More Thoughts on Rebel Galaxy

By Paul Spooner Posted Tuesday Jun 25, 2019

Filed under: Video Games 57 comments

I talked on the Diecast about how I was having fun playing Rebel GalaxyHeads up! Check the byline. This post isn’t by Shamus.. After the show, I played a few more hours and discovered that I was wrong about a few things.

First, most obvious, and as pointed out by multiple people in the comments, I was confusing Rebel Galaxy with Rebel Galaxy Outlaw. Seems impossible! I know! Two such distinct titles conflated like that. But I simply didn’t realize that the capital ship trading game and the fighter ship dogfighting game were entirely different. Or, will be different? And perhaps not entirely? Anyhow, my bad.

Of course, I probably would have been more aware of the differences between these games if I had been forced to pay for it instead of being gifted it by the Epic Games Store. The sense of false injury I was laboring under was my fault, yes, but it is also in part a result of the delivery method. If I’m going to spend money on a game, I’m going to figure out what it is I’m purchasing. But when I get it on the dole, there’s no incentive to clarify the scope. “Oh, this game! I know what it is, and it’s free! Great!” I think this is an unintended drawback of deeply discounted pricing. People might very well enjoy things less when they have unrealistic expectations unmitigated by the disenchanting process of research. They might even like them more when they pay for them. There’s probably a whole series of articles in that, so I should probably get back to talking about things I was wrong about.

Need me to break up the wall of text with an image? Ok. Here’s an image of a wall of text.
Need me to break up the wall of text with an image? Ok. Here’s an image of a wall of text.

Second, I didn’t realize that, while you can buy some fairly expensive ships in the starting system, they by no means represented the full range of ships available. This mistake I feel a bit better about though, because out of the nine common ships available, besides the special mercenary ships, and the ones you can only get through the merchants guild, and the ones unique to the Krell, and the… okay, there are a lot of ships! But of the nine main ones, six are available right at the start. That’s a lot!

The starting ship. Actually not super terrible, for the price.
The starting ship. Actually not super terrible, for the price.

I say “available” as if you could purchase any of them, but really they are simultaneously so hilariously out of reach and so disappointing that I feel like there has been some kind of design error. At the start of the game, you have 1000 credits and the rock bottom low-tier ship. If you strip all the equipment off, engines, shields, guns, everything, you can get that up to 3,045 credits. The first upgraded ship costs 43 credits. Oh, no, I just made another mistake. 43 thousand credits. And the ship after that is 129kc beyond the first upgrade. Each tier of vessel costs two to five times the previous tier. That’s a lot! The trade-in value of your existing vessel is essentially negligible! This punishing cost curve means that, while you’ll probably have graduated to the next system before reaching the tier-3 ship, there are three more tiers sitting there, taunting you. I’ve reached the mid-game, and only just now purchased the tier-5 ship, for 1.3 million credits!

This one cost hundreds of thousands of credits and looks kind of like a shrimp.
This one cost hundreds of thousands of credits and looks kind of like a shrimp.

You could be forgiven for imagining that these epic huge price tags would herald in commesurately epic stats, which brings me to the disappointing part. Your starting ship, the tier-1 vessel, can carry 10 cargo. Not too bad, especially since… okay.

I imagine that, on the inside, seated in the captain's chair among the high-tech consoles and glowing buttons, it smells like shrimp too.
I imagine that, on the inside, seated in the captain's chair among the high-tech consoles and glowing buttons, it smells like shrimp too.

This is one of my big gripes with this game. I started looking at all these commodities and thinking “Wow! All this stuff in the starting system! I wonder what new and exotic commodities I’ll find once I can finally afford a jump drive!” Jump drives, by the way, cost 75kc, more than double the price of an entire tier-2 ship. The equipment for the ships follows the same matterhorn-like costing curve but I’m already one digression deep. Because by the time you can afford a jump drive, or a single “Antimatter Speck”, which is a commodity for which you can see pricing at the beginning of the game, you will be very ready to travel out of the starting system and discover that these are all of the commodities in the game. Yep! No wonder of discovery! No impressive markets of exotics! Just station after station that are all sold out of Progenitor Shards, but are willing to quote you an exact price that they would be willing to sell one to you for if they ever got their hands on one.

