Stardrive - The next Master of Orion?

[Elim]

Can't be more shitty than GalCiv 3...

 

[Galdred]

It is advertised as turn based strategic layer with RT battles. Does it play like Total War in space?

 

[Echo Mirage]

 

[DakaSha]

is this game just as shitty doodoo as every other game ive bought in the past year?

 

[DakaSha]

Cool an impression by somebody who has to explain what a 4x is to his audience

 

[Destroid]

I don't know if I'd be more happy if this is good or bad considering what incomplete crap Stardrive 1 is.

 

[Vival]

Judging from a very quick first impression this appears to have improved quite a lot from stardrive 1. The shitty, chaotic realtime empire managment is gone, thanks to a turnbased system and battles being fought on a seperate map. Actually a lot of elements borrow heavily from MoO2 like the research which works almost identical(much incline) or planet managment where you freely change your minions between farm/work/science slots or weapon modifiers like rapid fire etc. . The ground combat, which unlike space combat is turn based, feels a bit tacked on like something in space rangers 2 and will probably lead to a dozen dudes deciding the fate of a planet in mortal kombat but auto resolve is an option. Thankfully the godawful ground troop spamming from sd1 seems to be a thing of the past now.

 

[KoolNoodles]

Downloaded and going to try it out and post some impressions. From just watching it at least looks like an improvement on SD, which was ok, but really unfinished. Improved ground combat, even if it looks boring to play through all the time(here's hoping the auto-resolve isn't Total War levels of absurd). No more real time strategic layer(biggest change, but can't be anything more than an improvement....right?), and kept the cool ship design and decent space combat(I didn't mind the real time since you could slow it way down and pause if needed).

The graphics are nice, the ship effects are nice(ships show battle damage, has a nice space opera feel to it).

Who knows about the AI, guess that will take one play to figure out.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

interesting ideas, boring actuation.
the map is extremely small, techs feel uninterestingly banal, space battles are unclear and land battle are outright banal and boring without an autoresolve button.
i had more fun with star ruler 2 which is more a puzzle game than a 4x :/

 

[SmartCheetah]

Definitely an improvement over the first stardrive, which in fact was just an unfinished game. Stardrive 2 is definitely a more solid product.
The turn based change was much needed, and it's there. More than that - from what I've seen, game is very moddable, which is always a good thing (First Stardrive had pretty impressive mods, eg. Timmod, so we might get something terrific) as people can add more content/work on broken stuff.
Lore? I dig it a lot. I mean, maybe it's not deep or whatever, but all those nine civs are pretty nicely thought out. Overall tone is rather "chill", instead of crazily pretentious, realistic style.
Personally, I like the combat. The fact that you can actually "feel" all the fiddling with ship modules. The encounter maps ain't big, but still you can use some clever tactics to annihilate your foes.
Economy is simplistic but pretty straightforward. I've done more than 500 turns and don't really need to micromanage all the colonies. Freighters (Pretty nice system) are doing everything for you. One of the colonies is starving, and you have much more food on the other one? Don't you worry. Freighters will help you out, so you don't have to set everything in place. That helps a lot if you're trying to play on huge galaxies (Altough, I was little dissapointed about maximum number of star systems you can have in a game :/)
Research is nicely done, as someone said before. I like it a lot.


On the flipside - Very little 3d art. Therefore, you will be stuck with a few hull models and that's it. It's not particulary bad thing, as it doesnt really affect gameplay (Maybe in a little way, because you can't create your penis-shaped cruiser. All in all, you're forced to pack all the modules on one of a few configurations) - I'm still hoping modders can do something with it(Provided that number of hulls ain't limited).
Diplomacy is rather minimalistic. It's not particularly bad, but at the same time - nothing groundbreaking - especially with lack of Allied victory. The only way to achieve one is thru conquering all the other civs. Therefore, you need to fuck all dem treaties in the end game.
Tactical ground combat - Well, Angryjoe is a fuckwit, and everyone knows it. He sucked at tactical ground combat totally, but at the same time - he was kinda right. It ain't specifically the experience I was looking for. Most of the time I'm clicking on "Auto" instead of throwing my fellas out on those little, square grid maps. Instead of doing 3d stuff, the sole creator of this game should have sticked to excellent 2d sprites/tokens (I bet they would be excellent, as art in this game is glorious) doing combat on bigger maps. What do we have? low poly, not-so-fancy 3d models (Why the fuck they haven't made more different hulls instead? :/) with terribad animations and stiff movement. I'm not a graphic whore, so I don't really give a shit about how it looks. It just feels...Bland. If you're expecting X-com type of battles - forget it. Just threat it as a minigame.

