The main draw of these games for me is in exploring a huge seamless sandbox, where not everything is mapped out. You can read developer notes on the various gameplay tweaks and additions here. I believe the flight model is fundamentally unchanged, and the AI is nothing special, but I think they've tried to make the economy feel a bit less robotic, among several other changes. The biggest change I've noticed is that the world feels larger, especially planets It seems the warp drives have been buffed to account for this. Has anyone else checked this game out? If so, what kind of experience have you had so I used a HOTAS for Mercenary but I've been too lazy to hook that up yet, so it's been K+M which has so far worked pretty Legacy feels like an upgraded Mercenary, so if you weren't overly keen on Mercenary then I doubt this would win you over. I'm also curious about what the multiplayer offers, since I never did any of that in Mercenary.

My income is from mining diamonds/platinum in the south-eastern nebula and selling at the nearest port, but I'm interested in exploring more lucrative trade routes.

I've mainly been building up money by mining/selling at the starting system (Pearl), but it's been interesting poking around the spaceport menus, tweaking my frame (currently maxed cargo space for mining) and seeing what kind of ships and equipment I can expect to upgrade to in future. Anyway, I heard some good things about Legacy, and am similarly enjoying it so far. I was also impressed by the post-release support that game had, which included walker-mechs.

Being able to explore the surface of any planet was very cool. There was a high level of customisability with the ships, and I liked the dev's belief that planets etc shouldn't be just wallpaper in a space sim. I played Evochron Mercenary after seeing it featured on GB years ago, and was pleasantly surprised at how much content the game had, especially for a 1-man project.

Evochron legacy ships