Game link: fractalsoftworks.com/preorder/ Captain Trek's Guide to the Modiverse: fractalsoftworks.com/forum/in... Starsector mod index: fractalsoftworks.com/forum/in... patreon: / cassius_scrungoman
I bought this game around...10 years ago now, when it was still Starfarer. I spent 15 dollar on the key and I honestly am starting to feel sorry for the devs because I'm probably approaching 3000 hours of game time and haven't given them money since. There's really no argument whether or not this game is worth a purchase.
"I have little to complain about the AI, it just works" Just make your flagship make it's own choices and realise that half the time AI outshines our lord and saviour... ourselves.
Hell fucking no. The ai is absolute garbage. They never shunt flux when safe, play waaaaay too passively when when they have overwhelming numbers, bodyblock each other on a consistant basis (causing myself and each other to die). If they dont have more flux vent rate than the flux build up rate of their weapons they will never fire all their weapons no matter what. I feel like a professional linebacker running circles around special needs 12 year olds trying to play a game of football whenever I pilot a ship. Im on cycle 229 of an ultra modded 0.9b(sseth's freebie version) that Im still trying to win before I move onto the new version. I hope and pray the new AI is better.
Oh, except for phase ships and ships with no shields. They suddenly become competant then. I've been trying to find a viable way to win against deathstacks of 60+ capitals without going full laser pointer paragon fleet and suprisingly low tech with shield bypass and reckless officers works.
@Bunny Hoppin 1) AI without officers is intentionally dumb 2) AI default mode is a bit passive - get automated commands or other mod and set it to aggressive 3) try to use tempest swarm with heavy blasters and see it wreck most of fleets. 3b) for anything refusing to die this way use drover spam 4) learn the way AI works - in order for AI to shine your shops need to fit specific constraints Note: to beat the shit out of remnant ordos with more than 1 Radiant you may need to lose some ships to actually win, the same applies when fighting high tech battlestation.
The ship AI can be quite dumb at times yeah, which is why you have to use the commands you can give them, and learn how they react to those commands. For instance, the Eliminate command can be placed on several enemies at once, while also selecting your ships to target an enemy specifically with the Eliminate command; however, if your ships are nearby several Eliminate targets, they will engage with the closest ones first. Even if you command said ships to prioritize Eliminate some specific target farther away, they'll still be aggressive towards the closest enemies while very very slowly disengaging in order to go fight that other enemy you prioritized. If you don't want this to happen, override the Eliminate command with the Engage command, the Avoid command (which will get your ships moving real quick), or no command at all. Remember, command points spent opens a command window, during which any commands issued are free, so micromanage as best as you can during that period. If your ships are getting bodyblocked, then tell some of them to rotate somewhere else by setting a waypoint or a rally command. And yes, when you're just starting out, learning the combat, even AI ships without officers are going to be more competent than you. Remember to engage with the Refit screen, you can customize your flagship to play more to your strengths as a limited real life being rather than to the strengths of an AI ship that can do more inputs at once than you. But also remember that you can pause the battle to change autofire and such, and to take in the current state of the battle without pressure.
Nothing like the feeling of blowing up trading caravans full of goods so you can cause a shortage on another sector so you can peddle industrial quantities of CRAB at their black market for maxiumum profit
ehh kinda, it's simplified through how they do units and shipping and pops. Blowing up a shipment only effects it's home colony and the colony it was shipping to (sometimes also it's home planet). This is understandable though since you're playing the game locally and not on a 164gb RAM 20 core server, and it's already pushing the limits (some of the blame falls on java)
Starsector is so good, and it’s criminally underrated. It also gave me the best first run ever, where I left the tutorial, and immediately got a Conquest. Albeit with like 4 D-mods, but still. Conquest right off the bat. It was wonderful.
The Apollyon class is the most fun I ever had in Starsector. VIC surprised me, how well balanced the ships are, generally speaking, taking into consideration vanilla content.
I'd say play vanilla first just to know how everything works. New players tend to get murdered by Nexerelin's invasions and the like. Also invasion fleets... tend to be quite a chonker to get through, so knowing how to fight is a must imo.
