I recently got into a new space game called Avorion. It's much like Space Engineers, where you can use a voxel grid to build almost any shape. Where Space Engineers failed to implement trade mechanics, complex AI, or meaningful space systems (such as a galaxy), Avorion has all of these things. Avorion is stricly 3rd person, viewing space from outside your ship, and from two other map views, while Space Engineers is almost strictly 1st or 3rd person, viewing from your astronaut's perspective. While both are still being actively developed, regardless of which direction Avorion goes at this point, it will likely be better in scope and value. The game uses LUA scripts that can be edited to manage most of the user interface and outer mechanics, so the game can be modded as much as (perhaps more than) Space Engineers. Personally, I'd like to see some design changes with how ship size scales - both with how the ship reacts phyiscally in space and how the building tools work to assist the player with making various shapes, how crews are hired, how turrets scale and are sorted, how mining and building resources work, how time is used for hyperspace (and how hyperspace is designed in general), and how trade is balanced. If the developers somehow made the turrets more independent of the player, or at least the player was focused more on flying the ship instead of using it as a blunt weapon, the game would make the drastic jump from old-style space-sim to something deeper about the human experience in space. It sounds like a stretch, but trust me, right now you outfit a big phallic analog with lots of guns and you go head-first into enemies. Avorion could easily be quite thought-provoking and fuel your imagination even more than it already does. I guess that's my way of saying that I'm happy with my purchase.
Now, without further ado, here are some of my ships so far.
