been lurking, decided to register ;)

[NotQuiteANewbie]

And Stars of the Dark Well? What do you remember about it?

Very little actually.

It was a space mining/trading/research/shipbuilding game.

The political climate of the game seemed to be dominated by a handful of mega-alliances that basically controlled about everything.

I agreed to join the Nexus Research (NX) faction as they seemed the least warlike, although there was some sort of border skirmish going on with another faction at the time I joined the game. As part of the deal they were going to provide me with a better ship; however I would have had to spend several turns traveling to one of their main shipyards to take control of it.

The general idea was I would stay away from the front and just start hauling resources around to free up more experienced players with more forces so they could go to the conflict zone.

I gave up playing before I ever even got to the shipyard. Just did not seem to click with me, and being essentially "forced" to join a faction so soon, before I had a chance to find my footing, left a bad taste in my mouth.

Yeah sure I could have stayed unaligned and been considered "pirate vermin" by all the alliances. That was not really much of a choice at all though.

The universe seemed too full of big powers, without enough places that newbies could have gone off to do their own thing.