Sword of the Stars II: Lords of Winter was released in October, 28 2011. After the first few minutes playing the game players started reporting, incredulous with what they were experiencing (or not experiencing), that the game was very unstable and incomplete. The (un)official word by release day was that (by mistake) the game had been released in beta state. That “bogus version” would eventually be replaced by the final product. However that build wasn’t final either (very far from it actually).

Two weeks after release I wrote a (somewhat lengthy) SotS2′ first impressions. I saw no point in publishing a review at that time because it was more than clear to everybody by then that the game was released unfinished. In public announcements, both the publisher and the developer have apologized for the game’s state at release time and committed to complete it.

Three months after release (more than the producers had announced they needed to put the game in a playable state), I’m writing Sword of the Stars II’s review. I read all the game’s latest documentation available (manual and beginners’ guide) and I played 3 games, for around 250 turns total. One game I played with the Sol Force faction, another with the Morrigi Confederation and finally one with the Liir-Zuul Alliance (the one I liked playing the most, by the way).

Exploring the Sword of the Stars 2′s Universe

I admit that I was never a big fan of the original SotS’ star map and its 3D navigation. Although it looks nice on the surface I find it quite hard to find a view that I like, so, I’m re-adjusting it constantly. Anyway, eventually you will get used to the starmap’s navigation mechanics. You can zoom in and out and rotate in every direction, but I miss the ability to intuitively grasp distances between star systems. And the UI doesn’t help you with this either since it doesn’t give you quick distance information, like parsecs, turns, whatever unit really, so that you know how far a star actually is.

On the other hand, SotS2 offers a very interesting way to move your ships around the stars. To send your ships to other star systems you must first create a fleet. To do that you must pick an admiral from the admiral pool (each one with its positive and negative traits). Then you need to select one or more ships to include in your fleet. Your fleet must always include at least one command ship, a special type of ship that is required to coordinate the other ships. After that you can start conducting missions.

Actually, almost everything you do in SotS2 is achieved through the missions concept. You assign a mission, the designated fleet moves to some place, does what it needs to do and then returns to base. Take into account that the mission ETA (the time it takes for the fleet to do what you order it to do) includes the time for the fleet to arrive at its destination, perform the required mission (survey, colonization, construction, patrol, strike, invade, etc) and then head back to base.

To explore star systems you assign a survey mission. Any type of fleet, with any type of ship is allowed to do this type of mission. To build structures you assign a construction mission. In this case you need to have at least one constructor-type ship to be able to conduct such a mission. Then you can issue colonization orders. For that you need to have at least one colonization transport in your fleet. These missions (survey, construction, colonization) are your basic non-military type of missions but then you have a series of military-act missions you can do, which include patrolling, striking or invading star systems. You can also perform an interdiction mission which will not directly attack a system but will attack anyone coming in or out of it.

I love SotS2′s mission mechanic. I like it because in my opinion it removes the barren feeling normally associated with the traditional way to create and move ships around in other games of this type. Moreover, and since you can’t have hosts of fleets, your ships and your decisions really do matter, and that, in my opinion, is a big plus for SotS2.

Expanding your empire across the galaxy

Another Sword of the Stars 2′s great feature is the stations concept. Stations are modular structures that you can evolve over time by purchasing additional modules that increase their efficiency. Some modules will lift empire limits, others will unlock new possibilities. Stations evolve through four stages, with the culminating stage being a very special, expensive and unique structure for each type. There are four basic types of stations: Civilian, Diplomatic, Naval and Science stations. Besides these four basic types of stations there are two additional specific ones, one for the Hivers faction (the Gate stations) and another for the Suul’ka Horde (Tribute stations). Then there is a lesser station type (to some degree) used for mining purposes.

You can use stations to expand your empire’s military and research levels but also to boost trade and diplomatic relations with other empires. Although it’s fun to build and develop your stations there’s still also some mystery about them since you don’t know, exactly, how much of an impact a particular station is having on your research, for instance. Research modules should increase the research bonus ok, but then you can’t see an accumulated bonus modifier. There’s some polishing work to do here, as I found the stations concept, more the information about them, a bit obscure.

Developing your empire… but… with so many doubts?…

The economical part of the game is probably the most confusing one of all the game’s weakest elements. I mean, what exactly is a planet’s “Economical rating” anyway (moreover it’s always the same value for all colonies)?! And the manual doesn’t help you either. What about the biosphere concept? How exactly does it work (again the manual fails you and there are no tool tips available to guide you). This is the sort of thing that makes you frustrated and wanting to stop playing the game because if we have so many doubts about the game how are we supposed to understand the full scope of our decisions?

For example, in the empire manager screen (above), where you make all your economical strategic decisions, there’s a slider called “Stimulus”. No tool tips are provided on how it works and again the manual (and the in-game encyclopedia) fail to help you again. So, it was only after I consulted the game’s forums that I could understand what the intention behind the stimulus slider was (I went to the game forums constantly to try to understand stuff I could not find anywhere else btw).

So, it seems that there’s a private (or civil sector) of some sort in SotS2′s mechanics. The idea is that if you help, the best word is stimulate really (like government spending), areas like mining, colonization and trade then the civil sector will act autonomously from you and will create their own trade ships, trade routes and mining bases, and even help the empire on the colonization efforts free of charge (no maintenance costs associated) at the cost of lack of control over those enterprises that is.

This civil sector seems to be a great feature but as so little information about the stimulus slider is available on how (or when) this can be used to help your economy you can’t help not to feel quickly frustrated again. For instance, there are a series of techs that you need to discover first before the stimulus slider can actually work. But nothing is said anywhere about what needs to be done, and the sliders are just there open for you to play with them. However you don’t have a clue on what you’re doing (or obtaining). There’s no feedback from the game (no feedback at all) so you actually don’t know if your investment in stimulus is producing any effect. This is a very severe game shortcoming.

SotS2′ tech tree is probably one of its stronger points however. There are many tech trees (or branches) to invest in, with plenty of techs to research. In some cases, before researching a new tech you must first undertake a feasibility study. This tech pre-assessment will tell you how likely a tech is to breakthrough. This is very interesting because this uncertainty on how many turns a tech will actually take to research (if it will breakthrough at all) adds another layer of uncertainty on top of the random tech tree. In summary, there’s enough content and depth in the tech trees to keep you entertained by researching and experimenting new techs.

The worst, or better said, most incomplete aspect of SotS2 is the diplomacy system. And SotS2 would not be a 4X game without it would it? Well, in fact there’s barely any information on the manual or in-game about how diplomacy actually works, yet and in a way this is quite consistent with what the game currently offers in this respect (or at least is perceived to offer), which is, very little.

The diplomacy functional skeleton is already there, you can see what races you have already contact with. You can negotiate treaties and request things from them however there is so little feedback on your diplomatic actions, and the bugs are so many that it’s utmost evident that the diplomacy system still needs to be finished before we can even say anything further about it. In summary, the game’s diplomacy system is not yet finished and is barely functional at this stage.

Spaceship design and construction

And now we reach one of my favorite parts of the game (that actually feels very complete): the ship design and invoicing system. If you want to prototype your own cruiser, dreadnought or leviathan class ship (or any other ship for that matter) SotS2 offers you a straightforward and satisfying way to do that. Like in the original SotS, ships are modular. There are three modules that need to be customized separately. There is an engine section, a ship-type class section and another module for other vessel special characteristics.

At first not all that you’re required to do (or know) is evident, which is a SotS2 general problem. But after you experience around with the various options provided to you, you start to get the hang of it. There are many weapons, weapon types and mounts to choose from. You can even compare one weapon against another in a nice graph instead of having to memorize damage numbers, or having to cycle through the various weapon one by one. There are also extra modules, mostly that you unlock through research that you can include also. As already said ships are separated in three modules that increase the configurations variety, so, you can also play with that to further customize your ships. With respect to ship design SotS2 also includes a very nice ship testing feature. After choosing all your ships’ parameters you have the chance to see it in action before entering in real combat. The game puts you in a simulation controlled environment with some targets for you to test your armament.

The invoice system, i.e. the way you instruct your ships to be built, is also nicely done and gives you (in this case) all the information and features you need to build your ships. Before building ships of your newest designs you must invoice a single prototype. Only when your prototype gets built you can start producing that design in mass. The only negative aspect worth mentioning in the invoicing system is that I didn’t find a way to re-order invoices in the invoices queue after they are submitted. Although this may sound realistic I think the game should allow you to re-order your build queue anyway.

Space combat

Since SotS was always much more about space combat than strategy, we now reach one of the game’s critical areas: space combat. First of all SotS2′s space combat is very demanding in terms of performance, but if you actually have a good, or very recent 3D accelerator video card, you should be fine. But I leave the warning for people with moderate-to-good video cards from 3 years ago: you may struggle a bit to get a decent and smooth space combat rolling, if you do manage to tweak your card well enough in the end I mean.

Unlike the rest of the game that plays in turns combat unfolds in real-time, in a limited time span between 5 to 12 minute sessions(this limit is set by you at game setup). Overall graphics are very good. The planet models for instance are probably the best looking I’ve seen to date. The space stations and all spaceships are also very nice looking (some of them absolutely gorgeous), so, the graphical aspect of space combat is overall very good.

Now, in terms of gameplay, I found combat to be quite straightforward. You point, click, order attack with the left mouse button, select several ships and order movement with your right mouse button. Point, click, shoot, move, shoot again or standoff and retreat, all the basic combat options that this sort of game usually offers. I quite enjoyed the combat overall. The voices are nice, a bit repetitive but actually quite good, especially the Liir ones. I had only a few annoyances to report, but those are not strictly related with the combat itself but more with the preceding and the succeeding UI panel, that I found to be a bit rough and even wrong, as it contained some mistakes. For instance the battle report screen (at the end of battle) shows you a wrong number of destroyed ships.

Some further scattered thoughts

The game offers multiplayer options (LAN and Internet) but during the time I played for this review I only saw one open game there, which was protected, so I can’t tell you anything further than this regarding multiplayer.

The ETA system for turns is still unfinished and frankly quite disappointing. Sometimes fleets take less time to arrive at their destination. Sometimes a fleet uses less time to build a station, for example. Other times these issues are far more evident. Sometimes you get negative ETAs (yes, “-2″ turns for example) or you get “5937593″ turns, or overlapped text. I found this ETA instability very disturbing.

Sometimes you can’t colonize a world and you don’t know why. Other times you can’t relocate a fleet somewhere and you also don’t have enough information either in-game or in the manual to understand why. Could it be that you can’t have many fleets stationed in one system? But we don’t actually know that there is a maximum number, so there’s that lack of information and feedback problem again.

