Oh and SPAZ is the Steam deal of the day for $2.49. Easily worth that and then some.
Oh and SPAZ is the Steam deal of the day for $2.49. Easily worth that and then some.
So I just go this. I kinda hate the research system because it just funnels you down a single path. It's no fun finding cool new equipment/loot because the one weapon system you upgrade is SO much more powerful that you just stick with the same thing, or maybe two things.
I almost wish research didn't exist at all -- that way, I'd just be have fun trying out all the new stuff I find.
I finally got a chance to play the semi expansion. Opinions are mixed.
Everything you do basically causes your bounty to increase. You will not have the money to pay it off, so this means you grind TONS TONS TONS of arena missions or you deal with it. Dealing with it is a mixed bag as well. Once your bounty gets high enough bounty hunters will show up during basically everything and this tends to mean you need to reload a lot when they show up at a bad time. The extortion thing is completely stupid. You will not have the money to do anything if you pay them at all. Beating the extortion fight is nearly impossible if the system is anywhere near challenging. They just keep coming and coming and coming in countless waves that never end. If you're high enough level over them, you can probably win, but it still takes forever. This is again another situation of you reloading 99% of the time they try to extort you. This is the same thing people used to do when you got ambushed and you couldn't fight back without killing your faction relations.
Money seems much more of a grind than i remember. I was playing on veteran but i had to turn it down to normal because it was just stupid and a grind. Enemies drop nearly no resources, i might get 150 materials from mineral drops while completing an area but it costs 150 to make even my smallest escort. My smallest escort dies ALL OF THE TIME and is basically made of paper. It will die nearly every time i kill anything bigger than a medium ship unless i specifically tell it to run away from the explosion, even then, it still dies pretty often from exploding ships.
About the only effective way to get any money at all now seems to be doing the bounty hunter arenas because you dont lose any money from them doing them. Some of these are about as fun as hammering one's own hand with a sledgehammer though. I swear one of them was completely impossible. You have a slow ship fighting about 6 small, fast ships which are WAY faster than you and kill me in seconds.
One thing is for sure, at this point in the game, it doesn't seem possible to just play the game without taking breaks to specifically grind for money. I don't want to afk mine. I don't think i will be finishing this game unless things pick up.
Drones still seem underpowered after all of this time. You still need to max both the drone skill and the weapon skill the drone uses to do even half decently it appears. This makes no sense from a game balance perspective and i am extremely disappointed because they had talked about fixing this.
Is this "semi-expansion" optional? It sounds like it makes things worse rather than better.
I don't know. I think it is a patch. Steam applied it automatically, not sure if you can disable it or if i would if i could.
Basically it just means i reload whenever i get extortion and i have to retreat at the start of missions if i'm doing something hard and a huge bounty fleet warps in. It also means sometimes i finish a mission but then a bounty fleet warps in and kills me, forcing me to reload because i can't pay for a new fleet.
The new hulls are pretty fun though. I'm a huge fan of the idea of drones, even if they are underpowered, so i was very happy when the bounty hunter expansion added a medium ship with a drone bay. They also have a small ship with a large shooter that i use (this thing dies all of hte time though, so maybe i will switch back to the ranger).
Fans of bombers will be happy to know they seem very strong now. I'm not sure if Bounty hunters did this or a previous patch, but bounty hunter adds a huge hull with a huge bomb slot...
The expansion just adds a 3rd faction which attacks you FREQUENTLY. The game isn't really designed for bounties when you do bad things to really work out well, so it is best if you just consider it a random hostile faction.
Some of the encounters really need to be tuned down in quantity though, ESPECIALLY the extortion requests which just go on forever and in the later waves have you facing groups of large ships (in systems where you would be slightly above the tech curve to have a large ship).
As you said though you pretty much get a bounty for everything. I am like 25 hours into my game and I still can't figure out why somethings give a bounty but others dont.
One question I do have though is how exactly do you clear a system from the zombies? I think I am missing something there.
You generally can't until near end game.
There are/were (i haven't played end game for a long time and they patched a lot) missions you can take to lower zombie strength in a system, but i don't think you can clear them out totally until later.
Bounties: I believe it is any of the following actions in a system under the influence of a bounty station (ie any system in 2-3 jumps from a station, which means nearly all of the them)
Killing any CIV or UTA ship
Doing any mission which focuses on killing Civilian or UTA ships.
Killing bounty hunter ships lowers your bounty by what seems like an amount equal to what you would have gained by killing a uta/civilian ship of the same class.
Doing arenas also lowers your bounty.