In Cheetah score Stardrive 2 would get 6+/10.
Good effort, especially because it's a one man project (+ outside assets)
If you're in 4x hunger, this and Star Ruler 2 should entertain you for some time.

 

[rezaf]

Hmm. I only tried this for a couple of hours, but so far my impression is that I find SD1 - as incomplete and flawed as it may be - to be vastly superior nonetheless, at least in the "am I having fun" category.

I started about 30 (in words, thirty!) games of SD2, and in TWO of them I found a planet worth colonizing in my reach (I checked ~10 star systems on or inside my borders in each game). Halfway through (after 15 games) I bumped up galaxy fertility or whatever it's called from Classic to Abundant, but it seemed to make hardly a difference. In one of the games I found a planet barely worth colonizing within my home system, so it was nice, but not much of a "bridgehead". In the other game, I found a monster planet, ultra rich gaia with 15 max pop.
That was kinda nice until the wolf guys decided to take it from me with a fleet I couldn't have hoped to assemble at this point even if I'd done nothing but building ships - the Wolfen had already colonized two systems and had an empire more than twice my size...
All other planets worth looking at were either defended by strong enemy fleets (pirates, story-dudes, monsters) or by the time my scouts got there it turned out they were already part of somebody elses empire.
Why to all these wannabe MoOs have to be so horribly uninviting to the new player?

From what I could see, many of SD2's system appear to be improvements on the predecessor. Whether or not the TB turns are an improvement over the real-time system from SD1 is kinda down to preference, but it appears to be well realized, and SD1 had the major flaw that the system tended to collapse under it's own weight in late-game.
RT combat on a seperate map ... a neccessity, but comes at the cost of loading screens. Haven't played a ground combat so far.
Research is a clear tribute to MoO2, with it's "1 out of 2/3" choices, but I'm not sure the erratic AI will make acquiring techs you skipped worth the (diplomatic or espionage) trouble - and there appear to be no "Psilons" that can just research everything.
Ship design has been steamlined a bit. It's easier in parts, but being used to how SD1 worked, it's also a little less flexible and ... sometimes a little strange. I can't quite put my finger on it.

Anyway, I won't play again until a solid amount of patching has taken place - these days, I have a low tolerance for games that kick me in the nuts instead of shaking my hand when we first meet.

 

[Rellin]

I enjoyed SD1 much more than I have enjoyed SD2 thus far. I am not sure why, but yeah, like others have said. SD1 may have never been completed, but it was fun until it was released and abandoned shortly thereafter. I played it something like 200 hours in beta and early access, and maybe a few hours post launch. Anyway, I am having trouble enjoying SD2 for some reason. The ship design side of it seems much less flexible and therefore less complex. The battles do not seem nearly as chaotic or exciting. Ground combat is boring. Maps are pretty small even on 100 systems (huge). I am trying to like it, but damn if I am not having a hard time doing so.

 

[KoolNoodles]

I think part of what makes the battles feel lame compared to SD1, is that they take place on a "map" in SD2. I love MoO, but I also really enjoyed sprawling galaxy wide battles happening in real time in SD1, with ships jumping in, ammo and fuel being limited, supply ships sometimes warping in mid-fight, damaged ships warping out, etc. It was a lot more dynamic and to me pretty exhilarating. I loved the ship design/combat in SD1. Everything else was pretty simple/bad.

So to me right now it feels like SD2 added elements I like(turn based strategic layer, before combat), and subtracted what I liked(the chaotic nature of interstellar combat in SD1).

It basically feels exactly like MoO now, except with real-time battles on small maps. Even down to the GNN, races, techs, custom start, crystals attacking you, "remnant" fleets....etc.

There are a few wrinkles with random missions, anomalies, experimental tech(also random depending on stuff you find), added planetary bonuses and "luxury" type resources that are interesting and natural projection from the MoO formula, but I'm not sure it's enough to make this game stand out. It does look nice, like a space sim should, but heck, Sword of the Stars 2 looks much better and it was garbage(what a shame).

StarDrive originally felt like it was trying something new and held a lot of promise. SD2 feels like the guy just re-skinned MoO2 to make money. I hear he wants to make it pretty moddable. We'll see what comes of that and future patching/content.

 

[Norfleet]

Diplomacy is rather minimalistic. It's not particularly bad, but at the same time - nothing groundbreaking - especially with lack of Allied victory. The only way to achieve one is thru conquering all the other civs. Therefore, you need to fuck all dem treaties in the end game.

Does the Federation option still exist? In SD1, you would form a Federation with your ally, whereupon you would absorb them, their ship hulls, their techs, and all their planets and units. That this option exists sort of removes the need for an allied victory condition since you can win by forming the Federation. Is this no longer present?

