Poll: Would you play a medieval trading game?

[Aetrion]

I can see from what I've been doing in Space engineers it does have a lot of potential for building and mining, but yes, it lacks much motivation to do anything else. (and trading isn't even an option.)

Now, I haven't played it enough to get a great sense of it, but while you can build all manner of things, and gather the raw materials to build it with, once you have a ship, there doesn't actually seem to be much purpose to having it...

Yea, this pretty much sums up the principal issue with Space Engineers. Since all you can do is built but the game presents you with very little reason to build there isn't a lot of real gameplay to it.

To me what makes space engineers great is that it really is about spaceships though. A ship in SE can be constructed and deconstructed down to every last component, every bulkhead, every walkway, every button panel. Having an intimate knowledge of your ship is essential to using it right, and that's something I find missing in so many games, where every ship essentially controls the same. In SE you can actually have quirks to the ship like "If something penetrates the armor right here it's going to sever the main conveyor line running between the cargo hold and the forward missile battery, but the ship can reroute the missiles through the refinery stack". In space engineers that's a real thing, and that makes me really wish there was a game with missions and stuff to do where ships are as complex and customizable as they are in SE.

 

[CrystalShadow]

I can see from what I've been doing in Space engineers it does have a lot of potential for building and mining, but yes, it lacks much motivation to do anything else. (and trading isn't even an option.)

Now, I haven't played it enough to get a great sense of it, but while you can build all manner of things, and gather the raw materials to build it with, once you have a ship, there doesn't actually seem to be much purpose to having it...

Yea, this pretty much sums up the principal issue with Space Engineers. Since all you can do is built but the game presents you with very little reason to build there isn't a lot of real gameplay to it.

To me what makes space engineers great is that it really is about spaceships though. A ship in SE can be constructed and deconstructed down to every last component, every bulkhead, every walkway, every button panel. Having an intimate knowledge of your ship is essential to using it right, and that's something I find missing in so many games, where every ship essentially controls the same. In SE you can actually have quirks to the ship like "If something penetrates the armor right here it's going to sever the main conveyor line running between the cargo hold and the forward missile battery, but the ship can reroute the missiles through the refinery stack". In space engineers that's a real thing, and that makes me really wish there was a game with missions and stuff to do where ships are as complex and customizable as they are in SE.

Yeah, that level of detail to a ship is almost unheard of. You'd think, given the level of detail being put into ship interiors that Star Citizen might get into that territory, but it seems somewhat unlikely somehow.

The fact that Space engineers actually simulates all of the inter-connected systems the way it does means you can have all kinds of weird quirks to a design that wouldn't show up in a simpler model with less going on.
(OK, so the way certain systems actually work is a bit simplistic in some cases, but the overall complexity of it is still fascinating.)

I recall with the default ship you get with one of the settings, the oxygen generators are embedded in the hull in a way that means if they're damaged you can't get to them without ripping out a whole heap of the ship's structure...

And the behaviour of gravity generators is... Well, you can do some really weird things with them if you feel like it. XD

So as a system with interesting behaviours, the ships you can build in Space engineers are a lot of fun.
Something with that level of detail would be indeed be great combined with some actual purpose for those ships...

 

[Aetrion]

Yea, Space Engineers doesn't simulate having to route reactor energy anywhere, the only thing that needs to be distributed through the ship is its inventory through a conveyor network. I'd love it if you had to build plasma conduits to the engines as well, because it would make the design process even more challenging. Embedded systems are nice if you want a really clean look to the ship or a very compact design, but maintenance does become a huge pain in the ass.

Star Citizen seems like it's going way too much the route of X or Eve to me. From everything I've heard about the game with permadeath and all that stuff I doubt it will ever be a satisfying game to people who care more about spaceship simulation than about a simulation of all the consequences of your ship blowing up because you got ganked by someone in a ship ten times bigger.