Just a quick update on my Space Rangers 2 game from the year 3303 to 3306. As I noted in my previous post, I’ve been meaning to get more involved in combat, and this I did. Combat in this game isn’t terribly involved. Each ship has a limited number of weapons slots, from 1 to 6, and basically the more weapons you mount, the more firepower your ship can muster. Your accuracy and mobility skills make a big difference of course, and your defensive options including armour which blocks a fixed amount of damage and shields which block a percentage of all damage, but in actual play, it’s a simple matter of choosing a target and shooting it until either one of you dies or someone runs away.

This process is prolonged by the fact than any combatants can always dock at a friendly planet or base to make repairs. This means that very often, actually destroying an enemy can involve chasing it down, shooting it until it’s smoking at which point it’ll run to get repaired and you’ll need to wait until it takes off again. Repeat until you destroy the enemy or it runs out of money for repairs.

Once I started to actively look for fights, I discovered that hunting missions pay significantly more than courier ones. You’re given a target to kill and you need to do search for the current location of the target using the in-game information browser. Think of it as the intergalactic version of Google. Then it’s a simple matter of tracking it down and destroying it before the mission timer runs out. Doing these missions on top of the courier missions and special quests (including one very memorable one involving a seemingly haunted house!) I’d already been doing gave me enough money to upgrade my hull to even faster and bigger version of the same class.

Another thing that I tried was exploring black holes. Normal combat in the game is turn-based just like everything else, but inside black holes it becomes a sort of primitive action game. If you win you can get some unique equipment as loot but I didn’t care much for the 1980s-style gameplay and opted not to repeat the experience.

Finally, I got more involved in the anti-Dominator fight. Occasionally the Coalition forces mount a military strike against a system held by the Dominators and I tried a couple of times to take part in one these group efforts to liberate a system, but never managed to get the timing right. I did manage to be around a few times when the Dominators attacked the system I was in and helped fight them off. When a Dominator ship is destroyed, they drop nodes which can be exchanged at Ranger bases for micromodules to upgrade your gear as well as equipment that can be sold to a science base to help speed up anti-Dominator research.

My current goals are to get a ship with the maximum number of weapons slots and start liberating systems all by my lonesome. That should be fun.