Haven’t played in a while but the better friendly fire mod was essential for me.

Actually nothing this time. I got back into Elite Dangerous hard and play it pretty much every minute of my gaming time currently.

I play on a smaller galaxy size and have a beefy computer.

It’s a mix of strategy and role-playing. Sure if you want to survive on higher difficulties, you probably need a build that is meta. But on medium difficulties or lower you can pretty much roleplay your empire as you like and there’s many mechanics in the game that help with this. Your empire can be a democratic haven for all, a mega corporation, a machine hivemind forcefully assimilating organics into its network…and much more.

There’s also a great exploration aspect of the game. Your exploration vessels regularly find anomalies that tell a neat little story and provide bonuses to your empire (which can range from a small resource bonus to making one of your leaders immortal).

Of course, there’s also the power fantasy. You start with just one planet, but you will quickly expand throughout the galaxy. You can then wage war against other empires, build a federation together with them or convince the galactic community to crown you as Emperor of the entire galaxy. But the game also regularly throws adversaries at you if the AI empires are starting to become no match for you, may it be one of the space fauna suddenly becoming extremely hostile or a Great Khan uniting a marauder horde and demanding everyone to become their vassal.

It is also rare that a bad outcome leads to a straight loss. Losing a war (usually) does not doom your empire but you only lose a bit of territory or get vassalized, both giving you ample opportunities to build up your strength again or make allies to stand together against an enemy.

Stellaris. I’m almost at 1400 hours in the game and while I now play it a lot less often than in the first 1000 hours, I still get the itch to play it again a few times a year.

Exactly, the moment things cost real money in the game, the design of the game changes to increase likelihood of spending. Guild Wars 2 e.g. sells increased inventory space…and it fills your inventory with so many crap items that you’ll constantly be managing your inventory without the extra space.

Need for Speed Porsche to be honest. The campaign of going through the Porsche eras is iconic. Buying new cars and tuning them up is really fun and you really feel the difference between the cars.

The original developers worked on the previous expansion.

Core Keeper comes out of Early Access soon I think and should be up your alley

I pretty much stopped watching videos like that. “$Game story EXPLAINED” but actually it’s just a 30 minute rehash of the story without anything added to it or explained by the content “creator”.

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No thanks.

I wonder which license they are going to use. Is it gonna be just an open source one or full-on FOSS?

This saddens me. The comments of the animes I watched usually had some interesting trivia or background information that I had missed.

If they didn’t in all that time, it’s probably because they don’t want to keep their account.

That’s an assumption that leads to corporate bullshit like this.

At its core it is a sandbox war economy simulator in space with some bad (optional) story tacked onto it. It offers some tutorials but most things will be learning-by-doing. The battles are quite fun and you can participate with whatever ship you like, from fighters, frigates or corvettes all the way up to destroyers and carriers. Building your own stations to fill the deliberate shortages of the NPC economies is very satisfying and the station designer is easy to use. The universe is somewhat dynamic with warring factions being able to take over territory of other factions and the Xenon faction posing a threat to everyone although these changes are slow so you won’t be rushed into defending yourself (except if you setup shop near enemy territory).

I’m really looking forward to experiencing the events of the older games in the new engine! (Though from what I understood it’s not the whole stories but just a few key scenarios).