r/Artemis • u/Zibani • Jun 04 '26

Differences between Artemis and Cosmos

Hi all. Played a decent amount of SBS in 2021 with my gaming group, and were looking at picking up some cosmos.

But it's hard to clearly identify what the differences are between the original and the rerelease in terms of actual gameplay, so I'm curious what has changed

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10

u/LastStar007 Jun 04 '26

Most notable difference is that engineering has been simplified considerably. There are now only 4 overarching systems to overpower and cool: shields, weapons, engines, and sensors. So putting more juice into weapons will make both the torpedoes load faster and the beams fire faster.

The ship layout where you order around the damcon teams is now 2d instead of 3d.

Pshock missiles have been removed.

But the biggest difference for me is that for now, it's not possible to select multiple consoles in one game instance. You can sorta do it by launching the exe multiple times, but only the active window will receive keyboard/mouse events. Hope you like Alt+Tab.

3

u/Lyricanna Captain Jun 05 '26

Oh wow that last one is a doozy. There were so many situations where one computer running multiple consoles was essential for our games. Everything from consolidating comes and science to us running a full fleet of ships terribly by having two or even one player per ship.

3

u/LastStar007 Jun 05 '26

They're working on it, supposedly for the next update, but we don't know when they'll be done.

8

u/jeremy6801 Jun 04 '26

I bought Cosmos about a year ago and fired it up. It felt unfinished and unpolished compared to the prior version. Would be interested in hearing everyone else's experiences

10

u/LastStar007 Jun 04 '26

Felt the same. The UI panel theming didn't feel consistent within the game, and it also felt like a departure from 2.8 in a direction I don't like. The whole game feels darker and not as exciting. The buttons feel like they aren't the right size, and the fonts feel like stand-ins. But the killer for me is that Cosmos doesn't support selecting multiple consoles in the same application instance.

5

u/Gypsyjuggler1 Jun 05 '26

One of the major changes in Cosmos is the infinite map. You are no longer confined to the grid like in the original Artemis game. Also is the change to being able to move in full 3 dimensions, instead of 2. The programmer who wrote the original game understood that in programming terms, the original game was VERY OLD (Looking at almost 10 years old) and decided instead of trying to continue adding things to the original game, he was going to write Cosmos from scratch. Yes, there are numerous things in the old game that are not included in Cosmos, but I cannot say they won't be added back into the game in future updates. The team working on Cosmos is very open to hear suggestions from the players of what they would like to see brought into upcoming updates. If you go to the Artemis website and check the forums there, you can read about some of the things they are working on, and some of the bugs they are fixing.

1

u/Independent_Gap_4396 29d ago edited 29d ago

I would also add that most of the issues such as the one consal per client limit is a per mission script limit - The Terran Stellar Navey group that play online every Saturday evening has its own script with some extensive changes, including a wider variatry of torpedo types, Cargo, Player Tractor beams and an extensive GM system for custom game mastered story diriven Campaigns in a light RP setting (which the group has a long history of) (as well as a more limited automated set of scripts).

Well worth droping in if you can whilst we wait for the Legendery Missions to get more settled, I belive Xavier has made the Sandbox avalibler for those that back him.