Khadgar42: I finished the campaign.
Now I'm flying in my huge carrier able to hold my ground against 3 Empire Dreadnoughts simultanously.
I've done some mining, pirate hunting and trading along the way. Plundered riches and got ridiculously wealthy by selling captured ships.
I don't know what's left to do. People are saying they spent over a hundred hours in that game, I'm probably missing something, then.
I have the feeling I'm not experiencing it right:
Is the galactic news useful, at all?
What good is a firewall in your grappler?
Why do need hitpoints for your internal system when your can make your shields hold enemy fire?
What good is trading if mining is quicker less of a hassle?
Why should you do either of them once you understood the techniques behind capturing enemy ships?
Why can you captain a Cruiser as an Ensign?
How comes you have a rank if you are an independent captain?
Don't get me wrong, getting the command of my carrier was fullfilling. I like the game so much I even withheld my anger and suffered Admiral Khuzevvzwhatever ramblings through all major main missions.
So in short: what's next?
For now not that much, after you have finished the campaign there is pretty much nothing to do but increase your wealth, your collection of ships and weapons, and with the latest patch getting involved in a few random war here and there, beside mindlessly exploring of course
A DLC plus expansion are in the work right now, as is a few improvement on the game here and there, no official declaration released on what new patches will bring, but the DLC and expansion are mentioned to give the player the possibility to run it's own space station and even made a sort of clan with territory management and all
Perhaps even the possibility of managing a small fleet wherever you go, but not sure about that, most opponent can't keep up with the player as it is, with a fleet you'll be pretty much invincible, unless new powerful opponent are added to the game + enemy clan to face with their own fleet
-Galactic new can help determine where a war is starting or stopping plus some trading info, will also contain the possible location of wanted criminals if you want to hunt them down, but unless you are interesting in trading or bounty hunting? Pretty much useless as it is now
-The firewall is present on ALL you devices not only on the grapples, and is meant to reduce the chance a cyber attack will manage to disable the protected device. Engineers class have abilities that are permitting them to disable opponent ships, some NPC have similar skills, right now however the chance of it happening to the player ship is quite low, will probably remain so until a patch improve AI behaviour
-Shields are unable to stop 100% of possible incoming damage, some NPC have the same ability the player have and their railgun may be able to bypass your shielding, plus if your shield collapse or when ship collision will be enabled by the authors, subsystem hitpoints will become a relevant factor in ship combat, probably the expansion will also add devices that can damage enemy subsystem or improve bombers and make them capable of bypassing your shields
-Trading can give you more money if done for extended periods of time, plus trading can improve relationships both with the faction you buy goods from as the one you sell them, while mining may improve relations only with the faction you are selling to
-Ship assault is still a significantly unbalanced factor in this game yes, we still don't know how the authors have intention to fix this yet. Even the first game has this very same problem, maybe adding a self destruct device to certain NPC ships will slow the player down, but it will be insufficient solution in the long run, other solutions are still in evaluation and the authors are open to suggestions
-Personally i think the limitations of ships size being determined by your unofficial rank is a little stupid, and it should influence the level of the mission you may get and both the quantity and the quality of good you are offered, both for military and trade equipments. I say unofficial because your character is not member of any official military as far as i know, so unless we count the movement he get dragged in from the beginning of the campaign, the player rank make little sense, perhaps replacing the name with "mercenary" ranks name would have made more sense
-As above
Till next patch or expansion/DLC? Nothing but exploring and senseless fighting
