My Starpoint Gemini 2 battles continue! For previous reflections on this game, see my posts on play session 1 and play session 2. Still experimenting with post title formats. Tricky to convey the series-within-a-series nature of what I'm up to here!

My efforts to get to the difficult stuff succeeded! By chasing down every main and side quest I had access to, I managed to advance the storyline battles to the point where I could actually lose at them. Now I need to run away from fights that get out of hand, manage my cooldowns, and use consumable equipment, or risk a Game Over. That keeps my attention better, though my desire for a more flexible save point system still stands. It sucks to complete a bunch of missions, then lose it all because they're out in a nebula with no space stations or planetside ports.

I finally managed to upgrade from my starter ship, spending almost a million credits on a Corsair corvette. I'll still need to grind a bit to get all its hardpoints equipped with weapons worthy of its name, but I'm hopeful that doing so will prepare me sufficiently to win the next storyline engagement. If not, I'm also not too far from attaining Chief Petty Officer rank, which opens up the ability to hire a mercenary ship to accompany me--something I'm rather looking forward to, given I chose the "Commander" character class who has a fleet-buffing cooldown.

During last session, I jotted down a number of little observations about the game, positive and negative, from bugs to notable design decisions. It doesn't cohere into a singular thesis perhaps, but the lists might give an impressionistic look on their own.

Nuisances

• There's a couple different navigation modes you switch between according to the needs of the moment, dictating how you turn the nose of your ship: with WASD, or by moving the mouse around the screen. When you choose to "Go To" a waypoint, the ship automatically orients toward it and goes into full-engine-power mode. But if you're in mouse nav mode, even the slightest nudge of your cursor interrupts that process, so you have to switch to keyboard and try again.
• My save point gripes are exacerbated by the fact that landing on a planet assesses a docking fee. If I lift off without remembering to save, I have to eat another charge, which tends to ratchet up from one landing to the next.
• You have to buy ammunition for your heavy weapons. That's fine, but if you "unmount" a heavy battery while changing loadouts around, the ammo in it vanishes. If you mount it back, you have to pay for a full load over again.
• Collision detection has some glitches. I once spent a couple minutes shooting at a space station, worried by the fact that my weapons seemed not to scratch it at all, but it turned out the shots were passing through it entirely. I had to wander around shooting from different angles until I found one where the blasts would connect.
• Some parts of the simulation are ephemeral, not kept with your save file. If you save and reload, drydocks' stock of equipment refreshes, available missions are re-randomized, etc. This can make savescumming unpleasantly optimal at times.
• The voice acting is atrocious. If you want a specific accent, hire somebody with the right language background, don't have some rando fake it!
• There are lingering placeholders in some of the text:

Yeah, the engineer who deployed our station AI forgot to change the defaults. So it announces us on comms as "StationName." We just figured we'd run with it.

Legitimately Cool Stuff

• Mitigating the slow travel time are a ton of different ways to get around. You can pay for travel at a jump gate, connecting you to any gate in the network you've seen. You can dive through a wormhole, which costs no money but tends to be situated in a dangerous area. You can catch a ride on a gravity ribbon that dramatically accelerates you. There's even a consumable item that will jump you to a point of your choice on the starmap within its radius, and there are levelup perks you can take to make those more effective.
• The starmap is enormous. In my 6 hours logged play time, I've covered maybe 1/5 of it. It's quite fun to hop through a wormhole and find yourself deep in uncharted territory! (Even if said territory is likely to be too high level for you...)
• Earning achievements gives you little statistical perks, like increased resistance to radiation damage or faster experience gain. It's a nice way of making achievements worth chasing, even if you don't care about your Steam cred.
• Ship upgrades have a great balance of incremental improvements--an enhancement that increases engine output, a better weapon--and major jumps, like when you buy a whole new ship. Enhancements and weapons you buy for one ship are automatically equipped to the next, so the early investment isn't wasted when you make the big buy.

I'm not sure how likely I am to finish this game. Less than 3% of players on Steam have earned the "Storyteller" achievement marking the end of the campaign mode, no doubt because it's so friggin' slow to get anything done. But I have committed to give it a fair shake for at least a week, dear readers, so I forge onward!