Astrobase Command - Now on Kickstarter

Farflame spotted the Space Sim Astrobase Command on Kickstarter:

Procedural Personalities Meet 3D Base Building, and Survival.

Leaders know that their crew's personalities are at least as important as their skills when entrusting them with key responsibilities. Every choice you make will be the difference between life and death in the void. Do you have what it takes?

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Build the 3D space station of your dreams and handle a tide of paperwork as your crew members, driven by powerful personality-based AI, tend to their jobs as they see fit while developing friendships, rivalries, and romances along the way.

Space isn't a gentle place. Your crew works hard to keep the station running while maintaining a work-life balance or their bodies, relationships, and mental-health will suffer!

Create your species on a visual and statistical level, so they look and play the way you want. A species of super-intelligent anti-social clones? We've got you covered. Tough and genetically diverse dimwits? No problem! When we say “create your own species” we mean it.

• Build Space Stations in Full 3D!
  Do you think games with side or overhead 2D base building are in dire need of another dimension? So do we! Your Astrobase can be as large or small as you want, along any axis!
• Hire and Promote Crewmembers That Fit Your Style:
  Scrutinize the personnel files your Recruiting Officer dumps into your inbox and hire the characters with the job skills, stats, and personality traits that you need to run your Astrobase.
  
  Carefully balance the mix of personalities to create the working environment you desire. While it is natural to promote a handful of your key characters to lofty levels, it's also fine to leave others as trusted and highly skilled lower ranking specialists. Not everyone needs to become an Admiral, and Admirals are expensive.

• Procedural Personalities and Procedural Storytelling:
  You can't control your crew; but you'll command them. Each member of the crew decides what needs to get done, and how, based on their individually generated personalities and personalized history. As characters interact in their daily routine, the drama of life unfolds.

• Deep Relationships and Character Life:
  Characters have their own lives. Watch them live it!

More information.

I decided to back this one despite being sceptical of procedural generation. It worked well enough in Battle Brothers and some roguelikes I've played, but I haven't liked it in other games, simply because the gameplay hasn't been good enough to make up for repetitious content. Still this game reminded me a little of a C64 game I really liked called PSI-5 Trading Company, and so I backed it out of Nostalgia.

Pitch makes it sound like an HR simulator, which is about as far from something I'd do for entertainment as I can get.

Sort of. In a way its like a sport manager simulator. That kind of thing is not for everyone. But I like playing them once in awhile.

No matter how proficient this team is, it is hard to see them deliver on their project.

The foundation is toxic: it adds a layer between the player and his sense of achievement.
Players do not like that. They do not want to command a crew (that could ultimately refuse to take the orders) Players desire to control.

As it is set, a poorly chosen personality will turn out with detrimental consequences. Players can not bear that.

These devs are probably going for an early release.Which means that only a few, unfinished versions will work as designed. Once they are pressured by players' feedback, they will dilute their own project and remove the features that are supposed to be core at the moment.

Hm, I've marked this one to get notified when the KS is running at its end, so I can have a look at it again and decide whether I want to pull the trigger. Sounds like it could be fun, but they'll need to convince me.