Cosmonautica

[Mr. Analog]

Remember Freelancer? Remember FTL? Imagine combining those into a more casual, cartoony experience with some elements of The Sims.

NOTE: This is an "early access game" which means they have a tutorial and an open world mode available and no campaign mode yet

You start out with a base amount of currency and a starting ship, you get to buy rooms for it and hire crew members. Each crew member will have different skills and needs and each need will have a different priority (for example: 2 crew members have a high need for the bathroom but you only bought one toilet and scheduled them on the same shifts!) Crew members gain experience the longer they serve with you and you can promote them, as they are promoted their needs will grow and they will gain new skills (and, of course, you have to pay them more!)

Stations / Planets:

Stations are where everything happens, they each have merchants for buying and selling goods, clubs where you can pick up speciality missions and employment agencies where you can hire new crew members (or post job offers).

The commerce is what makes you money, each planet has imports and exports and so you can plan out routes around the solar system that are profitable. Some planets that import material can sometimes have a full inventory of that material, but if you come back later you can sell again. Similarly a planet that produces something for export may not have any to sell.

Picking up missions at the station's club is a great way to make large sums of money fast, this is where you'll pick up jobs to transport passengers or deliver special cargo or even get some inside information about a planet that needs a specific resource. A lot of the jobs you get this way can be risky or time sensitive, if you take on a smuggling job and get caught you'll be fined and banned from using that station's facilities for a time (BETTER CALL SAUL!)

When you visit stations with shipyards you can buy / sell and move rooms around to make things more efficient, when you start to make more money you can eventually buy bigger ships to accommodate your growing needs, or even buy different kinds of ships. Finally! Your chance to command a slow moving bulk container ship or if that's not your speed a small, fast ship with a lot of weapon slots and maybe a free pirate hat (hint hint).

You start off in the inner worlds of a solar system, all the planets are close together and really you just have to plan your trips so you can take advantage of the orbits and build your finances. As time goes on though you'll find that some planets start having new needs and goods that can't be obtained in the inner worlds. That's where science and research come in. At the moment you can research the outer worlds of the system, things get a little more dangerous out there as the planets are further apart and in some cases swarming with pirates and rival merchants. The goods you can pick up and sell on the outer rim worlds are fairly profitable but make sure you have a good pilot and some weapons too!

In future releases there will be more research options for ship upgrades, etc. There should also be the addition of more systems you can plot courses too, and so far each system is randomly generated so there is a real opportunity for growth.

Anyway, I like this game because it combines a few genres I like in an appealing / funny package but isn't quite as harsh as FTL or as micro-manage-y as Freelancer

It's a fun little game with potentially a lot to give.

I'm pretty sure multiplayer is not going to be a thing (I'm new to the community) but if it is I'll let you all know. I remember some epic Freelancer back in the day

It costs $11 (and for me at least, has paid for itself in fun)

COSMONAUTICA:
http://cosmo-nautica.com/

On Steam:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/320340/

[Melbosa]

Sounds fun!  I buy and see!

[Mr. Analog]

Just a warning it is a fairly easy game

But it's addictive

[Mr. Analog]

Since my initial post they've added a few things.

For one the personality system is a lot more fleshed out as is the promotion system. Each character has a unique personality, some of these traits are obvious but others are shown over time or as the character matures. For example you may have a crew member that is prone to being ill but otherwise has high morale, so if an event happens that would upset them (like having a thief rob them at a spaceport) they bounce back quicker. When they are ill though they may not be available on their shift or won't work at full capacity. This is important if the crew member is the only pilot or weapons expert.

The levelling system for team members is more interesting, you can either add skill points to existing known talents or unlock a random talent. This is both good and bad because you can diversify what a crew member can do or choose to really make them the best at a certain skill. I've found that if you can build a small crew that can cover each others tasks is the best.

Other new stuff includes ship customization (colours and name) as well as 2 new ship types:

Pirate Ship: Unlockable after you reach $400,000 is quite large and supports the most weapon type mounts of any hull design (2 turrets, torpedo room, side canons and shield). I don't know if this ship comes with "antennas" which are required for intercepting other ships (will be unlockable through science research but hasn't been made available yet)

HUGE cargo ship: Once you hit $450,000+ you can unlock this massive beast of a ship. It has 2 turret mounting points, the most rooms of any hull design and 3 engines. it size means maintenance is going to cost you more and if you don't have routes already memorized that can take advantage of trade in bulk it's going to be expensive to run. I bought this hull over the weekend and the thing is a beast, your best bet is to haul waste from the inner worlds at a cheap price and sell the to an outer ring recycling centre in exchange for medpacks, chemicals and cosmetics. Try to stop off at other outer ring worlds to pick up goods that are in demand in the inner ring, from there you can make smaller hops between worlds and sell your cargo. Again, this thing is expensive to operate so you really have to be on your game to make it viable (and not fall apart at the seams!)

