Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jauntywundrkind 284 days ago
The environmental parameters reminds me a little of the old space 4x, Stars!.

Cute game. I break it out a couple times a year. There's been some great seed shop books (Watts's Freeze Frame Revolution, KSR's Aurora, Noumenon, Children of Time), and this is pretty different but has the spirit.

2 comments

I've often felt that an updated version of Stars! would be very well received. So many current 4x games are hyper-micro-management and Stars! had a perfect balance (IMHO) between management and overall strategy.
Planets[1] is still going and there's a maintained site with updated rules and quite a few people playing at planets.nu

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VGA_Planets

Alas, Planets.nu has no source code available. That's OK if you just want to play, but I really always wanted to make some changes, and to self-host (like you kinda could in the original vga planets)

The UI and server are relatively simple though, so it should be a fun exercise to vibe-code a clone based on phost and openplanets.

Actually, not needed apparently: https://github.com/stefanreuther/c2ng (there is even a web client at https://www.planetscentral.com/
Absolute banger of a game. About once every five years I get the urge to try and spin it up again.
If you haven't read Non-Stop by Brian Aldiss, I strongly recommend it.