Star Drive. I am so lost

The Game Room
1

I got this on Steam, based on the type of game that I liked, and spent all day at work actually looking forward to playing it. But when I finally played it, I feel…lost? I can’t seem to wrap my head around the interface, it feels so awkward.

The game itself reminds me a lot of Sins of a Solar Empire, where you build a fleet, colonize planets, and engage in interstellar war (and diplomacy) with other empires. But SoaSE at least kind of made sense; this one seems to heavily rely on customizing ships, which is not particularly user friendly.

Anyone play this? Any advice for a beginner? :confused:

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I love this game, though i appreciate it makes more sense if you’re used to the genre (i.e. played MoO2) - I can say that I recommend this game to anyone who liked MoO2, SoSE or any similar game.

Since release I can’t play - blue screen of death about 20 minutes in, every time, but back when it worked in beta I could win most games.

I’ll cover off a few points for you here, but if you want more detailed stuff let me know

  1. Money is king.
    Income, or the lack of it, will win/lose you the game. The best racial abilities? The ones that reduce maintenance costs or increase income or population growth. The first tech i always pick is the economic one.
    Why? Because money impacts every other system, and therefore has the ultimate flexibility. For example if you want lots of research don’t pick a research race trait, just pick money and reduce your tax rate accordingly (giving you more research AND more production)
    Want more ships? They cost no money to produce but upkeep is a killer and reducing tax rate means more production to build them. More spies? All spy actions just cost money (and time).

  2. Get more money
    Ok so starting feats aside, how can you get more income? - Population (and occasional technology/buildings) - With this in mind, in the early game you want to be looking for planets with a high pop cap (at least 2, until you get biospheres, then it kinda doesn’t matter ) and reasonable food income (at least 1) - production you probably only need a couple of decent planets throughout the whole empire and is therefore the least valuable resource on a planet.

Contrary to lots of games - don’t colonize everything you can! Pick the choice planets. Trying to maintain facilities on poor, starving, barren planets will just mean you run out of income and lose. Also make sure your transporters are spreading your population as fast as possible. More population is more income.

  1. Ships are worthless.
    Although its obvious, it took me a while to understand the impact of this, but every alive ship you have is nothing but a drain on your resources.
    The crux is that ships cost nothing but time to produce (technically production, which is just time modified by the planets resource value modified by buildings) but they do cost cold hard cash to upkeep.
    Less cold hard cash means more taxes. More taxes means slower production and research, i.e empire stagnation - see where i’m going with this?
    The point is ships are cheap to make but expensive to keep. The best strategy i’ve found is to continuously build ships - and continuously lose them, which nicely weakens your enemies.
    It doesn’t matter if your attack squad all died. You can just make more, so long as they weakened the enemy.
    Just remember - a ship sitting doing nothing is just a black hole of money. A ship that died just freed up your income, and (hopefully) killed some enemy in the process

  2. Design ships mostly for offense
    Kind of follows on from the last point, but when it comes to designing ships, you want speed and guns - most of the pre designed ships have a lot of armor plating.
    Sure armor is fine, but why do you want your ship to survive? So it can continue eating income? Better to ditch that armor, load up more guns and see what their armor does when your guns batter through and blow up their ships power plant.

  3. Super Ships
    Basically the last two points don’t apply. Super ships (battleship, titan, sometimes cruiser too) cost a bucket to maintain but also take ages to build so its not worth losing them. But since they cost so much you shouldn’t be having many anyway. When it comes to mid-late game, why not limit your heavy ship production and screen them with so many frigates and smaller it gives your computer a headache?
    Thats probably enough to digest for now - but if you need more let me know.

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good advice, though i would say it applies to most if not all 4X space games, and not this one in particular.

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Yup. Generic advice is generic. I think the OP was looking for something more like “How the hell does this interface work?” which is not something I can answer, since I don’t have this game.

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Yeah my bad, I was not answering the question asked (how to play) but the one I thought was asked (how to win) :smack:

There’s a bit to take in with the nuances of the interface, but the best advice i can really give is: stick with it, it doesn’t take long to feel natural.
Don’t worry about taking your time in the more complex screens - if you’re designing a ship or choosing research, for example, the game pauses.

The most complicated part is building a ship - there are videos online to show you how in detail, but here’s my overview:

Choose a ship class from the boxes on the right, you’ll get a grid in the middle that shows you where components can go

You can drag components from the left onto the grid to place them; but certain spots can only be filled by certain components - look for the little letters on the grid

E boxes: Engines go here
I boxes: Inside components (like reactors) go here
O boxes: Outside components (like armor/weapons) go here
I/O boxes: Can have either I or O components

When looking at the components on the left, they also have little letters that show you where they can go.

To be functional a ship must have:
At least 1 CnC (cockpit, bridge etc)
Positive non-warping energy output (or it can’t fly anywhere) - doesn’t matter if negative warping output, that just means you have to stop for a recharge after a while
At least 1 engine
All slots filled - fill em up with power conduits or armor if you don’t want anything else there.
There’s a list of ship stats on the bottom right - anything that stops the ship working (such as not having a cockpit) will be flagged up in red.

Finally, weapons have arcs (and shields have circles) - press the arcs button (top right) to get an overview. Anything not covered by the shield is, well, not covered by the shield. Weapons can only fire in their arc direction.

There are two types of weapons arc: Forward facing (you’ll see yellow lines denoting the boundary of the arc) and pivotable (you’ll see a red shading)
You can click on the weapon to select it, then click and drag the arc to change where a red weapon arc shoots. Forward facing weapons cant be changed.

If i remember right, the’re are also 360-degree weapons (a anti missile defense, as i recall) but it doesn’t show an arc.

If you’re looking for how a completed ship looks - the default designs can be loaded by the load button at the bottom. Just remember what i said before about the defaults being over-armored in my opinion :slight_smile: