Before I start and not sure if there’s a disclaimer on this site. The views expressed here are purely my own and don’t necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the owner of this site.

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted on this game, and given my glowing review from when I first started, it saddens me to give such a critical review. This has been prompted by growing discord with decisions made by the developer and his following blindly suggestions made by some members of it’s community, whose sole interest is to change game mechanics to suit their own agenda.

So let’s start with what has happened since I first started playing. I had settled into the role of trader and eventually ran for planetary leader of the one of 84 planets available as a choice. Won’t go much into the details of how you win an election, as this post is more a rant. There was a bug with starbases in the game, which allowed you to store unlimited amounts of items. Person and faction I was running against was using this exploit to in effect win the elections. Sad thing is, the developer took several months to fix the bug, and that was almost the end of CS for me, as I didn’t see any other viable career for me in the game.

Now, there was always some conflict in the game, and an opening appeared in the special operations branch of the faction. All hush hush at what was actually done, but I joined that group and was given several warships to complete tasks we were assigned to do. In peacetime, we’d track and kill targets that were a nuisance to the faction and in war time, we’d gather Intel and provide support for our militia. Our faction was primarily an economic based faction, but when war broke out that activity would cease and everyone was called to arms. Our tasks usually involved finding targets, knocking out shields or knocking ships out of docks for others to kill. Game mechanics were heavily in favor of the attacker, and at that time, if you were running a script to run an operation called scrubbing ions, you were pretty much guaranteed to get away. The developer eventually made a good change there and got rid of that, replacing with something more realistic based on the output of your ship, with trails from larger output ships lasting longer.

After a few wars, more changes were made among them a multi-faction feature. It was more a hindrance than a feature which allowed you to switch factions at will and attack under the flag of an alternate faction. That went on for some time and during that time, game was leaking players like a sieve with more leaving than joining. It was also becoming apparent that resources and items owned by players was piling up. This is just my opinion, but under the guise of game being hacked, the developer decided to wipe out everyones resources stored in their starbases. Unless you had already assembled your ores and resources into ship parts and had them stored in your dry dock or shipyard, all was lost. No ships are physical assets were lost, as the developer claimed that was backed up and that all the hacker managed to do was delete contents of the storage bases. How convenient!

Ships have always been expensive to make and buy in the game, given that you need to vote to acquire the points or donate real life money, severely unbalancing things for the casual gamer, or someone who can’t afford to donate. Several changes were made on how points were earned. One such change was to no longer give out points in the several games that were being run by the developer and to give them out just in the hub account which was linked to all the games being run. That effectively forced people to chose just one game, and pretty much killing off most of the less popular games. Now I had mentioned earlier some good changes were made regarding combat. Unfortunately it came at a price added to cost of ships. New devices were introduced called externals to make ships more expensive, but also easier to get away. Changes were also made to the game mechanics of beacons, the way a faction knows ships of other members are being attacked. Now operations outside of planetary systems only had beacons sent out to ships in the actual area of operation. And the already unfavorable advantage to attacker gets tipped even more in their favor.

Now back to the community and some player’s self serving interests in suggestions under the guise of game improvements. Eventually the multi-faction feature got removed. Well that’s what the developer says… It really just go renamed to ambassadorship, where you can be ambassador to another faction. Here lies the stupidity of the whole system. There is a limit on how many factions you can join as ambassador, but an entire faction can become ambassador in another faction. Now wait, being ambassador to a faction comes with features, I’d sooner call exploits. As ambassador to a faction, you’re granted free passage through that factions minefields. So you’re free to attack anyone you wish with full diplomatic immunity and should they follow you through any such minefield. Now even worst, and I won’t mention factions here. Minefields were present for over a year, without anyone bringing up that there may be a problem with size of fields built. A new war breaks out, and a faction that hasn’t yet used minefields decides they should look into them as a defensive option and once deployed, it now becomes an issue that minefields are over powered and for the good of the game!

It was a great game while it lasted, but it’s just not fun to play any longer! I’d suggest if you play one of the developer’s other dying games, specifically Interstellar War or Galactic Fleets, you Google “The Lacuna Expanse” and give that a shot. Unfortunately if Chosen Space is what you’re into, the recommended game will unlikely interest you.