Infinite Space Playthroughs: The Lone Wolf Challenge

Infinite Space Playthroughs: The Lone Wolf Challenge

Having set a new personal best for the highest score in Infinite Space III: Sea Of Stars, I decided to embark on another challenge: Is it really possible to fully complete the game, quest and all, without ever adding any capital ships to your fleet? The answer is, surprisingly, yes, and for this reason, I call this the Lone Wolf Challenge. There are a few caveats to this, though. For this to occur, you must overwrite every star system where you can add a capital ship to your fleet, thus removing both the systems and the ships from the map, and this is only possible with the use of a Limited Vacuum Collapser; in fact, you may need two such detonations to accomplish this if the systems containing the capital ships are too far apart to remove with just one blast, which also explains why, on many occasions, it's actually impossible to pull this off.

However, on this particular playthrough, I got lucky. Occasionally, only two capital ship allies will spawn on the map instead of the usual three, and this time, those allies spawned on systems that were close enough to each other, to the point that a single vacuum collapse would purge them from the map, unless I hired them first. Instead, as soon as I pinpointed the location of one of them, I decided to annihilate them both. Normally, this would be a bad idea, especially since I hadn't traded in my starting capital ship for something larger (and in fact, never did), but by then, I had upgraded said ship to the point where it was, for all practical purposes, a fleet unto itself.

This is the state of the map after the vacuum collapse. There were originally two star systems to the left of Karn, the Zorg home system - one was green and the other bluish-white. These were where the only two capital ship allies (one Terran, the other Garthan) could be found) on this particular map; however, I overwrote both star systems with a single vacuum collapse, without adding either capital ship to my flotilla, and in doing so, prevented myself from acquiring any allied capital ships for the rest of this playthrough.

With both allies gone from the map before I could even hire them, I only had a Terran corvette and two fighters (one each from the Zorg and Muktians) in my fleet. Given that the former was now the only capital ship in my fleet, this made upgrading it even more of a priority. To that end, I retrofitted it with a Nova Cannon (which I created from a Timeless Bauble), Tachyon Ray Gun, Temporal Flux Shield, Multibot Repair Drone, Quantum Corkscrew Thruster, Ion Flux Warp Drive, Hyperwave Filter Array, Plasma Coil Cloaker, and Sardion Optimizer (the last two of which I purchased from the Urluquai at 5 coins each).

The sole capital ship in my fleet during this playthrough after being fully upgraded.

Such was the effectiveness of the equipment I had installed that my lone capital ship was capable of taking on a Yellow Kawangi Dreadnought - and winning, as long as it was micromanaged correctly. Granted, any ship with a similar equipment setup (as long as it had a Nova Cannon and Plasma Coil Cloaker) could pull off this feat), but the fact that I was using my starting ship for such a task, and without even the slightest theoretical possibility of summoning any other capital ships from my own fleet, made it even sweeter.

Taking out a Kawangi Dreadnought with any ship smaller than a frigate is a remarkable achievement, especially when you don't have any reinforcements at all to deploy if you come under fire.

In fact, I was able to complete the Yellow Kawangi quest four times during this playthrough. This was made possible by the fact that the Limited Vacuum Collapser (which I used to overwrite the Terran and Garthan capital ship allies later on) was placed very close to the first star system that the Kawangi would visit at the start of the quest. And since the bug that allows Kawangi dreadnoughts to spawn on the map after the first one has been destroyed remains unpatched, I decided to exploit it as often as I could before reaching the time limit. By the end of the game, I had destroyed four Kawangi dreadnoughts, each on a separate occasion before any of them had managed to leave (and immediately destroy) the first system they visited.

The debriefing screen showed what was an extremely small fleet on paper, but one that turned out to be much more powerful than its basic composition suggested. In fact, with the right equipment choices, your starting ship can be effective enough to fully complete the game (on any difficulty) - and this particular playthrough was no exception.

In short, the Lone Wolf challenge in Sea of Stars is, in fact, theoretically possible to complete, but only under an extremely rare set of circumstances. However, that's exactly what happened this time around, and with the loadout my lone capital ship was using, I could still have fully completed the game even if the NPC fleet strength had been set to a higher level. Even so, it is generally inadvisable to attempt to complete a game with only one capital ship in your entire fleet, especially on higher difficulties.