A few years ago I played Naev for a few days. It was a lovely nostalgia trip, and I recommended it to friends who had also played Escape Velocity, but there wasn't much game there and it was a bit clunky.
A few weeks ago I got the itch again, so I downloaded Naev. To my pleasant surprise, development had not only continued but it has - dare I say it - surpassed Escape Velocity. There's a very cool stealth mechanic, the campaigns have been fleshed out, the AIs are more sophisticated than I remember in EV; it stands on it's own as a fantastic entry in the "Elite like" genre.
ETA: Some advice for new players, do the Empire Shipping missions (by talking to an Empire official in the spaceport bar in Empire worlds). It's sort of the second tutorial, they'll have you go to meet all the different factions, and you'll get your Heavy Weapons and Heavy Combat Ship licenses.
I absolutely LOVED playing Escape Velocity in high school! AmbrosiaSW made such great shareware games, with appealing graphic design and replayability--the modular system. I think all 3 EV games are good examples of the concept of "aesthetic unity" in game design.
Speaking of shareware: was I the only person who modded Captain Hector to take away his more powerful weapons?
I feel bad now for not scraping together the 10 bucks or whatever they were asking for, but mom would have just told me to go play outside if I'd asked.
Captain Hector. That’s a name(and bane of my existence) that I haven’t thought of in decades.
I, too, was too cheap as a kid to buy it and spent many hours trying to figure out how to outrun him. Such an interesting/infuriating mechanic to enforce trial periods.
It's not dissimilar from mechanics in other games, implicit in my comment is that none of the 3 EV games had any sort of stealth mechanic. (ETA: Actually, they had cloaking devices, but they were special unique items that you couldn't transfer if you upgraded your ship. Not sure if that exists in Naev, I haven't gotten very far into the main story.)
You can go into stealth, and other ships have a bubble around you can see on your radar (the radar is also much better than in EV). If you get inside that bubble you'll fall out of stealth. The size of the bubbles scales with the mass of your ship, so a shuttle or an interceptor can hide very effectively, but massive cargo ships simply cannot.
This makes being a criminal or smuggler much more interesting. In EV there was nothing more to it than being super fast and staying ahead of the patrols trying to scan you. In Naev it's the similar, but stealth gives you more options. It feels very cool to be drifting silently in space, waiting for patrols to move away so you can reach the jump point undetected. Feels more deliberate and clever.
Another cool thing is that the AIs use it too. So it feels much more like you've been accosted by a highwayman when you're a little Terrapin trying to finish a mission, and suddenly pirates appear out of the blue (black?).
So does stealth involve shutting down systems / power output etc.?
I always like a stealth system in space that involved not radiating, as well as avoiding active radar, too many sub sims in my youth :D
My favourite thing about The Expanse was when incoming radar stealth ships were finally identified by their bright drive plumes as they slowed for an attack.
No unfortunately (or not that I've noticed), though you drop out of stealth if you open fire or use your afterburners. It would be cool if you came out of stealth at half power; that would make it pretty costly, since power and power regen are the stats that dictate how long you can sustain your weapons in a firefight (missiles not withstanding).
That's very cool re: The Expanse. Alastair Reynolds, an astronomer turned sci-fi author, explores "weaponized astronomy" a lot in his books, especially the opening chapters of "Inhibitor Phase". Without too many spoilers, there's a ship that cools it's hull close to absolute zero and uses cryogenic gasses for thrust in order to maneuver, so that it isn't radiating IR. And they have to time their operations so that they aren't seen occluding the sun.
Another author who explores stealth in space combat is Greg Bear in 'Anvil of Stars' (the successor to 'Forge of God'). This is nothing like The Expanse, instead the galaxy is a hostile jungle full of predators just waiting for a young techno civilisation (like humanity) to naïvely broadcast its presence.
Jack Campbell's "The Lost Fleet" starts with Dauntless, and is reasonably good at considering light speed issues in combat, tactics, and moving fleets of ships at low fractions of the speed of light, eg .1c
However, if I remember correctly, stealth in particular is not really considered and is dismissed as impossible. Campbell does a good job of demonstrating tactics to hide ships, though.
It's the Kestrel from EV: Nova (which as we all know is the ship that singlehandedly put Krain Industries on the map), with a little bit of red added.
They're pretty shameless! Lots of the ships are pulled from EV: Nova with cosmetic changes (no idea about the legality, I suspect they got permission but I haven't looked into it), and there's a setting that skins the UI to look like EV classic.
