7/12/2023 0 Comments Stardrive 2 racial traits mod![]() Alien species communicate with you periodically, and the introductions allow you to question them (as far as they are happy to answer) and negotiate trading and peace terms. Talking of enemies, it's been a fairly peaceful overview of the game so far! But Stardrive has that deceptive effect. Of course this is accompanied by the sounds of battle and the smug feeling when you destroy enemy ships! Zooming out gives a large empire view while zooming in to observe individual skirmishes is as simple as scrolling the mousewheel. The seamless zoom is where the controls excel. All ships can be user controlled using the W,A,S,D keys, an interesting option that I found was a bit pointless outside battling large enemy ships, as click to move options were quicker and could be used whilst paused. ![]() Ship customisation is most important when battling as it allows you to have ships that have firing arcs that take most advantage of every situation and the ability to turn minimising hull damage. I found that at the start of the game the fighters were adequate for defense and basic escort runs and that as ship progression evolved it was fine to use the in-game ships, of which there are plenty. To take full advantage of the opportunities available you firstly have to research technology in the direction you intend to go, for example researching energy weapons opens up trees towards a disintegrator array or quantum torpedoes! Armour, power and physics are all helpful technologies and ship hull research gives the basic building blocks for your fleet. Stardrive has a reasonably large focus on its ship creator and several threads can be found on the forums where folks have customised titan class ships to unbelievable levels. Oh, and ships, glorious, enormous, fully re-speccable ships. As with all complex strategy games balancing the resources and planning your research are the key for successful universe domination. Resource management takes place on a planet by planet basis, all planets can be manually controlled or left to follow an automatic management schedule whilst the empire overview screen allows for a birds eye perspective to be used to control imports/exports and storage and to link quickly to specific planets (avoiding the task of finding them on the map). Resources are handled by - credits used to buy spies and other items - food for your colonists and colony expansion - and production for building ships and on-world buildings. If you have the luck that I have you'll end up surrounded by nearly useless planets that drain your resources and a lack of production requiring long waiting times for constructing useful buildings. ![]() Starting involves exploring the universe to discover nearby systems to colonise, sending colony ships to set up your off world expansions and providing these with the basic supplies to become useful. Fortunately the game speed is controllable using the '+' and '-' keys and the space bar to pause! This is phenomenally useful during combat and periodically overviewing the empire, but less so near the start while waiting for research and production to begin in earnest. I just went with all minor positive traits so that I was able to have a foot-up near the start! So the Retroid race was born and their quest for control of a turbulent galaxy commenced.Īs 100% speed takes 5 seconds per turn it can take a while to get started. It took me a long time to decide what way to inconvenience my human population in order to conquer the galaxy. Selecting traits uses a skill point system which allows you to choose negative buffs in order to obtain more points for specific positive racial traits. Picking race is between human and the seven alien races, all have their own basic traits but your chosen race is fully customisable. The game options are self explanatory, changing the size, abundance and difficulty of the universe as well as the relative speed, I kept the default, normal difficulty, medium size with a normal amount of solar systems along with having the full seven opponents. Or well, it did an hour or so later, after much video watching and reading in the tutorial section! Stardrive doesn't have the same active tutorials as say Sins of a Solar Empire but instead has a series of short videos giving an overview of the game, how to start and so on, coupled with rather a lot of reading! Which isn't actually a problem as it just made me more curious as to how the gameplay would really be, and the lessons that I picked up were invaluable! It's hard to say whether Stardrive would have benefited from a guided in-game tutorial over the current method, I'm going to say no as after reading the help on offer I felt more than able to begin a proper game, diving in at the deep end!īeginning a game of Stardrive has more customisation options than a luxury car salesroom, and is only the start of levels of detail perhaps unseen since Galactic Civilizations 2.
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