Sounds are basic, and music is minimal (although there is one for each faction), but they are enough to set the tone well. Voices are ok in general, mediocre at places (with annoying accents or simply unremarkable) but excellent in others (like when playing with the Liir for example).

Game screen switching, i.e. entering and leaving screens can lag severely. In large maps you can get up to 8-10 seconds to return back to the starmap (from the research screen for example). In smaller maps this is largely mitigated, and you end up getting “only” 1-3 seconds lag.

The fleet manager is cool, you can assign formations to your fleets (even in different layers: up, middle, down) although I’m not sure if this is actually working in combat as it should since in my battles my ships were all set in a straight line.

You can actually see stations under construction.

I didn’t like the fact that you can’t play with less than 3 systems at game start (for any map size).

The colonization system is interesting. After you colonize a new world you may decide to keep giving support to that recently established colony, especially if it was built in a less favorable environment. When you’re giving support to those colonies you accelerate their development, the downside however is that your colonization fleet is unavailable to establish new colonies elsewhere.

Very interesting shield technologies. The are several types of shields offered for research (against beam or projectile weapons for example) and you actually need to mount them in ships using special modules in order to use them.

The different factions, lore and background information is very good.

Bottom line

It’s clear to me that the game’s problem is not one of design but one of implementation. Both the art and the overall game’s design looks, and feels great. But you can’t help not to end up feeling frustrated sooner or later because of all the lack of information, crashes (for some people), bugs, lack of feedback or just incomplete or missing features.

After playing the latest version of Sword of the Stars 2 (the version the game was at, at the time that this review got published) I have strengthen my believe that this game has really great potential, and I mean BIG. Many issues have been addressed since release and the most important one being stability. The game is actually very stable now. At least for me it is. At release, and a couple of weeks after, I couldn’t even play for more than 4 straight turns (actually trying to do something) without crashing the game, and now, 3 months after that, I didn’t have a single crash after playing for this review.

At the time I wrote my Sword of the Stars 2′ first impressions I don’t think the game was playable at all, judging from my experience “playing” and by what everyone else in the game forums was saying. Now, judging from the type of activity I witnessed in the game forums (a lot more: “What’s that?, “How do I do this?” and less “I get a CTD here.”) the game is finally quite playable now. It’s not yet finished and lacks a lot of polishing work though. There are still bugs also to iron out. Examples of these are: wrong or negative ETAs, overlapped text at places, sliders that should not be active at game start, extreme lack of information and unpolished and buggy UI.

Now, about the golden questions you may be asking at this time: “Is the game already playable?”, “Is it ready?”, “Do you recommend the game?”. I will reply with this.

For the ones of you with a tight budgets that need to select carefully where to spend your money to maximize your game experience I can’t recommend this game for you at this moment. It’s too incomplete to be satisfying enough for you, and to be able to offer a solid game experience. At least for the $40-$50 price.

For you 4X veterans out there, that are still undecided whether to jump into SotS2 or not, I would say it’s already worth it for you to go ahead and buy SotS2. I think you can squeeze as much of the current game’s state to be worth the $40 or $50 bucks it costs. However don’t come back to me saying you had an unsatisfying experience because that’s probably what you’ll get. There’s the risk of not getting more than what you get now, yes, but there’s also a good chance you will.

If you’re new to this genre (space strategy) I don’t think it’s a good idea to enter in the SotS2 universe just now. There are other titles available that are definitely far better products, that will be more worthy of your money, and that will give you a better impression about the genre than Sword of the Stars 2: Lords of Winter will.

Guess I’ll need to re-review this one in a 3 to 6 months period, which is becoming a strange need these days.

Sword of the Stars II: Lords of Winter Buy it at GamersGate. Also available on Steam and Impulse.	Space Sector score: 4.0 (about the score system)

Legends is Distant Worlds’ second expansion pack, after Return of the Shakturi, released 11 months before and Distant Worlds original 9 months before that. Distant Worlds is a single-player 4X real-time space strategy game for the PC.

Both the devs and the community have been very active lately and a couple of days ago Matrix Games and CodeForce released Legends’ first official patch (v1.7.0.6). After trying that and after playing quite extensively for the past 2 weeks I’m now finally ready to properly review Legends. So, here we go.

What’s new in Legends?

The major additions and changes that were promised (at least that I could take note before release) were:

- Leaders / new character system
- Influence spheres
- New ships models (around 600!) with better graphics
- Ability to track where your ships are headed (ship vectors overlay)
- Potential colonies, scenic and research locations shown on main map (more overlays)
- Expanded technology tree (e.g. carriers, new planetary facilities, wonders)
- Race-specific events and victory conditions
- Improved fleet management and automation, including fleet postures
- Improved modding support, including full race and character modding
- Improved refueling system (more intelligent fuel management)
- Improved diplomacy system with refueling and mining rights and immigration policies
- Improved performance and sharper graphics

I can confirm that’s all in Legends plus these other interesting new additions:

- Research events (setbacks, research crash breakthroughs)
- Declarations of war now shown on main screen as galactic news
- Elegant new race-specific victory conditions system
- Resources events with new resources found on planets
- Catastrophe events and more menacing space creatures (the dreaded Silvermist)
- Races now have key resources that provide specific bonuses
- We can now see where ships are headed (with a vector, not just coordinates as before)
- Custom ship designs are now signaled with a different color
- You can set the game’s difficulty level

Characters

The character system is Distant Worlds Legends major improvement. Characters are special people who specialize in different aspects of your empire like economical, social, intelligence or military aspects. You have Embassadors, Colony Governors, Special Scientists, Intelligence Agents, Troop Leaders and Fleet Leaders. These characters are varied in nature and you can tell that your play style does influence their appearance and progression. For example if you negotiate often in the diplomacy screen you get diplomacy skill increase on your existing Embassadors and new Embassador characters also tend to emerge more. At least I experienced that.

Characters have positive and negative traits which makes them feel realistic and fun to play. You have a leader, only one; that’s you. If you don’t like yourself much, or other characters, you can dismiss them and new ones will eventually be generated. Some character traits are unknown at start so you have to put your character to the test before discovering their abilities. This is a very interesting and fun detail, since it involves a surprise factor.

Your characters level up with time, according to their past events (which are logged by the game for you to consult at any time). It’s really very cool to see your agents for example get specialized in sabotage or espionage due to the fact that you keep sending them to those kinds of missions. If they keep succeeding in their missions they will continue to level up those skills which makes the intelligence system much more fun and immersive to play now. Moreover you can’t recruit as many agents as you want as before. Agents now emerge so you have to take care of them much more carefully than before. I particularly prefer how the intelligence system works now.

In summary the Legend’s Character system is what I was expecting it to be and more. It is really a new experience to play Legends over Return of the Shakturi just because of that believe me. Characters provide extra strategic choices, gameplay depth, personality and immersion. And the expansion would probably be already worthwhile just because of that.

But there’s plenty more

Your colonies now project influence spheres. At first I didn’t quite understand what those were really about, but after playing Legends for a while, and after going through the galactopedia and the manual (both very good by the way), I finally got what they’re real aim is. By the way, in-game documentation is very good with links to the galactopedia spread all over the different screens to assist you in case you have doubts. I guarantee that you’ll have doubts many times :)

Planets project these influence spheres based on their strategic value (population and development level). The more of it they have the bigger the spheres will be. Inside your sphere of influence is all the territory that the other races see as under your control so they will avoid building mining stations and colonies inside your space. Due to this new feature you can now grant mining rights to the races you want, another cool new feature that deepens diplomacy options even more.

In addition to mining rights you can also decide to offer refueling rights to your neighbors, for the ones you’re not in a mutual defense pack already that is. Another nice one.

Another interesting new diplomacy feature is the ability to set immigration policies on your colonies. Distant Worlds allows several races to peacefully (or not so peacefully) co-exist in the same planets, which is a good feature in my opinion. In Legends you can now set policies to influence the way immigration works. For instance if you don’t want a particular race to be present in your colony you can set it up for relocation and slowly your private sector passenger ships will transport those races elsewhere (you can set immigration policies empire-wide if you need). If you want to enslave a particular race for economic bonuses on a colony you can also set that up, among other options like don’t accept a particular race completely at a colony (or colonies) or decide to slowly exterminate a particular race. Enslavement and extermination have a strong negative impact in your reputation (the way other races see you).

An old negative aspect of Distant Worlds has finally (and thankfully) been addressed in Legends, which is the way ships looked. This was a big complaint of mine in Distant Worlds since the beginning, as you can judge by my Distant Worlds original review. Ships looks were really very poor and unappealing. That is no more! With the help of a mod fan (nicknamed WoodMan in the Distant Worlds forum) the devs have injected 600 (yes, 600!) new ship models. Ships are now sharper and much more interesting, however there’s an option that allows you to use the old models if you prefer.

Research and the tech tree also had some improvements. There are now new weapons (rail guns that partly bypass shields); carriers (a special type of ship hull class that is suited to hold fighters); new planetary buildings (like the terraforming facility that is used to increase the colony development after a major catastrophe). There are also wonders now, Sid Meier’s Civ style. Below you can see 3 of them. From left to right you have the Gizurean Universal Hive, the Rusan Technology Installation and the Shandar Lava Palace Resort.

Wonders are special structures that provide significant bonuses to the race that finishes them first and are unlocked by researching required techs. There are 15, which vary in development, research, ships speed, defense, among other bonuses.

There are also two new nice twists to research that made it even more interesting. Now there are research crash breakthroughs and research setbacks events. The former causes a tech to breakthrough much faster, the latter causes an entire research on a particular field to be lost. Scientist characters also play a role here. If you happen to find one with the Creative trait your chances to breakthrough techs increase. Here is another example of good association between characters and gameplay.

Refueling, another headache from the past has now been further improved. In order to solve past annoyances which required too much fuel micromanagement we can now set a % that determines how many (a % of) ships in a fleet need to be out of fuel before they ‘assemble’, meaning they will get more gas before attacking (\Edit this only works when your fleets are automated). This is a VERY important implementation. In DW previous installments it was very annoying to witness that sometimes your fleets were crawling because of a single frigate having no gas. Now if you set a low % of refuel order before attacking, that fleet will refuel at the nearest refuelling point before embarking on its attacking plan. This is another big plus.

