Follow along with the video below to see how to install our site as a web app on your home screen.
Note: This feature may not be available in some browsers.
Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.
"This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.
The early alpha was very good. Haven't tried the release version yet but I'm sure it's only gotten better. You will definitely enjoy it, but I'd be very surprised if there were no more major patches coming. Might as well wait a bit - unless you're looking for something new to play right now in which case go for it.
Interesting concept, but from the videos it looks a little bit shallow. I'm going to wait for a couple of more opinions on this one.
How does the space-station room building work? Are there a lot of different buildings/rooms?
The game need more ships and less obvious ships combination. As currently stand the game is fine, but unless you rolled a pretty good officer, there is really no reason to mix and match because how obvious it is that the first group of ships work well together. After unlocking the other 3 it is also obvious that the 3 researchable ships are meant to work together.
Played a bit, but due to retardo pixel graphics and no zoom out made me quit. Mostly on characters and backgrounds, i am sick of pixel shit and its hipsters (i love the backgrounds / scenes but i rarely seen that made well, beside in a few threads on codex). Nice combination of some base buildings, basic research and space/ground decent turn based combat. Also has missions similar to FTL which might keep the players in. Ill probably play it more, but the graphics quality and lack of scale like in Shitbound, its quite annoying, and those characters look like they were taken from Shower with your Dad, actually i think that one had more clear pixel graphics.
Good gameplay at first look, annoying tutorial but good idea as premise, shit hipster graphics. For example, starbound pixel graphics didn't bothered me. Still, not bad.
The pixelart is fantastic and the game is heaps of fun. Love the backgrounds. Special mention to the atmosphere and groovy music. Going to hold off on playing this for a bit though. The devs claim they're working on adding more content.
Incidently, this game is pretty much exactly what I hoped Star Command would be. That one however is languishing into feature creep and development hell limbo. Glad to see this one got made.
The pixel art of the characters is a bit too cartooney, but the spaceships and stations look good actually. The alien ships are cartoon evil, but it seems OK. How do you find the base building elements?
The game need more ships and less obvious ships combination. As currently stand the game is fine, but unless you rolled a pretty good officer, there is really no reason to mix and match because how obvious it is that the first group of ships work well together. After unlocking the other 3 it is also obvious that the 3 researchable ships are meant to work together.
Huh? It's been a long time since I played the alpha but I don't remember a roguelike structure at all. There may be permanent elements but it's more of a 4x. I think they said roguelike during the campaign because they were influenced by FTL, but that's not the road the game went down.
Basically, no. Well depending on officer roll you might change your battle strategy somewhat, but most of officer skills are CD based anyway. Your starting officer with epic skills also change it somewhat, otherwise the game is one playthrough thing I guess. I just got fucked by the game suddenly requiring me to build 2 full fleet of tier 3 ships, so I am starting over. I'll update if anything actually changes.
Yeah, the replayable thing is more failed and try again, like I did.
Supposedly this is just the base game and the stretch goals have yet to get into the game. Based on the kickstarter page it would seem the dev will expand the role of other races (which currently sit around and give you quest sometimes) into proper 4x faction so there is that to look forward in the future.
Digging the OG star trek feel to the encounters, gameplay is great so far except for the so so combat. ships that cant maneuver in 2d much less 3d space is just a travesty.
Ugh, it starts nice, but grows very stale really quickly. I'm somewhere about 6 hours in and the game makes me want to puke already. It's just that the gameplay is barebones.
There is a nu-xcom base development and it is railroaded exactly that way. There's a feel that you construct your own base, but in reality there's only one efficient build-up and no room for experiments/maneuvering.
Science is equally railroaded - why have a tree when there's only one path ahead? Not to mention that a considerable amount of branches is useless (but that's traditional, I guess).
Combat is extremely minimalistic. And it's not even about the player's ships - it's just that all the enemies are pretty much the same and, instead of any sort of special approach and tactics, they just try to drown you in HP bloat and the ever increasing the damage (and the further the game goes, the more bloat there is). You don't really feel that you're fighting mutants/pirates/aliens - it's all the same.
Player's ships also have lots of issues. The biggest one is that engineers (one of the three main classes) suck. Period. They have awful speed (i.e., they take less turns), they have crappy damage (which multiplies on those low number of turns horribly) and, while they're supposed to be tanks, they're not that good at it. They have more basic HP, but tanking is not about that - tanking is about percentage damage reduction and healing efficiency (that's if we even bother to find this mmorpg shlock to be acceptable). And they have nothing special for that. One has some activated reduction buff but emphasis is on activated - by spending a turn, there are lots of ways that the fighter ship could replicate the same effect. Debuffing enemy, stunning enemy, heck, just nuking the enemy away.