You wouldn’t think, with aliens just everywhere, that alien artifacts would be so difficult to come by.
You wouldn’t think, with aliens just everywhere, that alien artifacts would be so difficult to come by.

So that’s disappointing. But on the up-side, you can carry 10 Tachyon Salt in your starting ship, each of which costs ten times your starting cash-on-hand. You’re not going to run out of cargo space any time soon, is what I’m saying. But once you DO get some of that sweet cash, instead of spending it on goods to trade, or ludicrously expensive guns, you could buy a whole new ship! And how much cargo space does this ship have? 30 cargo? Perhaps 45? No no, think lower.

A 4x bonus for having a mission to sell stuff? Don’t mind if I do!
A 4x bonus for having a mission to sell stuff? Don’t mind if I do!

Think, fifteen.

That’s right, you can haul a whole extra 5 cargo for 43 thousand credits. Or, you know, just buy the “medium cargo extender” which adds a flat +8 cargo space to any ship. Know how much that costs? 30kc would be a bargain, but you can actually get them for 28kc, just over half the price of a ship that gives you just over half the upgrades. The tier-7 ship has the largest cargo hold of the main line vessels at 42, but you’ll have to pay 7 million credits to get there, and the 1.3 million option in tier-5 gets pretty close with 30 cargo slots.

Let’s put this in real-world terms. I can go out and buy a 36’ skiff for $48k with a 10 ton net cargo capacity or $4.8k/t. In the middle range, are 100’ vessels with around 60 tons net (for $150k or $2.5k/t). And near the upper end are 300’ cargo ships with 1200 tons net, and those only cost about $1.2 million or $1k/t. As you get bigger vessels, the cost per capacity goes down, because of the surface-volume law, and economies of scale! This is exactly the opposite in Rebel Galaxy, where you’re paying 3kc/c at tier-2, 43kc/c at tier-5, and 167kc/c tier-7. Perhaps the whole galaxy is rebelling against the fundamental principle of economic incentive.

So, that’s disappointing too. And all of the ship upgrades are like this. Just to give you an idea of the range, the tier-2 “Light Frigate” costs 43kc and has combat stats of 4 broadside, 3 turrets and the tier-9 “Dreadnaught” with a 18 million credit price-tag has stats of 20 broadside, 16 turrets. It’s about five times as good, and about five hundred times as expensive.

Though, that’s not entirely fair. When you buy a ship with more broadside ports you get that firepower for free, so you don’t have to buy another four broadside banks. Which is good because each tier of equipment is exactly three times as expensive as the previous tier, and usually only exhibits about a 10% performance increase.

But what about the difficult-to-quantify upgrades? The ones that let you see cargo from a ping instead of a direct scan? Or make mining more efficient? Well, they are all basically worthless for the huge price tag. I’m not going to go into it except to bring up the Turret Optimizer, which is available for purchase right at the start of the game, makes all of your “projectile” turrets shoot 25% more rapidly, and costs 7.9 million credits. More than the entire tier-7 ship. For an upgrade that makes your guns, while definitely better, I wouldn’t say “significantly”, especially since it’s going to be chewing up a whole “component bank” of which even the most capacious vessels only have six, and the tier-9 (which is where you want it, because that has the most turrets) only has four component slots.

If you’re asking me to spend enough money to purchase the entire sector’s worth of robots, at least put some details on the brochure. I don’t even mind if they’re made up. I just want to feel like I’m getting my money’s worth.
If you’re asking me to spend enough money to purchase the entire sector’s worth of robots, at least put some details on the brochure. I don’t even mind if they’re made up. I just want to feel like I’m getting my money’s worth.

Just, I don’t even; Why? What were the designers thinking?

Which brings me to the third thing that I was wrong about, which is that all of the systems in the game are well considered and polished. They aren’t. So put on some yackety sax and read through this list with all the spaces edited out though I’m not going to actually type it that way because it would be really hard to read.

Warp pairing is weird, continuing the age-old tradition of escort missions being a pain. Your ship dances around trying to get in the right position to “jump to hyperspace” so awkwardly that it reminds me of my first time. Also it takes forever. Moving on.