There’s plenty more meaningful events added in Legends. There are now the new race-specific events. For example a race enters in a biological cycle where it will behave differently, more aggressively or friendlier. There’s the new catastrophe events. For example I had a major earthquake in one of my major colonies that decreased the planet’s quality significantly and I also lost a good amount of population. There are resource events now. I was surprised and very pleased to see this new feature. Now your colonies may occasionally discover a new source of a particular resource not found before. This seems to be a particularly rare event (it only happened to me once) but it is a nice new touch. And there are also the new research events (crash breakthroughs and setbacks) that I already mentioned above.

A word on the new victory conditions system

Till now Distant Worlds provided only the traditional dominance, conquest, time types of victory conditions. You reach a certain percentage of population, or number of colonies and you win. Although not a complete innovation in these types of games Legends introduces a new and more elegant victory conditions concept: races have their own victory conditions. These are specific goals that each race has to obtain to achieve victory. If you play with the humans you must achieve more mutual defense pacts, earn more income from tourism and trade than other races, for example. If you’re an Ackdarian you must possess the biggest capital ship of the galaxy and possess at least 50% of all ocean planets (Ackdarians are amphibians). And so on. Then there are many other interesting goals like the need to destroy most enemy troops (of the Boskara), enslave 25% of other races present in your colonies (of the Dahyut), build the Universal Hive Wonder (of the Gizurean) or start the fewest wars in the galaxy (of the peacekeeping Ketarov).

There’s really plenty of different flavors and variety on these goals, and that’s why I thought this new victory conditions system would deserve a section of its own in this review. The way victory progress is calculated and measured it’s also very interesting as you can see below.

Depending on your victory conditions setup at game start you will see victory progress which includes both the traditional and the race specific victory conditions. In red you can see the percentage of victory progression with respect to the Humans specific victory conditions. In blue it’s the economies’ %, in green the population and in yellow the territory %. This is all merged into a global victory progress bar which makes it very easy to grasp who’s in the lead. The first race to achieve the red line boundary on the right wins. You can set the weight of the victory conditions boundary now also. Default is 80% but you can be stricter or looser on your approach to victory. You can disable race victory conditions if you want and go only with the traditional population, territory, time or economy goals.

User Interface improvements

The User Interface has always been Distant World’s Achilles heel, its major weakness. The original game’s UI was inappropriate to play a game of this magnitude. The game’s potential was there already but without a good UI, sadly, we couldn’t experience enough pleasure playing the title. And unfortunately players can’t play potential alone yet. Return of the Shakturi solved most of the UI problems by introducing quick action buttons and the empire navigation tool which were surely most welcome.

Legends improves the UI even further, to the point where finally I have no major complaints about it anymore. For instance, now you’re (finally!) able to track where your ships are going by clicking on them or by turning on the ship vectors overlay, which will show you where all your civilian private ships or your state controlled ships are headed. Previously you could only guess where most ships were headed (particularly civilian ships). You would need to check the ships coordinates to know the ships’ direction. Clearly this was insufficient to say the least. This is now fixed and the ship overlays and vectors shown when you click ships are extremely useful features to have and another big plus for Legends.

Another interesting new UI feature is the ability to track colonies, scenic locations and research locations directly on the main map through overlays highlighting. Previously you could already see those special locations if you accessed the Empire Navigation Tool (a menu in the left side of the screen) but now you can switch on/off map overlays that show you where those places are with a circle around them all together. This is a very interesting and damn important feature to have during expansion planning since we can now zoom-out the map and look into the exploration’s big picture. Instead of going one by one we can now see everything glowing in the map which eases exploration and expansion by a significant order of magnitude.

Another simple, but very, very important new feature is the ability to track who declared war to whom in the main screen without having to go check that in the diplomacy screen every 5 turns or so. The devs were listening, as always. Simple thing to do, big plus.

The first Legends’ patch solved many fixes and improved the game’s balancing, judging from the patch notes, but it also added a very nice little tweak to the design screen interface. It’s now possible to easily distinguish your custom designs from the default and AI made ones. A simple new addition, but all helps.

Last but not the least fleet management is also significantly improved. There are now fleet postures. These are orders you can give to your fleets for them to act autonomously. You can order your fleets to attack or defend and you can set the range to which they will defend your territory independently from your actions (system, nearby systems or a whole sector away from the home base you set). This is also a VERY important new feature, specially against pirate raids or space monsters that appear out of nowhere (or other alien races as well). Many times you would have a fleet stationed in a planet and a marauding pirate would assault your mining stations nearby and the fleet would just seat there. Now you can set these fleet postures and not worry about minor skirmishes. Another big plus!

AI and automation

I don’t know if the AI is competent enough, I probably would need to play Distant Worlds Legends in full automation for a month straight to know that for sure but what I can tell you is that after dozens of hours of play (through DW original, RotS and now Legends) the AI feels competent. Diplomacy interactions are a good example of this. Negotiations feel appropriate, there are no WTF moments whatsoever. Overall diplomacy feels “authentic” and appropriate.

An important aspect about Distant Worlds automation is that if you like to play a higher-level strategy game style you can! Just turn many of the game’s aspects automated (for example ship design, colonization, diplomacy or espionage) and concentrate on other areas you enjoy more. The beauty of Distant Worlds is that it allows you to play in many different ways so you end up with many kinds of experiences and play styles.

The game is immensely complex so for many of you folks just starting now it is recommended that you leave automation on for some aspects of the game while you concentrate on others. I suggest you do this at least at the beginning, then you can slowly start switching off automation options one by one and start getting your hands dirty. I play fully manual now with some occasional suggestions left on and I can guarantee you that it is more than possible to control everything and have lots of fun with that at the same time. Even for an RTS. You just need to pause a lot to review your planning carefully from time to time and you’ll be fine.

Migration is 100% controlled by the AI and it works great. You can see your private sector moving people from planet to planet (from less desirable to higher desirable places) and also from other race’s planets to your own and vice versa. This feels realistic and it is at least fun to watch (since you can’t control anything that’s part of the private sector).

Your freighters are also 100% controlled by the AI. Freighters are the economic backbone of the game. They move all kinds of resources, luxuries to where they’re needed for construction, planet development or trade. There were some issues with freighters running out of fuel constantly in the past, going to the other side of the galaxy or moving around pointlessly in the game, but now, after the first Legends patch, that sort of things seems to have been finally resolved.

The bad, the not so good, and some suggestions

Let’s start with the worse thing about Legends, and Distant Worlds in general. Font sizes, blurriness and color contrast are a serious issue. It’s not just me, many people are complaining that some text in the game is very small and blurry/unfocused to read in places (tech tree and diplomacy screen in particular). Sometimes we can’t even distinguish a ‘+’ from a ‘-’. This is somewhat serious. Click on the image below to see an example of this (tech tree description text is very small and blurry).

This font size issue is not really game breaking or anything like that, but unlucky folks running this game on higher resolutions displays than the standard resolutions can get in trouble. Sometimes I have to lean on and put my glasses on in order to read stuff. Many people are complaining (myself included), others seem to be fine with it. I don’t know what’s causing this or how it can be fixed, so consider yourself warned. This is a serious minus.

Also, something that is really still a bit of a downer is that, although there are plenty of game setup customizations for you to choose from and many races to pick from you can’t yet customize your own race from scratch in Legends. This is surely one of the things that the devs should focus on providing next since it should not be too difficult to implement from what they have already. This is a slight minus.

When we give mining rights to a race the AI should acknowledge that. Currently they don’t say anything like “thank you” etc like with other gifts or treaties. It’s a small thing however. And we can’t request mining or refueling rights either, races are only allowed to offer them. In my opinion this is a slight minus also. The refueling and mining rights concept seems to be a bit rough on the edges still.

Another important thing to point out is that a couple more portraits for the characters of each race would surely be a nice thing to have. At least to have a small degree of variety. This is really not a serious issue but more character portraits would help with immersion.

Now some suggestions

When designing a ship it should be possible to increase or decrease the number of modules (or scrap them completely) in a faster way. Right now you have to click constantly to increase or decrease the number of components added/removed. It should be possible to edit the number of components directly if required.

Ships and facilities (the little icons on space ports and planets) could show build progress (as with a fill color that gets filled up as ships get built). This would be a very nice feature to have for colony ships and space ports construction in particular since they take A LOT of time to build. Instead of going through screens and menus we could just check build progress in real-time. That would be a great new feature since I lose a lot of time with building progress checking.

Another suggestion would be to show how many resources we have of a particular resource when we click on one in a planet. This would enhance exploration smoothness. That way we could know the number of resources we have in a nutshell without the need to go to the expansion planner. This would avoid breaking the flow of thinking also when we are carefully reviewing which systems and planets to colonize next.

You could have a way to store map snapshots. There are many levels of zooming and sometimes I find the need to capture a map (zoom and position) to restore later by pressing some hot key. I keep centering my maps on particular places all the time after being “distracted” by some event. This feature would surely be nice to have.

Further scattered thoughts

Another very interesting aspect about Legends is that you can actually, and surely be able to, win games peacefully if you want. This is not so common in 4X games but Distant Worlds manages to accomplish that for you if you want.

There’s a couple of new great music soundtracks (to add to the existing ones which were already very good).

You can now set the game’s difficulty from very easy to very hard. This will affect the amount of income generated by your colonies. Play very easy and you’ll earn more income than the other races, play very hard and it’ll be the other way around.

There is no multiplayer in Legends. Distant Worlds’ games are currently single-player only.

To play Legends you will need to own both the original Distant Worlds game and the Return of the Shakturi expansion. So, the all set, for the ones that don’t own the previous installments, will cost you around $63 (if you exclude VAT or other taxes required in some countries). It may seem a bit pricy but when comparing with some of the so called AAA games (that are “supposed” to be very good) that cost you from $50 to $70 for a single installment it doesn’t seem so much. Legends is to 4X space strategy fans as Skyrim is to RPG lovers, so the price doesn’t really shocks me.

Why wouldn’t Distant Worlds Legends be worth that much? Some will argue that Distant Worlds is a niche players-only game and that the price doesn’t really matter. I disagree. Legends is good enough to be appreciated by many more people other than the genre fans and, in my opinion, is totally worth the price.

Bottom Line

A very long review for an expansion pack wouldn’t you say? Yes, Distant Worlds Legends has it all. Powerful enough automation options for people who don’t like to micromanage and plenty of detail and depth for the micromanagers to be entertained for many months. What you can’t say is that there’s nothing to do in Legends. Boredom is to be found elsewhere.

The new character RPG system re-emerged Master of Orion 2′ leaders concept. DW Legends devs were wise to take the best of it and perfected it. Really, Distant Worlds Legends is what Master of Orion 3 should have been.