Having an engineer in your crew just forces you into unfavourable playstyle. And, well, the only other ships are scientist & fighter. The scientist balance is broken - the mass-healing one is the absolute victor, making another one obsolete (there are two branches for each class). You also can't sport two scientists as they're support/healers - their DPS is pathetic. So it's pretty much one scientist/two fighters combo no matter what.
Finally, ships don't have that many abilities, most of them have cooldowns and most of them rely on the "exploit" mechanics. Meaning that if you put a debuff on your foe, some other ability of yours may remove it to deal double damage. Basically, a one-two punch. Sounds nice, but when you take into account the low amount of abilities and enemy resistances, it turns out that (unless you want to play horribly inefficiently) you're a one-trick ponie - you're forced into repeating the one and the same strategy over and over again. That's fun.
Ground combat is the same, only worse as it's simply less developed - you have even less abilities and strategical possibilities.
Resource management is also horrible as it's the best of the "yay, let's visit all those windmills with a secondary hero!" in the heroes 3.
Lastly, the dialogues suck. The music in the alien conversations is tailored to cause a strong SC 2 vibe (and the music overall is the best part of the game) however, you just can't have a proper talk with them - it's two phrases and k thx bye. I highly doubt there's anything *Orz*-tier here. And even if it is, it doesn't seem to be worth all the grind. Yeah, essentially, this game is nothing but grind.
Ugh, it starts nice, but grows very stale really quickly. I'm somewhere about 6 hours in and the game makes me want to puke already. It's just that the gameplay is barebones.
There is a nu-xcom base development and it is railroaded exactly that way. There's a feel that you construct your own base, but in reality there's only one efficient build-up and no room for experiments/maneuvering.
Science is equally railroaded - why have a tree when there's only one path ahead? Not to mention that a considerable amount of branches is useless (but that's traditional, I guess).
Combat is extremely minimalistic. And it's not even about the player's ships - it's just that all the enemies are pretty much the same and, instead of any sort of special approach and tactics, they just try to drown you in HP bloat and the ever increasing the damage (and the further the game goes, the more bloat there is). You don't really feel that you're fighting mutants/pirates/aliens - it's all the same.
Player's ships also have lots of issues. The biggest one is that engineers (one of the three main classes) suck. Period. They have awful speed (i.e., they take less turns), they have crappy damage (which multiplies on those low number of turns horribly) and, while they're supposed to be tanks, they're not that good at it. They have more basic HP, but tanking is not about that - tanking is about percentage damage reduction and healing efficiency (that's if we even bother to find this mmorpg shlock to be acceptable). And they have nothing special for that. One has some activated reduction buff but emphasis is on activated - by spending a turn, there are lots of ways that the fighter ship could replicate the same effect. Debuffing enemy, stunning enemy, heck, just nuking the enemy away.
Having an engineer in your crew just forces you into unfavourable playstyle. And, well, the only other ships are scientist & fighter. The scientist balance is broken - the mass-healing one is the absolute victor, making another one obsolete (there are two branches for each class). You also can't sport two scientists as they're support/healers - their DPS is pathetic. So it's pretty much one scientist/two fighters combo no matter what.
Finally, ships don't have that many abilities, most of them have cooldowns and most of them rely on the "exploit" mechanics. Meaning that if you put a debuff on your foe, some other ability of yours may remove it to deal double damage. Basically, a one-two punch. Sounds nice, but when you take into account the low amount of abilities and enemy resistances, it turns out that (unless you want to play horribly inefficiently) you're a one-trick ponie - you're forced into repeating the one and the same strategy over and over again. That's fun.
Ground combat is the same, only worse as it's simply less developed - you have even less abilities and strategical possibilities.
Resource management is also horrible as it's the best of the "yay, let's visit all those windmills with a secondary hero!" in the heroes 3.
Lastly, the dialogues suck. The music in the alien conversations is tailored to cause a strong SC 2 vibe (and the music overall is the best part of the game) however, you just can't have a proper talk with them - it's two phrases and k thx bye. I highly doubt there's anything *Orz*-tier here. And even if it is, it doesn't seem to be worth all the grind. Yeah, essentially, this game is nothing but grind.
Unfortunately, it is my impression too.
It is a shame, because the overall strategic part is nice, but the core gameplay is a bit dull, and the game would benefit a lot from quality of life improvements, like automating resource collection (I know there is a tech for that later in the game, but it should be automated from the beginning), auto repeating task at the station (there is no real need to go through 3 screens to reassign your scientist on dark matter production).
The core game could also be improved too. IIRC, infinite space had a cool system without positioning (or was it in 1D? My memory is a bit blurry).
Some resource/energy management, and more distinct effects (than +-25 % damage mitigation, +- 25% damage dealt ...) would be welcome.
There is not enough trade off between exploiting a condition, and letting it run (because double damage on one shot is usually much better than +25% for all damage taken over 2 turns).
I think I'll wait until they patch more features in. Like the counselor class officers and pirate mini-campaign.
