I can't imagine stories because there's no mental budget left. I don't have time to get immersed in the setting at all. I don't feel like I'm managing a galactic empire. Games are supposed to be recreation - they shouldn't do that.Īnd perhaps worst, this completely kills what was enjoyable about the first game. I've got about 1/5 the time played in this one, and I'm already getting tired of it thanks to this - as in, literally, mentally fatigued due to the stress of trying to deal with Osirians. Because of this, I will not have that many hours played in SD2 before I uninstall because, frankly, it's just not worth dealing with for very long. I've got two hundred fifty something hours in SD1, and it has nothing like this. So, even the game's hours played metric suffers in the end. And to show what I mean, beating the Masters is easy: spam shields in your ship designs, and have a big fleet (that's all the Masters require). Once you've beaten the Osirians, you've beaten SD2, so you might as well stop. Compared to this, actually winning the game is effortless, and that's a problem. Now, while it's awesome that Zero knows gamers well enough to know that we'll grind at a tough goal until we achieve it, when it's done like this, people will just quit playing once they finally pull it off. Putting all this together, instead of coming across like the challenge that I think it's supposed to be, it comes across like an inconsiderate way to quickly inflate hours played statistics. But having to deal with it *every single game* whether you enjoy it or not, having it mandatory, having it affect only the player, and having it always come ridiculously early, with unreasonably picky victory conditions that partly depend upon luck, is just over the top. So, questions are, will this ever be patched to make it reasonable, configurable, or optional? Will we ever have the ability to mod it and make it more fun, at least until we're actually looking for an edge-of-your-seat kind of challenge? Don't get me wrong! It's certainly content that puts you to task, and this genre benefits from something like that. And they always only attack the player - the opponents never have to deal with this. There are countless ways this could be made more fun, rather than making it feel like it punishes the player. But with so much configurable in this game (you can even completely disable Masters and pirates), it seems strange that such a worthy challenge is not optional even though it comes along very early in the game every single time (in my experience). Now, I know there are huge MOO fans who love the difficult content. That just sucks - it's too finicky about victory conditions. You can have the perfect empire and perfect fleet, but narrowly miss this because they're one turn too far away. It just encourages the player to quit trying. Having to begin repeatedly when it's an hour or two before you even know whether you have a chance of achieving this goal, is a drag. It's about the player's time and experience. The reason I write this isn't to overly criticize, so let's not make this a negative thread please. So narrowly, in fact, that if you make it your goal, you will either save every turn until they show up, which is tedious, or start over repeatedly, which sucks all the fun out of the game. I'm convinced that it's possible, but *just narrowly*. To face the Osirians and stop their Star Killer, you need to have a massive fleet of carriers (about 200 fighters total), race the clock to get your fleet to them (regardless of whether Masters, crystals, War Hawks, or pirates are in town then), while building up your colonies, competing with the other empires, exploring, and doing the research and production to support all of that without leaving yourself screwed relative to your opponents after you defeat them.
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