 

[SmartCheetah]

Haven't seen it yet, so I guess you need to get a certain tech if it's in. My game bugged on one of the turns and I can't progress any further, unfortunately. Meh.
Gotta start over again.

 

[Raghar]

Why did it become so blatant copy of MOO2? The most important skill of developer is creativity. For creative person, it's blatantly easy to create something his own which would work flawlessly.

 

[Norfleet]

Well, there's something to be said for safety in imitating an established formula. I guess you just can't win. Do your own thing, people complain. Imitate the existing thing, people complain.

 

[JohnTheRevelator]

Nothing really wrong with copying MoOII. It's not like we're drowning in this exact type of game. My biggest gripe would be with how inflexible and awkward ship design is. Why can't I have side facing mass drivers? EMP from quick tests in battle mode or whatever it was called seems rather OP. You can easily stunlock even huge ships. Shields also seem bit too good and pretty much must have. Also most energy weapons on turrets seem to have the same really short range. In MoOII you could do long and short range versions of most weapons giving you a lot more flexibility. I also don't like how weapon upgrades are just there for slight tweaking rather than keeping older types of weapons somewhat relevant with advancements in appropriate tech field. Pretty important feature considering the nature of "pick one" style research tree. While ground combat isn't horrible it's not interesting either. That effort could have been spent better elsewhere. Nothing wrong with automatic ground combat resolution in a 4X in space scale game. There really was no reason to cram this mini game into it.

 

[Destroid]

The thing wrong with copying MoO2 is it's pointless. We already have MoO2, it runs fine in dosbox. Especially for an indie who can't bring massive production values to the table.

Are any of the ways this game deviates from MoO2 mechanics actually better than MoO2 original mechanics? Would you rather play this than MoO2?

 

[Rellin]

I think part of what makes the battles feel lame compared to SD1, is that they take place on a "map" in SD2. I love MoO, but I also really enjoyed sprawling galaxy wide battles happening in real time in SD1, with ships jumping in, ammo and fuel being limited, supply ships sometimes warping in mid-fight, damaged ships warping out, etc. It was a lot more dynamic and to me pretty exhilarating. I loved the ship design/combat in SD1.

Yeah, I think you got it. I haven't played SD1 in a long time, but yep, the on the map real time combat was much better. These new fights are slow and boring.

 

[JohnTheRevelator]

Would you rather play this than MoO2?

Not really. As I already pointed out there are more thing he should have copied. Weapon upgrades/modifications begin the most important aspect imho. More open map (you can park your ships in deep space) is one of things I do like over MoOII. The puzzle like ship design is something I'm not a big fan of, I have yet to see system like that to work well in 4X game. It just doesn't add much other than busywork. Now with more flexibility it could be really cool but that's always the case with systems like this so I won't hold my breath for it to improve with patches.

 

[Marobug]

Well, there's something to be said for safety in imitating an established formula. I guess you just can't win. Do your own thing, people complain. Imitate the existing thing, people complain.

Such is the way of the Codex

 

[Lone Wolf]

Seems pretty good, so far. Actually managed to lose a game on Normal, because I was fighting a three front war (Jesus Christ, should have restarted when I saw that my guys were smack in the middle of the galaxy).

Spent a few dozen turns smashing a few Vulfen fleets and preparing a riposte (needed to build a refueling station for operational range), when the Ryleh declare war. Okay, so I shuttle over my home fleet and shift the 2nd fleet to cover both Earth and Uumshi, my most important colony world. The Ryleh hit Prrssi (or however you spell it), a world of feline aliens I subjugated early on. My tech superiority lets me smash the first fleet they send out, and the others actually retreat in the face of hideous losses (never seen that before in a 4X). So, two front war, not good. But my big wins let me make peace with both powers and get a few dozen turns respite. I restock, but as soon as the peace timer elapses BOOM both declare war again. And both send even bigger fleets. And the space insect race (forgot the name) declare war, too. And a Remnant fleet attacks Prrssi.

To my great surprise, it was actually the Vulfen - those awfully stupid wolf aliens - that did me in by destroying the fleet above Uumshi. Cue sadness.

 

[Norfleet]

How are the missiles? I never met an early game problem I couldn't solve with more missiles. These guys:

are the greatest ship designers in the galaxy. Run fast, shoot missiles!

 

[JudasIscariot]

I think I'll just go and play MoO II. Too many times I start out with one or more empires right next to me even on a 100 system map and they always start declaring war on me and then just steamrolling me with fleets.

I can barely get two colonies before I get into war.