I said the automatic difficulty evaluation works well, but apparently none of the NPCs have access to that information, seeing how none of the pirates would run away from me when I re-visited the starting system in my tier-4.5 doom wagon that can vaporize their entire cruiser in a single volley. Not even a single volley, like, half a volley. I’m moments away from hulling right through their ship because my turrets have shucked all their shields and armor off by the time I’m in position for a broadside, and I call them up and be all “maybe you picked the wrong fight” and they come back with whatever canned sass the game designer gave them for such an occasion where they are feeling cocky, and between pressing the “okay I guess” button to end the really quite gracious on my part parlay, and giving the command to “fire” my battery of six MK4 Neutron Beams right into the side of their already-riddled-with-gouts-of-flame warship, my mining laser lights them up and it’s all over.

They blow up so quickly it’s hard to get a screenshot, so here’s one of me about to blow up instead. I did this on purpose, honest.
They blow up so quickly it’s hard to get a screenshot, so here’s one of me about to blow up instead. I did this on purpose, honest.

There’s no way to save the game manually. It just autosaves whenever you exit a station, kind of like NMS. Enough said.

Grinding Rep is a real pain. There are three zones, with Friendly and Hostile on the ends, and Neutral in the middle. That’s not the painful part. The pain comes with how difficult it is to move those faction feelings. From what I can tell, each zone is about 400 points wide, and you get about 10 points per mission. One mission I decided to side with the pirates and betray the militia captain with whom I had been working for three missions in a row and I got a -20 with the militia. Apparently they hardly even noticed. Of course you get -1 here and there for blowing up a faction’s vessels, and -10 for insulting them on the radio. But it’s devilishly difficult to increase your standing. All of this works out to mean that you can’t make significant choices of any magnitude with regard to your faction standing. It’s just the slow accumulation of little deposits and even littler withdrawals. The faction alignment bonuses don’t scale with relative difficulty either, so you can go back to the starting zone and get +15 and +20 missions all day long. And even so, I spent an hour trying to get into the Red Devil cartel, and all I really managed was to torpedo my militia standing.

The militia used to be my friends, but I guess they don’t like me taking missions from the pirates to smack their battleships around like pinatas until the candy comes out. Oddly enough, the pirates don’t seem to like it that much either.
The militia used to be my friends, but I guess they don’t like me taking missions from the pirates to smack their battleships around like pinatas until the candy comes out. Oddly enough, the pirates don’t seem to like it that much either.

You can’t purchase high-tier missile launchers at low-tier stations, but you can still resupply your high-tier launchers there. Kinda bugs me.

The only way to get this zoomed out is to keep toggling the map on and off.
The only way to get this zoomed out is to keep toggling the map on and off.

I want to be able to look at the system map while I’m in hyperspace, but the game pauses when you go to the map, so you can’t fly around in top-down mode. And speaking of what you’re allowed to see, the camera feels really uncomfortably close to your ship all the time. You can’t zoom out far enough in the system map either, and the only way to pan the map is by holding down the directional arrows, which goes too slow.
Ahh, the soul-nourishing open expanse of the ass-end of your battered spaceship taking up the camera all the time
Ahh, the soul-nourishing open expanse of the ass-end of your battered spaceship taking up the camera all the time

When you join the mercenary guild, you gain access to the “antimatter drone” turret, which out-ranges all other weapons by an order of magnitude, and has “huge” area effect and damage. Basically a super-missle. But it’s really only good for destroying groups of fighters, and the reload time makes it useless in a protracted fight, so that’s kind of a drag too.

The play-tips don’t respect your demonstrated skills. I know lots of games do this, but that doesn’t make it okay.

You’re ostensibly an a-moral empty shell for the player to fill with their starship captain fantasies, and you start off the game doing some pretty shady things, but the writer seems to make a point of not letting you take advantage of the AI macguffin hound in any way. Multiple characters ask you to sell it to them, and there’s never an option to even ask for a price, let alone follow through. At one point the religious fanatics show up and inform you that if you hand it over it will usher in a period of joy and happiness, and I was thinking “ooh, let’s try it and find out what happens! It’s only giving me a 10% boost to my engines right now, so what harm could it to do give it up?” But no, it wasn’t a real offer. My character later explains to the AI that it respects it too much as a person to give it away. Or some such nonsense. Missed opportunity.

