Good evening, you are listening to Three Moves Ahead, and I'm your host, Rob Zakeney.

Join me today is our friend Fraser Brown. Fraser, welcome to the show. Hello. How's it going? It's going pretty well. It is a beautiful springtime in Boston, and as soon as this show is over, I'm probably going to be taking a stroll around the city and enjoy its salad days, as it were, before the heat of summer washes over us, and we all broiled it off.

It's unusually lovely in Scotland as well. I don't trust it, and I won't be leaving the flat for a week.

Good plan, always advisable. Bad things happen outside the house.

Today we're going to be talking about Star Drive 2 and what it gets right about ship design

and some thoughts it's provoked about endgame design in 4X games.

And Fraser, you and I both reviewed the game.

I reviewed it for IGN and you reviewed it for PC Gameson.

And we came to, I think, slightly different conclusions.

And I think I ended up liking the game just a little bit more.

So, Fraser, why don't you get us started and tell us a little bit about Star Drive 2,

how it differs from its predecessor, and what it's up to?

So the original kind of just popped up a couple years ago, a few years ago,

developed by one-man developer, Zero

Sum games. It was a real-time 4x game, and while that evokes images of Sins of Solar

Empire, it was quite different. But in the end, I think a lot of people really wanted

it to be Masters Orion, and that's actually

what Zero-Sum has kind of tried to craft in Star Drive 2.

It does in many ways play like a modern Mootoo, but it's not quite as good, and it has quite a few problems when it comes to diplomacy and AI.

But it's one of those 4x games that also does a lot of things just really phenomenally.

The overall package might not be impressive, but there are just some things in there that it's worth taking stock off.

I think mostly it's in warfare.

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