The Starwraith series has some new entries, Arvoch Conflict for purely combat oriented space simming and Evochron Renegades as, apparently a successor to Riftwars, as a general combat/trading/exploration sim.
Side note: Be careful of what you write on their forums, as while they're not as ban happy as Derek Smart (legitimate in his case as he was cyberstalked for years) is with his BC/UC series, they are even more insular and will misconstrue any non-asskissing comments as insulting some how.
Anyways the Starwraith games are nice int hat their system requirements are significantly lower than other "current gen" gen space sims, have a MUCH lower learning curve as a result of reduced feature set, which means that you can go into a game and get done in 10-30m what would entail merely setting up to get something done in other sims.
The graphics remain fairly decent, although they are highly repetitive, and combat falls in between the BC/UC series and the X series, being better than X's while not as good as the BC/UC series. Trading, again falls in between the X and BC/UC series, not being nearly as rich as the X experience, while offering more options as compared to the BC/UC series. As far as ship options and types, both X and BC/UC severely exceed the Starwriath games in terms of options in the number of ships availabel (both X and BC/UC), and the number of ships available/ownable by the player in a game, although X severely trumps BC/UC in this respect as well.
The Starwraith games, specifically, sport MP capability now, although good luck in finding more than 2 players on any server at any given time, not to mention the relative ship capabilities available to you. i.e. n00bs you WILL need to make $$ first to afford a capable ship before realistically playing against other players. This is a nice option, entirely provided for the Dark BASIC application development environment that this series has been developed in.
Bottom line: It's a good game for what it is, even if the developer and fanboys seem to think that it some how can compete with the big boys offering quick access to game play and results.
NOTE: I'll re-iterate here, while they'r e not as ban happy as DS, they are so insular that anything that is NOT asskissing or giving free ideas for gameplay improvements is immediately construed as flame and you WILL immediately be subjected to "counter"-flaming. To their credit they're not banhappy, nor do they (as of now) delete threads in question. Highly unprofessional? Yes. Understandable? No, not AFAIK in this case, so I suggest looking elsewhere for a more friendly environment in which to obtain your space-sim fix.
(The NOTE section refers entirely to my own personal feeling about this "company" and their response to posts. I'll update with further information about the game itself (Evochron Renegades) once I put more time into it, which IS going to wait until I've picked up either a more capable netbook or a full form factor notebook as that is the platform that I purchased this game to run on with all of the above limitations wrt features/system resource requirements/"fun" (although my fun factor has been significantly reduced by the childish responses of the developer and his fanboys on the official site). [EDIT2] Fuck reviewing this fanboy shit, it's a shit ripoff of Elite, and mostly akin to FFE with somewhat updated grafix, well that is updated if you're a real developer otherwise its just shit, so IMO stick with the OpenGL (glffe) versio of Frontier First Encounters rather than shit from Starwraith, as they certainly are ethereal about what makes their game better and are like rabid dogs if they scent ANY sort of "negative" commentary... [/EDIT2=FOAD vice]
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Oh, and here's the link to the thread mentioned above
http://www.starwraith.com/forum/viewthread.php?tid=3567
Let me know if the link dies, as I archived a copy...
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