Great game! I wish there was a randomized map, because it feels like I know every corner by now, and I do the think resource cost scaling gets ridiculous (try building a train of any length with 2 people), but it’s a really great survival crafter + factory builder.

I really like it’s progression of resource tiers, and it’s exploration mechanic that lets you delve into ruins to find artifacts that give you bonuses to town morale.

It also has a nice pseudo-complex farming system, where you can manage the soil composition to favor different crops (or just choose to plant the crops that that area’s default soil lends itself to).

It also has randomized maps, which I like to reload until I find one with an interesting layout.

There is combat, but you can granularly control it, or disable it altogether (there are raiders, and wildlife like bears and wolves).

It feels very laid back, which is my jam.

I bounced off of it, and went back to Farthest Frontier.

I was not a huge fan of the way the villagers are accrued and assigned; it felt like they were trying to emulate Banished, but didn’t execute well on it.

I did love the way you draw housing plots, and the ability to add extensions onto houses that have different bonuses (e.g. a chicken coop that gives eggs).

I think if the city-builder+RTS hybrid aspect is very appealing to you, it’s one of the few out there. If you want a more traditional city builder, check out Farthest Frontier.

Locker room humor generally refers to talk between guys, which could have sexual undertones, but isn’t normally something I’d think of as “sexually-oriented”.

And flirting can range all the way from smiling long at someone at a cafe or calling them ‘cutie’ in conversation, to me spanking my s.o. as they walk by in a sexy outfit and telling them they’re gonna get punished if they keep distracting me from work- so there’s a huge range in there, some of which I’d definitely consider sexting, if texted to someone.

Frankly, I have zero sympathy for him, because it’s very easy not to interact over direct message with fans at all, much less underage ones.

I’ve worked customer-interfacing jobs that required a high level of direct, personal relationship-building before (sometimes even *gasp* with people I found attractive!), and I never once felt compelled to take those communications into a private space, and there was never even a potential for those people to have been kids.

You don’t “stumble into” private messages with a minor that “get out of hand”.

There’s not one. Sexting is very broad, it does not have to be pictures or direct references to boning. Any sexually-oriented text communication can be considered sexting.

I’m going by development budgets, not scope.

I wish people would consider Rimworld and Kenshi AAA, and CoD ‘A’, based on scope or hours of playtime offered. :)

Thanks for the detailed breakdown!

Starbound is I think very much reliant on you wanting to play it as a sandbox. It definitely has a lot of shortcomings. It sounds like you didn’t play it with mods, or at least with Frackin’ Universe, because FU solves most of the QoL pain points from the vanilla game (like movement being slow). The boss arenas actually used to allow you to build in them, but it completely ruined the difficulty; you could go into any boss room, build a box around yourself, and just whittle them down imperviously. While that might be someone’s preference, I don’t fault the devs for not wanting that, and that’s pretty standard for games to remove ‘cheesing’ exploits for bosses.

Starsector is really interesting to me, because I don’t feel that way about it at all.

I almost never end up running out of command points, if only because I only need to re-task ships if something is going wrong. Usually if I’m running low on them, it’s because I’m trying to kill off incoming DPS by focusing fire on one ship at a time, and at that point I should probably be retreating anyways. I can’t speak to the skill tree changes in detail, because honestly I mostly rely on them for the larger fleet bonuses, or tech unlocks (e.g. AI). They never struck me as being impactful enough to make my ship into a ‘hero unit’, so I never tried to see if they could.

The combat is definitely (imho) about fleet composition rather than fleet control.

But really, combat is only one small part of the game to me. Exploration, missions, building up colonies, looting ruins, etc etc. That’s what I really love about Starsector, and what sets it apart to me.

I’m sure I’ll rotate back around eventually! :)

Yep, I’ve played it!

I actually enjoyed Outer Worlds a decent bit, but I would consider it much less of a space game than Starfield. For all that people rag on Starfield about the ships just being loading screens, you got to manually assemble spaceships, and then walk around inside of them. Outer Worlds was really just spaceships as loading screens.

I don’t really go in for Annapurna games, for a number of reasons.

I think that depends on what you love about NMS.

If you’re a fan of the procgen exploration, Avorion, Starbound, or Elite:Dangerous

If you’re a fan of the multiplayer interaction, Eve Online or Star Citizen.

If you’re a fan of the base-building, Space Engineers or X4.

If you’re a fan of the Alien interactions, that’s very tough, but probably X4 or Star Control 2/ The Ur Quan Masters. xD

There aren’t a lot of other single games that have as many systems as NMS does.

I think that I would probably say start to check out X4 if you want 3D, and Starbound if you don’t mind 2D. Be warned, X4 does not fit well with “not much time to play”, though.

I do love Alpha Centauri! I’d probably add that under “space-adjacent” games.

That is actually #5 on my Small Games list. It sort of straddles the line in terms of size and complexity, but in the end I think it really falls under being a small, Indie game, being as it’s FOSS and community-developed and all.

Just to clarify, Star Citizen is the game that is currently playable. Squadron 42 is still under closed development.

They’ve really added a lot with the DLCs, but as usual with Paradox it’s crazy expensive to get everything at once.

I will probably add E:D to the list, but under protest. ;P

I kickstarted it, and I just honestly didn’t find it that much fun. Once Frontier started doing lots of “balance” changes that nerfed money accrual, I really bounced off. I’m not someone who plays any single game exclusively, but it felt like it was going to take 60+ hours just to move up each ship level, and I wasn’t gonna wait 6+ months realtime, or however long it would’ve taken, to buy an Anaconda (and not be able to afford insurance, and lose it anyways).

Yeah, I still play it. I’m based down in Eldjaerin in Minmatar space, right near losec where I do my capital production.

Occasionally I like to try to bait the Russians in Frulegur and Konora (e.g. Coastal Brotherhood) into attacking my carriers or HAW dreads, but I think they’ve learned not to anymore. :P

I think that I was probably spoiled by Eve in that regard. It has a lot of “wow” moments too. Or SC, though obviously that came after E:D. I’m also just not sure it really had the impact on the genre that the others have, though some of their impacts have not all been positive, obviously.

Huh, interesting. Is it a shared-world-shooter, like Destiny or The Division?

Yeah, it’s definitely very intimidating to get into, and I don’t think I could start now just because it feels like it’s too late; already 21 years old as a game.

If you want a space game that is very similar to Eve, but not online, check out Astrox Imperium. Be warned, it is very janky and indie.

I’ve got a bunch of other recommendations, but I’ll save those for my med/small posts, so I can write more about them.