For people who never played these kind of games, that is to say: 4X, grand-scale, highly complex, space empire building games then Distant Worlds Legends is the perfect game for you to make your entrance. Don’t be afraid if at first you feel overwhelmed, I’m sure many of you will. Just go through the tutorials, the manual, start automated and then progressively turn-off automation and slowly you’ll get the taste of what it is to be in control of a space faring civilization. The Distant Worlds forum community is also a very helpful one so they will help you move around if you have doubts or need advice, for sure.

For the hardcore 4X space fans (that didn’t know much about Legends yet and didn’t play it yet) I don’t have much to say to them really. Buy it NOW! Most of you have it already anyway.

In my Distant Worlds Legends preview I stated the following: “In my opinion Distant Worlds Legends shows enough potential to be running for the best 4X space strategy game ever made (Space Sector: Adam Solo)“. I’m not disappointed. After playing Legends for a while now it really is what I thought it would be and much more.

I consider myself fairly unbiased about the game. Yes, I’m a fan of these types of games but the ones who know me know that I value honesty and sincerity. Take into account that I gave a 5.0 score out of 10 to the original Distant Worlds when it first came out. Also, if you need further proof of sincerity just check my Sword of the Stars 2 first impressions article. So, take that into account when you make your judgement.

I finish with this. If Master of Orion 2 was the 4X space strategy gaming reference of the nineties, then Distant Worlds Legends is the 4X space strategy gaming reference of the early XXI century. What are you waiting for? Buy it now!

Distant Worlds: Legends Buy it at the Matrix Games Store.	Space Sector score: 9.4 (about the score system)

The developers of Starbase Orion have clearly stated that their goal was to develop a title that would be like Master of Orion with better multiplayer.  To be fair multiplayer in the days of Master of Orion 2 was still in its infancy and mostly consisted of packing your whole system up and trucking it over to your friend’s house and networking everything.

However, it is not an excuse today and Chimera is touting their multiplayer experience to be the one defining feature.  Their release comes on the heels of iOS 5, which was a major update for Apple’s mobile platforms and with new major updates comes new features and bugs.

The main body of this review was written just after release, however in order to give a more complete picture of Starbase Orion I have decided to finish my review once 1.04 was released.  So I will comment on the improvements since release and 1.04 as well.

After having the pleasure of putting Starbase Orion through its paces in the past couple of days, I am happy to report that Starbase Orion has gone and done exactly what it said it would!  Gasp, what? Adam mentioned in the preview article, Starbase Orion has taking the simplicity of multiplayer Warcraft 3 and improved upon the successful elements of MOO2 with better graphics.

The challenge for the developers must have been how to cram all the goodness of Master of Orion 2, stuff in multiplayer that can all be played on the iPhone and iPad?  Chimera Software has risen to this challenge, and if you will bear with me I will explain all the details of the game below with juicy screenshots.

Main Menu

Starting in the beauty of space, you find yourself at Starbase Orion’s main menu.  You can choose between the following game options:

• Galaxy Size: Small – Huge
• Opponents: One – Three
• Difficulty: Easy – Impossible

The 6  Race Selections (and their traits) are:

The Isather are Battle Hardened, Industrious Individuals, and Sanction Piracy

The Vass have Shared Intelligence, Quick Thinkers, and Fertile Biology

The Cyban are Brilliant Researchers, Industrious Individuals, and Fantastic Engineers

The Drask as Galactic Navigators, Combat Pilots, Persnickety, and Proficient Farmers

The Humans are Freethinking, Charismatic, and Highly Trained Smugglers.

Custom race

I like to choose Custom races, and pick the following traits: ( I like smart and nerdy races that can research the best weapons first. )

You start with 10 points to spend on racial traits.

-6 Borderline Genius (+ 2 research per scientist).

-5 Brilliant Researchers (chance per breakthrough to gain access to additional technology of the same type)

-1 Large Homeworld (race begins on a Large homeworld, instead of a medium homeworld giving you more population and structures like in MOO2)

-2 Rich Homeworld  (race begins game with mineral rich homeworld) which speeds up construction, like in MOO2.

+4 Low Gravity Affinity (no penalty on low gravity worlds, increased penalties on normal and high gravity worlds.)  Figure I can negate some of these negatives with research.

(One thing I would like to see added is the ability to change your race name.  The developers stated that more customization is planned in a near future update. However,  recent updates lets you change your race picture by tapping the picture)

Once you finished setting up the starting parameters, you enter the main game screen centered on your starting colony. The map view is very nice looking, it is isometric and looks like a major developer designed it.  The production values are that good for a small development team.

(1.04 Update has added more information and nice lush looking screens for galaxy map information like military capacity, economy, food, and research)

At the top of your screen is the information panel that tells you your maximum fleet capacity, empire money, Stardate button, food income, and research indicator. The only tappable item up there is the Stardate button which acts like a news ticker for events that happen; click on the event will take you to it if applicable.  For instance, if you finish research and tap on the notification under the Stardate button it will open your Research screen.

At the bottom of the map are Galaxy, Empire, Military, Foreign, Research, Menu, and Turn buttons.  They all pretty much do what the labels suggests.

The Galaxy button is useful for pulling up information about planets you scout, and offers an easy way to sort them and send colonizers to. The list will update as you explore new systems and scout their resources and bonuses.

The Galaxy screen is now cluttered with many planets; you can sort this view according to Classification, Minerals, or Population and with or without enemies.  Once you find a suitable planet for colonization, you can simply tap on the text next to the planet and it will automatically send the nearest colony ship.  If it is out of range, the screen will let you know and you can find a closer system to expand to.

The Empire view is very much similar to MOO2’s, in that it shows all of your colonies and what they are currently producing, and how the population is assigned to either Food production, Industrial production, or Research.

Each population can be easily reassigned by tap holding on and dragging to the desired job.  So if your Food indicator is reading -1 (19), and you drag an industrial worker over to be a farmer it instantly updated to show you the outcome of the reassignment.

This screen is useful; you will find yourself referring to it often, because you can quickly scroll through all your colonies.  This can become quite the chore once your empire expands, however thanks to a faithful and beautifully rendered Empire screen it is very efficient.  Why fix something that wasn’t broke.

The planetary screen can be reached whenever you tap on a planet you control or colonize, and it shows how many planetary facility slots are available, a production summary, and you can also allocate workers within this screen as well. Notice the nice visual touch of different planetary environments that representative of their types.

Also buried within the Empire screen is the production screen for a planet which has three tabs Special, Colony, and Military.  While two of the tabs are mainly what can either be built on the colony itself or military ships and troop transports, the special screen has included some nice automated features.

On the Special tab this is where you can perform automated orders for your colony, or terraform if you have the technology.  You can specialize colonies by telling them to focus on Industry, Research, or Farming buildings, and Military.  You can also instruct your colony to convert its production into wealth for your Empire, or to hoard its production for use in a future project.

The last option is very cool because let’s say you are researching the next best thing in Missiles, however your Rich colony has nothing to build?  In the past you would just have it produce extra credits, however now you can store your production so when you finish researching that great new Missile and add it to a new design you can finish it much faster with stored production.

The Military screen is the place to locate and manage your fleets, again another faithful adaptation from MOO2.  This list is also sortable by ships enroute or in orbit, and strength and size.  A button that takes you to the Ship Designer is also conveniently provided.

(Again I would have loved to see an option to rename fleets, and I hope it is included in the customization update)

You can also access the ship design screen from the military screen, also from the planetary production screen.  Ship design is streamlined for better or worse to picking the hull class, by tapping on the ship itself, what weapon systems to include, and what ship systems.

Weapon systems are limited by what technology you have researched, and are categorized by Short, Medium, and Long.  Lasers are long range, while Gauss Cannons are short.  Ship systems include components that extend ship range, shields, and armor.

The most notable absent items are things that made MOO2 unique like Black Hole Generators, Stellar Converters, or even Space Shuttles.  While I wouldn’t characterize the ship design and technology aspects of Starbase Orion as anemic, they are not exactly all inclusive.

I can understand the design decisions that maybe went on behind closed doors, to streamline things, however these extra items are what gives the game more character.  We play these games because I would be willing to bet that we all enjoy high-tech stuff, watch the Discovery Channel and read Popular Science.  Give us the theoretical things that are talking about, like a Mini Gamma Ray Burst Cannon.  There has been some thinking put into the whole ship, design, and combat aspect of the game that I will cover later.

The next button is the foreign button, which is mainly for managing your spy Agents, and looking up foreign empire information like how many ships they have built, or colonies founded.  There is an info panel on the right that displays espionage events like spies being caught, and successful mission like successfully stealing a technology, or sabotaging a facility.

Spying is a nice feature, that I do not believe is too powerful to be abused nor ineffective that one could ignore it.  So it was a good feature to include, and I can foresee great multiplayer games where players are chatting back and forth about successful espionage missions.

One major difference from MOO2 to note here is that there is no diplomacy, except for your opponents to tell you how much they would like to relieve the burden of your colonies, I suspect the reasoning here, is that it simplifies multiplayer.  A real diplomatic system would have been a major plus.

The next button is Research, and this screen allows you to browse the technologies available for research and to pick your next Research project.  There are three major areas of research here, and they are Astrophysics, Military, and Civil Projects.  Each section starts with four areas for you to pick, and as the game explains, as you select topics the colored circle next to them change from Green , Yellow, and Red.

As you focus on one area, other areas turn red, and disappear from your options all together.  This is similar to MOO2 system, where you only had the option to select one of three techs.  Once you picked one, the only way to get the other two is through espionage or planetary invasion.  The creative racial trait in MOO2 was expensive, but allowed you research all technology in a topic therefore not losing any potential techs.

The only other way to get technologies you have missed will be to steal it through espionage.  This is accomplished in the foreign screen and you have no real control over what you get except to allocate more spies to the effort.

Tactical Combat in Starbase Orion is not existent.  Well I am lying, there is ship combat however you are only a spectator and the only way to influence the outcome is to give specific orders to your ships.

This gives some extra decisions and strategies to players as you need to carefully plan the best design to counter your enemy and what orders to issue in combat to take advantage of these differences.  Are you going to focus on Gauss Cannons and lots of small fast ships that can close in and minimize the long range damage they are exposed to by ships so equipped?  The following screen shows a wise choice for a Gauss equipped ship.

When two opposing fleets are in the same system you get a warning that there is a battle, and this is your orders phase.  You can issue to your individual ships to take advantage of their long range lasers and engage at long range if possible, and then to choose the largest target or closest target.  These decisions can affect the outcome, so choose wisely.

