It's pretty ok. The shipbuilding aspect is cool, but you eventually reach max capacity and all your ships look like big death-cubes. The combat is good, but it's what you'll spend 95% of the time doing, and it can get REALLY tedious. Plus, the balance is wonky, and sometimes enemies bug out and spawn with 15.000 health on one or several of their components, out of the usual 1.000-1.500. It can end your run if you don't realize you need to strip them down and leave them for last. The biggest problem I found is that you're forced to always expand your ship, but unless you gimp your firepower by having tons of engines, you're gonna slowly turn into an almost immobile deathball that... uhh... turns slowly. Which is an issue when you're facing off against dozens of ridiculously fast enemy frigates that can destroy parts of your ship in a couple of bursts. If you're investing in front cannons, you're completely fucked as there's no way you're getting them in your front arc before they shred you, and even if you built around turrets you're gonna struggle hard as they outmaneuver almost all turrets. The only way to deal with them is to use lots of missiles, which are probably the best or second best weapons in the game. There's a couple dozen text events, but in a single run you'll probably see all of them, and the planetary exploration ones are so few they will repeat after you do them two or three times, and there's usually only one good choice. Overall, the game is worth playing once, maybe twice if you want to do a completely different build, but it's not a great roguelike and it's rough around some edges as a space-shooter.
Use the fighter bays to your advantage. Front guns are for the big boys. Once you fried most of their engines they're toast. And you definitely can't win without fast lasers turrets which automatically vaporize the quicker buggers. Absolutely right about the climb in difficulty as the game progresses, but that's the learning curve of this game.
I found the fighters and bombers pretty useless even en masse. Just like the "frigates" you get later that are not even good as cannon fodder. Hell, the frigates are even worse than the fighters! Though maybe it was that they just didn't scale well enough against the late game enemies, which is against whom I tested the fighters and bombers. That you are required to spec into turrets is a serious design flaw, and it's gotta be fast turrets too, so no heavy plasma!
Game has flaws at its core. One in particular, one crew member died of old age! But no one was trained all this time to replace her... Today, we train a replacement, and it will take 5 years! Yay! WTF.
That turns out to be a non-issue. I thought having too few remaining members after a jump would be a lose scenario, but it just makes you wait 5 years for every missing officer. And time doesn't matter at all, from what I've seen.
I suppose you could wait another 5+ years in the void waiting for a fully trained repairman to come along to fix just your ship's engine to get home while I trained someone to bring us home today just so I can get home to be with my family. I call this a serious issue of logic. Happy Valentine's though.
The combat is good, but it's what you'll spend 95% of the time doing, and it can get REALLY tedious. Plus, the balance is wonky, and sometimes enemies bug out and spawn with 15.000 health on one or several of their components, out of the usual 1.000-1.500. It can end your run if you don't realize you need to strip them down and leave them for last.
The biggest problem I found is that you're forced to always expand your ship, but unless you gimp your firepower by having tons of engines, you're gonna slowly turn into an almost immobile deathball that... uhh... turns slowly. Which is an issue when you're facing off against dozens of ridiculously fast enemy frigates that can destroy parts of your ship in a couple of bursts. If you're investing in front cannons, you're completely fucked as there's no way you're getting them in your front arc before they shred you, and even if you built around turrets you're gonna struggle hard as they outmaneuver almost all turrets. The only way to deal with them is to use lots of missiles, which are probably the best or second best weapons in the game.
There's a couple dozen text events, but in a single run you'll probably see all of them, and the planetary exploration ones are so few they will repeat after you do them two or three times, and there's usually only one good choice.
Overall, the game is worth playing once, maybe twice if you want to do a completely different build, but it's not a great roguelike and it's rough around some edges as a space-shooter.
Though maybe it was that they just didn't scale well enough against the late game enemies, which is against whom I tested the fighters and bombers.
That you are required to spec into turrets is a serious design flaw, and it's gotta be fast turrets too, so no heavy plasma!
Happy (very belated) Valentine's to you too