Drox Operative

[keith.lamothe]

Argh, I don't have enough time! I really want to get back into Drox now that it's gold!

I would say that it'll still be there when you're ready, but with Soldak games in all likelihood it will have run off to a deeper part of the dungeonsector and built a world-ending device while all your potential allies have gotten into some kind of galactic war.

[Mánagarmr]

Argh, I don't have enough time! I really want to get back into Drox now that it's gold!

I would say that it'll still be there when you're ready, but with Soldak games in all likelihood it will have run off to a deeper part of the dungeonsector and built a world-ending device while all your potential allies have gotten into some kind of galactic war.

Yeah, that's what I'm afraid of

[Mánagarmr]

Just tried the 1.000 version (retail). It's a lot slicker than it used to be, and some things are very streamlined (such as it's actually feasible to run a "carrier" setup with fighters, bombers and interceptors. Previously, that was such a mess.

I like it! Will probably sink a few more hours into this

[Professor Paul1290]

Bounty Hunters can be pure evil sometimes.

Also, there was a zombie infestation spreading among the planets of my allies. I fixed it, but soon after I got a mission to deliver zombies to my enemies. 

[Wingflier]

So what the hell happened to this game?  We had this huge thread on it that lasted for month when it was in beta, and everyone was really exciting for release.

Now it's been released and nobody has talked about it for like 4 months.

Does it just suck?  Gets boring quickly?  Better RPGs?

What's the deal.

[KDR_11k]

I like it but I haven't had it for that long yet. Maybe there's just not enough to it to keep playing forever.

[keith.lamothe]

I enjoy it quite a bit, I just don't have much time to play it.

I think it's an example of taking a base genre (action-RPG), adding genuine innovation ("living" backdrop, player influence on that), and executing it pretty well.  I don't know if it ultimately was my "best game of 2012", but it's probably in the top 5 or so.  Not that I really had enough time to do a fair survey of the field.

[Wingflier]

Out of curiosity, what was your best game of 2012?

Inb4 Ancient Shadows :DDD

[keith.lamothe]

I'd have to think about that

I think AS was good, but I made it more for you guys (well, and the money) than I did for myself.  I'm more of an RPG person.

[Professor Paul1290]

So what the hell happened to this game?  We had this huge thread on it that lasted for month when it was in beta, and everyone was really exciting for release.

Now it's been released and nobody has talked about it for like 4 months.

Does it just suck?  Gets boring quickly?  Better RPGs?

What's the deal.

I'm guessing it's because of Valley 2, Shattered Haven, and a bunch of the other stuff that's been happening recently.

I've been playing it a lot since then, but I didn't post because I was the last post and I'm averse to double posting because a lot of forums/boards have rules against that.   


Let's see, one time I allied myself with the Dryads and one other race (I think it was Human) and was trying to take out the remaining races not in my alliance or bring them in. I decided to destroy one. The Dryads had one or two worlds in this particular system and didn't have enough to attack, so I got the idea of speed rushing the worlds and doing sabotage on all the enemy worlds in that system to see if that would reduce ship production.

Interestingly enough it did work. After I did went around once doing that the number of hostile race ships went down considerably and I was going to build up the Dryads until they attacked or the hostile race's colonies were weak enough for me to take them out myself, whatever came first. However this did have an unintended side effect.

All of a sudden there was this absurd buildup of random mob ships on that side of the system where I crippled all the colonies. I was going to go take out one of the hostile race's worlds, but I was halfway over there when I started getting messages that the mobs were taking out those colonies already! I ended up running into this mass blob of mobs and turned back to get back to the two friendly Dryad worlds there to restock on shield boosts and repair, but when I got back the mobs followed me and curb-stomped both those friendly colonies as I was doing that!

I just made a run for the jump gate and jumped out of that system, and shortly afterward the system went white, as in none of the races had colonies in that system anymore it was all just mob clusterfuck.

In the end I did succeed in getting all the other races allied or destroyed and got a diplomatic victory, but that specific system was pretty much dead to me for the rest of that game.   


EDIT:
I meant system not sector! Corrected.

[keith.lamothe]

In the end I did succeed in getting all the other races allied or destroyed and got a diplomatic victory, but that specific sector was pretty much dead to me for the rest of that game.   

An interesting twist

But by "sector" do you mean "that star and everything on the same map as the star" or "the whole sector of everything connected by wormholes/stargates"?

I wasn't aware of any persistence of "old sectors" in the latter sense; if that's been added I'm very interested to know

[Professor Paul1290]

In the end I did succeed in getting all the other races allied or destroyed and got a diplomatic victory, but that specific sector was pretty much dead to me for the rest of that game.   

An interesting twist

But by "sector" do you mean "that star and everything on the same map as the star" or "the whole sector of everything connected by wormholes/stargates"?

I wasn't aware of any persistence of "old sectors" in the latter sense; if that's been added I'm very interested to know

Gah, I mean system. Sometimes I get the terminology mixed up.

I have played co-op and sometimes it drives my buddies nuts when I mix those two terms up. 

[keith.lamothe]

Gah, I mean system. Sometimes I get the terminology mixed up.

I have played co-op and sometimes it drives my buddies nuts when I mix those two terms up. 

Ah, ok, I figured something like that

But I wonder why the monsters didn't spill over into neighboring systems.

[Professor Paul1290]

I know race ships go between systems pretty easily, but I'm not sure if the monsters do so very much if at all.

I've noticed each system seems to have it's own set of monster types that make up most of the monsters in that system, which seems to suggest that monsters stay in their home systems for the most part. If they do bleed over then I haven't seen it that much and I haven't noticed boss monsters moving between systems either.
Perhaps monsters lack the ability to use starlanes?

Race ships on the other hand, do seem to go between systems a lot and the traffic appears to have an actual affect on the game even if it isn't military. I have noticed that races that are friendly to each other do send ships to each others worlds, and if these ships can go back and forth easily without getting destroyed then their relationship seem to improve more quickly.

I have occasionally seen diplomat ships and other such ships passing between different race's worlds, and if I start following them and escorting them through bad spots that they otherwise wouldn't survive through, then it seems to help things along.
It seems to help when I want an alliance between two races and don't want to spend too much on positive rumors. It can go both ways though as diplomats do mess up and "accidentally insult" the other guy.

[Wingflier]

The game says that one of the "victory options" is to make all the races afraid of you by completing big quests and killing race ships?

Can somebody explain to me how that works?  How do you even check how afraid someone is of you?