As a matter of fact, Space Rangers 2 has me hooked. Just found it last week. I beat Keller (the leader of the Kellerite Dominators of course) yesterday. I jumped into a Dominator-held system to find Keller, alone, being attacked by a swarm of Blazeroid Dominators who had him badly damaged. He jumped into his created wormhole, where I followed and defeated him. Sure was nice of those other Dominators to soften him up for me; handy that the 3 enemies fight amongst themselves.
It's cool that the galaxy starts nearly halfway controlled by the enemy and different systems are won and lost from the two major sides battling, and it's entirely unscripted. Whether you join in or not, people in other systems will be fighting and dying.
There are about 50 Rangers in the galaxy which are ranked from most experienced to least experienced; some focus on fighting the enemy Dominators, some stick mostly to being merchants, some rely heavily on banditry of transport ships. Whenever one dies, a new ranger is created at the bottom of the list with no experience.
A couple of days ago I jumped into a system which Rangers and military ships were fighting to free it from the Dominators, just in time to see the #2 and #6 ranked Rangers get destroyed.
The (optional) ground RTS battles are amusing to do a few times, but as RTS games go, it's kinda lame. The enemies always start with advantageous positions and much more resources (good, a challenge, right?) but the AI is pretty stupid here. It will repeatedly waste large streams of it's units on a heavily defended spot (for over 30 minutes straight sometimes), even when it can't even destroy a single unit of yours, all the while another opponent is taking over it's territory and even attacking it's base. Ah well.
Oh, when you start off, expect to be paying off pirates for a while until you can get better weapons and defences or a better engine to outrun them. At the start, they can easily whip your scrawny butt. Also, consider asking friendly ships to help you out when you're being attacked. They'll often assist you. It's kinda funny seeing a swarm of weakly armed transport ships successfully taking on a well-armed pirate.
The whole unscripted thing is what I like most about the game.
