Starsector Preview

I will soon be finished with my second year of university, and I’m looking forward to summer mostly because I’ll finally have time to play Elite: Dangerous than anything else. I’m really impatient, so to help pass the time I’ve been playing an Elite-lite in the form of Starsector this week. Set in a 2D universe, the aim of this game is to build a fleet of ships, earn money and kill pirates and space-mormons.

Starsector uses the age old RPG mainstay of instanced battles, and this is clearly where most of the development time has gone. You control your flagship with WASD, and have to aim your primary weapon by maneuvering your ship. Most ships have multiple weapons, and while you can manually control each of these by switching with the number keys, by default these will fire by themselves. Your ship  might have a shield to block some incoming damage, but instead of having a shield health Starsector uses flux, a kind of heat bar that increases as your shield takes more damage or you fire weapons.

In space, no-one can hear you scream

Most weapon fire creates “Soft Flux” which dissipates when not using weaponry, but shield damage creates “Hard Flux” which only goes away when you’re not using the shield. You can also vent flux, but this makes your ship very vulnerable. When the flux meter is completely empty, for some reason your ship can go faster, and while I suspect this is because more energy has been transferred to the engines, nothing really tells you that.

Pressing Tab brings up a tactical view and pauses the game, which can also be achieved by pressing space at any time. The tactical view allows you to submit orders to your ships, though this takes up a Command Point, and you have a limited number of these to use at a time. I don’t quite understand this mechanic, especially since the friendly AI has had little trouble in the fights I’ve seen. It feels like if I were able to command a much larger fleet, then maybe it would be beneficial, but I’ve never been able to get that far into the game without being crippled.

The tactical view for a mission with a lot of ships

As I said above, the combat feels the most fleshed out part of Starsector, and you can see this best in the trading and delivery mechanics. At each planet or space station, you can offer your services to deliver X amount of Y resource for Z amount of money, with a bonus if you do it quickly sometimes thrown in. You then have to buy X amount of Y, and you have the choice of either going to look for the best price or doing it quickly to get the bonus.

I started my first playthrough as a trader and thought that this would be how I made my bread, but I could only take small missions because I’d only just started out and didn’t have the cargo space for the more cost effective missions. Then came the real kicker: I couldn’t buy just ten high quality ore, I had to buy a thousand. For the life of me, I couldn’t see anyway of just picking up a select amount of something from the stores.

I took to the forums, and after searching awhile, found that if I shift-click, I’ll select one, and if I hold shift and click a slider will appear and I can pick up the number of supplies that I want. This information would have been useful earlier on, when I bought 100 supplies because I needed some and couldn’t work out how to just buy a certain amount.

You get a real sense of scale with these things

After taking a contract to transport some material to some other point in the galaxy, I was exceptionally confused as to why my fleet was moving so slowly. After a few minutes of getting nowhere, I dumped some of the cargo and was suddenly able to move at full speed again. I double checked my maximum cargo capacity and found that I was apparently significantly over, despite carrying only half my maximum for the contract.

I didn’t complete that contract, and because I had dumped so much of my cargo never to be seen again I had no money to take a new mission. So, scrapping my shipping business, I started a smuggling business. At each base, you have the option of selling on the main, legit market which gives you a surcharge and slashes your profits, or the black market. Smuggling is pretty reliant on the black market, since the most profitable resources are also outlawed by the authorities.

As a smuggler, you have to worry about random searches that, if you aren’t mindful, will cause you to lose your cargo and a bucket load of money. It will also make you lose influence, which is a -100 to 100 scale that doesn’t seem to actually mean anything because if you go out of favour with a race you turn off your transponder and they have literally no idea who you are. The flip side to this is you can’t use the legitimate market, but if you’re a smuggler or want to make any money at all in this game you’ll be selling on the black market.

Visibility isn't great here

Starsector has an RPG level-up system, which as far as I can tell only adds small benefits to the combat and nothing else. It might have been nice for those of us who enjoy playing games as a pacifist to have upgrades centered around diplomacy or trading, and it certainly would have encouraged smuggling as a more legitimate playstyle.

At this point, I still had no idea how to tell when I was overloaded with cargo, so I was pretty consistently finding myself dumping excess supplies in order to make it for a delivery. This is dangerous: supplies are a required resource that drops over time and is needed to keep your ship combat ready. Supplies are also used to repair the fleet after combat, and they’re used up at an alarming rate so it is very easy to find yourself without any. When this happens, your fleet’s combat readiness will degrade, to the point where accidents can happen and your ships can take random damage.

My smuggling fleet was destroyed by a group of eco-terrorists whilst in hyperspace, en route to making just enough money to repair the ships. Not perturbed, I decided to become a bounty hunter and exact my revenge. No more did I have to worry myself with cargo management, or have to run from pirates. Equipped with a small warship, I quickly dispatched with pirate smugglers and decreased my favour with them.

The loadout screen for ships I only saw destroying me

It was here, finally and when I least needed it, I discovered that while in the cargo interfaces the little window in the corner that tells you how much fuel and supplies you have changes to show you how much stuff you can fit in your hold. I kinda threw a bit of a tantrum here: this exceptionally important piece of information was hidden in plain sight and the game never brought attention to it and this made me pretty annoyed at it. Also, the pirates started sending bigger and bigger fleets to kill me, and after a jump into hyperspace I found myself facing a vastly stronger force, thus ending my career as a bounty hunter.

That kind of sums up my experience with Starsector; I’ve been struggling to find a playstyle that works for me. The trading doesn’t seem to make enough money to sustain the fleet, and combat early on in the game is exceptionally difficult, even if you have the strong early ships. I think the game needs a UI overhaul, because half the time I had no idea what was going on. Overall, I see a lot of promise in Starsector, but it needs a lot of usability fixes before I could recommend it.