Another design decision I am sure influenced by multiplayer, is this type of combat system that is quicker.  It seems very difficult to overcome how to keep Tactical Combat interesting for multiplayer for a turn based game, which would then have to be played real time?

So I applaud the developers attempt to make combat more involved by including consequences for design and order decisions rather than just simply auto resolving combat like GalCiv.

Review Update (v1.04)

Now as mentioned before the time of this review was before release, and multiplayer was not possible pre iOS 5.  With iOS5 came Gamecenter and iCloud updates that added some new features the developer were already set to take advantage of.

Gamecenter allowed automated multiplayer matching, and therefore it is very convenient to participate in multiplayer games.  Once turns are submitted, they are processed automatically and the next player is notified of their turn.

With iCloud your saved games are automatically store in the cloud, and thus can be moved between devices or restored in an emergency.

Improved UI main screen that gives you an overview of how your economy is, or your research is being calculated.

Among the many issues and bugs post release in the shadow of the release of iOS 5, was the AI.  I simply played a whole game on impossible on a small galaxy with one enemy AI, and not once did it attack me.  Seriously problems to say the least, especially the claim of the developers that their AI won some recognition in a AI competition.

November 4th the latest update 1.04 came out, and after updating I setup the same game and settings as my last test game.  After about 30 turns I encountered the AI with their two scouts out, and immediately colonized a system next to theirs to create a border.

I also sent my only destroyer there in case the AI decided to invade, and invade is what the AI did.  Once colonized the AI immediately sent both of his scouts there, and after a couple of blockaded turns my Destroyer arrived to free my start up colony.  The results were not in doubt, however a better equipped destroyer (had extra armor) arrived and erased my defenses.  The game was pretty much loss, because I could not compete with the armor add-on, as I had not researched it yet.  Brilliant!

Conclusion

Starbase Orion has undeniably achieved its goals of providing an experience similar to Master of Orion with better Multiplayer. Many of the features in Master of Orion that is lacking in Starbase Orion were necessary in my opinion to facility multiplayer.

This is ok in my book, because a real human will provide the best challenge then even the best contemporary AI. The only features that are lacking aside from having to facilitate multiplayer are promised by the developer Chimera Software to include more customization.

Final statement: Buy it now while it is on sale!!

Starbase Orion Buy at iTunes: (iPhone link, iPad Link)	Space Sector score: 8.5 (about the score system)

Screenshots

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Kyle Rees “Lordxorn” has been a Space Sector contributor since May 2011. Kyle is a credited tester on games like Distant Worlds: Return of the Shakturi, and Panzer Corps, and an avid World of Tanks player. See all Kyle’s posts here.

Distant Worlds Return of the Shakturi is Distant World’s first expansion pack. Distant Worlds is a 4X real-time space strategy game developed by Code Force and published by Matrix Games.

When DW first came out it had many problems, many of those related to its weak user interface. The game was practically unplayable by then, and that ruined the entire gameplay experience. RotS solved many of those issues. Here’s how.

From the Potential to the Actual thing

Many things changed in DW since the original release. But the thing that changed the most, the one that unlocked the game’s true potential and turned it into an actual playable and enjoyable game were the changes made to the user interface. But before getting to that let’s first see what’s new in RotS.

The research system was completely revamped. RotS offers many tech options now. You can queue projects and decide to buy/crash research to substantially accelerate it. Tech trees are well organized and provide sufficient information to the player. The only two less positive remarks I make to the tech trees is that sometimes it’s really hard to read stuff (font sizes are incredibly tiny in places) and the scroll bar does not provide a good color contrast, which makes it a bit difficult to navigate up and down in the tech trees sometimes. But these are pretty minor issues. RotS research has good depth, it is meaningful and is ultimately fun to handle.

There are fighters and bombers now. One major addition to the weapons research tree are star fighters. You have now many kinds of bombers and interceptors to choose from. To deal with enemy fighters you can use point defense weapons. I’ve used fighters in a couple of battles. They were fun to watch and can be a pain for enemies that don’t have point defense weapons. You can replenish your fighters and decide to launch them for battle at any time.

Another interesting new aspect in RotS is that you can build planetary facilities now, although there are only a bunch of them available to build and many of those are related to troop training. In addition to troop facilities you can also decide to build a Giant Ion Cannon to disable invading ships or a Planetary Shield to defend your colonies against enemy bombardment. Yea, very SW Empire Strikes Back, but that’s ok, I’d say that if you’re going to get inspiration at least you should take it from the best :)

RotS comes with a new backstory featuring two new alien races (the Shakturi are one of them). You can decide to take action and follow the story line or just play normally, as you prefer. There are plenty of victory condition possibilities to choose from. You can set population, territory, economic or time goals. You can set one of these, all of them or none at all and just decide to play a completely open sand-box game.

But I saved the best for last. RotS provides major user interface improvements to Distant Worlds. The UI was the worst aspect of DW vanilla. You could sense that the game’s potential was there, the huge amount of depth waiting to be unleashed, but the UI failed terribly and didn’t allowed the player to use that potential, and the gem remained unpolished.

I use the following aspects as a basis to analyze how good a UI is, taken from experience and literature (doesn’t matter if a game is complex and deep or not, or how many windows and amount of information it provides). And to simplify things let’s take out the presentation aspect from this list. That’s nice to have but not that ultimately important.

1. Do players feel in control of things? (The MOST important of all aspects)
2. Does the interface let the players do what they want?
3. Is the UI intuitive and easy to master?
4. Do players feel like they’re having a strong influence over the outcome of the game? Do they feel powerful?

I’m afraid DW vanilla UI failed terribly in all of these major aspects, especially in point 1. That was one of the major reasons why I gave DW original such a low-score (checkout my Distant Worlds vanilla review for details). Let me already advance that Code Force managed to solve most (if not all) of the UI known deficiencies.

First of all, it’s now possible to perform common tasks, like colonizing planets, build mining stations, construct new bases and so forth just by clicking on one-click action buttons from the main screen. For example if you want to create a mining base at a gas giant planet, an option is shown below the selection panel that allows you to easily instruct a construction ship to queue an order to build a base there. The same for building ships, colonize worlds, etc. These quick-action buttons solved the annoyances of having to find a suitable constructor, turn back to find the target to build the base (if you still remember the name or location). This UI new feature made the player’s life much easier, and removed a good deal of frustration from the player for not being able to properly manage his empire.

In addition to the quick-action buttons, RotS offers now an Empire Navigation Tool. This was it. This UI addition made all the difference. This navigation tool offers a set of scrollable lists that provide a quick glance and access to almost everything that is happening throughout your empire. You can navigate, access and interact easily with your colonies, construction ships, space ports, exploration ships, fleets, individual military ships, potential colonies, potential mining stations, potential research locations, potential resort locations, enemy targets and special locations. Wow! Someone was listening. This was exactly what the original DW game lacked. Due to this new UI feature it is now finally possible to play and feel in control of things. Thank you Code Force for this, great job!

A word on Immersion

Immersion is probably one of the best factors to define how good a game really is, because in the end playing a game is all about getting experiences, and feeling you’re being part of the game’s world is one of the best experiences you can get. In space games, especially in 4X games, the idea is to provide the player a feeling of being in control of a space faring civilization. In my opinion, RotS succeeds in providing a good deal of immersion to the player. Now that the UI is fixed the player is finally able to handle his huge empire and deal with everything DW has to offer more easily. The experience is not perfect because graphics are not very good. Ship models are not very detailed, are a bit blurry and not very pretty.

But if you can surpass that graphics issue (which is not that hard) you should have a great ride since music is wonderful, the galaxy feels alive and diplomacy options are very rich (you really can feel you’re out there negotiating with alien races). To add to all that, time flies (another way you can tell you’re immersed in the game). However not all is good about time passing so quickly since by late games you get the feeling you’re not progressing that much due to so many things happening at the same time. If you’re a control freak you may get the feeling of being overwhelmed sometimes, but that’s the price you pay for playing a hugely complex game as DW. You can always play a smaller galaxy with less habitable planets, no pirates and no space creatures for a simpler and more manageable experience. The game is rich in customization options so it should be just a matter of customization to get the right complexity for your taste.

Not all is perfect yet …

DW RotS is immensely better than DW vanilla, however there’s plenty of room for improvement still.

For example, DW RotS features a lot of resources, some are strategic, others are luxuries that increase your planetary development level and your people’s overall contentment. Although there are many types of resources, from commonly found to extremely rare, I didn’t feel the lack of them. Ok I felt Caslon scarcity once (gas used in engine fuel) in one of my games but that was it. Some spaceship components require special resources; it would be nice to take advantage of that and force the player to plan a more careful expansion and possibly spice it up a bit by forcing the player to get into conflict with other races for special resources competition. This would also enhance the exploration phase of the game. This resource conflict of interests is at the essence of strategic warfare, and should be looked at more carefully by DW devs. At the very least I think an option should be provided in-game setup time to allow the player to choose the resource availability level. Resources could be evenly spread or not, and could be made rarer or more abundant as the player requires.

Another less positive aspect is that even after the UI overhaul the UI has some oddities still. For example, you can retrofit space ports to later designs only if you click on the space port itself. If you double-click on the space port icon and choose the retrofit function the latest designs do not show up.

You can colonize continental worlds as Humans, since they are your prime environment worlds, however you are allowed to research the “continental colonization” tech…with no additional benefit I could grasp.

When you instruct your ships to refuel, they will head up to a nearby star port or gas mining base even when they have a deployed re-supply ship on their very own fleet. And sometimes ships don’t refuel on re-supply ships even when instructed to. They do refuel sometimes, other times they do not. So unfun.

Fuel is still a pain in the neck to manage in DW. I mean, I understand it is a hard concept to implement well and it’s equally hard to please everybody but Code Force is almost there. Much of the game is very intertwined with fuel decisions and although I really do like that extra layer of strategy it provides I think some things should be done to remove so much dependence on fuel. One possible idea would be to have the option to tell ships in manually controlled fleets to leave the fleet automatically when they reach, let’s say 20% of fuel, and then get back into formation. This percentage could be customizable. The game could also just provide a fuel consumption rate option. Casual players could be free from the refueling burden while hardcore gamers could still be allowed to micromanage their fuel decisions.

It would be interesting to have colony ship and re-supply ship listed in the empire navigation tool. I really missed that in my games.

