Children of a Dead Earth

[Marko Dash]

has anybody tried this yet?



i figured most people here would be foaming at the mouth for a realistic space combat game with the ability to design EVERYTHING yourself, from just customized ships, to absurdly massive coilguns with nuclear tipped rounds.

unfortunately i will be living vicariously through everybody else and youtube for this one as it's a 64bit only game.

[Titan Uranus]

Unfortunately, the module design engine has several bugs and silly omissions (integration errors, all turrets turned by reaction wheels, only gimbal turrets available, onle one especially inefficient style of laser available, absurdly efficient nukes, ect.)
Though there have been a few patches to fix some of the problems, and the modularity of the system is quite nice (if you can find a way to calculate something, it can probably be added to the game.)

The interface is pretty good too, it's got 3-body (approximated, obviously) orbital mechanics and an option to show your trajectory in the reference frame of a specific object, which makes interceptions a breeze.

It does suffer a bit from not allowing you to burn in any direction, only the 6 basic orbital ones.

The missile AI is also broken as hell.
One missile can destroy an arbitrarily large number of hostile missiles because the enemy missiles will happily spend all of their delta V chasing a single missile.

Missiles in general would be a whole lot better if they could be made to follow commands more complicated that "simple lead" and "simple lead with reserved delta V"
And since large numbers of hundred MW-class lasers are feasible on a single ship, most missiles tend to get fucked. There are all kinds of useful armor schemes, but they do not matter against 10-20 100 MW far infared lasers, not for most missiles.

Gun-launched nukes with terminal rockets are still useful though, you can add more armor when the rocket only needs to adjust the trajectory.

[TheFeniX]

i figured most people here would be foaming at the mouth for a realistic space combat game with the ability to design EVERYTHING yourself, from just customized ships, to absurdly massive coilguns with nuclear tipped rounds.

I would, but unfortunately it's single-player.

unfortunately i will be living vicariously through everybody else and youtube for this one as it's a 64bit only game.

You may not be doing any real gaming for the forseeable future. Even in indie development, 64-bit is becoming more and more standard. With all consoles on 64-bit now and the easily available 64-bit developement tools (Unreal, for just one): 32-bit is dead and/or dying. Games are wanting more cores and more memory addressing and 64-bit gives that to them.

You'll see certain teams continue to support 32-bit either based on having the resources to support both or having an established playerbase running toasters (read: Blizzard for both examples), but at some point they will drop 32-bit support because there's zero reason to be running a 32-bit OS in 2016. EDIT: On the Blizzard note, their new flagship (Overwatch) is 64-bit only.

64-bit CPUs have been standard for over 10 years and no Windows version is worth running a 32-bit version since Windows XP (as 64-bit support was balls). If you own Windows 7 or greater, your key will work on the 64-bit version. Just get the ISO. And even Linux isn't worth running in 32-bit these days.

[Nephtys]

You can build some silly ships.

I built a giant blunt cone covered in small caliber cannons that were tiny, mounted on a whipple shield, that just blasts head on against any target... except when hit by 10kg osmium kinetic kill projectiles.

The game's extremely obtuse as far as how different materials work or how to design a good railgun except by trial and error though.

I do wish more traditional turrets were available too. They'd be far more effective than these deathtrap gimbals.