StarDrive

Kickstarter: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1319847883/stardrive-a-4x-action-strategy-game-for-the-pc
Website: http://stardrivegame.com
Desura: http://www.desura.com/games/stardrive

StarDrive is a 4X game in the likes of Master Of Orion. Like X-Com I have never played MOO but it has its following hoping for a MOO4.
So how does one StarDrive? At the beginning of every game you can set your races traits. These cost or give you points that go into a single pool. If you want a Hull bonus for your ships it will costs you points. If you need more points you can choose a less favorable option like having a polluted homeworld. The game is being developed by a single guy who turned from being a laywer to a game developer. He does out-source stuff ofcourse.

The first thing that I noticed before I bought the game was the diplomacy animations from a space bear with Japanese armour and katana typing on an upside down keyboard. SOLD! Booted up the game and was met with this very nice piece of music. Nice ambiant music for starting up your empire. The overal presentation of the game is what really sold me the game. Most of the UI is still very basic but the looks of the planets and ships make me wonder why nobody has tried this before.


Honestly there is nothing much you can do in the beginning of the game but later on things get interesting. Colonize a few planets, research some tech, build some scouts. You know the usual. Once you've got your basics covered it is time to research those capital ships. Daniel DiCocco has added some ships lay-outs but customizing your own ship is part of the game. It is actually not that hard to build a ship. You need 1 cockpit/bridge, a power source large enough, some weapon mounts, fuel cells and ordenance storage. Armour and shields if you really need to.


Combat is fast paced and satisfactory. At any time you can ASSUME DIRECT CONTROL over any ship in your fleet. Fleet movement is very WIP at this point in time so I cannot comment about that but it should live up to our expectations. Weapons have their own arcs. Small swivel turrets will have a huge arc compared to big static canons. Explosions look awesome. Cannot say anymore than that.

Ships use their power supply when warping to their destination. If they do not posses enough energy they will drop out of warp to recharge their capacitors. There can be projectors built between planets to decrease power cost and increase travel speed. This helps heaps for transport ships.

Planets produce 3 resources. Food, Production and Research. Food is used by your populace to survive. Production is needed to build ground structures and ships. Research is used for... research, go figure. Structures help in gathering these resources. Right now these are all generic for every race. Still very much work to be done by Daniel, he's got his work cut out for him. He's not even start on Diplomacy. Daniel has recently signed up with Iceberg Interactive. Endless Space also signed up with Iceberg Interactive so I'll be doing a preview of some sorts on this board. What this means is that the game cannot be called an Indie anymore. Although Iceberg only does advertisement and distribution. Which will help to sign deals with Gamefly, D2D, Impulse, etc... Because of this development DiCocco has revamped the website and launched the new StarDrive forum.



Ground combat will definatly be part of the game. This will be done abstractly. There was a very short time where another engine could have been used for the GC part of the game but that was snuffed pretty early. Right now the combat will be done on the planet screen. Soldier will be dropped using Troopships and defenders will try and push the invaders back. Not implemented yet but interested none the less.

I have already told you the encounter with the space bear but there are other races you can bump into. A few races have been revealed so far. One of the more interesting races are the Pollops. A plant like-lifeform that communicate through music. The Vulfen a wolf-like race. Their home system is called Vulfar. The bears are called the Kulrathi (read: I see what you did there). There are 2 more that have yet to be revealed but they will certainly be very interesting. Ow, and there are also Humans.

The game will also feature multiplayer after release. Personally since Distant Worlds I've been waiting for a good space based 4X game. Sword of the Stars ][ was looking to satiate my apitite. Sadly because of its buggy release I had to wait some more. Seeing what both games can do I. I expect a resurgence into 4X games.

The Kickstarter for this game is already over and it did reach its goal of 7 500 dollars by 17 000 dollars. Not much money in comparison to the big Kickstarters. By accident Desura put the game into their alphafunding channel causing it to become available to everybody willing to purchase. This was not exactly planned and the alphafunding has been withdrawn but because of this little slip-up I managed to buy myself a copy.

This looks in a similar vein http://store.steampowered.com/app/208140/

capitan wrote:This looks in a similar vein http://store.steampowered.com/app/208140/

Yes I've noticed that game too. The only drawback of ES is that is has kind of lacking space combat. I like my 4X games to be deep and have nice looking UI but also have interesting and engaging combat. Sadly you can only set your stance during combat. Might as well auto-combat it or have some kind of abstract combat like Galactic Civilization 2.

Though it has to be said that it has some VERY nice GUI. And they are giving the community select imput for the game which is quite nice to see.

I check in on StarDrive every month or so to see how development is going. Bought the thing on Desura. Good on him for doing this himself, but man, it's gotta be hard. I think I was a little misled about the focus of development, thought it would be more micromanagement of a small fleet or single ship, but instead it has this MOO type focus. Also cool, but man... Escape Velocity and Nova were my JAMS. More of that please.

heavyweather wrote:I check in on StarDrive every month or so to see how development is going. Bought the thing on Desura. Good on him for doing this himself, but man, it's gotta be hard. I think I was a little misled about the focus of development, thought it would be more micromanagement of a small fleet or single ship, but instead it has this MOO type focus. Also cool, but man... Escape Velocity and Nova were my JAMS. More of that please.

Stardrive will have MP. You can console yourself with that thought.

Maybe this might interest you:
http://blog.naev.org/media/

http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/

Eeeeeeee SPACE! Thanks mate, good links, hadn't heard of either.

Oh, yes. The adventure mode in Stardrive is currently a proof of concept. It will become a full expansion post-release.