Lately, I’ve been playing Naev, which is a spiritual successor to Escape Velocity, a older three game series made by Ambrosia Software. So far, I think it wears the EV mantle quite well, and I highly recommend it.
It’s from a top-down perspective, you fly your ship to different planets and travel to different systems using hyperspace gates. You can trade commodities, engage in piracy, take up bounty hunting, courier missions, or get involved in the many story based mission arcs. So far, I really like it, and it’s free.
Hadn’t heard of it, but will give it a try. The best part of EV (aside from Hector!) was the mission storylines. Back then you could use ResEdit to make your own, even. If Space Rangers 2* had had the richer mission storylines of EV, it would’ve been nearly perfect.
I’ve been playing, but I find that it’s a bit of a grind. Combat is too fast for me to make headway with any ship build. Commodity trading is pointless because the prices are the same everywhere. I suspect by the time I can afford a ship build that will make piracy feasible, the money it’ll bring in will be less than what I was getting just hauling cargo. Even that is a pill because many times you have to keep re-loading again and again until you luck out and manage to slip past the pirates by constantly telling turning your autonav back on. Story-based scenarios also pay less and some of them can actually cost you money.
Still, it’s just fun enough to keep me playing just to see if a six-million credit ship will make anything but hauling cargo profitable.
Sums up my feelings pretty well too. The lack of trading implementation makes play pretty average.
Combat sucks (I managed one kill with my tricked out Hyena). My most succesful ship has been a stripped down Schroedinger, with afterburners and a cargo pod, no weapons at all. Flee from danger at every opportunity.
Missions are the only way to make money for me, take a storyline mission and do short runs along the way.
I may have to go old school and give Oolite a try (I loved Elite back in the day). Anyone played it and have mod recommendations?
PS: the build is only 0.5.0 so maybe by 1 Naev will be worth it.
Once I scraped together enough credits to buy a Quicksilver, I was able to make pretty good money doing the most urgent and highest paying cargo missions. A Hellburner helps escape from pirates, but I agree that it can be pretty frustrating to always get bagged right at the hyperspace node.
For me, it’s just nice to play a game that feels so much like EV. It seems as though it’s being worked on pretty frequently, and the last update expanded the game quite a bit.
I’ve gotten bored with it now, as I’ve gotten a tricked out Pirate Kestrel and completed most of the story missions, but I plan to keep an eye on the development.