@@avanitia I started with nexerelin I joined the parean faction or however u spell it, and ended up winning by conquest i have no clue what happened but i guess I'm a natural 😎 Iv been playing on to learn a little more though, tbh though it doesnt seem all that difficult so far other than being attacked by fleets double my power, it has been pretty easy to learn
I first heard of starsector two days ago. How the fucking fuck in the fucking world did I miss this gem, being a long time Mount and Blade / Eve online / Kenshi / Battle brother gamer ? Seriously, all these youtube algorythms could have suggested me content on this game before, I had to randomly come accross a reddit comment to find out about it. Here goes my next 1000 hours of gaming I guess
Any time would have been too late, I have been playing it for years, but I had the same reaction when I did find it. I bet those who found years before me also had the same sentiment. It also has a second punchline, mod content, its massive both in terms of quantity and quality, the foundation was brilliant enough to inspire for some of the best mods I have ever experienced in gaming. Cheers!
Hey, I made the CoH2 Portrait Pack mod for this game! I'm always looking for more Starsector content on RU-vid, the combat is very deep and I'm never quite sure what's optimal, so this was very nice to watch, thank you.
The refit screen is both my heaven and bane. I get too distracted by it but it's just so fun creating a unique ship to you. It's not very good but seeing a speed rating over 250+ on a cruiser is just satisfying.
@@randombillyn i doubt bc i like fragmentation dmg more than the otherd so i have do balance the dmg to break the shields quickly and ripp off the armor
@@francogaray2649 well, devastator cannons still have a high dps, and their high flux efficiency makes them a good weapon, especially for brawlers. It'll take sometimes, but it will shred basically anything. It's main problem is its lack of damage at long range. I do especially like it against pirates, and this kind of factions
i misunderstood the title, i thought this was going to teach me how to git gud but it was just a discussion on how great the game is. no arguments its fucking great
Not sure how long you've been at this whole RU-vid thing, but your delivery cadence and video transition pace are spot on. Well done. If you build it, the subs will come.
Happy to see more CCs get into making videos. I've ben playing this game since early 2014 and it has been a personal favorite of mine since. Best of luck with whatever faction you choose. And give the Star Federation ships a try. FTL was another personal favorite of mine from the back then and that mod beat the Imperium out for my favorite faction.
oh I remember that mod guide from Trek when he first put it together. I'd just joined and my god it was so useful. As a new player I was a bit overwhelmed by all the mods so having someone make such a great list really helped a lot.
At 4:14 is that Beaglerush?? Awesome video, I love this game beyond words, it's so nice to came back and play it every year or so, it's amazing how the quality has been consistently top notch all the way back since it was just a battle simulator.
Haven't dared to delve into mods (yet). My personal favorite ship is a Fury with two phase lances and a pod of sabots (anti-shield). Very good against small to medium ships, especially pirates and luddic path ships, as well as the drones that sometimes protect the survey probs and ships. Really feels good to fly around and pick of vessels here and there.
I like this. I like you. More Starsector content please. Just started playing, I love it! I have no idea what I'm doing though, perhaps that's part of the fun.
None of us knew what we were doing on our first few playthroughs, it's ok. Honestly, some of the best stories in this game come from early playthroughs and a lack of experience.
If you like DME and Volkov, Cassius, you really owe it to yourself to check out ScalarTech. God that's a fun little faction. Low Tech Armada is also great for just adding more pirate insanity that shouldn't even fly to the game.
Diable Avionics for LIFE! Fuckin love carriers and strike craft, and from when I went looking for mods that emphasized carriers and strike craft, DA seemed to be the one that was the best.
Saw this game first when Sseth made a video on it. Immediately got it to play the Doom-class Phase Cruiser. Never has blowing people up been so satisfying.
Oh! And if you like DME at all, you should check out Harmful Mechanic's new faction mod, Magellan Protectorate! It's all chunky armor boys, all the time, with a lot of unique hit-effect weapons, and HM apparently has a *lot* of additional content planned for it. Something to look forward to!
Been playing games since I was a kid in the mid 80's, and I can 1000% confirm that this is one of the best games ever made. It is nothing less than criminal that it is so unheard of, or not on a major platform (Steam!?). If I was a millionaire or rich (millions are pennies these days it seems), I would make sure the devs never had to work again.... On anything else......
I purchased this game right about the time it first came out, when the campaign was but a distant dream and there was no concept of building your own colony. It was just a basic 2D combat simulator, but it already had a lot of the addictive gameplay piece you covered in this video. I often talk to my wife about game design, and this game has great game design. Now, what I would like to ask you is, since you have great taste in games, are there similar games out there you would recommend? I got a great deal of enjoyment from playing Mindustry, I enjoyed Factorio, and of course I love the X series (X4 the latest one I've played) despite their flaws. What are your favorite closely / distantly related games to StarSector that you would recommend, good sir?
