Category: 4X Space

The free, nearly decade long,  beta of Ultracorps continues with a new mega game: Valerian.  This is a great MMO 4X Space MOO style game built circa 1997 and played, with a brief hiatus as it switched from the original developer to Steve Jackson games, ever since.  This game introduced me to tick based games where the players submit their turns and at a specific point during the day or week, the computer calculates all the results and a new turn begins.  Given the fact that a 12 hour LAN can only get through 30 or so turns of multiplayer CIV, and maybe over a weekend you’d be able to get through a game of HOMM3 with only a couple players, tick-based is really  the only way to play heavy strategy games multiplayer if you have anything to do in real life.  Give it a whirl and please don’t attack LORD GUNT!

Link

This is not a review and I’m playing just the beta (though it’s quite polished). I haven’t finished the game yet because it’s thankfully a challenge!  Hence, this is just a list of five good things and five bad things.  My benchmarks for any space 4x are: Master of Orion and Ultracorps.  For general 4X it’s Dominions 3 and Empire Total War.  That said, I think this little indy game from an English dude is the most important game in 4X space strategy that we have seen since Master of Orion 3 marred the genre.

Things I like:

• Beautiful and extremely easy to use interface: it is just flat out awesomeness incarnate. Dragging stuff, sliders, the works.
• Turn button works very fast and is almost always always accessible: when I get sick of mucking around with stuff, I can just click and it’s next turn from almost anywhere
• Sliders all over the place:  this is what 4X space games are all about.  If you don’t have sliders just go home and let the space piss cascade on you.
• Combine fleets interface: manual drag and drop and an auto combine to bring units up to full strength from smaller units
• Retreating: now you have an option in battle.  Though this hoses any possibility of playable multiplayer for Gratuitous Space Battles, it’s growing on me for single player.

Things I don’t like

• Random fleet attacks from random races: the user-created enemy fleets idea is cool and all, but it’s really not a replacement for having enemy empires
• No random map
• Unlocks from the battle game only: there’s no way to get unlocks from playing the campaign. With the campaign, I no longer care to ever play the battle game again, as the battle game is wholly complete within the campaign version
• No campaign enemy races, empires, technology, no diplomacy: fleets just show up at your door and can be any race
• Movement is one planet to the next: each move takes one turn, this isn’t the worst, I just don’t like it being this simple
• You can’t auto-resolve battles until you’ve set up your fleet and started the battle.

It’s 7$ to buy the beta and if you already have GSB– this is a no brainer.  Full review once I win.

Purchasable in quotes is because when you try to play, you get a required space to put a registration number– a number that’s not provided to you when you buy the game. I’m sure this will get fixed eventually, but I would wait until release to pick it up if you’re planning on it.

NOTE; steam users– you have to dig down into your steam folder to install the beta files. It should currently reside in VALVE/STEAM/STEAMAPPS/Gratuitous Space Battles/ Remember to CUT the last part of the path string the default setting gives you as it will try to create a new /Gratuitous Space Battles/ folder within your current Gratuitous Space Battles/ folder if you don’t.

Trailer is up for GSB: Galactic Conquest.  I’m trying to weigh my expectations (which are high and are all based around waiting for SOMEONE to make a good Master of Orion + Dominions 3 game) and the reality that while this may not be that game, it will still be damn fun and not a cascade of space piss into our open mouths like MOO3 was.  Here is a link to the trailer:

Gratuitous Space Battles: Galactic Conquest

Gratuitous Space Battles is game where you select a race, edit 2-d ship templates by placing some icons of equipment into blank boxes, drag a fleet based on scenario limitations to a 2-d map. After deployment is over you press play and sit and watch explosions, listen to various noises and then get a score if your fleet wins. You can’t control the ships themselves like Rome Total War or Warcraft 3: you just watch.  If you watch your fleet win you get some points to spend on unlocks (new ship hulls, equipment and races).

GSB does all these things very well, but without a campaign wrapper I found myself setting up the battle, tweaking ships a bit and then walking away to go do something else while it ran through the explosions.   That said, the explosions and sounds are fantastic and it’s really fun to watch, the ship designs are gorgeous huge 2-d sprites, but it gets sort of old and you just want the results after awhile.

My main tactic that worked pretty much all the time was to take rockets and put my ships all squeezed as tightly as possible into one corner of the map, so that the enemy fleet (usually spread out across the board) had to attack my huge lump of ships piecemeal and be thus destroyed piecemeal.   Since my fleet mass cannot be flanked (the space map has a ‘corner’) this worked really well and I won almost all the scenarios on normal on the first go without tweaking or even buying much new equipment other than better rockets.

If you’ve ever played Dominions 3, Evernight or Ultracorps, you can see very clearly that this battle method would work perfectly as a component to a multi-player friendly 4X strategy game: you set up your armies/fleets, you give them orders, then you complete your turn and at a certain time each day (or when all the players turns are complete) the turn ‘ticks’ and all battles are resolved. Since the players have no in battle interaction, you aren’t waiting around for players to fight out their battles making the entire multi-player experience far to long to actually complete a game ever (ala MOO2).  Unfortunately, from what I’ve seen of the strategic portion in development for GSB, you will have one choice during battles (rather than none or setting orders for your fleet BEFORE the battle) and that is to retreat.   While not a design flaw for a single player 4X game, this is a fundamental flaw if the developers of GSB want to move into the multiplayer realm with this game– it will have the same issues as MOO2– the game takes too long (and by too long I mean MONTHS too long) because players have to fight out their battles by hand rather than just watching (if they choose too) after a turn ticks.

Where Dwarf Fortress has tons of stuff to do and explore, but is so incomplete, graphically challenged, poorly documented and with a monumentally bad user interface (even for a Nethack style game), Gratuitous Space Battles has a fantastic interface, looks just stunningly beautiful and is really well documented– however, there’s just not very much to do in the game but wait around for some sort of campaign mode to be completed.  That said, I do like the game and bought it immediately when the strategic portion was announced.  If you’re thinking of picking this up, I would wait until they implement the 4X campaign.

As we age and degrade due to O3 toxicity, birthdays become less about seemingly random fornication and crop sickness and wrestling and more about exceedingly nerdy pursuits.    Mine for this year is a 6+ hour long game of Twilight Imperium + Expansion hosted by a buddy.  I’ve railed on this game’s 3rd edition for years now because the basic set with the basic set of rules is basically a broken game that has little to do with the movement of your pieces on the map board, and other than the pieces, is altogether worse than 2nd edition.  However, with the expansion, Fantasy Flight has purportedly fixed the terrible issues and I’m using my birthday gaming day to test out once and for all whether it’s a keeper.

That said, I’m completely willing to keep games that are played once every year or two– some are MONSTERS and really only need to be pulled out that often to deserve a place on the shelf.  I obviously would never part with my copy of Republic of Rome, though I’ve only gotten 2 plays with my set.  With the base set of TI3, my local play group essentially asked for it never to be pulled out again after a couple plays and that means it gets shot up to ebay. We’ll see if it’s worth it with the expansion this weekend.  Expect an AAR!