Well the first impression as i started it up was the settings and options were very similar to Din's Curse.. It's no surprise when i saw the level selection page that it confirmed it, although glancing over the devs helped confirm that too...

As for the actual gameplay... I'll get back to you in a bit after i get some time on this.

So my first impressions after an hour or two of gameplay is the game is kinda... aimless...

The first time i played Morrowind, i had the same impression. So this doesn't mean the game is good or bad, you just have to give yourself missions and things to do.

But for the most part i've been searching the nearby sectors, scanning planets, finding junk and scanning it, and fighting off small fleets of enemies who randomly attack me. Most of my relations with one race (shadow) is positive mostly due to fighting near their planets and they qualify it as protecting them.

So far it's interesting. I'll be playing quite a bit longer before i get a full impression of the game to give here, but don't expect quests to be shoved on you right away (although there are 5 win objectives, and 3 fails...)

You can either go to planets and plant rumors to improve relations, or you can press R to go to the races, talk to the race and ask them to ally or stop attacking another race... That only works if they have contact with the race (which you can give them).



Honestly after playing it a bit more it feels too slow... Maybe because i upgraded the hull of my ship twice (command 11), but it feels large and clunky... I'll probably start a new ship and avoid upgrading that as long as possible, the speed is wearing on me quickly though :( Beyond that though, it feels certainly dynamic enough, although things happen too fast much like Din's Curse. Thankfully the individual games or galaxies don't hold a huge level of importance, and you can win simply by allying with the single surviving race if they kill eachother off.

Alright after some 8 hours of gameplay and getting annoyed at it i have my final impressions since i'm putting the game down.

Pros:
The game looks nice, with 3D models and 4 layers or parallax scrolling it has a sense of deep depth of the universe that's beautiful.
The music (when it's on) is fairly nice.

and that's probably it.

Cons:
It's slow. This wouldn't be so bad if you could give waypoints and then have it go and maybe give it automatic actions to go with (Scan nearby anomalies, fight nearest enemy always rather than locking on, fight/ignore missiles, go here, pick up loot, etc). Often i find myself pressing the left mouse button or the W key for a minute or longer at a time with nothing going on.

Repetitive, in a grindy way. Go fetch x part, deliver cargo to species S in sector X, kill these monsters in sector Y, track down bounty, etc. Thankfully most of the quests can be completed via a UI, unless you're delivering a package.

Limited space in a major way. Being thrifty perhaps may be one way to play, but there's a lot of misc parts. Planetary defenses, fertilizer, non-lethal weapons, fire extinguishers, etc. All of these take up a huge slot and if you pick up extra slots you'll probably get 4 or 6 slot extras. If you're going to be carrying around extra crew or misc items, preferably you can stack them, either identical items, chips, or misc in groups of 4 (4 in 1 slot).

Weak Economy. Perhaps this isn't an issue later/higher, but i had a ton of crap and no one had any credits to sell them the crap... Making the game slower still because you have to visit everyone to see if they have credits.

Punishing Upgrades, this is annoying. When you put points into command, your ship gets bigger (and better, right?), you can use more equipment... But it also becomes slower, heavier, and lowers your defense (by quite a bit). It's not fun being punished for wanting to get a better ship :( With my ship getting slower unknowingly, the game got more and more stale because it takes even longer to get anywhere, and upgrading your engines takes levels, which the game happily hampers you on unless you're min/maxing.

Politics, there's a lot of it. Break pact with X, don't help Y, distract Z, etc. Building up friendships might not be so hard if it had a counting negative that slowly grows on it's own over time, as the game puts 'what have you done for us recently?'. This means you'll probably want to select one race and help them exclusively and try to get an alliance. You can force an alliance by demanding (probably not) or clicking 'how can i get this through' and they'll want all your money and everything you have... Thankfully the tone/color (green/red) hints if it's enough to consider offering before starting.

The ship, you start with 9 slots (3 heavy, 3 medium, 3 light), and maybe up to 4 race slots (computer, acceleration, race specific units, etc). Maybe that wouldn't be an issue if power requirements weren't present, since besides armor everything drains the power, and draining it too much lowers your effectiveness by 20% (per every 5 over?). So barely going over hampers you a lot, kinda annoying like the balancing used in Sacred 2 where it takes 5 seconds longer to charge the ability before you can use it again... So the first slot locked is your engines, the second is your weapon, and if you try to add anything the third will be locked with a reactor. That really leaves you with 6 maybe slots, mostly for crew and shields or weird weapons.

