Continued on with VRWorld II, the 2nd planet in my "savegame" system, with Mobysore bopping along in his spaceship. A lot of the frustrations and general 'meh'ness over the other levels faded away as I got more used to the controls in space mode and started interacting with other colonizations. The missions were pretty good to start with, but it seemed like there were patches where you would be rolling in money followed by 1/2 hr of scrounging for every skerrick. I had generally kept the peace and relied on the missions to set the tone of the game, but blindly clicking accept nearly got me into a war I didn't want.
Eventually one of my warlike neighbours had a go at me and took over some of the planets until they almost ringed my homeworld. It took me a while to figure out the usefulness of tier 1 & 2 colonies as well as the cheapness of home base rebuilds. The last point led to a wierd stalemate in the war where there doesn't seem to be any real consequence to dying apart from being returned to your homeworld, but if you're defending on your homeworld you effectively have infinite lives. It then comes down to whether you can stop them destroying your cities before you can kill them. I got frustrated though that I was caught in a loop of defending my home planet, rebuilding it (they need an instabuild button), fending off raiders on another planet, then back to defending the home planet again. Gone were the mildly interesting quests and the possibility of exploring, there didn't seem to be an end in sight.
Achievements finally came through for all the shooting I had done and once I had a better missile and laser beam the battles became more easy, which then left time to trade, which got more money, which helped build out my ship further. All of a sudden I could trounce through their bases and with them gone the game turned back to a more civil land grab.
Konked out at 3am with only another rank to go. I think that's the last stage, and it's certainly far longer than any pervious one. It has almost as much depth as Space Rangers II for a space trading type game, so it's looking like the place I'll spend most of my time. Might try the tide pool again though...
