I saw this and it (Solar Expanse) looked interesting, so after several days of not finding a torrent for it I bought it. It has a lot going for it but it has some pretty serious issues.>The moon has metal deposits, which makes sense as regolith has been tested and is up to 15% iron in places>they remove metal deposits on the moon>when there is backlash, they add a 5kt (5000 ton) deposit backSo they aren't going for realism here obviously, which sucks. The game is also very much unfinished, it isn't one of those games where they finish 95% of the base game and just add content releases, some major features don't exist (interstellar travel) or exist but are very unfinished (more advanced habitats are wildly unbalanced, you can only build underground habitats on mercury I believe because the body has to have a lot of radiation to enable their construction despite IRL underground habitats being a common feature of planned lunar and mars constructions).They also take quite a long time to fix bugs. There is an extremely important early game spaceship type called Stratos that as far as I know is the only spaceship capable of going from the surface to the orbit of non-earth bodies arbitrarily. Pretty much every other ship has to have cargo ferried from orbit to surface and vice versa so it is how you take stuff off other bodies to transport them elsewhere prior to having the tech and population to make more efficient lifting solutions. The big use of this is to produce fuel on the moon so that you don't have to lift fuel from earth to fuel your spacecraft. The problem is that if you order a stratos to load fuel and go from the lunar surface to orbit it will consume zero fuel in doing so, but the fuel will be deleted too. This has the dual issue of lifting non-fuel resources completely free, decreasing difficulty, as well as making the largest and most obvious use of the spacecraft unusable. This bug has been acknowledged by the devs for over a month.
The UI is a mixed bag, when planning a mission you can still open panels for orbital bodies and even the construction menu, meaning you don't have to cancel the mission planning to go check a value you need to know to determine how many resources you need like most games do.On the other hand I counted and sending 100 people from earth's surface to mars' took 48 clicks with pre-placed spaceships and fuel in LEO to ferry them. Cyclic missions leave a lot to be desired and AFAIK there is no way to for example only export excess resources, so a colony that produces carbon can't have its own stock to make food and only export when it has a cargo load + X.Balance of funding is completely fucked, the only passive income is simply a flat amount of money per colonist on non-earth bodies. Missions, which often require you to research redundant technologies (e.g. if you go nuclear spacecraft several missions require ion drives) but will pay out years of upkeep worth. Then the AI factions will request you sell them things and one spacecraft loaded with fuel will net you 100+ years of upkeep worth.Anyways it has a lot going for it, orbital transfers are pretty realistic and it reminds me of a somewhat improved Terra Invicta space layer without the combat. I would recommend no one buy it in this early state unless you're like me and the concept alone sells you. Check again in 6 months and see if anything fundamental has been fixed. I did notice there was a nexus for it already with 10 mods at the time, many of which substantially improved the UI. Anyways, are there any other newtonian space strategy games?
Oh also it has a demo and in hindsight I could have determined all of these problems from the demo. I just irrationally dislike demos when the "full" game is available.
>>2413945>Anyways, are there any other newtonian space strategy games?children of a dead earthKSP with a shit ton of modsi can't think of anything else
>>2413997>KSP with a shit ton of modsWhich? KSP2 promising colony mechanics got me really excited, shame it was a scam.
It sucks
yeah i saw this and it looked like the kind of early access release that would take another 5 years to reach 1.0
>>2413945I feel that the fuel transportation physics are borked, at least according to the UI transporting fuel beyond the minimum required for the transfer is free.
>>2414394Seems to work to me, although it only shows you that in this tooltip as far as I can tell.The UI really has a huge list of problems.
This game is crack, i dig it a lot
>>2414843I imagine I'll play the fuck out of it when the statos isn't bugged to fuck
>>2414886It's not bugged, assuming you mean Stratos
>>2415041Why then do the devs say it's bugged?
Post screenshots NIGGER
>>2415118Here is a screenshot of the text file I made to count how many clicks it took to send 200 guys to mars from the surface of earth
>>2415041It's always been bugged, for months before EA release. Transfers to orbit outside of Earth using Stratos cost no dV, its an exploit. Issue is, you kinda have to use it, because the game balancing SUCKS DICK, on top of all the UI issues that will never ever be fixed or improved, because those are the same devs that made Infection Free Zone, and that is also a piece of shit.I'd just skip it entirely at this point, whatever fantasy there is in terraforming Mars and Venus just isn't worth the aggro of setting up logistics networks in a game where you have no fucking logic triggers for missions, the automation you do have doesn't work more than half the time, setting ANYTHING up takes a hundred clicks a pop, and the UI makes your fucking eyes bleed with the strain of picking out that one solar sail fleet on that one particular route out of a hundred others on a drop down menu WITH NO FUCKING INTERACTIONSThe game SUCKS, the devs are RETARDED, and it won't get better, end of
Apparently there are modding tools considering there are non trivial UI mods
>>2416633Those mods are vibecoded and absolutely chock-full of bugs.
>>2416637>absolutely chock-full of bugsYou tried them?
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1116050/Starminer/More EA indie slop is out. This is a physics-based space miner that arrived to Early Access a few days ago. Already 850+ reviews, many of which say that it is full of bugs but somewhat fun.
>>2417839it reminds me of Celestial Command (another indie space miner that was abandoned in EA)
Allegedly they fixed the stratos
