Spacefleet: Heat Death

Only played for a bit as of writing this, but so far so good. Pretty sure I was the first person to buy this lmao. I am looking forward to see how this game develops. Keep up the good work dude.

I hate to give this game negative review because there is almost no games with Expanse combat on the market, but it's just too rough for now. Most frustating thing is UI. It's VERY hard to navigate and find stuff. If you want your fleet to fly to other station you have to find it in fleet tab, click LMB on it, then in other window you click select (why you can't select it in fleet tab directly?), then select where you need to go (take station for example), but you can't just RMB to your destination, you need to select it and press "set navpoint" or something and then it still don't flies because you need to set fleet speed or something but you can't because you forget about it while doing all this stuff. And this applies to almost every other task you will have to do in this game. I mean, it's fine to do such sophisticated controls for a game where you control one ship, not for a game where you can have several fleets. This game needs really big pass on UI (or an option to simplify controls.) Other smaller stuff: 1. This game have autotrade (you just toggle it and ships fly station to station trying to make profit), but in my try for some reason my trade ships made minimum profit deals so it took ages to make any money. 2. Some sort of codex with weapon stats could be nice to have.

been waiting for something like these for quite a while, fun game, the updates have been stedy, a lot of potenial

Very promising EA game. Combines tactical gameplay from Children of a Dead Earth with user friendly 3D combat seen in games like Homeworld. A passion project I can support. Still has a long way to go, but I like what I see and look forward to future updates.

While it may say 2 hours. I've played this game much more during the playtest. It is a labor of love by a single developer and if you want expanse style combat this is your game. Shoot off someone's radiators and slowly watch the crew and ship cook. There are issues. Joshua, the developer, is aware and transparent popping up the current status when you start the game. This is a stepping stone for a larger system wide version of the game. Have patience, it's early access, support the developer, and this can be an amazing game that scratches that expanse combat itch.