Bottom Line

Distant Worlds has come a long way. RotS good performance is no doubt the result of its persistent, game-loving developers that did well on listening to the community and provide what they needed. That and their hard work have made RotS into one of the best 4X game experiences available to date.

If you enjoy the RTS mechanic, you love to construct your own spaceships, you like a great deal of strategic depth and you’re fond of a rich diplomacy experience than DW RotS is the perfect game for you.

It may take TBS lovers a bit of time to get used to RotS RTS mechanics, but you’ll get there. Since you’re allowed to pause the game at any time you can take all the time you need to carefully think your strategy (I think my games were paused most of the times). Late games in huge or large galaxies can be a pain at times, things can start to feel a bit sluggish and you will feel overwhelmed at times for sure. But with the new user interface quick-action buttons, the navigation tool and the right level of game customization you should be able to manage. If you still feel overwhelmed you can always switch off unnecessary warnings or turn some things that you like less automated, like espionage or troop recruitment for example, and you will do fine.

DW RotS made me feel in control of the lives and hopes of my civilization, I cared for them and could feel immersed in a huge galaxy interacting with other alien races. And that in my opinion is what 4X games are all about. That was one of the reasons I took so much time to review RotS, I was really enjoying playing :) And I will continue playing no doubt about that.

Distant Worlds Return of the Shakturi (Buy Return of the Shakturi at Matrix Games)	Space Sector score: 8.7(about the score system)See Distant Worlds: Legends review

Screenshots

Star Ruler, the 4X real-time space strategy game developed by Blind Mind Studios, has gone Gold. Well, not officially to my knowledge, but v1.1 (current game version) is probably what Star Ruler could (or should) have been 1 year ago when it was first released to the public. Well, ok, life is hard for an Indie studio, but when I write game reviews I do not take into account who makes them I’m afraid. Anyway it’s always better to have a better game later than never.

I thought this was the perfect timing to do a Star Ruler’s (re)review since it seems to have reached a stable version and is now being sold in a box set following the Blind Mind Studios publishing agreement with Iceberg Interactive.

Most of my previous review content still stands so I decided to write this article focusing on the major differences of v1.1 (very positive I can already advance) from the original version.

So, what’s different?

First of all the tutorial has been greatly overhauled. The result is a very informative, fun and humorous tutorial. One of the best I’ve seen to date. All the mechanics are very well explained while at the same time BMS manages to provide us with a fun story line that doesn’t bores us to death while we learn how to play the game.

Ok, let’s get this straight right now; Star Ruler’s ship design is probably the best I’ve seen in space games to date. I’m not exaggerating. It was already good when SR first came out but now it feels complete. You really enjoy picking, designing and scaling all those elements and fit them all into your fully customizable spaceships. It’s almost a game in itself, and it is pure fun. You can tell that a great deal of attention was devoted to this feature. The feedback, the information, the retrofit update system, the blueprints (that’s what SR calls the designs) export / import feature for later use in other games, nothing has been left out and the result shows. One guy I talked with in the SR’s multiplayer lobby humorously said to me that he spends 90% of his SR time doing ship design. Excellent job BMS!

SR now let’s you customize your race when starting a new game. You can choose your color, ship looks (from 2 options) and race portrait (from 4 available). You can also choose your flag and create your own background story. But that’s not all. Besides customizing your profile you are now offered the possibility to choose from a set of race traits that act as bonus/penalty modifiers from a range of areas. Some examples of these areas are Biology, Society and Mentality. These traits customization is already a classic feature in 4x space strategy games and I’m glad the devs have spent some effort on this one because every bit of detail counts to the overall immersion factor.

Diplomacy has a few shortcomings still though. By the time I made the first review it was basic, but by then, and still today, diplomacy options lack depth. For instance you can’t effectively forge alliances with other races, bribe the AI to attack a 3rd party or check history records of friendship/hate with the AIs. So, you’re not told how other races feel about you. Visually the diplomacy screen has been overhauled but functionally I didn’t notice any improvements.

One area where you really notice BMS’s work was in the user interface. Now it’s much easier to access all the information you need. Examples: available resources amount, costs to build stuff, ETA for new tech, tech ratio. One major improvement is that now you can create quick links to any object in the main window. SR calls it to “Pin” an object. By pressing “P” or hitting the “Pin” button you can create these shortcuts to fleets, planets and star systems. This is a very handy feature to have (if not essential) when the scale of the world and the fleets are large, which is the case in SR.

Planet management has been polished and now you know how many resources a certain structure or ship takes to build :) I think the user interface has also been cleaned up and I did not notice any annoyance at all. Clean and crisp.

Planets now may possess “conditions”. These conditions are special bonuses (or penalties) that make that planet unique. Some examples are: rich ore deposits, high velocity winds, dense flora, and I could notice that there were plenty more. These conditions can be exploited. For instance if a planet is rich in ore maybe it’s a good decision to tell your governor to develop the planet into a Metal powerhouse (if you want to automate that planet management of course). The decision to incorporate these planet conditions in the game is a very good plus for SR.

Economy is now much more comprehensible. Much of it comes from the great tutorial but also from the overhauled user interface. You don’t feel overwhelmed so quickly now. You can monitor the amount of resources you possess at any time and you can also glimpse on what each planet’s local economy holds. Planets have local economies but they contribute to a global empire economy basket with surplus from planets being allowed to be transferred to the global empire treasury, if you happen to have spaceports in those planets.

Fleet management seems to have suffered a major improvement also. It’s very easy and intuitive to create and manage fleets now. There are also tactical options you can choose from, like ship formations and ordering ships to hold position, guard or engage at will for example. Selecting ships is also very easy and effective. The use of CTRL, SHIFT and drag makes it very easy to select ships and it’s very easy to assign orders also. Combat is fun to play and watch. Ships get damaged and can be repaired by special ships and individual components can be compromised, destroyed or disabled.

In spite of all these positive aspects sometimes spaceships move a bit erratically to say the least. If you see your ships coming backwards (in the opposing direction they should) don’t worry, it’s supposed to be that way. It has something to do with ship deceleration but you can disable that in the Options menu if you find it awkward. But ship’s movement is far from perfect though. Sometimes you choose a fleet, order it to move, or order it to orbit an object, or guard, and then the fleet’s ships start to come back and forth, up and down, constantly moving in awkward patterns. I guess there’s some work still to be done with how fleet formations work because there’s where the problem seems to be.

Ships need to refuel in SR but the way the mechanic works is great. Ships that get out of fuel head autonomously to the nearest planet, refuel, and then get back to formation automatically. Thank god they implemented it this way.

Research, even after all the improvements it is still a bit obscure unfortunately. That or I’m really missing something. But not all is bad about it, far from it. Research in SR has considerable depth and will undoubtedly make you think and force you to make constant decisions. You can tell that the devs wanted to innovate the concept by introducing non-linear mechanics to the way you do research. By introducing the hunch/guess system the intention was to insert some elements of surprise and unpredictability.

Maybe you decide to bet in a hunch because you think it can reveal a technology field early on, but those bets are expensive and you can lose all your effort. In summary, the research system is not very intuitive but I guess the devs deserve the credit for having tried to innovate it, even if not everything has come out the way they intended to. Today I chatted with a few chaps in the SR’s multiplayer lobby and nobody there was 100% sure of how hunches, guesses or links work. It’s definitely not just me having these doubts.

SR now features social and economic policies (called civil acts management). This is a nice new feature that contributes to an even deeper array of choices. At times you may decide to bet on producing more metals with penalty on other resources, or decide to make a tax break to raise morale (that causes an economy boost) at the cost of more goods and luxuries consumption.

In terms of graphics nothing noticeable seems to have changed. Ship models are nice but are very look-alike. There are only two model sets (from what I could understand). Maybe mods will bring much more models. And from what I could tell all races, even Remnant races have the same ship’s look & feel. You can’t also distinguish your ship design mounts, or modules in the ship models. Well, Indie studio with low budget for Art, I can understand that :)

There are other cool new features included in this release of SR. Pirates and Remnant ships. I think they are new, at least I don’t recall having seen them in the original version. Remnant ships are powerful ancient ships that were left out to guard long-time uninhabited systems. Possibly there are treasures or other bonuses involved in their defeat but that remained unknown to me because I didn’t manage to beat them, even with a very powerful armada (I thought I had at least). This is a very important aspect in space strategy games, the ability to make the player curious.

Bottom Line

Playing Star Ruler v1.1 was a very different experience from the first version released to the public that I played, in a positive way as you could already grasp. I still felt some shortcomings playing, some oddities and awkward behavior here and there but nothing too serious compared to what I’ve seen before. All those major and less major improvements the game suffered made it substantially better but UI improvements where probably what made the trick in the end.

You now feel that you’re in control, playing a complete, complex and enjoyable game. The lack of beauty in ship models is compensated a bit by a very satisfying universe full of astonishing beautiful stars and planets, with good textures, by the way. Research is still a bit difficult to grasp fully but you can tell devs made an effort to improve it. Now techs have links between them so that you don’t feel lost for example. Diplomacy is a bit weak, or maybe the right word is light, but it functions well. You can make peace, make deals for resources and tech points, trade maps and share research. It’s enough but could have been much better nonetheless.

Ship design is complex but elegant; it’s time consuming but a pleasure. AAA publishers and studios should have a look at how these guys have made it and learn how it is done right.

The game is also fully moddable. Check here for a list of mods that people in the forums are saying great things about.

I’m not adept of direct comparisons, but to help you understand better what I felt playing the game Star Ruler felt to me like playing Sins of a Solar Empire in a larger scale with deeper strategy elements. And you, the hardcore 4X space gamer need to try it out. Star Ruler is finally ready for you.

For you the not so-much-4X or RTS lovers I think you’d still find SR very interesting. You can always have a look at the demo if you have doubts still.

Star Ruler (v1.1.0.0) (Buy at GamersGate or at Amazon store)	Space Sector score: 8.3 (about the score system)

Screenshots

To put it simply Stellar Impact puts you in the role of a spaceship captain. Your objective is to side with other players and conquer your enemy through a death match, while navigating through asteroids, gas and plasma fields (these environments affect your navigation by the way).

Stellar Impact is more about tactics but contains also some strategy elements, so it is an RTS. It also has some RPG elements (skills and levels). Each player commands only 1 ship. Some bonuses eventually activate some companion ships that help you in battle. It’s not really a MMO since there is no persistent universe. Stellar Impact is an online multiplayer game (pvp only though) where people setup occasional or regular games. Games also have a clear beginning and end, so it’s definitely not like WoW or EVE at all in that respect.

