[PvK]

Originally posted by TerranC:

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- The ship you start with is a destroyer, but the game mechanics were that of a fighter. I never felt I was in charge of a crew and substantial vessel. Larger ships were somewhat better, but the game didn't simulate the experience of captaining a capital ship.

You can always mod the effect.

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I'm really not convinced "the experience of captaining a capital ship" can be modded very well in this game system. The patch to add 1/8 time scale will help somewhat, but it's still possible to crash your ship into planets and other objects because you were looking the wrong way, and in general the feel is that the player has no help at all from the crew - you have to do everything manually without so much as an "Um, captain, we're being attacked from a direction you aren't looking at the moment."

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- Size relationships were way off. Planets looked like beach balls, even close up. Other than the distance "gauge", you couldn't tell how close you were to a celestial body until you impacted.

Size relationships are way off in any space game; show me one game that ever got it right.

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The I-War series did a rather good job. Omnitrend's Universe back in the 1980's even had realistic gravity effects.

Moreover, Star Fury doesn't even seem to try to get scale right at all, when ships and planets are nearly the same size, and it's taken literally, with ships actually in danger of collision (or accidental weapon hits) when they should be hundreds of kilometers apart, and their weapon arcs and ranges actually measured as if they were planet-sized ships. Meanwhile, due to the decision to use one-scale-fits-all for both combat and long-range movement, simply spending a few seconds admiring the view from different directions causes your ship to be in danger of surprise attack or navigational error for days or months of game time.

I'm not saying these are incompetant game decisions. Star Fury can be a lot of fun and many players don't notice or care about these things. However some of us do, and it doesn't make sense to say they don't exist, or to say all other games are the same way.

PvK

[ October 13, 2003, 23:17: Message edited by: PvK ]