Stardrive 2 changes full#

Planets (and habitable asteroid belts) come in all manner of shapes and abundance, along with occasional tantalising bonuses like mysterious mines or weird objects. In StarDrive 2, as with most 4x space games, scouting and colonising some resource-rich worlds is the way to generate all things of value. Or at least an economy that’s imploding at a tastefully slow rate. Of course before you can build any of that stuff, you’ll need a functioning economy. If, for example, you’ve created a bunch of frigates with large amounts of frontal armour but little protection on the sides, you’ll have to use other ships to hug the flanks like little protective blankets. In combat, vessels take damage to their outer components first (which, depending what’s housed there, can affect their functionality,) followed by the more vital inner workings (power reactors and the like.) Once the center has taken too much punishment, the ship explodes. Ship construction in StarDrive 2 can direct, or at least supplement, your tactics in the main battle sequences.

I appreciate the freedom to customise, but replacing every single piece of armour by hand can still get pretty tiresome. For those who’d rather not spend hours playing ship inventory Tetris, preset designs are available. To avoid ending up with delightfully curated space brick and breaking your poor naval commander’s heart, minimum levels of power, ammunition and thrust have to be adhered to. Beginning with basic grid-divided hull shape, it’s possible for players to pick and choose from any researched technology and design all manner of space variants. In-depth ship design returns from the original StarDrive and is just as exhaustive/exhausting (delete as applicable) as before. These ponderous capital vessels can get swifter with technological improvements, but rapidity in battle is provided by fighter supports (launched from the bigger hulls) and corvette-sized units. Just like galleons of old, you can toggle the firing mechanism on all ships to deliver broadsides rather than forward aiming.

Stardrive 2 changes full#

If fleets meet in space, the game cuts away to a separate battlefield where the ships clash in the manner of a real-time strategy title.ĭespite being set in a sci-fi universe, aspects of these conflicts resemble the ship battles from the more recent Total War games (better than Rome 2 though, in case you’re worried.) Larger vessels are the equivalent of a gigantic metal space-vault full of lasers, and turn about as swiftly too. In StarDrive 2, the game is effectively on auto-pause and only starts moving along in real time whenever you move the ‘turns’ forward by pressing (or holding down) the appropriately named Space bar. Ships and fleets out in the great strategic map of space would do battle if their paths crossed. The first StarDrive had a real-time universe, in which time ticked around constantly unless you stepped in to make use of the pause button. A turn later GNN will broadcast who defeated the dreadnaught and reveal that he has been using his broadcasting station to transmit the Stardrive technology to races every few thousand years in hopes that one may one day destroy the dreadnaught and stop the Masters from wiping all life from the universe as they apparently have for countless 'cycles.When presented with a scepter-wielding science elephant, I am going to hire him every single time. Once a player defeats the Master dreadnaught they are rewarded with the ship module 'Death Ray', arguably the strongest ship weapon in the game, at the cost of needing thousands of units of power. Depending on how early in the campaign it is the dreadnaught can be accompanied by anywhere from a couple to several smaller master ships. Once this project is completed the player who completed it can then travel through the pink wormholes to face the Master dreadnaught 'Master of Orion II'.

Getting a ship to the pink wormhole location will result in a special research project. Defeating the fleet drops an anomalous box containing 'precious metals' that rewards the finder with 50BC. As a campaign progresses the size and power of the fleet that appears from the wormhole will increase. During this journey it will engage any other fleets it passes, including AI player fleets and random hostiles such as pirates, sometimes resulting in it being destroyed before the player is ever even aware of its presence. Once the pink wormhole manifests a small fleet will begin making its way towards player controlled worlds.

Their arrival is marked by a pink wormhole called a 'Massive Subspace Anomaly' appearing somewhere nearby player controlled space. The masters will appear periodically during any campaign.