Sol Trader

It's as if Crusader Kings 2, Space Rangers, and Dwarf Fortress had an orgy, and now no one knows who the parent is. It has the most ingenious idea for conversation modeling and social network modelling I have ever seen. It isn't a perfectly polished or balanced thing but I'm so glad that it exists. It feels like a successful thesis, for someone who thought deep and hard about what it would mean to create a truly dynamic world with interacting agents. Who looked at every static, signpost NPC and fetch quest and decided to try and seriously solve it once and for all. Even if this game isn't perfect, I can pretty much guarantee that some of the ideas being shown off here are going to inspire other game developers who are trying to sove the riddle of dynamic narrative. For me, anyway, that alone makes it worth buying.

I really like the concept of this game - some sort of a career simulator in a futuristic world, with elements of economy and networking. This is what I thought I was getting into when I bought this game and started playing. However, I ended up getting very bored very quickly. To my disappointment, the game ended up being all about talking to people, getting them to trust and like you, so they ask you to do all sorts of missions for them, usually going back and forth between places or getting information about people they know. In my book, this type of game would be defined as "a gossip simulator". No matter where you are, the main gameplay mechanic is choosing an AI to talk to, so you can impress it in order to complete one of many boring types of missions. /yawn You can also get a job, except the mechanism seems confusing, to say the least. Instead of getting to your work place and have some activity the game would present you as your supposed job, you have to "get owed" hours first, which means waiting... and waiting... and waiting... I suppose it was designed like that to let you do other things while having a job, but it just doesn't make sense to me. None of it. I suggest avoiding this game, as it hardly offers any fun, if at all. If you're really curious about it, wait for it to go on sale, and even then, I'd suggest not expecting much.

Overall, I feel mixed about this game. I keep coming back to it, so I am certainly getting some enjoyment out of playing. It is complex and complicated, and it is more of a social simulator than a trading game. Yes, you can trade, but that does not necessarily seem to be a major focus. It can be tedious at times, which can make the game feel even more boring. I have been multitasking while playing. [h1]System Info & Performance Report[/h1] [table] [tr] [td]Operating System[/td] [td]Ubuntu Linux 16.04 x64[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]CPU[/td] [td]Ryzen 5 1500x[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]GPU[/td] [td]GTX 1050, nvidia-396[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Game Saves[/td] [td]Automatically and manually (1 slot per character)[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Notes[/td] [td]There is a fairly steep learning curve[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Technical Notes[/td] [td]No problems[/td] [/tr] [/table]

Neat game in theory, less so in practice. The gameplay is fairly shallow and repetitive and there's a lot of waiting around either in space travel or waiting for time to pass in areas where you can't sleep. The maps are somewhat confusing (tip: there are multiple areas each with their own map) and interaction with space objects is somewhat confusing (tip: the blue text indicates a planet while the green text indicates a station that teleports you to another station. Each station usually has one local planet nearby). The background is fairly pretty, but most of the faces look exactly the same and the music is unobtrusive at best. Might be worth $5 as something to play around with to learn about the concepts, but $20 is a steep ask.

Had a bit of fun with this. Flew around, talked to people, completed jobs. At first it was interesting reading the kinds of things people had to say about each other. The conversation system is kind of neat. Then it got too be a bit too much. Too many similar faces, saying similar things. I stopped paying attention to any of the words, and was just looking at the conversation symbols. Then I thought, why am I even doing this? There's no interesting story. I'm not getting any better at this, it's just more of the same, over and over. I suspect this is one of those "games" where it was more fun to program than it is to play. Some interesting ideas in here, but the whole thing feels hollow.

For a one man dev team you did something really special here and I hope the dev continues with this diamond in the rough. I like the focus on connections between people and how you have to use them to your advantage. This one is worth a least a go or two and I do not regret my purchase. . What you can do: Form relationships and advance your career as a pirate, politcian, diplomat, naval officer. What I'd like to see: More attention on the space aspect of everything such as stations, being able to perhaps purchase or build a station(an example would be a mining station in which you can hire people to mine asteroids for profit) Overall I'd like to see the scope of the game magnified but first I'd rather the dev concentrate on getting what he has now up to snuff, the UI is good but feels clunky and there are some features that aren't in the game (player marriages, children and the like) due to some bug related to those portions of the game. Support this dev as he clearly cares enough about the game, and remember he is just one person

Oh this game... This is NOT a space sim as you might be expecting. If you expect flying, trading and shooting, then you might not like the game. This is more of a ... a ... political simulator? ... private detective simulator? ... trading simulator? ... relationships simulator? This game is unique and extremely ambitious. The game is challenging to understand, as it is hard to communicate the mechanics of the game properly. I think the idea is well done, but the difficulty of presenting the system makes the game look borring. At this point I can't imagine how it could be done better. If you get used to the system it is quite enjoyable. I have spent about 7 hours just talking with NPC in this game, working on my career and making friends, I bought a space ship and never used it. I can't offer pros and cons as this game is incomparable. Except that from Steam page it appears like typical space trade/fighter sim, and it is not that.

