Indeed all valid points. I bought this the second it was on GoG last year when it was in-development and adore it. Yes keeping up with the parts and modules was initially daunting and it can still be a little tricky. I found that colours and module types help so for example, there might be a particular component that is mostly yellow with a green middle and a similar looking component with different colour and middle. I found they are both usuable in the slat but has different power output, noise levels etc so that might help.

Would be nice to see a full list component by component in a table showing comparisons. In the release version though (avail I think since version 0.98 from Dec 2018) the lists can be grouped so you can list Defence components and Stealth Components.

As for 688 Sub, the game style is a little like it yes. I certainly get the feel of it as a sub sim from the very start with the ping and torpedos, calculating jump solutions and if you don't want for 100% you can mis jump, arming weapons, point defences...all very nice. You can hide in the blue nebulae......I found it very sub sim like and I adore sub sims.

There are no crew no but there is no real need, you can jump into engineering and do things in there rather quickly. That is part of the mechanic.

I don't think boarding is there but you can contact and threaten other vessels. I don't do this as I only do humanitarian missions. I'm sick of almost every game you have to go out and kill/attack. I want to help and keep out of politics :)

The game lore is immersive with a ton of story lines and news. Much like real life you cannot follow every news item BUT if you follow ones you choose, you see story arcs all over the place and hints on where you can get involved. There is a lot there.

To your other questions, can you be a nasty ass pirate ? Yes. Cane you destroy other ships ? Yes Can you threaten them ? Yes hopefully they will drop their cargo and you can scoop it up. You can chase after them, you can try to destroy them etc. Can a pirate warn you, and you decide to drop your cargo ? / surrender (equivalent) yes.

My ship now though is an Enceledous class, the largest. With 4 batteries I can stay stealthy fairly easily. I found I can generally turn the sensors off as I don't need them. It means you don't get update on other ship vectors (directions) but space is large. This sensor mechanic is very subsim like but I found it is a little under developed perhaps ? or maybe, and this is likely, I just don't use it correctly but I found little consequence of leaving it all turned off.

Hope this helps. It's an amazing game from amazing devs and I plan to try to build the actual controllers. The devs are releasing more info on how to do that.

The Dunmer mastered space travel? I suppose we should look out for tree shaped shuttles headed for Mars.

Is this the re-release of a nineties game?

Well graphically it looks similar to vanilla Morrowind... well maybe a little lower quality, closer to PS2.

Regardless, looks interesting. Maybe i'll try it out some day.

Thanks for the detailed response!

It definitely sounds like it would be right up my alley. I'm constantly on the lookout for a game involving space ships where the ships behave as something other than directly-controlled fighter planes in space. The few games that do actually go more in-depth with the flight controls, will quite often still have manual controls for weapons - which never made a lick of sense given that modern warships (on the ocean), modern fighter planes, hell almost any modern weapons platform has far more weapons automation than that. The fact this game appears to bring some of that logic across is not only commendable, it's also baffling why it wasn't done in similar games a long time ago.

The fact that the ship "controls" operate similarly (on a basic level), and at least take inspiration from, actual spacecraft automation systems, is also pretty cool.

Will most likely grab this in the near future... Actually the main reason I didn't already buy it, is due to the bizarre way that scrolling has been implemented in this game. Is there truly no way to activate the mouse wheel for scrolling? If not, that seems like a very, very strange design decision - the mouse scroll wheel is probably one of the most useful things anyone has ever added onto a mouse, and ever since it's existed it's been pretty much a universal standard that the mouse wheel is used to scroll things. It's almost as fundamental to the operation of the mouse as using the left button to click boxes and buttons! Why would they throw away one of the most universally useful and universally accepted mouse-UI improvements in history? WHY!?

Just wanted to point out, for those that may not have realised, something that Styggron briefly mentioned and is listed as the last point on the store page.

Yes, you can build your own controllers for the game! They don't have to follow the plans supplied, you're given the details of the interface so that if you know what you're doing (or willing to learn), you can build as simple or as complex a control panel as you want!

As an example, here's a video of Scott Manley with Jenny from Flat Earth at GDC 2017 showing the panel they built for the show. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I270vSrTIuk (Ignore Jenny's accent, FE are an Aussie company :P)

Also,
Well, it can be used to zoom in and out of screens. So in the above video you can see them looking at a panel overall and then zooming in to an individual screen and back out again. You can use the scroll wheel to do that but from the very brief play that I've had, I don't see that there's much advantage to doing so. It's an option you can turn on, but in general I agree, I think it could have been better used.

Edit: clean up some formatting and add the video link and changed some wording

Well that seems like a strange design decision. From the looks of it, there aren't multiple levels of zoom - it's just in or out? So straight away that seems like a waste of the scroll wheel, when one could have used a button or something.

It still doesn't explain (or excuse) not being able to scroll any of the screens using the mouse wheel! From what I've seen, these only scroll using the keyboard, and then only one line at a time? Here's hoping they'll eventually patch it in...

Updates. I want to see more stories. I want to see more ships. I want to see my cofee maker in my galley MAKE ME COFFEE. I don't know.. More interactive stuff to click on that makes me believe I'm on a ship I own in the middle of space dodging galactic ATF agents. Make it happen. PS. I love you guys. Thanks for making this great game.