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PaperclipPerfector
11hr ago
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Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Notes -
Video game thread.
Got sucked into a week-long Space Haven rabbit hole - a spaceship survival / colony sim game that had been in early access forever and is now out. I'm sure there are dozens like it. You start with 3-4 crew, build a ship, try not to die .. profit? Comes with a moderate depth of systems + some "The Sims" elements, like the crew forming friendships/relationships, and having personality traits. e.g. one of mine has "antisocial", which gives a passive -5 mood condition "did something I dislike" every time another crew member tries to socialize with her, which is often on a tiny cramped ship, especially when another has the "comedian" background and "charming" trait.
Anyway, turns out surviving in space is really hard: too much work to be done, not enough hands to do it. My tiny crew of 3 was living hand to mouth with almost no time to do anything beyond basic needs. After a month of this, the shiny "enslavement facility" upgrade in the tech tree was looking real tempting. Fine. I guess we're slavers now.
Using the element of surprise, we picked a neutral faction, the galactic military, bribed them with the last of our money and nearly the last of our fuel until they were friendly enough to let us board their prison ship. The initial plan was to steal some prisoners, but it turns out you can use drugs on allied NPCs without turning them hostile. Probably an oversight. We come back with a load of sedatives, drug all the guards, pick them up one by one, and shuttle them back to our ship, locking each in a separate room to be dealt with later so that we can deal with each 3v1 when they wake up.
Once we've abducted as many as we can fit, we spool up the hyperdrives and jump systems. The game informs me this is "kidnapping" and will turn the military hostile. No problem. Expected. I locked them all in separate rooms for that reason. Unexpected: for some reason jumping systems resets everything, meaning the guards all wake up and, crucially, the doors on the ship all unlock, letting them group up. What follows is a chaotic and destructive ~30v3 fighting retreat which leaves our injured crew locked (manually) on the bridge, and 23 surviving angry guards on the other side of the door. To solve this problem, we open the airlock vents, causing a massive amount of damage to the interior of the ship, but dropping O2 low enough that the guards pass out. We quickly close the airlocks, don spacesuits, take the guards prisoner and put the slave collars on.
That's the start of our problems. We now have 23 nearly-dead slaves, no money, little fuel, on a ship with most of its critical systems broken. We need to, in rough order of priority: repair/build more oxygen generators to support that many people, find a source of energy cells (each slave collar runs on a specific type of battery that needs to be crafted with electronics + power), heal the slaves and make sure they rest enough so that they don't die, expand the ship and get a farming operation running so that we don't run out of food given the expanded headcount, and source raw materials to support all that - this, in an already very resource-starved survival game, and having just made enemies of a major well-armed faction.
The adventures that follow are pure emergent gameplay, riding the tiger of our slave enterprise, evading the space cops, and trying to turn enough of a profit to keep it all together. Would recommend if you have time to burn and like this sort of thing.
This almost sounds like old school Oregon Trail, but in space. I love classic adventurism in video games but it seems like they’ve just gotten so damn complex these days, and Alpha Centauri was complicated enough decades ago. In a way your initial description also somewhat reminded me of the movie Pitch Black (which is one of my favorite movies). Perhaps I’ll take a look.
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I've had Space Haven on my wishlist for a while, since I almost never get Early Access games. Now that it's out I'll have to try it out sometime.
I've been playing a couple games on and off, most notably I've stuck with Lobotomy Corporation. It's I've warmed up to it a bit since my frustration last week. It helps that I have a much better idea of the mechanics and strategies after looking up some mostly non-spoilery guides. Importantly, after you complete enough tasks and finish the requirements to complete a day, you can still keep doing stuff to grind out your people's stats. Early on I had dismissed this as a gimmick/exploit, but it turns out that this is super important and necessary if you want to avoid being under-leveled long term, as the game's difficulty ramps up much faster than you will if you're just filling the quota. After resetting my run and doing a whole bunch of grinding on early levels I'm in much better shape. And for the most part it avoids being an exploit because as the day goes on the crises that occur become worse, and also you risk wasting more of your time if some stupid RNG kills your fancy people and forces you to restart.
I'm still kind of annoyed at the volatility. Having your people level long term seems to require that you have 0 or almost 0 deaths each day so you aren't constantly replacing them with low level noobs. And the game doesn't warn you if someone is about to die, only after they're already dead. So I can be like 5 minutes into a day then whoops, you made one mistake or just had bad rng and one of your guys is dead, guess you're restarting the level! And then 6 minutes into trying again it happens again and you have to restart again. There's a certain type of crisis that happens which randomly rolls one of several boss monsters to face, and one of them just insta-kills all of your people who are sitting in their home base. You know when that crisis level is going to occur ahead of time, but not which boss, so prior to it occurring you have to select and move all of your people out of each base, just in case that boss gets rolled. It's annoying and tedious, and was super annoying when it killed me several times before I knew that was a thing you had to do AND had to do prior to it even showing up since there's not enough time to react once it triggers.
But it's fine. I like the core gameplay loop of sending the right people to do the right tasks, and without nasty threats the game wouldn't have a challenge. I just kind of wish it was more strategic maneuvering and resource managing type of threats rather than gimmicky insta-kill type things that force you to restart with no warning.
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