Of the recent Star Control name droppers (Long Journey Home, upcoming nu-Star Control, etc) I still have highest hopes about this.
Though those hopes aren't very high.
I give this a verdict of "not very good" (read: shit). It's railroaded as fuck, combat boils down to savescumming RNG rolls, as due to lack of any real player choice or customization, victory or defeat is decided essentially at random, resource management comes down to the boring micromanagement of flying a space truck from one truckstop to the next as there are really no decisions you can make here, and it's quite easy to render the game unplayable when you're told that you need to build X arbitrary building, but there is nowhere to build it and you can't deconstruct any redundant or obsolete buildings to make room, nor unlock additional space because it's arbitarily gated as well.
The conversations, as mentioned, are pretty much down to kthxbye, and the humor largely consists of weak attempts to emulate Star Control 2's humor without any understanding of what made Star Control 2 funny at all. The end result is that this game is schlock, pure and simple, and not in a good way. Do not remove this one from inventory if you feel the urge to try it. It's a step above "trainwreck", but not much above it. Even Interstellaria was better than this, and that game was shit.
No time to write much but the previous 3 reviews have said it already. I bought this & regret it. Gave me a few hours entertainment before the shallowness etc. bored me.
Actually, I think the game still has potential, and it gets a bit better later on (but not enough, though)?
Its biggest flaws could be remedied, by things like adding some loadout customization (to add some other choices than who to bring on a mission), or having some mutlally exclusive sidegrades instead of straight upgrades of existing skills on level up.
The combat could be spiced up by strengthening the effects of buffs and debuffs, and making them a bit more interesting ( some of them offer interesting trade offs like the +200% damage dealt next turn coupled with a debuff increasing damage taken, but many are poorly balanced) . This would also help differentiate aliens better.
Aliens ships could also be given strong passive effects to make them play differently.
And having front and back ships (with front being easier to target, and back being harder, but dealing less damage) ala Infinite Space would also give a little more decision space.
Reworking the UI and removing the excessive tedium would also really help (like auto repeating missions, and autopiloting resource collection in the beginning).
btw, cheatengine speedhack makes this game much more playable (I used speed*5 to get rid of the neverending combat animations).
Oh my stars. It's been an amazing week for us and we're humbled by the reception that Halcyon 6 has received! We've been pouring over forum posts and Let's Plays and Twitch Streams and trying to take in all your feedback and commentary - and we are loving every minute of it. But, as we said in our launch post: we've only just begun...
So, what's next?
v1.0.0.2 drops this week: We'll be pushing out an update to fix the bugs you've told us about and we've squeezed in just a couple of those much requested enhancements. Expect the update today or tomorrow along with full patch notes. And yes, you will be able to properly complete the Expand Your Fleet quest and bump the game up to 60fps. Thanks for letting us know about these folks, and thanks for your patience while we worked through them.
In the next couple weeks, we'll be addressing some of the most requested Quality of Life fixes. There's a whole bunch of stuff on the list, but most notably:
- We will introduce an improved resource collection process in the early game (spoiler
resource collection was always automated in the mid game, but we've heard you loud and clear - running your officers from sector to sector isn't very fun for very long
)
- You'll be able to scrap rooms (in some fashion) so you won't run out of expansion space
- You'll be able to cancel activities in progress, like ships being built (with some amount of resource loss that we'll figure out soon)
- A bunch of other cool stuff!
Just a little further out on the horizon, we're planning a properly interesting content and feature update. Along with some of our Kickstarter promises, this is the update where we'll tackle one of the chief complaints we've heard about Halcyon 6: combat can feel a little boring or repetitive. We've heard you, and we've already hammering away at changes that will still ring true with the spirit of the game, but hopefully add a bit more intrigue and decision making to combat.
We are a small but ferocious team that prefers to leave our development doors wide open, so to speak. You'll be hearing from us about our progress and how all these changes and new ideas are shaping up. We welcome your feedback along the way!
Thanks again for all your support. Remain ever vigilant, comrades: The federation needs you.
Was a bit disappointed with this one. The replayability is rather poor, the customisation options as well as synergies to explore are few and far in between. Combat becomes old fast, and since there isn't a way to speed the animations up or autoresolve, at some point you'll start trying to push towards the end asap - only to find out that you need higher tier ships, and those cost increasing amounts of resources, therefore there's a lot of grind between here and there.
Overall, it's great in concept but fails to deliver. Interestingly enough, prerelease material seemed way more ambitious than what we've got. I'm hoping they scaled down a fair bit to push it out of the door but plan to reintroduce a bunch of features as time goes by. If they add some meat to the game, I'll happily revisit.
My advice: don't buy it now but follow the dev team and see if they build on the release version in further patches. Might be worth the purchase in a couple months, at the moment - no.
)resource collection was always automated in the mid game, but we've heard you loud and clear - running your officers from sector to sector isn't very fun for very long