Gameplay

There are two playing modes in Stellar Impact: Conquest and Battlefield.

In Conquest mode you team-up with fellow online players in a battle for domination with the destruction of your opponent’s base as the final goal.

In Battlefield mode the first team to eliminate all adversaries three times, or to hold an objective for at least 120 seconds, wins.

Stellar Impact offers 5 different spaceship classes. The player is allowed to choose from a Corvette, Frigate, Destroyer, Cruiser or a Dreadnought class ship. Nothing new here, these are your classic ship classes to be found in many space games. There is no unlock system or progression requirement of any kind though, so, you can play with all 5 ships classes at any time from day 1 if you want.

I find this freedom to choose any ship from the start a bit simplistic. To make it more fun and engaging I would have preferred that an unlock system of some kind would have been provided so that you could command bigger ships as soon as you gained more experience points, but I understand that it would limit game freedom, and being this game more action-oriented I guess this was an understandable design decision to make.

Your main interaction with the game is made by steering your ship, capture objectives, target your enemies, fire and destroy them as many times as you can (players re-spawn each time they die). To steer around you need to adjust your throttle (stop, mid or full). To do this you use the keyboard keys W (for more throttle) and S (for less).

Tactical Map User Interface

To change directions you can use the keyboard keys A and D or you can use the mouse right-click button. To lock a target you use the mouse left-button and to shoot you hit space. Using the keyboard to continuously adjust speed and fire, while at the same time use both mouse buttons to change directions and lock enemies can feel a bit overwhelming and awkward at first, but after a couple of games you get used to it pretty quick. Controls are not that bad as some people are advocating. After a couple of games you will do just fine.

In addition to the pure tactical gameplay elements Stellar Impact also offers some nice strategic elements that make the game very interesting in my opinion.

The game features interest points scattered through the game map. These interest points are called objectives. These provide additional bonuses to the party that owns them.

There are Singularities, that if a research center is built there (is owned) produces additional technology points for your team. If you build an outpost on a Vortex your team gains the ability to teleport to other outposts. On crystal sites you can build a refinery. With refineries you can summon more escort ships to aid you in battle (these little ships are pretty handy to have around). If you colonize planets you gain access to more command points. Deciding which objectives to claim and when is a major strategy element of the game.

You can build outposts in singularities to teleport to other outposts

All these refinery, outpost, research centers and colonies are pretty abstract concepts though. You don’t actually give orders to build anything. Structures are “built” if you sit right next to the objectives for enough time for them to be “activated”. Escort units are spawned automatically into the game.

Technology points are necessary to increase the rate of research. When you reach a critical research amount you are allowed to unlock additional skill levels during battle. Examples of these skill levels include more fire power, more shield strength, more armor, radar upgrade, among many others (and I mean a lot many). Command points are also necessary to upgrade your skills.

These 2 dimensions (technology and command points) and the objectives capturing goal help keep the game more interesting instead of relying solely on tactics, since you have to balance things carefully and decide the right thing to do next. You have to be very quick sometimes on making these decisions, something that may create a bit of anxiety or lead to a random-choice decision by the player. This quick-decision making requirement may not appeal to everyone.

The upgrade panel. Where you improve your bonuses and skills during battle.

Some players will decide to invest more on capturing objectives, others will decide more on engaging other players head-on and quickly gain territory. It’s up to the team to communicate and to eventually give specific roles to certain players.

Skill system, Equipment and Personnel slots

In addition to real-time tactics and strategy elements Stellar Impact also offers some RPG elements to the player; a somewhat complex skill system.

You can choose 4 skills to use on each of your 5 different ship classes during battle (skills ranging from attack, defense, maneuvering and others). You can change these skills at any time you’re at the hangar (main menu). In addition to choosing skills you can also decide to reward your personnel with eventual medals you win from battle. You can choose to invest on your navigators, on your gunners, your engineers or your scientists. Giving your personnel medals unlocks passive skills, which have a permanent effect.

The skills, personnel and equipment upgrade panel

An example of a Scientist passive skill is “Escort ships flying with the ship have armed rockets“, an example of a Gunner passive skill is “The speed of projectiles is increased by 5 units per second“. The passive skills possibilities are the same for all ship classes. In contrast, non-passive skills are more specific to each ship class. All ship classes can still use the same non-passive skills but each class specializes in one field more than others.

It’s key to note that each time you gain enough experience points your ship class levels up. That new level provides an additional skill upgrade level you can apply in-game. A higher level also allows the recovery of better equipment after battle. So, if you have a Cruiser of level 2 (MK II) it means that you can only upgrade your bonuses and skills in battle to a maximum of 2.

Graphics and Sound

Graphics are nice, as you can judge from the screenshot below, nothing too fancy but with sufficient detail. Spaceships rendering is good.

Cruiser ship model zoom-in

Music is present during battles but it’s nothing too memorable, but it is adequate. Sounds are basic. Your spaceship firing sounds remind you of naval ships cannons, when you’re zooming-in closely. In “nominal zoom” view sounds are a bit poor. Overall, music, sound and graphics are ok but just don’t expect too much from them.

Free trial

When Stellar Impact was first released (in Aug 22, 2011) it allowed you to play only 10 multiplayer matches for free. After that point you would need to buy a subscription for about 10€ (approx $14 at the time of this review). Tindalos Interactive, in a patch released the day I wrote this review changed this. Now players can play indefinitely for free but the catch is that they are limited to the first skill level for all ship classes. This means that when a player reaches the maximum experience for level 1 he cannot upgrade that ship class with skills greater than 1.

Tindalos was probably noticing the short amount of players (I never saw more than 10 players in the game lobby) so I guess letting players play for a longer time while limiting benefits is more interesting than limiting the player to 10 matches. Let’s see if that works better.

Only Multiplayer

There is one lacking aspect in Stellar Impact that must be stressed out. It does not provide single-player gameplay.  There are no AI opponents, so you cannot generate maps to play by yourself against the computer. This means that you must rely completely on other players showing up in order to play.

In the meantime, if you don’t find anybody else around to play, and if you still want to give it a try, you can create your own games, although they are only for practice and so, they are not true single-player games. However they can be used to get a taste of the game since you can target turrets and escort ships (and they do react and fire back).

We may or may not agree with this lack of single-player gameplay decision but this is Tindalos’ business strategy, although a risky one in my opinion. If enough people “buy” into the game they get themselves a ticket, if not they probably need to revise the plan and provide something for people to do in the meantime.

Conclusions

I find Stellar Impact quite solid and fun to play. You can feel that the game really has a sufficient to good production value. This is not due to a specific mechanic or a detail in my opinion but to the overall gaming experience that the game succeeds in providing.

Action RTS is not my ball park but I did enjoy the adrenaline of playing 4 games. It’s really intense! The objectives, skills, technology points and command points provide a satisfying layer of strategy that helps to provide a strong gaming experience.

Controls can take a while to master but are definitely not a show stopper, far from it. You get used to them pretty quickly.

As a downside (hopefully temporary) there are not that many players to be found in the game lobby ready to play at the time of this review, but I’m convinced many will come since the game quality really deserves it.

The somewhat complex skill system, the personnel passive skills, the number of ships and its skills should be more than enough to satisfy you and keep you entertained. Not to mention the fun and deep tactical aspect of the game. For instance you can dodge missiles by maneuvering correctly, so there seems to be sufficient depth there also.

Stellar Impact may not be for everyone however. If you’re into real-time tactics games or if you enjoyed titles like Defense of the Ancients, Dota 2 or Demigod and you like the Sci-Fi theme then this is your next game. If on the other hand you’re more of a hardcore space strategy gamer that likes more complex strategy elements (like building units and planning your structures carefully) or if you’re a Sci-Fi TBS fan, then you could still enjoy Stellar Impact but it’s not guaranteed. If you enjoy playing online multiplayer games and you’re more into RTS then you should enjoy Stellar Impact. If you’re a casual gamer then I guess you should give it a try, maybe you discover action RTS to be your thing, who knows.

Anyway, and in overall, I recommend all Sci-Fi gaming fans to try Stellar Impact out. It’s free to play till a certain level, so you’ve nothing to lose. The game deserves, at least, the time you take to download and try it out.

Stellar Impact (Buy at GamersGate)	Space Sector score: 7.5 (about the score system)

Some months ago I’ve made a quick first impressions of 10 Min Space Strategy. The game was still in Alpha stage by then but there was already a demo available. By then I thought the game was already fun to play. There were no crashes or bugs, a few quirks here and there but nothing too serious to report.

Some days ago Goblin Lunatics has released the final version of 10 Min Space Strategy. Now it’s time for some more serious business. Here we go.

I downloaded 10 Min Space Strategy, installed it, configured the graphics, audio and language settings. By the way, have I mentioned that this game is free? Yes, completely free. No trial, micro-transaction, premium or any other babble. I think this is probably the most finished, playable and complete game I have ever played that it’s 100% free.

Races configuration

You are allowed to customize your race in 10MSS. That’s right. Not just the name and color but you can also pick from 20 different (interesting) traits, your homeworld type, and an overall credo (which means your race’s belief system). The credo provides you with special bonuses and special buildings.

10 Min Space Strategy: Race Configuration Panel

Being able to customize your races and choose your traits through a points system is a rare asset to be found these days in space strategy games. 10MSS delivers more than a sufficient number of race styles and traits to satisfy your customization needs. Traits are meaningful also. Although a great deal are modifiers (bonus percentages) others provide special abilities like the possibility to capture enemy ships, to be a tolerant race to hostile environments, to be more efficient against space monsters, etc, etc.

Exploration and Exploitation aspects

Once you start your game you see your planet and some other planets around. Some of them have a funny icon on top that looks like a scorpion. That signals the presence of a space monster on that planet (it took me several minutes to figure that out for myself  I confess).

In 10MSS the maps don’t contain stars and start systems, as usual in these types of games, but only planets. One can imagine perhaps that the entire map represents one single star system. The starmap concept is pretty abstract in this sense however that does not hurt the overall game experience in my point of view.

10 Min Space Strategy: Game Start

One very interesting thing to notice in the map is that besides planets there are also anomalies around. These anomalies provide extra bonuses when they’re under your control. These anomalies can be asteroid fields (that I think should slow down ships) that provide a production boost. There are also gas clouds (that I also think should also slow down ships) that provide a population growth boost (although I did not grasp the reason for this last bonus). There are also alien wrecks that can be explored to increase your research speed.

