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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.
The first story mission has one big Babylon 5 reference, your fighter is basically a Starfury, and the entire art-style reminds of me of old-school X-Com. 10/10 game, will continue playing. I just wish that you could shift perspective in the overhead view and trying to design any starship that isn't a giant flying brick is an exercise in creativity and tetris-style arrangement.
In that theme, I'm honestly surprised you wasted the time going for slave collars and didn't work toward blitzing into Robots. If anything, that's one gripe I have about the game - to really get everything up and running, you need a minimal crew of around 8 to 10 crewmembers to manage a single ship, and 4 of those are going to be dedicated toward scavenging derelicts. Granted, if you go robotic, you then run into the issue of keeping them supplied with power. So...
I mentioned X-Com earlier, and if there's any complaint I can make, it's that they didn't go all-in on the combat side of things and make it even more like X-Com, as being able to sling around det-packs at enemies and setting everything on fire would make for far more engaging combat.
As I discovered, you also can't count on the in-game AI being sessile, either. It's quite the experience to be prepping to explore a derilict, only to have another ship jump in and promptly head over to steal your prize. Granted, this CAN backfire...
I'm not sure where the mod scene with this game is going to go, but if it takes off akin to Rimworld, there's a monstrous amount of stuff we'll probably end up seeing.
I went for slaves over robots because they can do farming/industry/mining. The bots are useful for specific, narrow tasks. It's worth having some salvage bots to scrap derelicts and do simple logistics. The combat bots are hilariously overpowered killing machines, and I think optimal combat strategy might be to have a full ship of them, just point the army at what you want to die, and don't even send any crew.
Truthfully, I found slaves to probably not be worth it when factoring in the food and energy costs (demands ongoing resource intake), and I should have put a bullet in most of my captives and cut losses, but at that point, running a successful slave operation was kind of its own goal, and after sacrificing everything to get those slaves in the first place, it felt right.
for sure, the combat is a bit shallow at the moment, and I'm very interested to see where modding takes it.
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