There is a Russian game Space Rangers ¹ I played in the early ’00s, and I quite enjoyed it, was one of my favourite game.
It’s a 2D game with quests and space exploration, battles and some arcade mode in hyper-space. I remember it very well, as it worked very snappy on my poor computer (even by that time standards).
Now as I remembered that game, I wonder if Naev is something similar. I would rather not promote a Russian game these days, and I would rather play open source game. But from user interface perspective Naev looks quite bad when compared to that Rangers game made two decades ago. I judge Naev by its screenshots, so maybe the game looks better.
Despite its bugs Space Rangers was incredible. The diversity of gameplay was great. Fly around space, fight people, solve puzzles and manage ski resorts.
When I retire I want to start a foundation to create free to play open source video games. Initially I was thinking we’d focus it on mobile games for little ones since so many of those games are designed to extract as much money for parents suffering through dinner etc… but this game looks like a cool target also
I see a lot of Escape Velocity fans in the comments. Recently, one of the developers of the original series started building a remake [1] of EV:Override featuring compatibility with the old plug-in format, which, despite its crowdfunded nature, seems to progress well.
I'm still a bit salty that they didn't leverage any of the perfectly good EV clones or general purpose game engines out there and have spent the time since the Kickstarter building an engine from scratch.
Sounds very similar to Endless Sky[1] - another open source game drawing on the old Escape Velocity games. I really enjoyed both Endless Sky and the Escape Velocity games, so I'll have to check out Naev at some point!
I found Endless Sky to be ok, but it didn’t hold my interest in the end. The early part of exploring a new game was fun, just going through the mechanics of trade and navigation and such.
My one combat was decidedly one sided and a disaster. I honestly don’t remember the game play of it much. Most of the navigation and movement is automated.
By the time I got enough money for another ship, I had become disenchanted with the mechanics. Trying to min/max sales and trade and such. And was never strong enough to play Galactic Marshal or anything like that.
That’s when I put it down. Just may be the game doesn’t suit me. Or I never got into some sweet spot of challenge to engage me. And since the galaxy is fixed (at least I think it’s fixed), I didn’t see much opportunity in replay of it.
The actual storyline develops after a significant amount of in-game time, and is actually kinda easy to miss the initial two hooks if you click through things too quick. Basically, a planet gets nuked, and a while after _that_, somebody approaches you once you end up in a certain area of the map for a little while.
(And that's before you discover [censored] and [censored] and the whole [censored] storyline that happens after the “main”/initial plot ends)
I played an earlier version of Endless Sky but haven't kept up with the recent developments. I agree that combat in Endless Sky is a lot harder than in EV and really is not worth it until you can get a quite decent ship and get good at the game mechanics for combat. The key for me was to start by doing standard missions until you get enough money for trading commodities. Then you start developing trade routes and shipping commodities yourself. You build up a convoy/fleet, monitor prices in different systems, and make real money by buying low and selling high. That's more fun than it sounds, but it is a bit of a grind admittedly. Once you get going you can really make tons of money. This is the easiest way to afford a decent ship (in my opinion). And to me that's when the fun came in. Endless Sky also allows you to own multiple ships (unlike EV), so you can design different ships or even fleets for different purposes (one fleet for combat, one fleet for exploration, one fleet for trade, etc.). But there is unfortunately a bit of grinding you have to do before you can get to that point.
Note that none of this involves the storyline, so you can do this for as long as you'd like regardless of how much of the story you have completed.
I was having a blast being an explorer in a scout ship, shuttling interesting characters around, never getting into any battles because my ship was fast enough to outrun any pirates and I never pissed anyone off.
Unfortunately at a certain point the game the railroads you into a storyline where you are forced to pick a side in some galactic war and entire sections of the map become unpassable because everyone attacks you, even if you are pootling along in a civilian ship with no weapons. I think you're supposed to build up a fleet and kill everybody, but it's such a big change in both tone and gameplay that it really bummed me out. Oh well.
Yeah there's no real way to finish the game as a plain old simple trader iirc, that's just the first of I think three or four major wars you get involved in during the entire game?
Note that trade missions generally give about 10x value compared to trading yourself. Going into dead-end system chains can help stack multiple missions with the same destination.
Some brief notes about combat in Endless Sky (with some differences from EV:N):
* The population of ships is much higher in ES; it's much easier to get overwhelmed. Note that when you initially enter a system it starts with 5 seconds (I think) worth of ships, and they keep randomly spawning at a continuous rate (in the game files, the numbers mean "expected delay between spawns in milliseconds" I think). If there is a hostile enemy ship, chances are its random delay was pretty short, so more will come. Instead you should try to arrange your fights to be in a system with low traffic.
