Skip to main content

Stardrive 2 Races

This game continues to hold my interest, despite the bugs, and the latest update fixed almost all the ones that were annoying me most.

One thing that the game manual actually says, and the UI for game setup supports, but that is just not true, is that the various races are interchangeable - that you could apply the traits for one race to another one and get an identical result.

There are two ways in which the underlying racial choice affects play, and they are both significant.

First, each race has three or four unique technologies that only they can research. These generally complement the default settings for that race to some degree (for example the Pollops get a planetary building that reduces food consumption by photosynthetics *only*, by 0.5 food (to zero)), but are of varying utility overall.

Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, the number and arrangement of squares in ship hulls is wildly different for each race. A few of the races have an advantage in number of squares, and a couple are totally sc****d. Among the non-sc****d races, the exact layout of the squares generally favors components that fit a meta-pattern. For example, Kulrathi ships have taller, thinner side quadrants that let them pile on the "spinal" format weapons, but make strong broadsides difficult.

I use these URLs for quick reference when choosing which underlying race template to use for a game, based on what I plan to do:

Race unique techs (not really helpful unless you've played the race to see what the tech does):
http://www.stardrivegame.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=11330, look at the 6th post in the thread.

Race hull layouts for Corvette, Frigate, and Cruiser:
http://imgur.com/gallery/JaRrPPk

There is a numerical summary of the sizes of the various hulls on the SD2 wiki, but without the shape information it's not as useful.


Overall, the Opteris have excellent hulls and great racial techs. The Bulrathi have excellent small hulls but their BB is only OK and their Titan less so; their racials are all about ground combat. The Pollops have great hulls and good techs, especially if you take Photosynthetic. The Chukk have big hulking ships and nice techs.

Humans are middle of the road, with OK ships and decent techs.

The Ralyeh have really bad ships; they have two nice racials and one meh one. Their ships get worse and worse the later you get in the game; I didn't finish my game with them.

The Vulfar have incredibly crappy ships - so bad that I haven't even played them to see their racials.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Can't write, must play Pillars of Eternity

OMFG, I've barely started the game and I'm already hooked and feeling alt-oholic. I only looked at character generation and the first few minutes of play last night, as I can't afford to miss a day of work just for a new game any more. But I'm already sure that this game is living up to high expectations. It's not perfect, there are some flaws that Rock, Paper, Shotgun already did a good job describing, but this is better than many of the game I've paid $60 for over the years. Going to be hard to tear myself away long enough to keep my wife and toddler from getting upset at me this weekend.

The highest bang-for-buck thing in Fallout 4

So, I had a hankering for some first-person murder hoboing the other day just when Steam put Fallout 4 on sale, so I gave up my plan to wait for the GOTY edition. It's mostly living up to my expectations, good and bad, based on reviews and on previous Bethesda games. The ostensible plot hook (lost baby) is completely underwhelming (sorry, clicking a blob of pixels a couple times can't compare to bonding with a real baby) but irrelevant to the game anyway. The main plot sounds potentially less stupid than the one for FO3. The settlement stuff is not quite as bolted onto the side of the game as I expected - taking time and perks to improve your settlement network can pay off in upgrade mats. But the thing that surprised me most pleasantly was remarkably simple. If you choose a somewhat common name for your character, the voiced robot butler will actually call you by name (http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Codsworth/recognized_names). I didn't know this going in, and my first ...

This article didn't quite change my life, but it was the most worthwhile thing I've read in a while

I like the games I like, and I'm no longer in the business of making games, so in many ways this article is not to my address. But it was still really worth my time to read carefully. It never gets anywhere near the stupid misogynistic pseudo-editorial "defense of games" crap that I'm not naming to avoid the still-raging humans pretending to be flamebots, and it comes from the opposite, and very constructive direction. And it quotes Tim Gunn more than once, in a very on-topic way. Tim Gunn is an awesome individual, even though I doubt he's ever been in the same room as a videogame for long. http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2016-11-07-video-games-are-boring