Let’s start by saying that I love trading games and I really love games that use social actions instead of violence to achieve ones’ goals. So, SOL TRADER sounds perfect! No. I tried... I really tried to like this game. but at this stage in its development I can’t in good faith, recommend nor endorse this game. After a few hours of trying to learn-on-the-fly I resorted to watching the only YouTube tutorial which was by the developer as he played the game and EVEN HE IS LOST!!! This is a game of many questions, namely; "What I am I supposed to do?", "Where should I be going?", "Where is that bloody person I was just talking to-OMG THEY LEFT THE PLANET AND I DON’T HAVE A SHIP AND NOW I CAN’T FINISH THIS STUPID MISSION?", “Why does this person hate everything I want to talk about?”, "Why am I playing this?" nothing is intuitive, nothing is motivated for, I had more fun when I wasn’t playing this game.. This game hates its players. 1/10

This review is for v1.3 which I have played for over 50 hrs now. I liked the concept alot and was very interested in the random gen of characters in a sci-fi world. The results however, are awkward and flawed gameplay that causes difficulty in completing missions or achieving goals. I started my char at age 18 and hope than when I replay at 25 I will get better results, but in the game I played most of the businesses in most of the cities has nobody working in them EVER. Since my chosen lifetime goal was to visit every city in the solar system, this became impossible when nobody ever showed up for work at either of the Outer Alliance Embassies I found. I even tracked them down in the bars, the people who had the embassy jobs and befriended them and even became intimate with one so I could try to use the MEET ME btn that lights up when your close enough to someone. So, I went to the embassy he worked at and told him to meet me and his button greyed out and said that he got my request and he never showed up and his button stayed stuck in greyed out inactive mode no matter how many time I chatted with him afterwards. I have had similiar problems getting and selling things since usually there is no one working at those businesses either. I have revisited the cities with the embassies for 50 hrs now with no one EVER being there. This make my chosen goal impossible. So, I proceeded to do mining and other things, buying new ships and trading ore and amassing a ton of money, doing a ton of favour missions for people. I have also had a problem with any passenger missions since I cant seem to get anyone to follow me and get on the ship in order to transport them anywhere. So, my feedback is that random generation without enough EXCEPTIONS or controls to set a functional enviroment that enables easy play, IS A BAD IDEA. Having nobody working in places that a player needs to access to achieve goals because the game randomly gave those jobs to characters who like to drink all day and dont want to work... THIS IS BAD. These glitches that make the game very clunky and awkward to play could be fixed and I hope they will be.. but I see the developer is off to make a new game so I guess we are stuck with this flawed game that is not really worth buying, unless you like frustration. Added after further play: More problems... You cant get anyone to follow you on passenger missions, if you get killed and eject to a planet, then try to talk to anyone anywhere you get a error/crash and cant play the game anymore. If you kill the pirate that is attacking you, and anyone finds out about the incident, you get a huge Morality penalty and everyone on that planet soon thinks your a scoundrel for defending yourself, If you befriend the wrong person you get a huge morality penalty and everyone thinks your a scoundrel simply for knowing the wrong person, the autosave overwrites any saves the player has made and you cant get back to previous saves so you get stuck with a horrible event and cant go back to a previous time. All of these problems combined make gameplay very frustrating.

This game is unique in that it is more about people, relationships and information gathering than a more typical space exploration or combat orientated game. There is some exploration, mining, trading and combat but so far I have been so engrossed with just meeting people and doing missions that I have yet to even shoot at anything with my space ship. The game does a great job of creating a dynamic living universe of charaters that move about from their homes and jobs to the local bars and space ports on the various planets. The portraits of the various characters are also dynamically created but often they don't differ enough to make it easy to distinguish between who is who looks-wise. More distinctive looking portraits would be nice. I would definately recommend this game if you are looking for something a little different to your typical space game.