I broke a blockade, and the bartender still made me pay for my drinks. Didn’t even get a fun song and bimbos. This game sucks.

Even bounties suck. Man, why can’t I ever get a break?
Even bounties suck. Man, why can’t I ever get a break?

On the bright side, while the ships and equipment are a static set, all the systems and the sector map are procedurally generated, new with every new game you play! Not sure how much that matters, but there you have it! On the whole, I’m still enjoying Outlaw Galaxy, but it could be a whole lot better. Maybe they will fix all of that stuff when Outlaw Galaxy Rebel Starfighter comes out in 20X6.

 

Footnotes:

[1] Heads up! Check the byline. This post isn’t by Shamus.



From The Archives:
 

57 thoughts on “More Thoughts on Rebel Galaxy

  1. lucky7 says:

    I checked the byline, and the post is currently listed as being by Shamus.

    1. Retsam says:

      It’s actually by Shamüs, his evil twin.

    2. RFS-81 says:

      Paul really nailed the tone, though!

  2. Matthew Downie says:

    The exponentially more expensive high-tier equipment seems normal to me. Most RPGs work that way.

    1. Paul Spooner says:

      Right, but that fact isn’t usually shoved in your face from the very start. It opens up as you play, just like the commodity system also doesn’t in Rebel Galaxy.

    2. kdansky says:

      Yes, seems to me this is a case of game balance over realism. Generally I think that is the right approach to making games. In this case especially so, because doing it the realistic way would end up in a winner-takes-all situation. You have too little cargo space to bother for the first 70% of the game, and then you get a big ship and suddenly your cargo space is bigger than you’d ever need, and results in an instantly broken economy.

      Starting with high values and giving little increments works a lot better than starting with small values and giving massive increments.

      Just imagine and fantasy RPG where every weapon upgrade doubled your damage. It would basically always be unplayable: Either you can’t hurt your enemies at all because you’re underleveled, or you massacre them by the dozen with every swipe.

      Going from 10 to 15 is sensible: Any formula that gives good results at 10 will also work at 15, and vice versa, but at 15 you get 50% more profit, a nice chunk of cash.

      1. Dev Null says:

        “Yes, seems to me this is a case of game balance over realism. Generally I think that is the right approach to making games. In this case especially so, because doing it the realistic way would end up in a winner-takes-all situation.”

        Way to make real life real depressing…

        1. kdansky says:

          Hey don’t shoot the messenger!

      2. Ivan says:

        You mean Borderlands?

  3. Abnaxis says:

    This post (and only this post, as far as I can tell) has a black background in the main text (captions have the normal white background) on chrome on my Android phone

    1. Daimbert says:

      Same here on my Chrome on my laptop …

      1. Pax says:

        It doesn’t have a background at all for me, and the dark grey text is up against a grey pixely-y background, which makes it impossible to read. Chrome Desktop.

    2. Lars says:

      The div-Box of the text has a transparent background. The Background-image shows a black pavement of some old game. Anyway: The gray text is unreadable this way. Hope tomorrows background-image does a better job, or Paul has to go back to a solid div.

    3. Retsam says:

      It looks really cool this way, actually. Totally unreadable, but really cool looking.

      (It wasn’t like this a few minutes ago; maybe something broke when the byline was fixed)

    4. Paul Spooner says:

      Same for me on both android and desktop Chrome. Turns out that the new author comes with a new CSS entry, which Chrome doesn’t know about because it’s saving bandwidth by not checking for CSS updates.
      Ctrl + F5 fixes it, sorry for the hassle.

      1. Pax says:

        Ah ha! That does fix it! Unfortunately I waited until after I’d read the whole thing via highlighting to check down here again. :(

      2. Paul Spooner says:

        On mobile, go to the menu > History > clear browsing data > select just images/data > select just shamusyoung.com > wait an eternity for the hand-held supercomputer to forget a few files > go back to the page and click the menu AGAIN > refresh.

