> I've listened in on discussions of relative merits of ship builds for the current anti-xeno initiative and they are deep and far-ranging.
> I've watched combat streams from players who've practiced for literally a year to master the intricacies of no-flight-assist piloting.
We agree on these points. The ships and the piloting are the game's strongest qualities. They're what I miss most.
> After immersing myself over a couple of weeks in the various aspects and sub-communities it's amazing to me that people fall for the facile "mile-wide-inch-deep" truism.
The community of players is indeed awesome. Playing with others nearly makes up for all the deficiencies of the game. It makes everything that much more fun and more emergent. The sheer existence of groups like the fuel rats is something this game deserves praise for.
Doesn't make the game itself any less problematic. The problems still exist, they just don't seem so big because you're playing with friends.
> I've listened in on planning sessions for the "rather basic" "tally of points" (BGS) system, and it's far from basic, there's plenty of strategy and tactics involved and political thinking and negotiations with other player groupings are part of it - it's more like 3D Risk than what you describe.
Nah. I've played games like Risk too and they were far more interesting than this grind. Maybe it's "interesting" to the top squadron guys but I don't see how. They're essentially maintaining territory: have everyone in the squadron do a ton of little tasks so everything will stay more or less the same. Pretty much no impact on anything but which factions control which stations which doesn't mean anything anyway. It might sound fun to sign up for the empire princess faction and imagine you're gonna help her take over the galaxy but that quickly goes away when you join a community and discover they're in maintenance mode, only occasionally gobbling up territory when some other faction gets sick of the game and stops playing or something.
Compare that to eve online and its actual player run world and it's like night and day.
> There's a lot more to the game than "space trucking".
Maybe if you've already done everything else and have meta ships you can battle other players or thargoids with. Until then it's an endless grind. Buy at station, sell at another, repeat until number is big enough to buy new ship and modules. Land on planet, shoot and pick up rocks containing common elements until their quantity is big enough to upgrade existing ships and modules.
Space trucking is the most polite way I can describe this menial busy work.