* The easiest way to get started with combat is to take escort missions, which spawn fixed enemies, and have allies that you can use as shields. They also persist if you disable them and land, so you can capture them easily (sell your fighter and buy a shuttle which can hire more crew). This is by far the fastest way to make money (as in, pay off your debt on day 3).
* Ships do persist between systems, so if they jump out you can follow them
* You absolutely can play the game without ever buying anything or doing missions, slowing capturing more powerful ships until you get a Bastion. This isn't a reasonable thing to do, but I did it anyway just to prove it can be done.
* The Monty Python maneuver has been heavily nerfed, but still has an important place.
* There are 4 different approaches for weapons on your ship/fleet; each ship should largely pick one and stick to it (and you should ground ships with the wrong loadout for your current task): 1. do as much damage as possible, 2. reliably stop shooting when target is disabled (that is, beam or weapons or at least high-velocity ones (though this is less important against slow and tanky enemies); it won't help if your allies see another target behind it), 3. overload enemy heatsinks (very useful against certain ships but useless against others), and 4. drain enemy energy (I've never found this useful, but have been affected by enemies using it on me). Also a couple special cases: 5. the player ship should be somewhat optimized for capturing, which may be at the cost of weapons, 6. your main ship might also want extra fuel, for exploring or just avoiding deadlines (escorts can land/takeoff to refuel without taking an extra day ... they can share with you, but they are dumb if multiple uninhabited systems exist on your path), 7. anti-missile also takes away from direct damage but is usually worth it (and without the tough energy/heat costs), 8. it does matter which gun slot you put your weapons in; use the I(nfo) window, 9. weapons that use ammo get expensive for the player's fleet, unlike enemy ships (and I guess mission-based escort ships, but those are rarely really combat-capable) which get everything for free; unlike EV:N your permanent escorts don't refill for free (but you do get to choose their loadout, so it's a net win I guess).
* Regarding engines, steering is generally more important than thrust for both combat and escaping to another system, but thrust matters for escaping/dodging within a system. A full guide to optimizing your ship would not fit in this margin, but it is certainly possible to beat the default ships, especially by mixing outfits between factions.
* Many factions will forgive you easily if you just attack pirates or something, but some factions will never forgive you. If you accidentally draw aggro merely jumping between systems should suffice.
* There are some outfits that you can only get by boarding or capturing a ship, and some that you can only get by capturing the whole ship. This includes outfits never buyable, outfits only be unlocked later in the main plot, and (if you use 0.9.8 which is still widely deployed) outfits that were supposed to be removed for balance reasons.
I've played Endless Sky a decent bit but always struggled with combat; thanks for this guide. What's the Monty Python maneuver you mentioned? (EDIT: Never mind, found an explanation at https://evn.fandom.com/wiki/Monty_Python_Maneuver)
For anyone into this sort of game, I always recommend Starsector [1]. It's a beautifully made game that is in active development and already very fun to play.
I’m not sure if I’d call one update every half year/year ‘active’ development, but it has certainly been consistently developed for 10 years or more at this point.
This game looks pretty exciting to follow. Escape Velocity was a huge part of my childhood. My brother and I completely scraped that game clean of secrets. I learned how to use ResEdit because of it. We would daisy chain ADB keyboards and he’d fly while I controlled weapon selection and escorts.
Wow, another Broken Mirror fan in the wild! Yes, that was the best Trek game there eas until Infinite came out this year. The author really got what made Trek tick and the gameplay was a perfectly serviceable EV like. One of the most technically ambitious flash games I ever played.
Never did play Escape Velocity but I like this one so far. It's a charming little game with some decent story development. And it even runs natively on Mac.
A few weeks ago I got the itch again, so I downloaded Naev. To my pleasant surprise, development had not only continued but it has - dare I say it - surpassed Escape Velocity. There's a very cool stealth mechanic, the campaigns have been fleshed out, the AIs are more sophisticated than I remember in EV; it stands on it's own as a fantastic entry in the "Elite like" genre.
ETA: Some advice for new players, do the Empire Shipping missions (by talking to an Empire official in the spaceport bar in Empire worlds). It's sort of the second tutorial, they'll have you go to meet all the different factions, and you'll get your Heavy Weapons and Heavy Combat Ship licenses.