        1. galacticplumber says:

          Well I reloaded and it’s not black anymore. Is it supposed to be…. Pinker…. than normal?

          1. Paul Spooner says:

            It also tastes like shrimp. You’ll have to take my word for that one.

      3. tremor3258 says:

        Fixed it for me as well on Firefox.

    5. Urtbman says:

      It’s an amazing combination that is completely illegible both as it stands AND if I try to reverse the text color by hilighting it. That’s some Prime Grade A DRM there

  4. Hector says:

    I made this comment yesterday, but the game turns into a slog the second you leave the starter zone. They’ve shown all the gameplay tricks, and as soon as you hit t3 gear the game is basically over.

    1. Paul Spooner says:

      Yeah, the only thing I hadn’t seen by that point was the Antimatter Drone. If that one drone was going to carry the rest of the game, they should at least make it cost more. No! Wait! What am I saying?

      1. Hector says:

        Ha!

        More seriously, I think the random starmap/systems was a big mistake. The game needed a better difficulty curve. I can’t even guess as to whether the random decision contributed to the blandness, or if they tried randomization to spice up the gameplay. It didn’t work either way, though. The world is just so bland that nothing really pops out, and random generic stations everywhere does not help at all.

        1. ElementalAlchemist says:

          I think it was down to resources. It was made by two guys and they needed to get it out the door in a reasonable timeframe.

  5. Jabberwok says:

    I seem to remember that some ships were more cargo focused than others. Upgrading to a higher tier attack craft might not carry much of a cargo boost, but a hauler definitely would.

    I also remember that when it came to making money through trade goods, the better profit margins were (as they should be) through piracy. Just waylaying and robbing passing merchant ships, instead of buying the commodities yourself.

  6. ThaneofFife says:

    This post appears to be grey text-on-a grey pixels background in Firefox.

  7. Erik says:

    I remember playing the game, and eventually quitting because I had to do endless busywork to afford the upgrades that allowed me to take the next story mission.

    The music was good though

  8. Mattias42 says:

    Not about the article itself, but the background with the pixalated car driving on a road seems to have some weird transparency thing going on with… well, at least this article.

    As in, the text goes light grey but still see-through, and the whole background shows up through the article.

    Seemed a bit too unreadable to be intentional, so thought I’d mention it.

    Edit* Link to a screen-shoot of how it looks on my end.

    https://drive.google.com/file/d/107P9C1sQlAiw_MCSBqs1fG0bAR3dNIz3/view?usp=sharing

    1. Syal says:

      The background has now switched to PacMan, so now the gray and the blue text is unreadable.

    2. Lino says:

      This looks so cool! Now I feel bad for not getting this bug :(

      1. Mattias42 says:

        Have to admit, it looks cool, yeah.

        Maybe add some sort of outline to the text, and add this as a background option? A lemons-to-lemonade style thing?

        I’ll freely admit my ignorance on how easy and/or hard that would be, though.

        Oh, and a pic of the Ms. Pac-Man version of the bug, for posterity:

        https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AUecbiQPRxZ-TDP-Ca-a3t10KbEWu-uJ/view?usp=sharing

  9. Bubble181 says:

    You know, for me, it appears as grey on black. I just assumed it was a stylistic choice, with Paul preferring a dark color scheme because it’s better on the eyes or some such.

  10. Storm says:

    Speaking of grinding rep, even if you follow it through to the end the game has a last bit of nonsense to throw your way. I spent a couple hours grinding rep for the Red Devils, with occasional missions for the militia to keep them from hating me, and I was sitting with Red Devil rep just on the edge of neutral, and militia rep right smack dab in the middle.

    Then, when I finally got the last lousy point to tip the Red Devils from ‘hostile’ to ‘neutral,’ the Red Devils stopped shooting me as expected… but my militia rep immediately shot down to ‘hostile.’

    Which, I mean, it makes sense enough for the two factions to be mutually exclusive, but the game never communicated that, and given how torturously slow reputation is to change it just felt like the game was spiting me.

