Doesn't EAW include large non-space parts?
You can autoresolve the groundbattles away, either by button or by death star.
I got x4 and all the dlc for under $40 during the sale.
It is kind of bad though since the game is going to be extremely bare bones without a few of them. It's a paradox situation where at least the split and terran dlc's should be base game content.
galciv4 looks like an interesing game...
The ai-generator is not like bings or whatever, they add curated pictures based upon your promts whenever they feel like it, you don't actually generate pictures ingame.
that's nothing
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1293300/Space_Cats_Tactics/
i'll assume you know about homeworld
nexus
battlefleet gothic
star trek armada
sins of a solar empire
Star Trek: Starfleet Command
Solar Settlers
Seedship
Space Rangers 2
Hidden Dimensions 3
Strange Adventures in Infinite Space
Star Wolves
Slipways
Stars!
is there a game other than stellaris that has a good species/civ editor?
see
+Galciv2
Space Empires 3-4
Children of a Dead Earth is still one of my favorite space tactics games. Shame about the dev disappearing, but the game is still solid.
i played a couple of levels before i dropped it but it seemed like that game was playing itself. i just did what the text told me and i won. is it really that good later on, or do people like it for the ship builder and realistic physics?
The first few missions are really easy, but the later missions can be ball-busting. Vesta Overkill is the biggest filter; the game gives you full access to the ship builder, then it puts you up against a very aggressive fleet that can easily overwhelm you. If you just use the default ships, the enemy fleet is practically guaranteed to kick your ass. You have to design your own ships if you want to win.
With the later missions, you need to figure out how to pull off extremely complex orbital maneuvers while budgeting for fuel and on limited time. Less than 5% of people who own the game on Steam have been able to complete the second to last mission.
>do people like it for the ship builder and realistic physics
I mean, yeah, that is a big part of the appeal. It's probably the only game on the market that lets you design your own nuclear reactor, from the composition of the fuel mass to the material of the control rods.
Would have been a dream game if that happened. From what I remember, it was a solo dev project, and the game engine can't really handle too many ships and effects at once. I built a PD drone swarm for Vesta Overkill, and the sheer amount of rounds being fired all at once brought the game to one frame per minute.
they missed the opportunity to allow a full scale solar system skirmish with orbital mechanics and their logistic implications for structures and so.
A KSP grand strategy basically.
Not Strategy, more of a business management sim but Kerbal Space Program. The frankly autistic amount of customization you can make to your spaceship pretty much btfos every other scifi game out there currently. Starfield? More like StarFailed, lmao!
If you have schizophrenia, Aurora4x is pretty good for soloRP
sword of the stars
total war in space, but you actually have to think about logistics and support for your fleets
Since no one's posted it yet, Starsector.
It's the only space game that has a de facto general on this board.
isn't starsector technically an RPG?
No, it's a game about space battles
It's an RPG in the same way total warhammer or any game with basic RPG elements is. It has some basic leveling, missions and it has a sandbox, but it's more a piloting and fleet management game than an actual RPG (sans mods)
it's a top-down arcade shooter
Starsector if you want to pilot a 2D ship, build up a flotilla, and trade, explore and fight to make money.
It has RPG and 2D Shooter elements, but it's mostly a game about making ship loadout builds, managing resources and planning how to make money.
Sseth's CD Key should still work to this day:
Starsectors "RPG" mechanics are about on par with researching Ground Attack +3 in Broodwar.
>It's the only space game that has a de facto general on this board.
I feel like it has more to do with drama and autism rather than a mark of quality for the game.
Star Ruler 2 is a flawed gem. It's very much unbalanced, especially with the DLC, the research mechanic is mediocre and the diplomacy is odd and card-based.
BUT you have the ship designer and the economy and those are genius.
In the ship designer, you place weapons, armor, systems tile by tile and the facing and layout of your stuff actually matters in combat; enemy fire doesn't just draw HP, but will hit a certain point, and if you put your bridge at the very front with zero armor, your expensive new battleship will just die to the first laser beam it catches.
Economy: You don't accumulate money, you have budget cycles. If you don't spend all your money, you can direct the surplus into influence/research/whatever.
And the planetary economy is probably the best thing I've seen in space 4X. You can build some facilities directly to get a few research points, manufacturing etc at a steep maintenance cost, but the main driver is the pressure system: Your population will construct buildings according to the various "pressures" a planet receives from resource imports. For example, if you import a gold resource, that will give x "commerce" pressure, so your pops will build banks that will make you money.
The higher a planet's level, the more pressure it can take and the higher the pop cap. The result is a wonderfully organic empire where you have dozens of tiny farming planets shipping food and water to small and mid-sized resource-exporting worlds, which in turn feed into a scarce few hiveworlds that will outproduce the rest of your Empire by far.
the ship designer ruins the whole game. first of all, it takes too much time to design a ship, and secondly, you can cheese the game by designing all your ships with a hollow center. Because weapons will auto-target center of mass, the projectile will fly right through the donut hole. The stellaris ship designer is complex enough for a 4x game.
>you can cheese the game by designing all your ships with a hollow center. Because weapons will auto-target center of mass, the projectile will fly right through the donut hole.
lmao Starfield has the exact same exploit
Aurora C#
Distant Worlds 1/2
rest is irrelevant.
all of those are mediocre
has anyone ever figured out a good planetary development system?
