![]() Tolerance effectively acts as a cap on how many treaties you can make with a given race at a given time. He’s also gone a long way toward solving a nagging issue in a lot of 4x and grand strategy titles by introducing a diplomatic Tolerance mechanic. DiCicco has made an effort to be as transparent as possible about what the evil space squid cultists think of you, and why. The diplomacy system has also been overhauled since the original StarDrive, and I have to say, the new negotiating mechanics are pretty brilliant. Especially if all of the planets in your colonization range are full of nothing but asteroids. ![]() The right combination of negative traits can leave your economy, and thus your empire, non-solvent on turn one, which is a nearly impossible hole to crawl out of. In an effort to build a race of wolf people who just like to fight and not much else, I discovered that it’s fully possible to design an essentially non-viable race. But I mention the negatives first as I ran into an issue regarding them. Okay, some of them are actually positive. Like in the original, StarDrive 2 lets you pick from a roster of pre-made races, or create your own by selecting from traits like Dumb, Lazy Workers, and Corrupt. Vessels are still fully-customizable with a shipload of different modules, and new to this iteration, all ships have multiple zones (weapons, propulsion, command) that can be damaged and destroyed independently. The typical skirmish involves using point defense ships to stop enemy long-range missiles in their tracks, while trying to get your own warheads to land and flanking with fighters and more agile frigates on targets of opportunity. Two fleets meet on the galaxy map, and are placed into a (so far featureless) pocket of space to duke it out. Space battles now take place in an instanced, real-time environment, not unlike in the Total War series. I feel more like I’m playing Civilization V in space than a really over-complicated version of Sins of a Solar Empire. DiCicco says this has allowed him to build a “deeper strategic experience.” At least so far, it seems to do its job well. Income and events tick on turn ends, instead of being constantly in flux. Movement ranges are in turns rather than time. Holding the spacebar can spam multiple turns in a row, creating a sort of facsimile of the smooth passage of time in the original. ![]() The biggest moment-to-moment change in how you manage your interstellar empire is that the game has switched from real-time with pause to turn-based. But especially for what is (from a design standpoint) still a one-man show, I’m pretty impressed. And there are still systems that don’t quite mesh together as well as I’d like. ![]() It has a lot of moving parts, many of which I don’t fully understand the inner workings of yet. It’s sleeker and more stable, running on Unity as opposed to the old Microsoft XNA of the original. I'm not a player that usually earns the "Godlike-difficulty" achievements, but they still serve my interests, if only to be able to tell if the person writing a strategy guide has a clue what they're talking about, or if the person claiming to have done such-and-such incredibly difficult thing on the forums is likely to be worth taking seriously, and so on.StarDrive 2, for which DiCicco is still the sole developer, reminds me more of The Citadel from Mass Effect. I'm not necessarily advocating the Europa Universalis "Ironman-only" model of achievements, but please consider making at least a few of any new ones you add with DLC require playing on a certain difficulty level. I don't want a Herculean challenge, but even for Easy, this is ridiculously trivial.Īlso, why put out a strategy game, take the time to make Achievements part of it, and then make them doable on easy mode? I feel like that trivializes them, making them almost meaningless, less valuable to the player, and basically a waste of dev time. Given that I'm in the middle of my first game, started it on Easy (which is so easy a three-month-old kitten could beat this game on that setting) and haven't read much of the guides or (incredibly sparse) wiki yet, I'm hoping that this feature exists in Normal. I would expect on Easy that I'd need to garrison the planet for at least a couple turns, for Normal, no less than five turns, and for any harder difficulty, 7-15 turns. I feel like this makes the game a bit too easy in the conquest department and trivializes strategic planning just a mite. It's a little ridiculous that, even on Easy, I can steamroll a planet and not need to garrison troops for even just a couple turns.
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