Merker
Posts: 208
Joined: 7/3/2010 Status: offline
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Yo, I'm surprised nobody mentioned this, it has most of the wishes people mentioned around here(getting out of your ship with a crew and walking around on a random spot on a random planet, driving in an apc from your cargo hold on the said planet, leaving the bridge and flying around with your own fighter, stealing other people's vehicles and using the enemy's tanks to destroy his own base, simulated boarding battles on your very own ship(tell those engineers to stay in the engineering when intruders try to sabotage the ship or prisoners escape after damage to the detention bay), has an interesting campaign or you can just roam through the galaxy trading/shooting/capturing enemy bases/or just plainly exploring every planet, even gas giants if your shields can handle the HUGE pressure) , and, most important of all, IT'S TOTALLY FREE: http://www.3000ad.com/games/universal-combat/ http://www.3000ad.com/download/ Called Universal Combat, it's a niche kind of game that started with the old Battlecruiser 3000AD, also free and around that very site. You can pretty much command your ship any way you want, and send every single one of your crew members to do anything you want them to(well, within the limits of their capabilities, sending an engineer with a handgun in the middle of the enemy base will only get him killed, he's no Scotty; however beaming down with your elite marine squad to take out the enemy air defenses while you instruct your fighters to launch ground strikes and your shuttles to drop the heavy tanks is a very nice way to have fun....if you don't get yourself killed in the process....which can be avoided if once you beam down you get inside the nearest enemy tank and start blasting their own to pieces....before getting back to your ship in the nearest shuttle/stolen enemy shuttle and launching a nuclear strike on the other enemy base on the dark side of the planet....after which you decide you need a base of operations and disable the orbital space station, board it, and take it over in the name of your government....then doing a spacewalk on the punctured hull of your ship in your EVA suit, watching the sunrise as your orbital path takes your to the light side of the planet, waiting for your surviving engineers to finally fix those blasted engines so you can get to the nearby moon and pick up the mining drones you left there before the battle so you can use the minerals to fix the power systems so you can power the subspace drive and jump back to earth for a quick repair at a cheap price.....totally forgetting about the 10 enemy intruders rampaging across the ship, fighting around the shuttle bay with the few marines you have left and trying to shoot those medics trying to heal your crew and engineers doing their business....all oblivious in the emergency to the fact the the primary life support is down and they will all suffocate in a few hours, unless they get to the sections where secondary life support is still functional....everyone totally not noticing the enemy carrier and escorts inbound for your ship, because the sensors got damaged in the last attack and all you can see is the big space station you just captured 2 clicks from your ship firing it's HUGE laser cannons and blasting the carrier&company as they barely get out of hyperspace. Well, that's a small presentation of what you can do in that game. I played it myself and I love it. It's very complex and has a steep learning curve, but it's awesome once you get the hang of it. The campaign was much more diverse for its predecessor, Battlecruiser Millenium Gold, but then again, that's not the highpoint of the game. If you can do the campaign you're an ace anyway. You can play the game at your own pace, might get frustrated because things happen in REAL TIME, so if your engineer says that fixing the engines will take 7 hours, then you'll just have to float around for 7 hours. Fortunately, I learned how to fix that with a couple of codes input at the shortcut window, which give you the ability to accelerate time and play the game much more relaxed. I'll tell them once I can find them. Also, forgot to mention that your crew is LIVING, as they actually have to go to sleep and eat, and get medical care, and can get infected if you keep sending them to weird jungle planets or get irradiated if near big explosions or toxic environments. They also LEARN, and get better at their job, especially your bridge crew and pilots, if they live long enough of course. You can also do research in your research lab if you play a military career with a ship that has one, and there are a number of cool artifacts that you can find in the universe and your research engineer can figure out once she's smart enough, even a PLANET BUSTING weapon that just turns any planet you shoot it at into a flaming rock of lava, and gets your courtmartialed, hunted down and executed if you're into the terran military. You can also command fleets and space stations once you have a high enough rank, which is awesome since help is scarce to come by in the hostile quadrants of the galaxy, and it gives another reason to capture space stations, since any ships that were still docked when you capture them, come under the custody of your factions and thus, you. I have a couple of saves in which I have a pretty good situation if you want them. Cheers
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