Space Sims/Strategy Games Catch-All

I haven't played enough yet to give the full game a solid recommendation, but Stars In Shadow has pretty robust ship construction. More recently, Distant Worlds 2 is pretty good at that.

Thanks for the info on the SR2 project; I have that game gathering dust in my library but hadn't heard of the modpack so I'll need to give that a look.

In an entirely different vein of spaceship construction I picked up Space Haven a couple of days ago and have been enjoying that quite a bit. I haven't had any really wacky events yet but I'm still working on my first ship.

I'm going to go way back, LtWarhound, and suggest Sid Meier's Starships. Might be a bit high level in the ship design but it is fun.

I got on a similar kick to play something that involved detailed ship design and found Starship Corporation. On paper it should be great. Design starships and use them to complete missions, sell to customers, unlock more design components, repeat.

In practice it's got a terrible UI, an unhelpful tutorial, it crashes often, and it takes 30 seconds to save what's basically a 100x100 cell spreadsheet. So yah, probably avoid this one if your poking around digs that up.

I think the game that inspired wanting detailed ship design for me was Starbase It's an MMO but of the 450 hours I played, I would bet 400 of them were in the ship designer, creating ship designs bolt by bolt, beam by beam, even coding to manipulate mining lasers etc

My masterpiece was a 'tunnel' ship called The Maw of Sarlaac that pushed the maximum boundaries of the ship builder, capable of surrounding the largest asteroids in the game and gobbling them up with lasers and tractor beams.

I still dont know of a single player game that comes close to scratching that itch

Oh God I'd never suggest Starship Corporation. The UI is horrrrrible, especially when it wants such fine tuning.

I'm personally not a fan of ship building but two games I think do it very well, Starcom Nexus and Sunshine Heavy Industries.

qaraq wrote:

In an entirely different vein of spaceship construction I picked up Space Haven a couple of days ago and have been enjoying that quite a bit. I haven't had any really wacky events yet but I'm still working on my first ship.

Yeah it was half price on GOG last week and this week Steam has the same price. Been mulling it over.

Anytime someone compares a game to FTL I have to at least try it. The 100 hours I spent on that was some of my favorite gaming of the early 2010s. About to have 10th anniversary of release in Sept.

Sunshine Heavy Industries is pretty sweet! Its chill and fun and cute.

Steam summer sale is on and just from my wishlist it includes endless space, homeworld remastered, space engineers, Stellaris, star traders: frontiers, astroneer and into the breach.

Anyone play astroneer lately? Is it "done?"

Oh yes, and quite good too.

Mix, I'd lead with Star Traders: Frontiers and Into The Breach. I have not tried Astroneer, it looks done, but those two are guaranteed hits.

Astroneers is great. Lots of fun exploring and making sure you have air, building your base, eventually getting a rocket to explore other planets in the system. Its stylish and very entertaining.

Astroneer is fantastic. About a year ago they added a whole quest system too. Absolutely adored playing through it, twice, with my daughter watching.

Tempted to get Dyson Sphere.
It looks like it touches on a hybrid between RTS and Sim City I have wanted to make/play for 20+ years

Dyson Sphere isnt an RTS at all. It is basically Factorio, if you have any familiarity with that.

If not, you mine stuff, connect the miner to the smelter by conveyor belts, connect the smelter to any of a dozen things you might need the smelted ore for to make more advanced components, connect those assemblers to the other assemblers who use the components to make some more components, repeat. In this one a major goal is to set up a legit dyson sphere around a star, or dozens of stars if you set up a multi-system logistics network.

Flying from planet to planet setting up automated production systems, seeing your original miner expand to a planet-scale factory and receiving deliveries from across the system and even from other star systems is just glorious.

It is awesome if you are into that sort of thing, but it is not at all RTS+Sim City

There are some shots of a planet full of turrets firing at things. Is there no combat at all?

No those are cannons shooting solar probes at a star, they'll maneuver into place and become part of your Dyson Swarm. The developers talk about adding combat at some point but I think it's a bad and distracting idea for this game, and probably why they haven't done a ton with it in the past year, but what's there is a great and complete automation game already so I don't see that as a drawback.

Yeah, the automation sounds like enough for me.
I Love Sim City 2000 but it gets dry when you max out the "tech tree".
This sounds like it scales better and longer...