This is sort of a game you keep returning to. Great replayability, usually fueled by reading or watching some sci-fi stuff, there is a burning desire to start a new Starsector campaign. It's good already, but it keeps getting better with yearly updates and new mods
I loved the giant ship that looked like a tooth from The Kingdom of Terra, I forget its name but somethin about setting off a explosion behind your own ship to shoot forward at breakneck ramming speeds was just so enjoyable to me.
I'm terrible at combat in Starsector, but what makes the game so special is that I've put more than a hundred (extremely enjoyable) hours into it playing as a smuggler and explorer. It's really a game you can play however you like.
The AI in Starsector is truly amazing, and not just for enemies but your own ships as well. Its hard to describe how awesome it is to be able to send a squadron of frigates against an enemy flank, and think to youself "Yeah they got it, I can focus my attention elsewhere"
It’s good because it’s a passion project, not the mass produced AAA cash cows we’ve seen the last decade latching onto the flavour of the month theme, roguelike, zombie, survival, battle Royale etc.
yeah i like using ouroboros from kingdom of terra too, but only at late game phase, without exploit expansion hangar bug it already great ship(i use 10 segmen as hangar and the rest as weapon chamber), but when exploit that bug and suitable missile and weapon it become to OP( can solo, Remanant starbase plus 3 Full size Remanant fleet, well of course a long battle)
didn't even touch on the absolute ridiculousness of the vanilla super ship, the Ziggurat. That thing is so absurdly fun to fly and it honestly can't even be properly explained just how obscenely overpowered it is once you get a feel for it. It can solo the doritos, can solo a star fortress, can solo any vengeance fleet (from nexerelin), can solo several cathedral-class ships on its own, can solo the Anargaia (massive ship acting as a main hub for a faction from the legacy of arkgnesis mod) and able to beat a remnant nexus supported by 2 ordos, each with a couple radiants and/or solars. I'm almost fully certain, that there is no other ship, even when looking through mods, that is more powerful than Ziggy.
Wasn't a mod, I started that run as Blade Breakers which also gives you a bunch of their blueprints and a Sparrowhawk. Lots of clips were also from their singleplayer missions. Also, good news, you can get them just by modifying ship_data.csv in mods\Dassault-Mikoyan Engineering\data\hulls, and removing all of the "UNBOARDABLE" tags from their ships.
I knew that for most blade breaker assets, however I saw you using the battleship which is unobtainable under normal circumstances...if it's a mission though. That a tag inside for all hull files right?
@@tylarkit4439 oh, that! I was using it in a simulation through the test all ships mission. and, yep, every single modded (and not modded) ship can be changed in this way by editing their ship_data.csv file.
Should have thrown in HMI just to show the other end of the spectrum from VIC and DA. Sure wacky abilities and cool guns are neat, but what if we strap a small planets GDP of engines onto this low tec starfortress and go hunting pirates?
I still have starsector on my laptop and an old flashdrive. I haven't played it since A year pre-covid. I got upsetti with the combat system. Because WASD was too much for me. Maybe I'll give it another shot.
@@cassius_scrungoman I will say that review is more for "look how cool that game is, play it" rather than for lore or gameplay mechanics (it says transverse jump is illegal while it is not, it just doesn't enable your transponder when jumping into the system among few other things; tl;dr - skill issue)
I am glad that this game is finally getting the recognition it deserves. I got it when it was still called Starfarer, and had seen many feature changes since then, from the shift of crew experience to the addition of officers and colonies. I know that Sseth covered it, and he is right that its a 10/10 with the community mods making it better/worse/!BETTER!
There is something even better: Its DRM free, once you own a key. You own it. As in, no ammount of further installs is gonna stop you or something like that.
Gonna recommend the unsc mod cause the unsc ships are a tad unhinged. You only need about 5 frigates and one cruiser to body a high tech station in only a minute thanks to the mac cannons that come internal on the ships
>ALLIED SHIPS COME IN FRONT TO SHIELD THEN WHY DO MY FRIGATES DO THE EXACT FUCKING OPPOSITE OF THAT AND JUST RETREAT PASSIVE AGGRESIVELY WITH MY HAMMERHEAD, LEAVING IT TO DIE AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Ships behaviour is determined by many different things, such as ship types, weapons, player orders and tactics and officer personality Bigger ships (hammerhead) is supposed to defend smaller ships (the frigates) while they support and distract the target
I love how absolutely everyone who plays this game doesn't spoil *[REDACTED]* because they're such a good *[REDACTED]* that you *[REDACTED]* after you think your *[REDACTED]* *[REDACTED]*
