I want to tell you about a game.

I want to tell you about a game.

Yes, you!

Its called Endless Sky. It is open source and free and available on steam. Here is its webpage: https://endless-sky.github.io/

What it is: economic space exploration and exploitation on the numbers of running a small commercial spaceship. This is the closest game I know of to anything like the Solar Wind & Sail series.

There's a plot, and it continues to evolve as the game continues to be built. There are maybe half a dozen factions within human space, and about as many alien species.

The economy just radically changed to extend the mid game. The mid game is my favorite part, so I am replaying.

What's the mid game?

Well ...
Early game: You've got a big ole' loan, you buy and sell crap, and try to make ends meet. If you're lucky, you can get ahead of your loan and buy a better ship.

Mid game: You've got a better ship. You can participate in a fight, haul a bunch of cargo and pax, and take over disabled ships. You can pursue the plot pretty easily. You have to be careful and avoid direct entaglements, as decent pirate fleets can overwhelm you.

Late game: You have a flagship and battle fleet, and are a match for anything out there. Money ceases to matter much, as your economic needs are met by boarding pirates and selling off their stuff.

How'd they change it?
Well ...
Let's say you are attacked (oh no!) by pirates. PIRATES. And you manage to disable them before they destroy you (hooray!). In this game, you can take possession of their ship and sell it off.

Used to be: You'd get full new value for the ship. If you were in a shuttle worth 500k and managed to defeat a bad-guy shuttle worth 500k, now you have a million. You can probably upgrade to a better ship immediately! You need to pay for the "death benefits", but you can minimize this by having better weapons for your crew.

How it is now: Depreciation of assets! Plus, anything you steal is automatically fully deprecated to just 25% of the base value. So now, you'd have to take possession of FOUR shuttles to get the same wealth, plus during all this time your ship has been depreciating in value!

This means getting to the first upgraded ship is much harder. There is now an economic reason to do things other than anti-piracy activities, as the jobs and buying and selling can still produce reasonable wealth.

I've played through this game a few times. I've got one save game with all the best stuff -- best ships, weapons, engines, more money than god. But, what I love the most is the struggle as the early game turns into the mid game. When I'm not sure if I am netting any wealth.

You should play it, and tell me about your progress.