Fighting/Flight: You have to hold down the button (keyboard or mouse) to move. You also have to do the same to attack, but if you defeat an enemy you'll stop attacking even if you're still being bombarded. This means you'll constantly be pressing 1/2 (depending on how many weapons/abilities you have) to keep it cycling. Makes it feel like a really weakly made MMO. Also ship turning IS SO DAMN SLOW!

Final Thoughts: If you love grinding, love outer-space, are patient (you a teenager and thus easily forgiving), or you don't have any other games to play, or you have multi-player friends, then will probably be fun for you. Otherwise i don't recommend getting it.

Honestly it's not a bad game, it's just too slow for me. If your ship's movement/turning was 50% to 100% faster and you had more inventory space or special slots for misc items, the game would be a lot more interesting. Maybe you can get that later in the game, but i can't stand to spend another 10 hours to try and get to that point.

Better post your level. Game spins around the player. It is your problem that you are too slow for this game. Do different tasks, duh. Hunt for monsters, lead wars, explore planets. You can get large 16 bays at level 32. Takes a hour at worst. Drop the crap. It's like in Diablo, selling broken items is stupid. Engines give speed and defence, more than you lose from increasing ship size. IIRC 2 engines is enough to max speed of the biggest ship. And have you read what defence gives? Chance for evade. It is sooo scary to be hit... Upgrade shields, armor and resist. And how exactly deep diplomacy is in cons? Too deep for you? You pigeonhole yourself into this. My ship has 30 slots with max speed. You can get robofighters, I had 12 and didn't bother to shoot anything smaller than red bosses.
For speed - upgrade engine. Your problem is that you haven't figured that when you create a Galaxy, it stucks at this level, and you grow. In 3-5 levels you outgrow galaxy. Try to start on higher difficulty than yourself. Everything else is solvable with better items.
Personally, I think that for the same price you can get Space Rangers, which would be infinitely better game.

Utopia lvl10 is the highest ship i have. The other one's 4 i think. I always do about 4-6 tasks at once... Half of them say i completed them without accepting them, and just hit 'solve'. Buying or random drops? Largest random drop on i got was 8. None of it's broken! It's just stuff i can't equip or use. Fun, and i thought having two weapons was a better idea so i could kill things quickly... No, usually things resolve themselves long before i can reach the planet. The only time i seemed to make a difference was when Drakk declared war on me and i destroyed all their planets because i could actually shoot them now. I don't know... It doesn't do a very good job of suggesting or explaining anything. Just because something's there doesn't mean it tells you the best way to do things.

My usual configuration:
Heavy: Engine, Weapon, Reactor
Medium: Armor, Shields, some boost or secondary weapon
Light: Whatever will fit. Usually shuttles or crew.

When you upgrade and your ship is suddenly 30% slower, that seems like a slap in the face. Once again, buying or random drops? I only ever had 1 drop for me. Actually i'm quite aware of that, and then i'm also aware i go to an area with ships 1 level higher than my own ships they cluster f**k me and i can barely take out a couple of them. Makes me not want to raise the level higher than my own. Yeah, but much like Smugglers V, i'm not entirely sure what i'm doing and get lost easily. Perhaps the hardest part is i'm not sure if there's a time limit for stuff before key things happen or not, since the whole universe is alive and moving all the time.

1. Tasks - I mean selftasks, not the game quests. My usual way is unlocking all stargates first, for example. Then hunt for bosses for purple loot.
2. Getting items - scavenge option on the trade screen of Scavenger race and their descendants. Fast, reliable way.
3. Stuff you aren't using is a garbage. Even level 100 items rarely cost more than 100 credits, while quests award thousands. Heck, at level 100 races can gift you 20-30k. I was bribed to start the war for 1m credits.
4. Thing is, killing npcs isn't the target of the game. You can get diplomatic or economic victory without destroying any ship. Faster deliveries, smaller money losses on insurance would outweight engine over gun.
5. So you haven't tried to extencively use rumors, espionage, haven't tried to form an alliance between races ... it is a matter of low level.
6. When you upgrade and get slower - it feels like 'me strong, me smash'. Get more slots, add some engines and everything else would be a direct upgrade.
Critical items for me were
Heavy - laser, 4 fighter bays, 2 reactors, 2 engines, armor plate
Mid - radar, allstats bays, 3 shield, virus weapon
low - 10 legendary droids with 20+ allstats each.
race - scavenger, engine, marine.
7. Scavenge option in trade screen on scavenger planet. Sometimes gives purple items.
8. Start 24 level game and complete some freebie quests. Money, exp, upgraded crew. More item types unlocked, like engines for med slots or reactors for low.
9. In space rangers there is an achievement for 100+ years game. Some things are tied to time passed, but nothing critical. AI is restricted, 2 dominator races wouldn't attack if there are less than 4 systems for coalition. It includes 2 secret pirate systems, though. So you always can take home system and arm bases (prioritise science)to the teeth, survive till good weapon, then counterattack and win. On easy coalition would win on their own, on hardest there would be struggle.