    (This did, however, lead to the amusing scenario where I was doing story missions working for the militia captain and every time we met up at the spacebar I had to awkwardly dock at the station while taking broadsides from militia destroyers)

    1. Paul Spooner says:

      I read about that while doing research for the article, as well as the possibility of having neutral rep with all parties due to some mission that gives a big boost to militia rep. Still feels puntative, especially since, as you say, it wasn’t communicated.

      Really though, I just wanted to dock at the pirate base and see what they have for sale. Turns out you can bribe a pirate captain if you find one at the base, and the base will go neutral and allow you to dock that one time. Great way to gain access to a ton of pirate rep missions!

      Yeah, I feel like the “neutral” zone needs to be bigger, or stickier or something. Or, maybe they need a “fear” track as well. It’s just nonsense to keep getting jumped by what amounts to mice. Also really annoying to keep loosing pirate rep when I’m just flying around trying to do pirate missions and pirates keep throwing themselves under the treads of my atomization engine.

      1. Ivan says:

        Sounds like it needs a less binary faction rating system. Possibly something more akin to New Vegas’ faction system, where favour and disfavour were seperate counts that were both almost impossible to lower, and combined for an overall faction attitude.

      2. Storm says:

        Wait you can bribe the pirates??? That would’ve helped to know. I had to keep hoping pirate missions would spawn at the neutral stations.

        And then it didn’t help that they had something like one unique (if admittedly nice) ship. They wouldn’t even buy all the illegal cargo I’d been carting around!

        Honestly the only reason I was able to grind pirate rep at all is because I like allying with pirate factions in these kinda games to see what they have to offer, so I made a point of avoiding swatting down Red Devil ships from the very start. And even then it took a few hours of grinding. Less than stellar game design!

  11. Amstrad says:

    This game is good for what it is, especially if you can get it on discount or in this case free; but it clearly feels like the developers had a much more ambitious and open title in mind and at some point had to re-scope it down to the current version in order to get a game out. I enjoyed it, but I’m really looking forward to the new game to see if they’ll be able to fully realize whatever vision it was they had.

    1. Sleeping Dragon says:

      I think it’s a very “lite” representative of the genre and with that in mind, and as someone who likes the idea of the X series but never had the patience to finish the games, I enjoyed it. Probably helps that “broadsides in space” is something that makes me unreasonably happy and that I could use more. Despite what some other people said in the comments I never felt the game was too grindy, it certainly had periods when I had to fly around and save up cash but I think I enjoyed the missions enough that it wasn’t a problem (iirc my engagement with the trading system was fairly limited, mostly offloading stuff I picked up after combat).

      1. Storm says:

        I have plenty of criticisms of the game, but at the end of the day I did enjoy my time with it. And yeah, “broadsides in space” is what basically sold me here, I’m perfectly willing to tolerate the games flaws for that alone.

  12. Asdasd says:

    Enjoyable article, nicely written. Shame about the game though.

  13. Grudgeal says:

    Bought the game on GOG with a 90% discount a few years back. My favourite part of the game was probably the music. Oh, and that one alien that I thought spoke ‘KOTOR-alien’ at first, but it turned out was speaking Norwegian. It made me wonder if all the alien languages in the game were actually just Hungarian, or Basque, or other similarly obscure languages.

  14. The Rocketeer says:

    We are no closer to the day when I will see someone mention Rebel Galaxy and not expect them to start talking about Jaster Rogue’s incredible voyage across the stars aboard the notorious space-pirate ship, the Dorgenark.

  15. Decius says:

    Nitpicking the details of the core gameplay loop is not a good way to address a dislike OF the core gameplay loop.

    It’s a real challenge to get an economic simulation game to work, and if you succeed you’ve managed to make a game for a very niche audience.

    I don’t think it’s possible to make a good economic simulation/combat game. Sid Mier’s Pirates! might look like it succeeded, but it merely managed to make a good pirate/privateer game with economic subsystems. Wing Commander: Privateer also might look like one, but it’s just Wing Commander with a different mission structure, and so forth.

  16. Benden says:

    Paul, bad news. I’m gonna need you to write more words about complicated things that make no sense and irritate you, then post those words on Shamus’ site.

    Great post!