Problem is scalability.
Complex systems work great when your empire is 3 distinct planets and a lot of the gameplay can just be fiddling with those 3.
But when your empire is 20 planets, suddenly the amount of stuff you have to do each turn becomes overwhelming, and you don't feel like it matters as much because each planet is only 1/20th of your economy.
Every aspect of complexity strains scalability, making the game progressively more tedious and less fun the bigger the scale gets. But simple systems tend to be generally unsatisfying to manage and can result in situations where players are bored because they don't have enough to do, or enough levers to press to make the campaign feel worth continuing. But generally speaking, players will strongly prefer games that offer them the grand scale of commanding an open-ended galactic empire vs a focused game that limits them to a solar system or 2.
The solution is either to keep the scale small so a complex system has room to breathe; keep the system extremely simple and add depth to the game in other more scalable mechanics so that you can afford a larger scale; or centralize management to a single menu that remains the same and involves the same number of clicks and actions regardless of whether it's managing 5 or 50 planets. The latter is more like the system that something like HOI has, which solves the scalability issue nicely but as far as I know has never been tried successfully within the 4x space empire builder context and there's still a tension there between making the condensed menu succinct and functional while also making it complex enough to be interesting to engage with.
I don't know but if I made one, it'd be mostly hands off with SotS-style growing in infrastructure over time until it was developed, with the max amount depending on the relative habitability of the planet. Then I'd have it be like Endless Space 2 in most other respects with defined planet types instead of the habitability rating of SotS and you'd put pops on them to maximize their strengths and minimize their weakness, though you'd have to deal with happiness maluses or even declining birth rate of pops if they aren't suited for the planet. And it'd use that same planetary specialization menu so you can set planets to focus on growth, industry, or whatever. Might even have the same disputed colony thing when multiple people colonize the same world, except you'd have to buy the others out or kill them off for the planet to stop being disputed. Personal building of stuff would only be system level objects like orbital defenses, space shipyards, or space colonies, and maybe wonder like structures you could add to a planet. There would also be a system where star systems needed to be at a certain tech levels to properly produce things or make use of certain things you researched so if you didn't have a science planet, you'd need to build space universities to keep them from being backwater bumpkins with half your improvements and no ability to build your latest ships. Same for stuff like space police and security.
I wouldn't mind Shadow Empire style either, with planets having actual structures and the people on them building what they needed or wanted and you're able to fund them to get them started or build goverrnment buildings if you want.
Fragile Allegiance
I'm old
Nexus: The Jupiter Incident. It's a tactical space battle sim with a narrative space opera singleplayer campaign. Pretty antiquated now but I think it's approach to space combat still hasn't been surpassed (not that anyone is fricking trying) and the visuals aged pretty well.
Sword of the Stars:
Hybrid turn-based 4x Wargame with realtime tactical battles a la Total War. Its main gimmick is the fully 3d starmap that seems to utterly disorient a lot of folks and the massive, partially randomized "tech forest."
I like it particularly because in abstracting a lot of the empire management aspects to make way for its realtime battle focus, it also sidesteps one of the main issues with most 4x and empire builder games where they get bogged down with tedium and repetitive tasks as the game goes on. It can have performance issues on modern rigs.
>Nexus: The Jupiter Incident
Good game but I was really disappointed when I figured out that the marine boarding pods or what they're called were just there for story segments and did nothing when I tried using them in combat.
They do work. When they successfully board a vessel, they will steadily cause damage to whatever systems you've prioritized, disabling shields and whatnot.
If you don't have a system prioritised they spread their damage out too much, so you probably just didn't notice the impact.
They're kind of bad, because if you can bypass point defense you can just use bombers or heavy missiles instead.
Oh, that's cool. I thought it was some cut feature left in as a story crutch.
Nexus is probably the biggest wasted potential bait and switch I've ever played. It starts out with this super interesting near future corporate wars in space then flips to a super generic sci-fi with uninteresting generic ships. It's good but it had the potential to be so much more and just threw it away.
The story is a classic example of star trek poisoning. That said, supposedly it was originally two games being developed separately--a story driven space combat sim and a turn-based 4x. The latter project was cancelled and its assets rolled into the former to salvage the sunk cost, hence the genre shift and why the mission briefing menu is literally just an empire management UI.
>tfw they did a Kickstarter for Nexus 2 like a decade ago, but it failed so now we're never going to get it.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mostwanted/nexus-2-the-gods-awaken
Stellaris, but because of how the game works, you have to play it almost exclusively in a roleplay mindset to get the most enjoyment out of it. Playing it as a standard 4X just won't be as enjoyable imho. There's also plenty of mods if you're going for something specific.
Space trader on the Palm OS. a classic that Elite Dangerous is distantly related
There is a Windows port that has more stuff in it.
Star Trek: Starfleet Command - Orion Pirates 1 and 2
i wasted so many hours in these games... Man
Does this count?
https://store.steampowered.com/app/46270/Star_Wolves/
>Star Wolves 2 is genuinely bad, which everyone including the developers agree
https://store.steampowered.com/app/46260/Star_Wolves_3_Civil_War/