Fun. I think diablo and torchlight and Final Fantasy have forced me to take a very conservative approach, where i never buy anything and only use what i find, then when that magical one item i absolutely need appears i can buy it. Currently i'm only sitting on about 10k of credits.

Even level 100 items can be junk, fun... Now that i know that i think i can manage leaving crap behind. It was for me, Drakk was an ahole... I was working on an economic victory, was only 50 credits away on the screen, but i'm not sure how it calculates it since i'm sure i sold 5x the amount it listed... I've tried, i simply don't have the resources via bartering. Placing rumors didn't seem to change the outcome of the dryads getting destroyed, being put in a war. Simply being successful on my rumors it told me only 'xxx heard a useful rumor' and didn't tell me in game terms how much of an effect it had... Am i suppose to do the same rumor to each and every planet of theirs in order to sway them? When you're already slow, going slower doesn't make you feel better. But i hear you, put on a second engine and screw the heavy slots of weapons or reactors until i have more slots later. Plus don't rely on dropped loot. I know in most of the other Diablo-like games, store loot was usually weak, good to start with, but never any good later. Guess i'll have to rely more on trading.

Hower over things for tooltip. Economic victory counter rises as % from "selling technologies, planet info and reward from quests", decreases by dying (-insurance and cloning service) You can see ingame effect on diplomacy screen - hover over race, it would show Dryad-human 48. Rumor, then it would be Dryad-human 49

Good strategy - choose "aggressive" race as sacred victim, decrease everyone's mood against them, start the war, destroying enemy's ship would improve relationships with every race's enemy = with everyone.
Especially fun at big galaxies when there are 100 ships fighting together for every race. Race ships also give tons of exp. Enemy's colony ships are good for farming. There is a race which lets you respec skillpoints used (can't take back from command).
So, it is a safe bet to add skillpoints to use items, then remove them when you would get good crewmembers.
Reinstalled the game, I still own the save.
It is possible to remove power needing at all, though a bit tedious - one race can improve durability, another can reduce power needing with possibility to damage items.

This is why we need physical manuals. With a physical manual i would take it with me when i'm waiting in line, on the toilet, taking a bath, etc, and learn all of this with all the explanations and rules. As a PDF or tooltips, scouring for the information (obvious or not) becomes a pain.

Curiously the technologies i come across have a value of 0, so i don't quite see how this would work...

Although giving the game a second chance i did manage to get a full alliance by offering technology alone...


And most of my experience so far is from random enemy ships or quests... Interesting...

Interesting...

Right click on them, they would be added to your technology batch, then appear on diplomatic trade screen.
Works better at higher levels, when both technologies can cost thousands and races can afford it.

After getting convinced to try the game again i've given the game some more play on my best ship, and ended up using 2 engines to get a higher speed. Also there's a few options so the game isn't quite as slow, as you can toggle engines on/off, cursor as the direction you're pointing, etc. These do address my main concerns.

Still even with the game faster more interesting and more money, the game is still slow, but you're almost always under attack or bombardment.

You still need a lot of patience.

As for the fighter bays... nice, but they end up dying too quickly. Course they are level 12 vs level 13 area, and i have to level up a few more times before i can properly take advantage of higher energy reserves.

There's also been the occasional required level requirement before you can use something. Like 'this crew needs you to be level 10, you are level 9' which just serves to delay me using them... Tell me my technology is incompatible, or i need more spots, but not because i'm one level off. Geez... I'd rather be able to attach him and have him suffer a small penalty till i get to my level than end up accidentally selling him because i couldn't use him.

Trading with Scavengers did seem to speed up getting good stuff (before they were eliminated), but in the most recent game growing from level 10-17, i've had humans and dryads allied with me. Great in theory, but even if i'm technically higher level than everything else i'm still having issues because i can't level or use equipment that would make things easier, like having more energy or a higher power load. Perhaps if i had a larger energy reserve things would be simpler.

I guess my biggest issue with the game currently is the forced waiting period due to you having to level up before you can use stuff.

I'm still not sure if this is the game for me.