Okay, so I spent my Saturday night, last night, playing Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator with some people I've never met before. It an event I saw on one of my Facebook groups that some people were playing it in a neighbouring suburb so I decided to go along.
I hadn't played before but most of the others had. So they told me start out as Science and just scan shit while observing how the game works. Science was a rather easy job. Just check the long range scanners; look at unidentified stuff. Target and press scan. Wait for scanning to resolve and identify the ships. Scan again to gain shield frequencies if you're going into battle. If you don't have six people you could probably have Communications and Science run by one person (players can select multiple positions and you just press the tab at the top to swap between the screens). Science also finds what heading the ship needs to be in to get to any specific place, can see how far away any object is so helm knows when to slow down during warp, and identifies hazards such as mine/asteroid fields or nebula clouds so that helm can steer around them. In later games I played helm and weapons.
It felt more like a teamwork simulator than anything else. Lots of communicating information is required to all work together and I was quickly one of the team. I never got to play engineering but they looked to have the hardest job and have the most potential to fuck everything up or win the crew the game. They work pretty blind to everything else so need to be kept in the loop. Most of the game happens outside of the computer program, itself.
It was very easy to install (drag and drop). I'll buy a copy should I ever host a night, myself. Definitely worth checking out if you get the chance.
(Edit: as a side note, I haven't had a LAN in years. These people I met were as geeky as I remember I used to be [like, really stereotypically, neckbeardingly geeky - bad fashion sense and all]. Really eye opening how much one changes.)
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