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Re: Don't Let the Stars Fade Away Sun, 04 February 2007 12:22 Go to previous messageGo to previous message
Altruist is currently offline Altruist

 
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Messages: 1068
Registered: August 2005
Location: Berlin
sirgwain wrote on Sat, 03 February 2007 15:51

What makes Stars! better than all those newer games out there you could play instead? (Even if you did have a Stars! 3)


Very good question!
Especially when planning to make a clone/freestar version.

I think I've discovered Stars in 1998/99. The mix of a playable demo-version, tutorial, playing single-player vs AIs, hotseat vs friends, pbem via the net I thought and still think of as a great variety and approach to gaming. Additionally this very small game comes with the full ability to host games. That Stars can be played with the slowest, smallest, oldest computers I liked a lot, too.

When I entered the pbem-area I discovered the unbelievable wealth the player community had contributed to the game: websites, news-group, articles on a level you usually find papers at university, autohost. The player community in general was fantastic.

The absence of fancy graphics was/is IMHO an advantage: Stars is a hardcore strat&tact game. If you don't like this branch of games and thinking, Stars isn't your game. (Yes, I do draw an anti-correlation between liking graphics and strat.)

1) Player community
In comparison to all the morons you meet in MMPOGs, the Stars-community is a highly friendly, mature, intellectual group. And I loved to read all this lengthy strat-articles.

2) pbem (instead of MMPOG)
Playing vs AIs is, from a strat & tact view, very boring. Playing vs humans is thrill. MMPOGs I tried, fell prey to it for a while and abondended them again: too many morons, too bis alliances, too tyrannical on your daily time schedule.

3) roleplaying is possible
Completly optional. Sometimes not a single message will be exchanged in games, sometimes it has taken the major part of my time playing Stars to create characters and settings.

4) hardcore strat & tact game
This is actually not the least important point but the most complex.

a) easy to learn, difficult to master
A good strat game should be easy to learn (what Stars IMHO is via tuturial and AI-bashing), difficult to master (nobody will disagree, I guess) and one you can never outlearn because it hasn't a single reusable best way of winning.

b) Three major parts of the game
* race design
* development
* tactical warfare
Each of this parts can be split into several sub-areas and allow astonishing different approaches.

c) no unique 'best' way to play or to win
This is another fundamental concept of Stars on which pretty much everything of the game is based and what makes it so replayable. There is no best race design. Apart from the fact that every race design needs to be customized for the specidic game settings, even then there is at least 1 counter to every great race design and that counter can be countered again.
The same applies to ship designs.

d) tactical map
We don't even think about it but there are many games which have no 'real' map but operate on virtual space you can conquere/colonize/use, where you do know stats about your enemies but there is no location to them. In Stars everything has a fixed location and you can/must fit it into your tactical approach (cutting off space, securing strategical spots etc.).

e) variety contra limitations
16 ship designs, 10 base designs. This allows quite some variety. at the same time it's a limitation everybody has to take into account. And I believe this a great approach and compromise to variety and limitations. One of the side-benefits is that without this limitations micro-management could become unbearable. Another side-effect is that it adds another tact & strat feature on how to use those precious slots. That's what I call an innovative usage of memory-limitations.

Conclusion:
It's year 2007 now. But I don't know of another game which has implemented the above features as well as Stars. There surely are some problems, especially with micro-management in big games but the biggest problem is probably that the game lost its Jeffs.

And the idea to create an open-source Stars is important. I would like the first aim to be an identical version to the original Stars. From on there, options and changes could be implemented in a way that we always have one conservative main Stars-version being the consensus of the player community with several sub- and side-versions for specialized wishes and game-scenarios.

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