Soldak's Space Based ARPG: Drox Operative

They are a self-published title by a developer who's previous Steam title performed poorly (You also only have the Dev's word that Steam is the problem).

But honestly I don't see why they'd bother going out of their way for this. Games like this are the reason Greenlight exists, I mean it looks like a good game and I'll vote for it but why bother making that system if you aren't going to stand by it.

I went ahead and voted. I thought the Quick Look of this game made it look like a lot of fun.

Version 1.002 is out: patches and changes. This patch adds new manually aimed ballistic weapons, makes it easier to deal with completed quests, balances a lot of things better, and fixes a bunch of minor issues.

Version 1.004 is out: patches and changes. Since the last official patch, the patch adds new remote detonated mine weapons, adds gambling to human planets, fixes some multiplayer bugs, adds a way to ignore individual races, and fixes a bunch of minor issues.

Folks please vote for this on Greenlight. It deserves to be on Steam.

So I'm trying out the demo and being completely overwhelmed. Any tips to get started? I feel like there are way too many stats to deal with all at once, then race relations, etc. Plus, wasd controls get me stuck in some planet gravity wells for some reason, whereas mouse movement escapes fine.

For some reason this is not linked to at the Drox site (just in their forums), but this should have everything you need.

Drox Operative Help

Important: pay attention to his recommendations on how to fly around and how to attack. I'd been doing both in ways he does not recommend, and changing to his suggested methods for both helped a lot.

In terms of being overwhelmed, look under 'strategies'; his first section there is about simply how to survive. Even better is the section titled "Drox Operative just seems too complicated" on different ways of playing. I followed the advice there:

Hope that helps.

It's been a while since I've played and was wondering if there is a way to manually aim weapons like mass accelerators? As I've had cases where I can't even hit a ship just floating there with them.

A bunch of weapons, especially the ballistics, are skillshots now. I haven't used them much but you'll have to aim the cursor where you want the bullet to go and adjust for moving targets.

There are now 2 kinds of ballistic weapons: the old version that auto aims and tries a bit to guess where it needs to fire to hit a moving object and the new version that fires at the cursor so you are doing all of the aiming.

Version 1.006 is out: patches and changes. Since the last official patch, the patch is mostly needed balance changes, but also fixes a few minor issues.

Version 1.007 is out: patches and changes. This patch makes it easier to find friendly planets, polishes the UI in many little ways, balances things better, and fixes a lot of little things.

Is there a way to make the minimap more useful? Can it be resized or filtered? Right now it's only useful at letting me know the general direction of a warpgate.

You can increase your radar stat to increase the range of the blips, but other than that not really.

Version 1.009 is out: patches and changes. Since the last official patch, the patch gives Fringe planets the ability to reduce the power load of player components, gives repair discounts at Dryad planets, makes Zombies spread better, and fixes a lot of little things.

Spread now include hazelnuts. Zombtrella. Mmmmm

Been getting back into this and I have one suggestion that has been bugging me. If you could sort quests both on your quest screen and on each race's screen by what star system they appear in, that would make things a lot easier to grab or check on all the quests in an area without having to look through the entire list.

One question if anyone knows the answer: Do the different types of damage mean something other than for flavor text against enemies or defense for you? As in, if I have two weapons, one that does 30 kinetic damage and another that does 25 thermal, is there a reason to use the latter on an enemy as opposed to the former?

There's two ways it matters. First, different defenses are strong or weak against different elements - shields are good against kinetic but weak against radiation and EM, as I recall. On your character sheet, hover the mouse over the shield / armor / structure stat to see a tooltip that explains it. Second, boss enemies sometimes have bonus resistances, potentially making them much tougher if you're using the wrong element. A boss with Major Thermal Resistance takes a lot longer to melt with a thermal weapon, although the chance of meeting a boss with the exact resistance that nerfs you is pretty low.

Version 1.010 is out: patches and changes. Since the last official patch, the patch makes radar more useful, adds a way to pay money for Brunt vendors to stock new components, makes the Hive carry more quest goods, and fixes a bunch of smaller things.

Love it, totally need to get back into this.