Ask Lemmy

A bunch already here that I like for different reasons but I think my favorite is what they did in the game The Sword of the Stars. Sadly a case of a game with great ideas but only so-so-execution.

My memory on the mechanics might be wrong as I haven't played it for years but basically as a strategy game the fun twist is that every species has a fundamentally different approach to FTL.

You have a Lizard species with basically Star Trek warp drive with fixed speed above light speed from any point to point of their choosing.

Then you have humans that stumbled across naturally occurring interconnect lines between many stars and can travel faster along those routes by comparison to warp drive but have to travel below light speed off of those lines.

Then an aquatic species that doesn't do FTL in the normal sense. They developed teleportation but is it only for short distance. However they are able to get the power requirements down very low and rapidly repeat the process and so they flicker across space and the distance of each step gets longer the farther they are from a gravity well so they travel faster around the outside of something like a galactic cluster than in the middle of it. Reversing the normal pattern of where things get colonized.

And last was an insect species that developed ship size star gates but travels sub light to anywhere new but as long as they bring a gate ship travel is basically instant after that.

And the bonus layer is that since the game has direct ship to ship combat also in the mechanics the difference drive types have trade offs as well like the insects having extremely good combat drives since they don't have ANY FTL systems on their combat ships so it all goes to direction propulsion.

So far it is the only Sci-fi setting I can think of that has so many different ones overlapping not just something like a newer system replacing an older one.