I tried out Don’t Starve for the iPad. Unfortunately, while it seems like a pretty good port, I think it really doesn’t work unless you know the PC version pretty well. Mainly because I had zero idea what most of the little icons on the inventory bar were, and the “examine” action just gave some flavor text that generally didn’t help me identify it. Presumably in the PC version you can get tooltip help when you hover over icons with names, so you can tell what’s a cooked berry and what’s a raw berry.
I do intend to get to the game, now that I’m back at my desktop I’ve taken up with Drox Operative again. I’m struggling with it. I really don’t like how the game continues to run while you’re docked at a planet and selling, because I’m often in the middle of trying to figure out what to keep and what to sell when the local space monster ships will take a run at me.
At first, I found I absolutely had to take a beam weapon since I could only afford 1 weapon slot, and there’s lots of stuff that moves so fast that only beam weapons (or beam weapons on fighters) will hit them. Currently I’m running a fighter bay (for those fast targets) and a high-DPS railgun, which fires really slow moving shots but isn’t reduced by range so it works well against slow and stationary targets.
I’ve gotten into a routine where I make all the races in my starting system like each other, so I can do missions for everyone without pissing the other race(s) off. Once I’ve got them up to 80+ relationship with me and each other I’m generally set, and it’s just a matter of time until I clear out anyone else.
This time it was Utopians and the Hive in the starting sector, and things were doing well enough until the Talons showed up. Each of “my” races had 15+ planets and the Talon only had 2, so I went off to their distant home system and tried to attack them, since they started off at war with “my” races right away.
That didn’t go to well. I didn’t get badly hurt, but they had 6-7 ships down there, and I couldn’t seem to make any progress. I couldn’t really concentrate on any one ship because they were moving in a pack, I’d damage one or two, run away a bit, and then come back and they’d be healthy again.
I did that for a while then decided it was time to resupply, and discovered that while I was flailing unsuccessfully at them, they’d wiped out the Hive and reduced the Utopians down to 1 planet. Apparently they’re much, much stronger than the other races, so the relatively economic strength of the Hive and Utopians didn’t matter.
I fended off the attacking fleet, and manage to nurture the Utopians back to 3 planets, but the Talon have 11 at this point and I just don’t see that I’ll ever manage to turn that tide. I’m hoping I can keep the Utopians alive long enough to score one of the non-conquest victories like Fear.
I tried a couple of area-effect weapons, but they were rather ineffective. The EMP shock weapon, for example, damages everything in range, but even if I spam it I don’t make much of a dent on a Talon fleet. Similarly the Shock Torpedo I have just doesn’t do enough damage. Mostly what works is concentrating railgun fire on a single Talon cruiser at a time, provided that I can isolate one so I can work on it.
