Post by SZCZ GAMES in Ur-Quan Masters - Hunt of the Kohr-Ah comments

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Greetings fellow SCII enthusiast! I'm glad this caught your attention. I absolutely love SCII, and have played through it multiple times. More than 10, easily. Each time doing things a little differently. Selling humans to the Druuge was fun.

Anyway, thank you for your interest. I'm not sure how playable this game is now. I've gone back to it, years after finishing it, and it's extremely unbalanced. Like, horrendously bad. There's no balancing at all! I thought I was being super clever with so many different little things, for example hiding stats unless your science or whatever was high enough - the bit about spies was kinda broken. The game is basically either stupidly hard and unintuitive, or ridiculously easy (science is way too powerful). And if you do too well, the game punishes you with surprise catastrophes! And if you do super badly, it surprises you with bonus events to help you. This was my attempt at "balancing" it.

The resource management came from watching Battlestar Galactica, but given that I love SCII, I had to use that scenario. Lots of fun.

It's nice to read that you also loved the game so much you were writing your own follow-up scenarios. Super cool. Did you ever play Star Control 3? I finished it twice, but I didn't like it much. And then I played the newer recent Star Control game, but I didn't like it at all! It just didn't land right.

The original creators are working on a true sequel, with a different name but the same races. Are you following that? I forget the name they use. Free Stars? By Pistol Shrimp Games.

doctorfrog132 days ago (2 edits)

Ooh late reply. I don't get on itch too often.

As for your game, I didn't play real long (I'm easily distracted), so I can't offer much feedback, but it's in one of my many folders as something to return to. Like a little digital shrine to dig up in the future, with other cool ideas I breezed by.

It was just great to see a game idea similar to my own narrative roleplay idea. I would have loved for an SC sequel to follow that idea, rather than rehash all the elements of the original. SCII is a singular thing, it evolved from SCI, but it's not something I want to see repeated slavishly. Your game idea is at least taking off in another trajectory, so kudos. And yeah, it has Galactica vibes, which I also find very appropriate for a sequel to a sequel that focuses so much on resource and strength gathering in a desperate atmosphere.

Boring story about SCIII: I got my first PC around when the demo for III came out (PC gamer demo CD), and it was a baffling thing to encounter. The full game had a nice treatment in PC Gamer, IIRC, and had what appeared to be claymation'd talking heads. The writeup didn't give me much of a clue about the game, and the demo was the Super-Melee mode, and it frankly seemed primitive compared to the FPS and Star Wars flight sim games I was more into at the time. Gimme this in a first person cockpit, I thought (as if that would work).

So I never played SCIII, and I may never. But SCII? I'll return to it one of these days, though my One Golden Runthrough will remain the core memory of the game: after losing my first game, I started over and played it meticulously, keeping notes and everything, getting the ending I wanted. What an experience, and to be honest, the first failure made the second play so much better.

SZCZ GAMES132 days ago

I'm just pleased to be chatting with a fellow SC fan. :D

I've enjoyed the first SC, on all the platforms (mainly Mega Drive; but the C64 version is kinda interesting too).

I love SC2, have finished it many times. Often with different tactics. For example, did you know you can farm the Slylandro probes using the Thraddash?The Earth cruiser is pretty good for pummeling the Thrads. Do it enough and they choose to follow you due to your strength. And a Thrad can obliterate a probe using it's thruster fire - the probes just plow right intothe flame. Only in 1P mode or on easy difficulty in Super Melee mode. On the higher difficulties it will avoid this, tell me that the 1P game has the difficulty on lowest.

I finished SC3 twice. I downloaded it from Home of the Underdogs, and my dial up internet cut out so had to download it twice. But I played it eventually. It was... OK? The map was confusing. The melee somehow worse. The ships unbalanced. But I liked the claymation puppets and I liked the voice acting. The planet management was... Tolerable?

Did you play the recent sequel? I didn't like it.

As you say: SC2 was a special unique thing, and I don't think you can really reiterate on that formula. It was lightning in a bottle. The environment which they worked in was unique. They weren't getting paid, for the last 6 months it was pure crunch with no money to get it finished. They poured real human blood and soul into it. They suffered for it.

On a side note, I later go into Master of Orion due to my love of SC2. I needed more space games with interesting aliens. The first MoO ended up being a lifelong favourite game. The sequel not so much, though I know some people prefer MoO2 over the first.

It's a 4X strategy game, so a different genre to SC2. But have you tried it?

itch.io

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