Cosmoteer

I picked up Cosmoteer at a Steam sale for 16 bucks. It is one of these indie games that managed to get an "overwhelmingly positive" user rating on Steam, which is usually a sign of a game worth looking at. In this game you fly a spaceship around the galaxy, take on quests, and fight space pirates. But behind that exterior hides a rather clever management game about space ship construction. You start with a very small ship with very limited equipment, and over the course of game you gather the fame and resources needed to make your ship bigger and bigger. And that is a lot more complicated than you might think. If for example you add another laser to the front of your spaceship, you also need more command points, more crew, and more energy. So a simple change to the front of your spaceship might require some additional work in the middle. And then of course your spaceship has gotten bigger and heavier, requiring more thrusters to move it around. Which then require more crew and energy. It all builds up to a rather nice optimization puzzle, with lots of different viable builds and strategies.

The core game loop revolves around the most limited resource: Crew. How much crew you can hire doesn't only depend on how many bunks you built, but is also limited by your fame. But quests and enemies of a given level have a fame cap, beyond which they don't add to your fame anymore. Thus in order to progress further, you need to seek out higher level quests and enemies. With one star system usually having a range of 3 levels, after a time you need to hyperjump into the next star system in the galaxy. While the types of available quests are limited, at higher levels you'll meet higher level enemy spaceships, which might have builds that your current spaceship is weak against. Forgot about missile defense? You might be in for a surprise when you meet the first enemy with nuclear missiles. And sometimes you have a build that works, but you got bored with it, and absolutely want to try out a fancier gun instead. How about a railgun? You'll just need to redesign your ship completely for that. Thus Cosmoteer has a good amount of hours of fun.

What Cosmoteer also has is over two thousand entries in the Steam Workshop, most of them ships. Arguably the Steam Workshop isn't well equipped for players to exchange ship designs in the thousands, as it is extremely hard to find a ship that you like and that also fits your current progress in the game. But there are other sources, like a Discord, to exchange designs between players. And there is even the possibility to import PNG image files into the game.

While there is enough of a game in Cosmoteer to justify the purchase price, ultimately it works better as a toy: Playing around with different designs and seeing what works is a lot of fun, even if it isn't the most efficient way to beat the game.