Anyone here played Starshatter?

[PvK]

I tried the Starshatter demo a few days ago and was actually quite impressed. I'll probably spend a couple more play sessions analyzing it before deciding whether to take the plunge, but that's mainly because I'm finicky and my spare time is limited. Basically I thought it looked extremely good, and did a lot of things much better (or perhaps, mainly much more to my personal tastes) than other games with similar elements.

It's certainly a completely different game from the Space Empires series, since it's a ship command simulation rather than a space conquest game.

It's also a much different (but closer than SE) genre to Star Fury, in that Star Fury more closely follows a free-agent roleplaying formula.

Anyway, the things I really liked about what I saw in the Starshatter demo included:

* Detailed ship damage model with fairly complex inter-system dependencies (though I will be analysing it a bit more, and seeing if repair times can be modded up and hull damage modded down, for more fun with derelicts).

* Newtonian ship movement that doesn't seem excessively acrobatic or dumbed down (though I will be analysing it a bit more, too).

Things I specifically thought Starshatter did well that really put me off Star Fury:

* Vastly more realistic scale - space is not cluttered, planets are way bigger than ships, ships and fighters seem to have more appropriate relative sizes, and the space and time for maneuver seem much more appropriate.

* Better distinctions between ship classes. They seem much more appropriate in scale and abilities and limitations based on size and role, as opposed to Star Fury where the different ship classes seem more like "power ups" or RPG "character classes" or "levels".

* Better feel in the destroyer squadron demo scenario of captaining a large ship and leading a squadron, while Star Fury seems more like piloting a suped up star fighter (or bumper car in space) and constantly having to do things like dodge obstacles.

* Seemingly appropriate roles, situations, and equipment for a military ship, as opposed to Star Fury's "you are an undercover ship captain who runs errands to earn credits to upgrade your equipment completely at will and do whatever you want". That's a question of genre, and I do like free agent games like Omnitrend's Universe or Elite, but in Starshatter it seems like the roles and ships and situations make sense (in the demo anyway) while in Star Fury I'm left incredulous about most of the content.

* The movement of the ships, especially the larger ones, seems much more correct in Starshatter.

PvK

[iceboy]

Originally posted by Gandalf Parker:
This seems to be your only post here. Have you tried the game Space Empires IV from Shrapnel Games?
What did you think about it?

yep ive got it and all the expansions. space empires IV is a great game!!!

[Atrocities]

Normally we like to keep post such as these to a minimum. I am sure you can understand.

[Unknown_Enemy]

I bought starshatter.
It has abseloutely nothing in commun to SE4, think more of freespace. But good game, the dynamic campaigns are really a good move.

Graphics are ok, indeed air to ground are bad, but the rest is neat and clean, proportions are respected and the physic used is newtonian. It was a good buy.

As for Matrix games, it is for me a very respected publisher, its Steel Panters mega campaigns have been on my HD longer than SE4.

Only problem with Matrix was that their forum was a sad place, not very friendly, but I heard that they recently started to mass-clean it .

[gregebowman]

I'm still slowly transferring my Steel Panthers game I d/l to my work computer to my home computer. It came to over 250 files after I broke it down with WinRar that I have to put on 3.5" disks, and I'm about half-way through. One of these days I'll get them all on my pc so I can play this game. I haven't check the link yet to Starshatter, so I can't comment on that yet. But heck, I haven't played SF in months. I don't know if I'll have the time to play a similar game.

[Aiken]

Originally posted by gregebowman:
I'm still slowly transferring my Steel Panthers game I d/l to my work computer to my home computer. It came to over 250 files after I broke it down with WinRar that I have to put on 3.5" disks, and I'm about half-way through.

You should really think about purchasing removable USB flash card. This will make file transfers between computers a lot easier and faster.

[Phoenix-D]

Well, I played around with the demo for this a bit more, and it makes the cardninal sin of moddable games: you can't access the stock data files! Anything must be done from scratch or not at all.