Pillars and 4x Aplenty!

I'm still alive!  All my efforts have been directed towards work lately, so I have not been in the mood to write.  I'm still playing games when I get a chance though.  Just not so much lately since the wife has been out of town and I'm acting as a single father.

Pillars of Eternity.  I just finished the first act.  It's still pretty awesome.

Star Ruler 2.  A new 4x game I picked up.  Sadly, one of the main screens is giving me motion sickness so I can't really play.  There is a spinning planet behind some text which just gets to me.  I love 2015.  The developer maintains an IRC channel, so I popped in and just asked him if anything can be done.  He's going to put an option in to disable it in the next patch.  How awesome is that?

StarDrive 2.  Another 4x game came out, two in a month?  Crazy.  I picked this one up too, as I can't play Star Ruler 2 at the moment.  It's really good so far.  Very polished with an excellent UI.  I haven't gotten too far yet, as I've restarted at least 5 times.  But I finally figured out how things work so this save might actually get played for a while.

Star Trek Online.  I still log in regularly to DOFF and R&D,  but just have not put much time into doing missions lately.  Too many distractions.

SWTOR.  3.2 is coming up soon, which means a new planet/story.  I really need to get that half level so I hit the cap.

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StarDrive Check-in

StarDrive is an in-development 4x game by Zer0sum Games.  It's actually a project I Kickstarted, because there can never be enough 4x games!  The game is currently still in development, but a number of improvements have been made.

First, they signed a deal with Iceburg Interactive for publishing.  Congrats to them!

Now on to a quick look at the beta.

The Race selection screen is coming together nicely.  This screenshot does not really do it justice because the portraits on the left are actually animated and look great.  The art has been coming along very nicely!

This screenshot shows Subspace Projectors.  These installations are automatically built (by your planets) to connection two colonized systems.  They are new to 4x games, so I asked the developer about them.

Subspace projectors are used to extend the area of influence for your empire.  This is important because you can warp for free while inside your borders.  Outside of your borders, you pay a massive power penalty for warping.  As you tech up, you can even gain bonus movement speed while inside the influence of your projectors.  The concept is that you will build 'roads' with these to speed movement within your empire.  Furthermore, as you tech up, you can add warp inhibiting effects to your projectors, which slow enemy movement speed within your borders, or even prevent enemy FTL altogether.

You can check it out at http://stardrivegame.com/

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