Way back in the day there were two games, Lightspeed and the followup Hyperspeed. You can find them online if you look hard enough, and still run them in an emulator. They were So. Frigging. Fun.
The story is, humanity messed up Earth, so we need to colonize somewhere else. All of humanity is loaded on these ark ships, but you, the game player, are the advance team. Your job, upon arriving in a star sector, is to explore, find a suitable planet for the ark ship, and make the sector safe for humanity. The sector has existing politics that you'll have to figure out. Make alliances with some species, commit war on others. Find resources like water and metals, trade them with friendly species for the ones you need.
It's hard to put my finger on why exactly this game was so fun and engrossing. It might be because of how well it integrated half a dozen "mini games" into the larger one. As you're exploring the sector, all you get is a star map with distances. Run out of fuel? Sucks for you! So there's a mini-game of "optimal route planning". There's a mini-game of market trading, over time you can find arbitrage opportunities in how much different species value different resources. There's a mini-game of "flight sim dogfight" for when you need to use the big stick. &c. Also, plot, plot, plot, plot. None of it would work without someone creative sitting down and drawing out the epic tale of "what's going on" politically inside each star cluster.
Way back in the day there were two games, Lightspeed and the followup Hyperspeed. You can find them online if you look hard enough, and still run them in an emulator. They were So. Frigging. Fun.
The story is, humanity messed up Earth, so we need to colonize somewhere else. All of humanity is loaded on these ark ships, but you, the game player, are the advance team. Your job, upon arriving in a star sector, is to explore, find a suitable planet for the ark ship, and make the sector safe for humanity. The sector has existing politics that you'll have to figure out. Make alliances with some species, commit war on others. Find resources like water and metals, trade them with friendly species for the ones you need.
It's hard to put my finger on why exactly this game was so fun and engrossing. It might be because of how well it integrated half a dozen "mini games" into the larger one. As you're exploring the sector, all you get is a star map with distances. Run out of fuel? Sucks for you! So there's a mini-game of "optimal route planning". There's a mini-game of market trading, over time you can find arbitrage opportunities in how much different species value different resources. There's a mini-game of "flight sim dogfight" for when you need to use the big stick. &c. Also, plot, plot, plot, plot. None of it would work without someone creative sitting down and drawing out the epic tale of "what's going on" politically inside each star cluster.
I want another game like that.