So a friend got me into Skyrates recently, and I’ve been having a ball with it… but having been designed for casual play, it isn’t particularly conducive to sustained attention. As such, I was wondering if there were any similar trading games that came out in the last several years? I played Escape Velocity! ages ago, and loved it, but I’m finding the controls to be too frustratingly clunky now.
Did you ever play Freelancer? It was one of Microsoft Studio’s earlier games; originally billed as an MMO because of its scale (and can still be played on private servers with 100+ people), but it has a storyline and sets of trading/combat missions, with some really compelling trading factors. You can ally yourself with the single-player “enemies,” the pirates, and have access to their bases and upgrades, and can sometimes find illegal substances to trade in the more remote areas. These substances net a huge profit in the more straight-laced sectors, but that’s only if you can get them to the planet docking ring without the Sentries scanning your hold.
Overall, really fun, and much more playable after you mod the graphics/gameplay quirks. Like after a certain amount of profit in a certain sector, the game will lock out the warp gates until you continue the story path. Not as much fun that way.
I also got addicted to Skyrates in the round before this one, but this round I got a horrible start in trading, so I’ve kinda fallen off of it :< Have they talked about another reset?
Thanks for the recommendation… I tried Freelancer, and I kind of saw where it was going, but I couldn’t get over the bugs: every second or third time I went through a warp gate the game crashed, and after I while I uninstalled it out of sheer frustration.
I don’t think they’re planning on a reset for Skyrates soon, though- they’re working out some new fixes for the economy, and there’re a few really annoying bugs that I hope they get rid of first-one totally screwed me yesterday, when I filled my queue for the day and came back to find that I hadn’t made any of my assigned trades, and had basically wasted the entire day flying around with an empty hold.
Thanks for the heads up, I love it already and just as I was getting sick of Mafia Wars this filled the hole in my life nicely.
Oh, you’re definitely welcome. One word of advice, however, from hard (well, alright, easily) won experience: if you go the trade route as I did, you’re probably better off avoiding buying a zeppelin-their enormous cargo holds are tempting, but the damn things are slower than frozen molasses, and I found that with the potentially unstable markets with higher-level trade goods, it’ll often take so long to reach a red zone that the supply will have recovered before you arrive. As far as I can tell, the best zeppelin strategy is to fill your holds with a volatile good when it’s at purple and then waiting at the same station until the market crashes and you can sell at a profit.
You might want to check out the X series. The latest was X3: Terran Conflict I believe. There is combat but you can happily avoid it and concentrate solely on trading if you so wish. I doubt you’ll find a space game with more potential for trading and building.