Dust Fleet

"Object reference is not set to an instance of an object" - the dev needs to fix this game...

No.

Combat is nearly identical to Homeworld 1/2, but much less refined. The (turn based) station building/galaxy view feels clunky and disrupts gameplay flow. Tbh this game just made me want to play Homeworld again.

ich empfinde es als angenehm und heraus fordernd ich habs es vor einem jahr schon über die familien bibliothek gedaddelt. konnte es mir beim sale leisten um es zu würdigen

Solid. Reminds me of Homeworld.

Pleasantly surprised by this little game. I think I've grown accustomed to 1 dev games lacking in polish, completeness, and struggling to tie together far too many features that are beyond a small teams ability. Dust Fleet manages to hit a sweep spot where there are just enough features and mechanics to be interesting, and they are polished just enough to be enjoyable and playable. Starting right with the tutorial, which I have to highlight as being one of the best. Fully voiced, big flashing buttons, and a small coherent little plot to follow, while giving you some freedom to play around after the hand holding. The campaign was more of the same, feeling more like an extended tutorial. The story wasn't anything stellar, but interesting enough to get through. It was mostly just a series of little missions, betweem which you build a space economy and fleet to take into the missions in a stress free turn based mode. I kinda liked that, but can see why some might find it boring. The ships and battles themselves were fairly decent. There's easy controls for area attacks, simple power distribution to defences and attack. There are individuel turrets which have different fields of fire, and combined with a frontal armor design means that there is some room to manuever and gain an advantage. Same with fighters and bombers, which can strip ship turrets, and there are capture ships to capture enemy ships and stations. All well implemented with simple controls. Most similar games don't offer this much, and pull this off in a coherent and intuitive package. There are issues though, quite a bunch, but most don't become too noticable until mid way through the campaign. Firstly, the AI is a bit braindead and does nothing but A move. Missions often have enemies come in waves from different directions so it hides this a bit, but still. When it comes to ships, one factions ships are all just strait up better than the other. It kinda makes researching your own ships a waste because not only is it faster and cheaper to research ships by capturing the enemy ones, but you need to do this anyways to get the best ships. Sadly most ships don't feel like they are worth building even if you have the research. There's actually no point in researching the MK2 gunship or whatever you start with, since it costs so much more, and requires a special upgraded station to build them. It felt like a wasted opportunity to not have a bunch of upgraded MK 1,2,3,4,etc ships and weapons that were just upgrades through research to fill up the barebones tech tree. The decision to instead upgrade ship stats through veterancy was imo a mistake. There's a very limited selection of weapons, and a limited selection of active use modules. The later is a poorly thought out system, because how are you supposed to make use of these very expensive, although powerful modules when I have 3 on each one of my 10 cruisers, then 1 on each of my 40 frigates? All while managing carrier strike craft, fleet manuevers, power distribution, etc etc. SOASE is a better example of how to do this right, by only allowing them on capital ships, and even then many are passive or have autocast. The 3D battle map was also IMO a mistake. Games like SOASE manage fleet battles just fine on a 2D map. The extra dimension, can be useful, but mostly it just gets in the way of having a good camera zoom, and slowing down and complicating ship move orders. The controls aren't bad, they were surprisingly simple and intuitive, but it all feels like a waste of opportunity cost of what could have been with a better 2D battle map. Finally performance. Initially it seemed fine, but battles with a large numbers of ships the framerate tanked bad. The true crime is that I was getting sub 20FPS, while my CPU and GPU utilisation sat at 20% and 10% respecively. This was the worst, through most of the game it ran okay enough. Despite all my complaints and nit picking, I had fun playing through. Worth getting on sale for 10$ to get a dozen hours out of it.

Given that this game has come from a single developer, for what it is, its great. Has some good ideas and I wish games like Sins of a Solar Empire and Homeworld 3 had done something like them as well. Its genuinely a fun game to play. Had a few game breaking bugs, but it autosaves frequently, so loss of time and effort is minimal. It is also a little short in campaign time, but the essential skirmish mode is great for replayability and the ai is honestly a bit tough lol, which i quite like :) . I am looking forward to more from this developer in adding content and balancing some ships, more bits to add to the ships would be nice .. armour and prop mods would be a want to have I would love to see what the future plans for this are