Big fan of X series and Star Sector. Will I like this?

[[Slayer]]

Just wanting to know you guys opinion before I jump in. I might hold off because winter sale is in a couple days to get it, but there are other games I might want more.

[rickcarson]

Hard to say. X series universe is ~60 hand-crafted sectors, whereas Avorion is something like 5-10,000 randomly generated sectors. The obvious implication being that X series is probably more .... not sure how to put this .... detailed?

I like both, but for me they *both* kind of 'fail' when I get to the station building side of things. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's just too big a time sink for too little return - or paradoxically maybe it's the idea that I'd get infinite money if I just let them run forever takes the fun (?) (urgency? challenge?) out of it.

But then I can skip that in Avorion. The game doesn't _force_ me to build stations and fighters. (Another massive time sink)

I dunno. You can ignore the bits you don't like, and do a (relatively) deep dive into the bits you like. E.g. if you don't like the ship-building / space-lego aspect of it, then you can just download designs off the workshop.

If you want a space-game where you fly around in the enterprise and a klingon warbird and the millenium falcon are your wingmates, with long-range support from a battlestar, this is the one.

[Blueberry Muffins!]

It's a lot of fun, but the top line is: X4 and Star Sector are grognard games, and Avorion is not. It's different. I'm the figure-it-out-myself refuses-to-learn-from-workshop-or-youtube sort just for context, and the modes short of hardcore feel so easy I don't play them. You have your own personal fleet and fly your flagship yourself, you can definitely build yourself a massive star-spanning empire but just as the ship sim is coarser than Space Engineers, the economic and logistics sim is coarser than X4's. I'm old, I suck so hard at micro I bounced off Star Sector.

Flying is purely third-person (with your current ship as your avatar) or god's-eye view. You achieve combat roflstomp in your current territory very soon after you get basic competence with ship design with the pieces you have, then you try to expand the economy you built (your preferred mix of robbery, trade, mining, manufacturing) to fund and supply your personal fleet to where you can carve yourself a solid foothold in the richer and more complex and varied territory closer to the core. Diving for riches and lording it over the outer fringes is good for cheap thrills; there's seven basic materials in six tech rings (you start with iron and titanium) to master.

A major activity is designing your space ship(s) at the level of stretchy voxels for crew quarters, engines, thrusters, docking plates, armor plating, hangars, etc. Your saved designs are global, I figure that sh*t out in creative mode and then just load up ship templates (or load up and bolt onsubsystem templates) I already worked out when playing with annoying enemies who tend to bring guns and demands.

The ship designer feels really quirky and limiting until you learn to work with it, then there's just a couple things that you'll be jonesing for but can work around easily enough.
It can get engrossing, and the basics of ship design matter, a lot. It's not close to Space Engineers in level of detail. There's crew quarters but you don't have to plan crew access to for instance your weapon turrets. There's cargo holds but you don't have to design the internal transport.. There are consequential subtleties to how many things work but they're subtleties and details on this basic plan: you want enough of everything, you want the guns placed with good fields of fire, you want the armor placed to protect anything that might get hit, you have constraints and tradeoffs on maneuverability and speed and armor and capacity (crew, fighter, cargo, torps, energy). If you like your ships to look really good rather than just like serviceable blobby messes either pick designs off the workshop or prepare to spend some unguessable (but I'll guess quite very large) amount of time on that.

If you want to record or otherwise show off your fleets I'd imagine using the large variety of cosmetic parts, lights, glass,, color schemes, holograms, on and on, well, will pay off bigtime.

Combat and flight AI is plenty quirky. I use it as an assist not a fire-and-forget in all but the easiest situations. X4's pilots for instance won't route around asteroid fields, instead they'll try to bull their way through and take for-frikkin-ever about it. Avorion's AI seems better at that but nobody would call it good, and it has its own frustrating idiocies.

There's far more galaxy to explore than you'll ever reach and there's fun stuff to discover, lots that's part of the plot, lots that's not. You build and crew carrier fleets and mining fleets, transports and merchants and scouts, you hire captains and send them off on the missions they're good at.