Due to the fact that you kill hundreds of ships to do basically anything other than mining, lowering your bounty through arenas or killing bounty hunters that come after you is likely basically a non option. It would simply take forever. Paying your bounty is also insanely expensive. It would likely take more money than you gained from killing all of those ships and the quests you did just to pay it off, even if you didnt buy anything.
This is simply an example of too much of a good thing. I wanted relationships to span systems initially myself as well, but something like the bounty system is not designed to work in a game like SPAZ.
Hmm, sorry for the negative opinions. I find the bounty hunters quite easy to manage, but I designed them so that is probably why. :) Here are a few tips.
If you operate outside bounty hunter space, then no bounties will accrue (and no extortion attacks etc etc)
If you operate in a non stronghold system, but inside bounty space (so in a system neighboring a stronghold) all bounty effects are at 50%
If your bounty gets very high, stay out of stronghold systems.
Extortion will only ever take a portion of what you are carrying, so they cannot bankrupt you, and if you are super poor, they wont bother at all.
Don't pay bounties in Rez unless you are rich. Do some bronze level arena events and within 3 or 4 you will be clear. That will take a very short time in general (stay away from gold ones) Arena events are also faster than mining sometimes to gain Rez (the bonus respect is also useful)
Getting positive bounty (respect) is very wise and then the hunters can be used to clear gates for you. This is very useful. I managed to play on insane all the way to chapter 4 being a pacifist (aside from the obligatory story missions)
We may add a tuning slider for galaxy creation to allow you to set the bounty hunter density. I have a feeling it is mostly a density issue instead of a system issue. you may be stuck in a cluster of strongholds, which can make life hard. Their ships are also designed to be a lot more like a player would field, so they are pretty hard to fight. We did this because they can be avoided.
Anyhow I hope this helps, and we do listen and we will try to get that slider in.
FWIW, I haven't had any problems with bounties. Played maybe 15 hours so far.
I don't mean to sound so negative, because i've put a ton of hours in to the game and i really like it, just... coming back to it after some time and finding myself completely unable to support myself through normal gameplay (i define this as not specifically mining as i'm not a fan of it personally).Originally Posted by Blorfy
A lot of systems are in bounty hunter space and because of the quest/tech system, you basically need to go everywhere to get stuff done, so avoiding them isn't really an option in my opinion.
Yeah, extortion doesnt take all of your money, but it takes around 40% which, unless you're flat broke, is pretty huge.
I do the middle difficulty arenas and i'll admit that some of them are quite hard even then. One of them i just could not do no matter what i tried. I personally don't really care for arenas except as a short diversion because they don't use the character/ship i built up over the past X hours.
My personal opinion is that bounty hunters are just given too huge of a focus. Bounties build up too quickly and dealing with them requires too much time. Extortion battles are load game situations (simply because they are nearly impossible at a tech level the system would be challenging for) and if a few bounty hunter bases got their extortion fleets together, they could easily wipe out all of the zombies in the game. Maybe this was intended though and i'm just too stuck in the previous version of SPAZ.
My main problems likely stem from my complete inability to sustain my fleet without mining. I feel like if i have any losses other than my small escort, i will go completly broke. If i lose my one Large ship, it is a reload situation in most circumstances simply because of how much money it would cost to replace and how little combat gives. More often than not i can't replace it even if i wanted to.
The grind is a bit worse, but I also increased the difficulty, so that might have just been that. (If I had known it that it basically equates to more grinding, than I wouldn't have upped it) At least grinding arena missions has no downside other than time spent.
I've never payed an extortion, if someone wants to fight me at my home turf with ship designs I want to steal anyway, go right ahead. I've never lost one.
Bombs are seriously more effective, the early incineration bomb is way too good at low tech, one hit would destroy a fully shielded large miner ship (the thing that is vaguely two balls and a stick...)
I liked the new ship designs, but not enough to finish the game over again.
Last edited by JoshV; 04-19-2012 at 05:53 PM.
You've never lost an extortion battle? I remember i tried one early on in the game and they instantly killed my mothership.
I did never lose another one though because i always reloaded the game to avoid them until i tried one much later on while going through a lower tech system. Even in an older system you end up fighting 2-3 waves of 3-4ish large ships each. That doesn't count the 3-4 waves of smaller ships you fight before that either. It is just crazy.
I recently completed this game and I have to agree that it's impossible to avoid taking time out to grind for resources. But this is part of the design for many games and in my case at least, I didn't feel the need to grind to deal with the bounty hunters. I mainly used the arena to deal with them.
