I'm looking for a Game...

[fusion]

...that is a 2d space trading/combat in the similar vein to FlashTrek: Broken Mirror. I'm a stickler for old fashion two-d games especially if they can be modded.

So far I've looked at freelancer but it wasn't quite what I wanted. If anyone can suggest titles to me it would be great!

[Stark]

Just play Space Rangers 2. Case closed.

[Ford Prefect]

Space Rangers 2, seriously.

[Losonti Tokash]

Space Rangers 2 Deluxe.

[Feil]

Escape Velocity 3 is horribly overpriced, but otherwise pretty good. Since Space Rangers 2 has been mentioned already. Three times.

[Stark]

If EV had a dynamic world without fixed solutions it'd be choice as hell cause the combat is neat.

As it is it's just 'find profit run, repeat 100102910291291029 times, get infinite money', and not DESPERATELY FUND WAR EFFORT AND PUSH RESEARCH TO DEVELOP MILITARY OFFENSIVES AND SAVE THE WOOOOOOORLD.

[Dave]

If EV had a dynamic world without fixed solutions it'd be choice as hell cause the combat is neat.

As it is it's just 'find profit run, repeat 100102910291291029 times, get infinite money', and not DESPERATELY FUND WAR EFFORT AND PUSH RESEARCH TO DEVELOP MILITARY OFFENSIVES AND SAVE THE WOOOOOOORLD.

So, does "Space, Pirates, and Zombies" come any closer to this ideal? I found it came close but gathering drifting loot for the zillionth time just got old.

[Stark]

SPAZ is just fundamentally boring. The combat is fine but everything else is stupid or broken. Space trading game shouldn't have you grinding for levels - I think that top down game with the motherships and a configurable fighter was better.

[Steel]

I really liked Space Rangers 2, great game the first time I played through.

Should have great replay value, but then I noticed that the game was actually doing some pretty aggressive level scaling. In my first playthrough I was getting richer fairly steadily and thought I was just going at the pace of the rest of the galaxy teching up, but then on my second playthrough I made a big score off some dominator components and bought a much better ship. Suddenly overnight even every shitty pirate is flying something twice as big and four times as gunned up as before and the Dominators have better shit too. That killed the feeling of progression and that you were able to influence the war in a meaningful way aside from solo capping systems.

By all means have things become more advanced over time, and allow the overall tech level to influence what enemies are equipped with, but giving everyone better stuff *based on the value of the players ship* is a terrible idea.

SPAZ is just fundamentally boring. The combat is fine but everything else is stupid or broken. Space trading game shouldn't have you grinding for levels - I think that top down game with the motherships and a configurable fighter was better.

What is this motherships game thing?

[Stark]

The level scaling is intentional and I think it works in a cool way, with the development of new techs etc. pirates just (bizarrely) get them first, but early prototypes are usually available, but large and expensive.

I'll check impulse when I get home and get you the name. It's quite fun and like $10 lol.

[Zaune]

It's not quite what you had in mind, but if you're after a retro space combat/trading game with lots of modding support, Oolite is well worth a look.

[Stark]

And if you want a 2D game that isn't 3D, that shooting/resourcing game was called Starscape. Not much 'trading' though, but I think it does everything SPAZ does without any of the thousand things SPAZ gets totally wrong.

You still want to play space rangers.

[Steel]

The level scaling is intentional and I think it works in a cool way, with the development of new techs etc. pirates just (bizarrely) get them first, but early prototypes are usually available, but large and expensive.

I'll check impulse when I get home and get you the name. It's quite fun and like $10 lol.

I think the scaling would be great if a few things were changed about it. First, there is a logical mechanic behind tech increases so use that to determine the tech of most ships in the coalition, don't explicitly include the players bank balance - apparently just hacking yourself loads of cash upgrades everyone else suddenly! Secondly, why is there no delay between a new level and everyone else having it? Surely they should have some feedback limiting the rate at which they purchase new tech beyond getting the best everything whenever they next land on a planet? This would allow you to at least get ahead of the curve a bit at times, and you would be able to see the progression of your opponents, rather than during your first jump everyone else becoming godlike.

The dominators also directly improving based on your wealth is absurd. A system where their research upgrade rate was based on their overall losses (or indeed anything else) would be much better. This would be overall influenced by how the war progressed, so if they were winning they would keep churning out shitty ships, but if those start getting wiped they divert more resources to better tech. As it is they base their development rate on how much trading you've done.

EDIT: Thanks for the name of that game, I'll give it a look.

[Stark]

I dunno, you can win like ten million bucks in space text adventure and the galaxy doesn't immediately jump in tech. I've never seen the surface mechanics fail in a super-cheesy way. Maybe it only happens if you cheat. :V

Then again if stuff is based on trading, something I never do because it's boooooring, maybe that's why I don't see it. Too many military attacks to stage and loot to ninja.

[Steel]

I dunno, you can win like ten million bucks in space text adventure and the galaxy doesn't immediately jump in tech. I've never seen the surface mechanics fail in a super-cheesy way. Maybe it only happens if you cheat. :V

Then again if stuff is based on trading, something I never do because it's boooooring, maybe that's why I don't see it. Too many military attacks to stage and loot to ninja.

All bets are off with cheating, who knows what arcane system these russian indie devs put in place to stop that instead of taking 5 minutes to get a native english speaker to look at their near incomprehensible text. However I did an experiment when I had ninja'd a bunch of really expensive dominator bits and sold them to a science base, and within a month the hull size of pirates had gone from ~350 to ~600 within a month before the tech level increased, that was just due to my bank balance. I did the same thing selling the same tonnage of loot instead of the valuable stuff, and the tech level increased at the same rate, but the hull sizes didn't.

[fusion]

Thanks for the comments, I was a bit busy the last couple of days. I'll look into them.