Ok, so, I preface this by saying I have a lot of expertise in realistic orbital combat, I was of course excited to see a new game about this, now onto the review [h1] Written on V.0.2.3.2 [/h1] Being direct as usual, I feel like the UI and controls are extremely clunky and make the game nearly unusable, what I was hopping the game was was a tactical experience, a game that would allow you to precisely control fleets and individual ships. So far its more like a total chaos where the ships all have AIs that do things you didnt really ask them or want them to do, ships feel impossible to control in battle Real life space combat relies on things like precise dodges and angled armor, these elements feel completely absent from the game right now, there is no ship designer either. if a ship wants to go somewhere, it will not drift, it will automatically flip and burn. Its coded like a RTS game where you tell a unit to go there, and the game does that with newtonian physics. except it FLIPS THE SHIP IN A COMBAT ZONE WHILE BEING SHOT AT lol. Again spaceship combat is fairly similar to tank combat, angling your vehicle so that the armor sits at the optimal angle it was designed to best survive is a central part of it (and yes angled armor works for hypervelocity projectiles, it's complicated). These ships are all rockets, theyre long cylinders with an engine at the back. so to slow down they need to physically rotate. A ship like this could be used in combat sure but the tactics that would derive would be very specific to that type of ship, it would never expose its rear to the enemy and therefore either dodge sideways at long range in a semi predictable pattern or drift diagonally or spiral in pseudo orbits. Or if the armor works at all just sit there aiming at the target not wasting any fuel. You cant do any of this in the game right now, there is a point at the enemy order I found somewhere deep in a UI menu but it seems glitched and the ships were moving the things that are in the game are also weird, like theres an entire trading system and even...... gambling? I get you want a space pirate yarr harr harr simulator but maybe thats not the best thing to spend time working on in the pre alpha, right now the foundation of the game isnt there yet To send a bug report it automatically uploads the specs of the device and like.... no? how about no lol I found several bugs but didnt report them because I dont want to send any analytics anywhere, that should be turned off by default and maybe have a checkbox you can select to send that data for things like graphical glitches There also doesnt seem to be any orbital mechanics which is a big dissapointment, the map is 2D, ships move in a straight line between things that orbit on rails, and the ships also cant stop mid burn so its a fully fake simulation, the game doesnt have objects that fly with a position direction and velocity vector, rather just a position on a 2D grid and they move in a straight line kinda meant to mimic flip and burns. but as it stands there is no orbital mechanics in this game so know this before buying it. no orbital mechanics inside battle either. The UI is also very hard to read, the toggled off buttons are blacked out but like.... the highlights and the text are blacked out so theyre barely readable, that needs to be changed, the UI is very convoluted, over complex and hard to read in general and that absolutely ruins user experience. The UI style is nice, but the way its been done in the details needs to be changed, fewer buttons, bigger buttons, less color confusion, less redundant features and menus, more readable text with higher contrast. I would suggest throwing out most of the existing UI and replacing it with something like a list of friendly and enemy ships. remove all the small selection boxes and hit boxes and replace them with selection boxes the size of the full rectangle. COADE despite having a famously basic UI is already infintely more usable currently which ship is targeting which is very confusing, selecting an enemy ship is difficult, there is no dropdown menu or list of ships to target, theres a lot of unecessary visual noize meant to give military sim vibe like "track 9241" and names but it just makes everything harder to read and especially take longer to read. the buttons to speed time forward and slow it down dont seem to be the same in the map mode and combat mode despite both modes having this time warp function. there is no UI element to speed up or slow down time in battle For ship controls I would suggest replacing everything by what Terra invicta is doing. Ideally with orbital mechanics inside battles and the ability to set a manneuver node whenever you want in the path of the future trajectory of the ship instead of exactly once every minute. That system works really well to control large fleets of ships in a 3D space, what heat death has so far just doesnt work at all. The combat UI should be replaced by something inspired of COADE for the ships, the list of your ships on the left of the screen, then perhaps a clear UI of the system overview and interractions like in terra invicta when you select your ship, on the bottom of the screen. time warp button on the bottom left or right. a trajectory line like in terra invicta where you can create manneuver nodes that the ships will follow, where you can tell them to burn or orient in any direction. basic commands like burn towards target, aim at target (padlock in TI), dodge automatically with RCS thrusters, or burn tangatially to the target (even better if you can set an angle other than 90°) A ship designer would also be highly welcome where not only the loadout but also the shape of the ship and its configuration (position and orientation of all modules especially radiators engines and weapons) can be chosen. Trade is also completely broken, there is a lot of automation in the game and none of it really works, again I dont think this is what you should be focussing when none of the actual fundamental physics and combat and UI systems work yet, but the automated trade feature right now loses you more funds than you gain, I turned it off at the end of the tutorial in the "60 days before fleet arrives" and the ships just automatically moved from station to station buying things and selling them and.... lost money over time as they did so. splendid. Personally I do not care at all for this trading system, as a post beta new game mode once the game already works sure, but right now its just weird. Trade also makes basically no sense in space, you move resources just as the supply chain of a military industrial complex that sources its materials from different planetoids, period, you dont go from one place to another to make a financial profit, you just bring carbon from asteroids to the moon or something instead. that would be interesting, logistics is something absent from terra invicta, even though its a central and important part of realistic space military strategy, where do you get the atoms your ships are made out from, how do you send them where they are needed, can they be intercepted etc. thats the kind of resource system I would put in a game like heat death instead of mysterious NPC merchants who just have infinite money and buy resources for no reason the fact you cannot pause (the controls menu is basically empty so far, and i tried every key by trial and error) maybe because its meant to be an immersive simulator is really horrendous too, the UI is far too unusable to be able to order anything you want in real time. And for such real life space combat, everything would be pre programmed before the battle anyways for exactly that reason. The "time delay" "because it needs to move through the chain of command" also makes no sense, its done by computers instantly in the game and would... also be made by computers instantly in real life modulo lightspeed time lag. Overall pretty messy

No actual physical objects around make it extremely difficult to move correctly, couldn't even do 2nd beacon in tutorial.

It's a fun game, learning curve is CERTAINLY less steep than that of say, Nebulous - but it provides what it says. It's a 3-D, 'realistic' space combat simulator. The orbits are a bit weird though (even with torchships I don't think ships would vroom vroom in straight lines, as opposed to orbits. Hopefully we get ship customization and modding and multiplayer and stuff (COADE doesnt have multiplayer). It's worth the 10.79 (USD) I got it for :D pew pew!

It's hard sci fi, but it abstracts away all the crazy stuff so you're just focusing on the fun parts. I had fun with it during the tutorial.

Very, very cool. Accurate orbital mechanics make the game challenging, interesting, and fresh. As an expanse fan this is everything I could ever ask for from a space game.