It sounds like a lot of you are still quite early in the game. I'd say that rez isn't much of a bottleneck at all compared to goons which are far scarcer, especially in the last stage of the game (zombie ships never drop goons!), and are much harder to grind for.
I find that I run out of rez only due to my obsessive need to buy every blueprint in existence even when I'll never use them but I needed to grind for goons to outfit ships and protect them from zombie infestations.
By the way, if you find that your small ships die a lot, you might consider not using them at all. Later in the game, I often did missions without any escorts at all and even when I did bring them, only built as many escorts as I thought I needed. That saves quite a bit of rez.
Another alternative is to use the Short Bus, especially in the smallest escort slot. They're always free no matter what gear you put on them. They won't do any damage but they're still a bit of a distraction, plus they rebuild almost instantly when they die.
Hey y'all, SPAZ modding tools have been released!
http://spacepiratesandzombies.com/updates.html
Wheee!
I bought the game quite a while ago, but just started playing it last week. I gotta say, it's deceptively addictive. One of those games where I started playing after lunch and suddenly my wife is telling me to "get your ass off the computer and come down for dinner".
I'm a completist, so I'm already backtracking through different systems to acquire blueprints. Spending a lot of time in systems that other folks would likely have moved on from a while ago.
I played this game 15 hours over the weekend. I didn't mind the grind too much until now. I hit a wall in the mid 50s. I have all my research up but it's taking forever to grind Rez to get the blueprints. I should've concentrated on one maximum-tier blueprint, but that's hard because the core world layout is so linear. I can't even continue the main quest until I get through a level 70 system.
Grinding reptuation is a bitch because of the stealth units. I hate the redemption events because the useless allies get in the way of my laser beams.
I realize this has been discussed to death. It's still a shame. SPAZ has the most satisfying space explosions since Freespace 2. I love lining up that last shot and avoiding the shockwave. It also conveys the greatest feeling of terror from 2D spaceship art since Space Rangers 2.
I guess I'll go waste my time in the bounty hunter arena to try to see this through.
BTW, is this true? Or is it possible to get combined arms going? Right now I've got a pretty boring setup with beam weapons and defense. I just want to make sure I'm not missing something before I write off that part of the game too.
Oh dear God, I thought I was almost done with the main quest.
For future reference: bounty hunter grind fixed all my problems. I got my blueprints and now I'm happy. It's always a relief to slog past a frustrating wall in a videogame.
Skill effectiveness increases exponentially as the skill gets higher, so yes, you do want to heavily focus on a smaller number of skills and max them out in most circumstances.
I'm listening to the old QT3 podcast now. They're talking a lot about combined arms like this, but it's not clear to me whether it's more effective to just blast everything with my highest technologies. Tom even mentioned "party-based RPG" which is exactly what I want. :( I wish the numbers were more visible and understandable.
Well, i don't believe that is correct. As mentioned, skill benefit HUGELY increases as you level them. Having 7 in both projectiles and lasers will not be anywhere near as good as having 9 in just projectiles (purely an example, i am making these numbers up) because the last couple upgrades are just MASSIVE. Then the "recently" added specialists make the situation for spreading out points even worse because now you need to split your available specialists between the weapon types.
Maybe near end game you will have the free points to max both lasers and projectiles for example, but i'd much rather max a secondary defense (ie everyone wants to max either shields or armor pretty fast after their weapon, but eventually a second one is nice too), energy and engines.
I would not call spaz a party based rpg personally. Your fleet does expand quite a bit over the game, but they are just silent wingmen flying whatever ship you construct for them. I suppose different people can have different definitions of "party-based rpg" though.
Ugh I just realized I invested all my goons incorrectly in the lategame. I should've put them into colony bases first. Someone put me out of my misery.
I did kill a Tier 3 Bounty Hunter base in Chapter 4 at around level 90. That was fun.
All done. No more brick walls. In the end I loved it. I feel like I dodged a bullet though!
Looking forward to the expansions and sequel. I'll try some other techs then.
You know, I never did unlock that Manta Ray ship. Maybe I'll look for a few more blueprints before I quit.
Hey y'all, I just got word from one of the game's creators that SPAZ will be released for the Mac next week. Yay!
Great to hear it! I've been waiting for this. Of course now I'll find my trusty mini is too underpowered for it :(
My PC is six years old and it runs wonderfully on it.
Anyone know if the modding scene developed for this? Enjoyed SPAZ well enough, but felt the game wasn't anywhere near fleshed out enough and needed a little bit more content.
I'm still waiting for them to implement my suggestion to have fighters follow the mouse to make them more effective.
Last I saw there were a decent spate of mods on the official forums, but I've not looked in a while.
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