    1. Paul Spooner says:

      Thanks! Unfortunately, there were not enough comments on this post, so my funding has been cut. Shamusyoung.com is fully committed to continuing to provide you with Paul Spooner content, and we will not be cutting the crew at all. Also everyone is on unpaid furlough until further notice. Look forward to our upcoming full price expansion pack!

  17. psychicprogrammer says:

    They might even like them more when they pay for them. There’s probably a whole series of articles in that, so I should probably get back to talking about things I was wrong about.

    Less a series of articles and more an entire field of study, behavioral economics. SMBC did a great comic on this: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/eat-the-apple

    1. Sleeping Dragon says:

      Interesting in that I will often have the reaction of “it was good for a free game” or “it was good for a 5$ title”, it still probably comes from me subconsciously comparing the price to what I think is a “real” pricetag on videogames. Might also be related to the fact that for a long time I did not generally have a lot of money for games and stuff like 80% sales were pretty much the only times I was buying them before I got reliable income, I still tend to buy games 2-3 years after release except for some indie titles, so by that time the hype has died down and I generally know what I’m getting into.

  18. Duoae says:

    I played this game for free with ps+ and was enjoying it until I got the hyperdrive and entered the next system where I found I was being destroyed basically instantly upon entering any sort of combat. I had ground out the highest level equipment and ship from that first system and just felt that the game was completely unbalanced.

    Maybe I missed something or didn’t understand the game systems well enough?

    1. Paul Spooner says:

      They may have rebalanced the game since you played. I didn’t have much trouble, but I purchased higher-level equipment in the next system before going into combat.

      1. Duoae says:

        Could be either! (Or could be I was crap :) )

  19. Lino says:

    Very fun read! You’ve got a very fun, lighthearted and informative style, and I hope to see more of it in the future. I haven’t played the game, so you kind of lost me at the end with references to the intricacies of the game’s many systems, but this isn’t really my genre, so I guess it comes with the territory.

  20. Duffy says:

    This is only the second game I ever refunded on Steam. I was so pumped for a capital ship game and within 20 mins I was so disappointed I uninstalled and refunded.

    Maybe one day….

  21. Galad says:

    Ohai Paul! The first commathingamajig was a good idea, else I wouldn’t have known it was you. At least not until..

    “so awkwardly that it reminds me of my first time”

    BWAHAHAHAH! That’s the kind of humor we don’t usually see from Shamus :)

    Also, Pirate Lords hunted: 0. You should try this at least once, if pirate lords are even accessible in your game yet. They’re a bit of a drag to hunt, but still kinda fun.

    1. Paul Spooner says:

      Hah! You’re welcome.

      I took that screenshot near the beginning of my “research” play session, and two of the things I set out to do were hunt a Pirate Lord and break a blockade. Sadly, I noticed nothing remarkable about the Pirate Lord, other than he dropped a “special cargo” container that had a ship component in it (a MK-2 turret I think). The only thing more disappointing was breaking the blockade, which was acknowledged, as far as I can tell, nowhere except for that number incrementing.

      1. Galad says:

        Eh..well..assuming we’re still talking about Rebel Galaxy, not the newer outlaw version, that game was shallow but fun for some 20 odd hours

  22. Binary Toast says:

    Ah yes, Rebel Galaxy. I keep meaning to go back for a third playthrough, with the idea of seeing how far I can get without trading up to bigger and better ships. A demi speedrun, if you will.

    I remember a couple observations I made, back when I played it last year. The first is that the soundtrack makes the game. Without the soundtrack, Rebel Galaxy would be so-so at best, but the music just ties everything together. It’s a great example of how much a good soundtrack adds to an experience.

    The other observation I made also involved the soundtrack, and an amusing effect it had on my gameplay. Now the most profitable method to make money is to take shipment missions, and avoid combat as best you can. Just slam on the boosters if you get interdicted, and slam your face into auto-dock with stations as you run blockades. This is the most time efficient way to make money… But some of the best music in the game are the combat tracks.

    So you end up in this situation where the profitable thing to do is avoid combat (unless you scan that someone’s got a good drop), but you kinda want to get into scraps to hear the music.

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