Some other improvements include the battle system, which is semi-realtime. Crew that are ill won't be able to man systems, so it really pays to have people who can have secondary skills like pilot the ship / operate weapons in battle. The space fights are generally easy to avoid still if you have a capable pilot, however there are some advantages to getting into battle in that the ships you fight are often carrying valuable cargo. Battles can either be picked up as missions from stations or as random encounters on outer rings.

With the improvement battling can give you, you can choose more than one path to get you started in the game. The slow but steady way to build your ship/crew up is to focus on delivering cargo and transporting people, the other way is to beef up your weapons systems and hire a weapons person to go after nogoodniks, though the rewards are generally larger for this the cost of repairing your ship after each encounter means you have to figure that into your profits. Torpedos are very powerful but expensive and turrets are cheap but only work at close quarters (which means you'll be taking damage).

Cargo smuggling is still a bit of a swizz, you need a hacking room and a hacker and so far as I can tell you only get a +15% bonus on cheating the contraband scanners. You can make a career out of smuggling as well as shipping cargo but the penalty is fairly harsh, for one your smuggled cargo is confiscated, you are charged a violation fee AND you will be banned from trading with that station for a variable number of days based on the gravity of the offence.

Hacking can now be used in battle, which can be handy, you can knock out the enemy's ability to use their weapons, which is great if you have a ship that can only mount close quarters weapons like turrets. Shields are also a new addition and are manned by a crew member with the science skill.

Scientific research is still limited to unlocking the outer rings of the system. Once you get past unlocking the outermost ring you should train your crewmember with the "do science" skill into something secondary, otherwise they (and the science lab) are a maintenance cost to you outside of battle.

Some more random events have been added to the game that affect your crew, everything from the choice to celebrate a birthday party or deal with a sexual harassment case will come up, how you choose to deal with these is up to you but each come with consequences. For example: if you choose not to celebrate a birthday party the morale for that person goes down quite a bit whereas if you choose to celebrate everyone on the ship has a temporary increase in tiredness and lowered performance (as if from a hangover... which they can get sometimes while visiting a station).

I'm not sure if this was a thing in the previous version but I noticed it more in this version is if a crewmember gets sick it can spread to other members they are around, likewise if one of them picks up a space STD while visiting a "love park" it can also spread. The worst is having all your crew members sick, usually there aren't enough beds for all of them and it means you are both defenceless AND without a pilot (and you will have to pay to be towed to the nearest system if things are really bad)

You can get a medic and a medbay, I'm pretty sure this decreases how much time crew spend sick and/or prevents the spread of it, but overall I'm not sure how effective it is as a room yet.

COUGH anyway this has been a long post, but the winning strategies so far:
1. When getting started make sure you have both a cargo hold and seating for 6, picking up jobs at various station bars is a good way to make money, this is made better by also hauling goods that are needed by the destination station
2. As soon as you can afford repair / cleaning robots buy them, they work faster and non-stop and will repair / clean rooms to 95% or higher, which is way higher than most crew you will be able to hire or promote. The more damaged / dirty your ship is the more it will cost you to run (if not from being less efficient than crew getting sick)
3. Get a science person early on and start researching outer rings as soon as you can, medium to low value goods that are easy to get in the inner ring have a higher value on the outer rings and goods produced on the outer rings are usually unavailable in the inner rings and are also usually in high demand, you will make a killing hauling in outer ring stuff to inner ring merchants
4. When you unlock outer rings invest in a weapon room, ammo and crew skilled in shooting stuff, if you can afford it make sure your weapon crew member has a secondary skill (like piloting) otherwise they are going to cost you money outside of battle

This game is really fun and starting to grow. Not only is room placement important inside the ship (efficient routes, maintenance) but with the personality system it's almost like managing Sims relationships and of course on top of that you have the challenge of learning profitable shipping routes, taking on missions and making a buck in a system full of challenges.

FYI I've put more than 20 hours in now and still find it fun. It is still early access and stuff is changing on a monthly basis, so YMMV