The war-happy industrialists mentioned earlier wanted a jolly war with the Chukk. Unfortunately, they were also an unrelated cog in that game’s downfall. The Chukk are malicious, fecund, polluters – but they signed a trade agreement and taught my Draylok people how to be better at farming, so they’re alright by me. As already indicated, they’re the same as in Star Drive (right down to returning art work,) with the addition of the carapace-sporting insectoids, the Chukk. That means I’m not going to be reporting any late-game stuff in this preview, but it has given me a chance to mess around with several of the Star Drive 2 races. In 4x games, I have a tendency to re-start campaigns when it looks like everything is either stagnating or actively sliding towards collapse. I think that’s a little informal for a diplomatic proposal and that you should stop enslaving owls, you monster. The only way to scoop them back up is to talk to a bunch of other outer space weirdos and hope they understand the concept of a fair tech-trade. Research in StarDrive 2 is a fragile thing, because once you’ve selected something to learn, all the other items in that tier crumble away into memory dust. This department will be pumping out all of your agricultural, military and socio-cultural improvements even if you lack the incredible leadership foresight necessary to put an elephantine hero in charge of all scientific affairs. Your new galactic empire can be given a helping hand with automated freighter shipments (assuming you’ve built some freighters – which you absolutely should,) and will hopefully be backed up by a robust science sector. Your work force won’t enjoy the irradiated soil and crushing gravitational penalties, but that ancient sprocket might make it all worthwhile. Planets (and habitable asteroid belts) come in all manner of shapes and abundance, along with occasional tantalising bonuses like mysterious mines or weird objects. In StarDrive 2, as with most 4x space games, scouting and colonising some resource-rich worlds is the way to generate all things of value. Or at least an economy that’s imploding at a tastefully slow rate. Of course before you can build any of that stuff, you’ll need a functioning economy. If, for example, you’ve created a bunch of frigates with large amounts of frontal armour but little protection on the sides, you’ll have to use other ships to hug the flanks like little protective blankets. In combat, vessels take damage to their outer components first (which, depending what’s housed there, can affect their functionality,) followed by the more vital inner workings (power reactors and the like.) Once the center has taken too much punishment, the ship explodes. Ship construction in StarDrive 2 can direct, or at least supplement, your tactics in the main battle sequences. I appreciate the freedom to customise, but replacing every single piece of armour by hand can still get pretty tiresome. ![]() For those who’d rather not spend hours playing ship inventory Tetris, preset designs are available. To avoid ending up with delightfully curated space brick and breaking your poor naval commander’s heart, minimum levels of power, ammunition and thrust have to be adhered to. Beginning with basic grid-divided hull shape, it’s possible for players to pick and choose from any researched technology and design all manner of space variants. In-depth ship design returns from the original StarDrive and is just as exhaustive/exhausting (delete as applicable) as before. These ponderous capital vessels can get swifter with technological improvements, but rapidity in battle is provided by fighter supports (launched from the bigger hulls) and corvette-sized units. Just like galleons of old, you can toggle the firing mechanism on all ships to deliver broadsides rather than forward aiming. If fleets meet in space, the game cuts away to a separate battlefield where the ships clash in the manner of a real-time strategy title.ĭespite being set in a sci-fi universe, aspects of these conflicts resemble the ship battles from the more recent Total War games (better than Rome 2 though, in case you’re worried.) Larger vessels are the equivalent of a gigantic metal space-vault full of lasers, and turn about as swiftly too. In StarDrive 2, the game is effectively on auto-pause and only starts moving along in real time whenever you move the ‘turns’ forward by pressing (or holding down) the appropriately named Space bar. Ships and fleets out in the great strategic map of space would do battle if their paths crossed. The first StarDrive had a real-time universe, in which time ticked around constantly unless you stepped in to make use of the pause button. When presented with a scepter-wielding science elephant, I am going to hire him every single time.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |