SPAZ - Space Pirates and Zombies (SPAZ2 EA on Steam!)

I'm finding the combat really janky and hard to follow.

Hmm... by janky, do you mean choppy? It should be smooth as glass. If it's not, I think there's a DirectX Compability Mode switch on the launcher you could try.

edit: also remember you can zoom out with your mousewheel, so you can see more of the battlefield. It zooms in fairly close by default, and I preferred it much farther out.

it does feel like they toned down the engine speeds a little more from beta.

jam3 wrote:

it does feel like they toned down the engine speeds a little more from beta.

You noticed that too? I was wondeirng if maybe I was just carrying too much. It's probably not a bad thing, the ships did tend to zip around a fair bit too much before, but man am I slow these days.

Ship acceleration decreases very rapidly when you start stacking up ore on the holds. In serious dogfights its worth telling your ships not to pick up stuff.

Yeah I know it slows down as your ore load increases. I played the crap outta the beta. It definetly feels like just across the board engine speed, acceleration, and turning speed were tuned down.

It could be that things were a little zippy before. Games like this can get really frustrating if you constantly overshoot a target.

Since factions are separate between star systems. Is there any reason at all not to screw over one or both of them to get what I want? The TSA will get pissed no matter what because I need to bust through a blockade to leave.

Ah well, this is what being a pirate is all about

Tamren wrote:

It could be that things were a little zippy before. Games like this can get really frustrating if you constantly overshoot a target.

Since factions are separate between star systems. Is there any reason at all not to screw over one or both of them to get what I want? The TSA will get pissed no matter what because I need to bust through a blockade to leave.

Ah well, this is what being a pirate is all about :D

If your OCD like me and the second you see a blueprint you want it then your going to get your Police rep up just enough to buy whatever prints they have and see if the civies have any ships in the system you want to reverse engineer and the second you have all that switch to civ rep, get access to their trading station in the system, clear all the gates (that you can depending on your level, also netting you some of the best ship plans) and rinse repeat.

In repeat playthroughs you might know exactly which plans/ships you want and which you don't and just want to bypass a system, the universe is pretty large after all, and then bribe the police.

I like SPAZ but a dynamic faction system it really isn't, maybe if the police stations offered the same exhange services, or offered you protection at a price, or something. Maybe it'll change as patches/expansions come along.

Police? Are these new?

If I let a side mission slip by, does it eventually come back? I've just started the game for the first time and in my third system I have the Balance of Power side mission available. At this point it is just too tough for me and it will expire in 2 jumps. Is it gone for good at that point or will I get another chance?

UTA are basically the po po.

Tannhauser wrote:

If I let a side mission slip by, does it eventually come back? I've just started the game for the first time and in my third system I have the Balance of Power side mission available. At this point it is just too tough for me and it will expire in 2 jumps. Is it gone for good at that point or will I get another chance?

In the beta, side missions were very repetitive. I'm sure you'll see it again.

From what I played of the demo I'm going to leave off buying the game just yet. Its fun but its also lacking a little polish. My actions on a particular system end up being meaningless the moment I move on. Tiny and small ships seem to become obsolete very quickly and I have no reason to use or collect them. The developers do have a lot of neat stuff planned, I think I will just wait for that.

If you ask me if the game is worth the 15$ -according to my play time it does. But I still find waiting for new content a very reasonable decision . The game becomes a little repetitive at some point (I didn't play release yet so I'm talking about beta) .

The small ships are still useful when you get upgrades and they are also very cheap while very hard to hit. You can use darts (tiny) for a long time while getting good ROI on them. Once you get more upgrades the small ships become more effective. They can survive better than tiny and they are still fairly fast and maneuverable. One of the best combat small (IMHO) is colt if you set it up correctly. There are other useful ships when you need missiles or mining . You have to change ships according to the situation.

Even though the bigger ships have more HP and firepower they don't survive as much as you want and losing them can be costly (rez might be easy to get but mining is mine consuming).

I found mining to be a cinch actually. The trick is to get the AI to do it for you, they won't target asteroids unless you give them the mining laser.

Well speak of the devil. There was a small patch overnight that reduced the difficulty of the mission I was having trouble with.

Tannhauser wrote:

Well speak of the devil. There was a small patch overnight that reduced the difficulty of the mission I was having trouble with.

Good, but to answer your earlier question (in a slightly different way than ebarstad), yes those missions will pop up again in the same location. You can very much grind that way if you like as even completing missions will have them show up again.

I think the same is true of anomalies, but I could be wrong.

anomalies,

Huh, I've played all the way through twice, and I don't remember seeing one of those?

Malor wrote:
anomalies,

Huh, I've played all the way through twice, and I don't remember seeing one of those?

The yellow missions. Sometimes it's a gigantic chunk of ice/rock flying through a level that you can shoot the crap out of, other times it's just some random nonsense. I'm pretty sure they're called anomalies when you mouse over them in the map.

Malor wrote:
anomalies,

Huh, I've played all the way through twice, and I don't remember seeing one of those?

Isn't that what it calls the question mark quests? I haven't played very far in so I've only seen the comets.

Oh, you mean comets? Superfast, impossible to catch if you miss them before you have good engine tech?

Oh, right, maybe anomaly is just a code word for 'random side quest', got it. Guess I never saw that.

So something cool I found out about this game last night that makes me love it more. Save games are done through cloud.

You can play the same save on multiple computers, for those who have a laptop and home pc.

Nice touch.

Malor wrote:

Oh, you mean comets? Superfast, impossible to catch if you miss them before you have good engine tech?

Or get lucky and have it coming straight at you.

One thing I am waiting for is more complex orders. Id like to be able to do things like tell ships to pick up people, but not ore. Have smaller ships pick up ore and dump it for bigger ships to collect. Or the reverse, have small fast ships shuttle the ore from larger ships back to the gate so the big ones can just fight. With that complexity of control it would allow you to do some neat stuff with different fleet compositions.

Also I wouldn't mind being able to hand control of ALL ships to the AI. Cannons are fun to use by I am horrible at lining up shots.

Reposted here for usefulness?

Here is a tip that might be spoilery? Not sure. I found this helps me earn Rez without having to progress into harder regions and risk losing expensive ships.

Spoiler:

By respecing and going into data debt this prevents you from leveling up. A good thing too because missions that once paid out 1,000 Rez, for example, will pay out 800 Rez when you go up in level. If you want to keep earning good money without having to advance yourself into harder regions: 1) respec, 2) enter data debt 3) take on that 1,000-reward mission over and over again against foes you can handle. This avoids loss of expensive ships and possibly finds you new blueprints and specialists.

[/quote]

This is a lonnnnnnngggg game. I appreciate how it changes things up as you progress. I don't think that's spoil-territory.

Tamren wrote:

One thing I am waiting for is more complex orders. Id like to be able to do things like tell ships to pick up people, but not ore. Have smaller ships pick up ore and dump it for bigger ships to collect. Or the reverse, have small fast ships shuttle the ore from larger ships back to the gate so the big ones can just fight. With that complexity of control it would allow you to do some neat stuff with different fleet compositions.

Also I wouldn't mind being able to hand control of ALL ships to the AI. Cannons are fun to use by I am horrible at lining up shots.

Turrets. Turrets. Turrets. Gotta go turrets.

The trick is to find the biggest turret upgrades you can and slap your cannons on that. And then set the turrets to auto-track. Profit will follow.

Is it true you can only have a maximum of four hangars?

It is true. However, you don't particularly need more than that, once you have the biggest ships.

VicD714 wrote:

Is it true you can only have a maximum of four hangars?

It's also good (but expensive) if whenever you find a huge ship flying around to take it out. It takes quite a few blueprints to build one of them but once you do - bam! "Watch out you bad guys. I'm a big boy now!"

Malor wrote:

It is true. However, you don't particularly need more than that, once you have the biggest ships.

Rats! I was hoping for the ability to have a fleet of ships. I suppose it does make sense though, since the story is about space pirates, instead of a galactic empire.