Sometimes I play Factorio with combat turned off so I can have a more chill experience and just build train networks and fix rail lights. Fun way to play and makes for a very different game.

That's my usual mode of Factorio; I'm just not that interested in fighting the biters, I just want to build a cool machine. They start out as a threat, become a pointless drag on your productivity, and then once you have the firepower to take them out at will they're just a sink for your attention.

Katherine of Sky on youtube has some great Dyson Sphere videos if you want to see the game in play.

qaraq wrote:

Katherine of Sky on youtube has some great Dyson Sphere videos if you want to see the game in play.

All of her videos are great. Love the cat cam. Her community Discord is delightful, too. They play a big Factorio community map.

qaraq wrote:

That's my usual mode of Factorio; I'm just not that interested in fighting the biters, I just want to build a cool machine. They start out as a threat, become a pointless drag on your productivity, and then once you have the firepower to take them out at will they're just a sink for your attention.

Katherine of Sky on youtube has some great Dyson Sphere videos if you want to see the game in play.

I used to be here but realized that peaceful mode means that one whole research tree becomes essentially useless but also has to be research because of dependencies in other trees, so it cannot be ignored.
I tend to set my maps up so that biters are less of a pain in the early game by setting the starting area to 150% (moves biter spawn further away from spawn) and I also tend to turn evolution off. I find this to be a decent way to minimize biters but still make military research somewhat useful. Because I am with you, I would rather build a cool machine than fight waves of enemies. In an ideal world, military research would be completely optional, then I could just do a peaceful map and ignore it completely.

I also hate the enemies in Satisfactory.

Last thing, third or fourth KoS videos - really great!

Sunshine Heavy Industries is just what I wanted in another chill puzzle game. Thanks for suggesting it!

The aliens in Factorio makes you decide how you manage your production. You can go heavy pollution and expect lot of fighting, or use modules to cut down your pollution to suffer attacks less often.

I think a lot about the morality of Factorio when I play it. Think about it from the biter's perspective: an alien falls from the sky and starts poisoning your atmosphere and you have no way to communicate with them, so what options do you really have?

Quintin_Stone wrote:

I think a lot about the morality of Factorio when I play it. Think about it from the biter's perspective: an alien falls from the sky and starts poisoning your atmosphere and you have no way to communicate with them, so what options do you really have?

Also, the exploit all the resources and chop down all the trees, because trees are the real enemy. I try not to think about the game moralistically because it is very bad from that perspective.

Trees are there to be run over with my tank.

I am enjoying Final Upgrade more than I expected, and here's a callout for Robear. Its giving me some Logistical vibes.

You design ships and space stations with the purpose of extracting the local resource, storing it for trade, using it for construction, or refining it into other products. The ships you set up can be automated to serve the trade routes you set up. I suppose it's a bit like x3, x4 etc just nowhere near as heavyweight.

The Logisitical vibes are mostly this sort of sequence:

Mars is at level 1, it produces Iron. It needs Copper to upgrade its resource extraction rate and Iron Ingots to upgrade the colony. Venus provides copper, so set up a mining outpost so you can provide that copper to Mars, set up a quick trade route, assign your space trucks to trading, and watch em go.

Its in early access but has a good amount of content and polish now. There's combat but I created a peaceful sandbox to play in for now while I get to understand the mechanics

Thanks Poly, I'll take a look!

Oh I forgot about Final Upgrade. Excellent suggestion!

Wound up playing Final Upgrade based on the recommendation here. Quite good overall. Different enough from factorio to be interesting. While still having some of the charm. Do wish the ship to ship combat was more interesting. As it stands its bit of a boring slug fest and there's not much to ship designs. Outside of that it's quite good. Also the tutorial and hint system is surprising solid.

Also tried ΔV: Rings of Saturn. That wasn't for me but I respect it for what it is. Super detailed space mining. I'm not actually a fan of sim space flight/combat games so this probable shouldn't have been a surprise for me. Neat though and does make me want something like that but a bit more arcadey.

Veloxi wrote:

Oh God I'd never suggest Starship Corporation. The UI is horrrrrible, especially when it wants such fine tuning.

I'm personally not a fan of ship building but two games I think do it very well, Starcom Nexus and Sunshine Heavy Industries.

Sunshine Heavy Industries is the best