Cosmonautica

joxer

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This one looks totally crazy highly interesting, did anyone try this:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/320340/

http://cosmonautica.com/

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At least 352 people have left a review on Steam Early Access.
The product is given a general score of 9 out of 10, as so many SEA stuff.

9 out of 10, that's telling it all. Why bother to look elsewhere? With that score, it cant be a bad product.
 
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LOL
Neptunia got 9/10 on Steam and I still thumbed it down and am suggesting not buying the PC version.

I'm asking here because I lost trust in Steam reviews.
 
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I already bought it and checked yesterday for 2h.
It looks interesting but not very deep.
I expect a lighthearted game with 15-20 of fun, but can't really tell if it's good or not yet.
One downer for me: The game has a couple of minor bugs apparently, and the first patch is 2 weeks or more ahead as the Developers mentioned in forums.
 
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Anyone wants to share more detailed preview and compare this to FTL or Interstellaria or some other similar games?
 
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Played it for 15h now. It basically has almost nothing to do with all these other games.

At the core, this is a game, where you have a spaceship, decide which rooms you put in it, and which crew members you recruit.
Like in Sims your crew members have needs like Toilet or leisure time. But that only needs that you have to have certain rooms in your ship, like toilets. If you have that, this is set, and basically the whole game play element doesn't come to the surface anymore. Also different crew members can get a low morale if their needs are not forfilled or if they like different food -> just recruit ones which like the same food, and you are set.

So this element is pretty non-essential for the game.
What you do with your ship then is trading, fighting or do missions, which are either trading, fighting or transporting people.
But because the systems itself are extremely static, this is only interesting for a couple of hours. The overview about what can be traded also isn't exactly good.
So you just go to system A, get a mission to transport Robots from B to C, then you fly to B, buy robots, go to C, deliver them, repeat. Or you go to planet A, buy books, and deliver them to any other planet. Regardless if a planet imports them or not, all will take a certain amount, and you can already gain tons of money by doing so.
Once you have enough money, you can buy a new ship, with more space and weapons.
And then you take combat missions, and they are like 5-10 times as time efficient as trading.
Now it takes maybe 5-10 hours until you have everything: The biggest ship, a perfect crew and all researches.

If you decided to play the sandbox mode, you can basically stop playing now.

However the campaign is quite nice. It is told via text windows and a picture of your dialogue partner, and they are giving you a lot of missions you follow to find out what is in the box, you won at poker at the beginning of the game.
It basically also consists of the 3 things of course: Bringing goods, killing someone or transporting somone. But in the context of the campaign it doesn't feel that meaningless.

Imho it's an okish game. But you probably need to play the campaign to have fun with it. The campaign has the same world every time, while the sandbox mode has a procedurally created map. But without the campaign missions it's just boring after very short time.

So compared to FTL:
-In FTL, you have limited time, so you get excited about new crew members or new rooms. In Cosmonautica you don't.
-In FTL, you have an interesting combat with lots of mechanics which interact with each other. The combat in Cosmonautica is extremely dull.
-In FTL, you have random events with interesting decisions. In cosmonautica you only have a couple of decisions in the campaign, but not in sandbox mode.

The only thing in common: Cosmonautica saves automatically. But it doesn't have difficulty levels and I haven't managed to die yet. So it's also extremely easy.

If you got any more questions, I am glad to answer them.
 
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Basically you're saying the game can be liked by someone who refused to buy FTL because of it's disbalance?

I've seen many people reporting frequent crashes, what's your experinece with that? Did it crash a lot?

And finally, is it worth the release price or we should probably wait for some bargain?
 
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FTL is actually extremely well balanced, while Cosmonautica is not.
Of course the balancing is also at very different points.
In FTL it is important that all weapon systems and so on have their use but also none of them is 100% mandatory and cannot replaced by others.
But the balancing in Cosmonautica is more considering missions and trade routes. And these are extremely bad balanced. Regarding weapon systems and so on you hardly have a choice anyways. So I wouldn't talk about balancing at that point.

Regarding crashes…yeah. The game is not the most stable one. I would say that I get one crash in about 3 hours average. That isn't horrible, but also not really good.
The good thing however is that the game automatically saves everywhere. So all you lose is 1 minute to restart and load the game and maybe 30-60 seconds of game time.

Regarding the Price: The normal price is 15€, but it should have a reduction, which it doesn't have due to a mistake of steam or the developer.
On gog.com it has the correct price of 11.59€
And on their homepage it costs 12.74€, but there it also includes the Android version. http://cosmonautica.com/getit.html

In any way, the price range of 11-15€ is only worth it, if you play and enjoy the campaign - but it's still not a great deal. If you only play the sandbox mode however, you will be bored after maybe 4-6 hours and then it's definitely not worth it.

Oh, and one more thing: In comparison to FTL it also has 0 replay value. The game is extremely simple and it's very unlikely to get stuck. The game autosaves, but I guess if you "die", you just get a setback, and need to buy a cheaper ship or take a credit. But it's not like you are starting over all the time. There also isn't really a learning curve as the combat is trivial (and still badly explained).
 
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Had moved this on to my "followed" list. Looks like I'll be moving it right back off. Appreciate the info.
 
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And just finished the campaign.
Played maybe 3 hours to get to know the elements and controls of the game.
Then started the campaign:
10h till I had researched everything and had the biggest ship in the game.
14h till I finished the campaign.
 
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