But there’s more to anomalies. First of all they vary in size which also varies the bonus level they provide and the number of ships you need to control them. Another aspect about anomalies is that they are finite. I think this was a great design decision. By being scarce the anomalies are like gems to be exploited only when the time is right.

One interesting improvement would be the ability to know when a resource is being exploited, without the need to go the “Empire screen” to check that. If the resource is being exploited it would be nice to see it glow for example. This is a minor quality aspect, but important nevertheless in my opinion.

Concerning Planets

In your planets you can build Factories, Research Centers, Cities, Bomber Factories, Supply Depots or other special buildings depending on your race credo. These buildings provide you with almost everything you need to thrive in the game.

I find the planets buildings construction, and the overall production system, quite elegant. It’s all very simple to manage but there is considerable depth to it. For starters you have a limited number of slots available in your planets (that swing around and glow so that you know that that planet still has slots available) so you have to plan carefully what to build on those slots. The game also allows you to build multiple structures of the same type if you decide so (I’m glad they did it that way). Too many factories and you create larger fleets faster but if you lack research centers you will stall your technology advance. Nothing is left out, population plays also a major role in production. So you need also to balance your population capacity and growth to decide what to build.

In the beginning you control one single planet, your homeworld. Your homeworld will be of your natural environment type but you can colonise other types of planets, although with a penalty.

Another great feature of 10MSS is that planets have special abilities (as far as I could tell all of them have one, maybe not the best decision). And there are plenty of these special abilities. Some examples are Natural mineral resources, Remains of a lost civilization or an Alien defensive structure just to name a few. These features provide bonuses and another layer of strategy since players must decide what’s best to build on each planet in order to take more benefit from its special feature. As a minor remark currently it’s not possible to rename planets, I think it would be nice to be able to do that.

Another nice thing is that some planets are guarded by space monsters. You need to wipe those out before you can colonise them. Although I like the space monsters idea I think it would be preferable not to disclose which planets have monsters until a spaceship arrives there. This would increase curiosity and the surprise factor, two crucial things that increase fun in a game.

Research

There are 5 tech research areas in 10MSS: Environment, Industry, Propulsion, Warfare and Empire. The first deals with populations improvements (capacity and growth), the second enhances the spaceships construction speed, Propulsion increases your spaceships reach and scanning ability, Warfare increases your combat ability and Empire deals with limits (the number of things you can build).

The research system, as with almost anything else in 10MSS, is simple yet effective. Each research center produces +1 research point for each population unit present in that planet. Therefore it’s not only production but also research that is dependent on population which makes population a key constraint in the game. And rightly so in my opinion (not like in some other games where it does not matter how much population you have you can always produce the same, but is a talk for another day).

You can pick which tech area, from the 5 above, you would like to focus your research on (only one at a time).

But there’s more to research. In addition to the 5 research areas, that if researched increase the “power” of each area, the game provides you also with “Research Traits”.

10 Min Space Strategy: Empire Details (Research Traits)

These research traits are kind of special projects that can be unlocked as soon as you reach a certain level of research for each of the 5 main research areas. These special projects may require just one research area to reach a certain level but normally it takes two research areas. This research traits feature is a cool aspect about the research system that makes it less 1 dimensional. This surely enhances strategy decisions to be made.

Space Combat & Planet Bombardment

There are only three types of spaceships in 10MSS: Fighters, Bombers and Colony Ships. Fighters are the backbone of your armada. Bombers are used to bombard planets. Colony ships are used to colonise planets and build space stations, a very important asset to deploy in more demanding times.

Space combat is completely cinematic. When two enemy forces engage in battle a screen is shown where you can watch the battle unfold. In the meantime, or after the battle ends, you can look at both yours and your opponent modifiers/bonus (and usually there are plenty of them). Most of the modifiers depend on the races traits, others depend on research you do in-game.

10 Min Space Strategy: Battles

Fighters are the ones (and only ones) that engage in direct combat. The Bombers mission is to bombard planets, but they can also be very handy when indirectly used in combat, if you happen to have the “Heavy Torpedoes” trait. When you have this trait your bombers don’t count for your overall ship numbers but they add up as bonus when your armada engages an enemy fleet. If you attack an enemy fleet composed exclusively of bombers the combat ends prematurely, you win and the opponent looses all bombers.

Although combat sounds very simple (and it really is), since there are no tactical aspects to control, it is still very engaging and fun because although you don’t control what happens during the battle your decisions before the battle do matter. You often  ask crucial questions like “Which mix of fighters and bombers should I use?“, “Should I mix Fighters and Bombers at all?“, “Maybe I should split my armada into 2 or maybe 3 additional fleets“.

A potential criticism that can be made to 10MSS  is that it provides only a small bunch of ship types, and you cannot customize any aspect of them either. Normally you would expect to have corvettes, cruisers, heavy cruisers, battleships or dreadnoughts in these kind of games right? Or at least some ship customization abilities. In 10MSS the spaceships concept is more abstract than usual, so there are only fighters and bombers to do all the war, and all your industry and research, the ALL game, revolves almost exclusively between these two types of ships alone.

In my personal opinion that criticism is more than acceptable before you try 10MSS, but after you play a couple of games you don’t notice that lack of ship types at all. The ships concept is so well abstracted that you don’t feel so much the need for more ships (although it wouldn’t hurt to have a couple more).

Planets can’t be conquered in 10MSS, so there’s no invasion concept. To remove your enemy from a planet you must bring bombers to bombard that planet. Each turn, depending on the number of bombers you bring, the enemy population will drop. Every turn you lose some ships in the bombardment process. When no population is present in the planet it becomes empty and it’s time to bring in your colony ship.

The planets siege process is quite straightforward, however it wouldn’t hurt to allow planets to be conquered and to provide a report on damage and possibly even allow the player to decide if it wants to destroy facilities. After a certain amount of population is massacred the remaining could be conquered and not completely annihilated. This would avoid the need to bring colony ships, a very tedious process, specially in late games.

Another very interesting concept in 10MSS are space stations. You can build as many as your Empire tech level allows you to. You need a colony ship to build a space station (awkward?). Ok, maybe it should be another type of ship but  I figure that for simplistic and economic reasons Goblin Lunatics choose to give the colony ship a double purpose.

10 Min Space Strategy: Space Stations

Space stations have an effect radius (that can be seen in the picture above) and can hold 1 module that you choose from possible alternatives from military strength, increased ship movement among others.

There is a catch to space stations however, you cannot dismantle space stations after you build them. You can build many of them but it would be nice to be able to scrap them when they’re not needed anymore. I only built a couple of space stations in my games but I imagine that they can be quite important, specially in very large games or multiplayer games, so the ability to dismantle them would be important in my opinion.

Other aspects

Music is great! It can become a bit repetitive however, especially on larger maps, but nothing too serious since the games don’t last for that long.

The game text fonts are a bit distracting and take a while to get used to. Another esthetic minor aspect is that information can sometimes overlap, especially on smaller planets. Maybe there should be an option to toggle some information on and off, like the planets population or name.

Explosions effects in the strategy map and in the cinematic map are simple but at least they’re there.

Battles feel balanced. I don’t know all the numbers behind combat but I didn’t feel the need to know them also. There are so many bonus modifiers that it’s always a bit unpredictable what the battle outcome will be, I like that.

A minor detail about space combat when sieging planets is that it would be nice to have the name of the planet appear in the cinematic dialog. It’s a minor detail but everything helps to immersion. Not being able to rename planets also bugs me a bit.

Personal suggestion: Besides gas clouds, asteroid fields and alien wreaks the game could also offer wormholes or stargates (fixed from game start, with no need to create additional ones). This would increase strategy complexity dramatically since these gateways would need to be watched carefully. Done right I don’t think this would hurt the simple mechanics of the game.

Another thing that would be useful would be to have a relocation feature to send ships produced in a planet automatically to a designated planet, space station or any other place. I surely missed that during my late games.

End game is simple. You win, that’s it :) There could be stats, plenty of stats. But maybe some highlights like the maximum number of fighters and bombers built, the elapsed time and a score would be nice to have.

10 Min Space Strategy: End Game

10MSS provides hot-seat multiplayer. I’ve tried it, it’s simple and looks flawless.

Graphics are simple but more than appropriate for these kind of games.

The user interface is practically perfect. It provides you with plenty of tooltips. I would say that all the information in the UI is self-evident or if not the tooltips will do the trick for you. No tutorial? No manual? Who needs it? After 15 minutes you already know 90% you need to know and the other 10% will come later in natural pace.

One minor issue with the user interface though is that it provides no information about how many turns a building or a tech will take to construct or to research. Was that on purpose? I must confess that bugged me in the beginning a little bit but then I got used to it and it didn’t bother me at all in the long-term.

There are no diplomacy options, none whatsoever. You are always at war with your opponents. That being said however it’s funny that I think I was successful in doing a certain kind of abstract diplomacy. What I mean by this is that in the beginning of my large game I did not attack my opponent and the AI did the same. We carefully monitored each other and no one wanted to make the first move (like in chess). At some point the AI was present in a planet I found interesting to claim mine so I “declared war”, not explicitly of course. So, although there are no diplomacy features in 10MSS there is some degree of implicit or imaginative diplomacy you can apply. But that being said yes, it’s a minus for the game not to have at least the basic diplomacy options, especially one that candidates to be named 4x. In my opinion a game is only pure 4x when it provides a minimum set of diplomacy options.

An important remark is that I found 10MSS a little bit too easy. I played 3 games, one small, other medium and another large and I won all three of them without the need to restart or load once. I guess the AIs probably squabble between each other too early and never reach (this is just a guess) critical numbers. I do amass fleets so I found quite easy to put AIs fighting each other and then after they weaken themselves I attacked with my huge fleets and steam rolled them.

This is what happens when you don’t have diplomacy options. If we could forge simple nonaggression treaties or military alliances we would know, and the AI also, who is enemy and who is not. This is surely one aspect that these kind of simpler games lack.

However I did find the AIs decently competent. I never saw a unescorted colony ship or any too apparent suicide mission in 10MSS (so unfortunately common in some AAA games that claim to have “great” AI).

One thing that the game lacks though are events. Things that surprise the player and increase the fun of playing.

The extermination phase, like in so many other space strategy games is very boring, after some point you know you’ll win so probably there should be a “the AI surrenders after some point option” or something.

Conclusions

It was a long review but I think 10MSS totally deserves it. It’s not because a game is Indie, free and simple that it doesn’t deserve to be thoroughly reviewed. Moreover I did have fun playing and that surely helps the review become a bit more extensive.

10 Min Space Strategy holds to its promise, it is great to play quick games. I think this game would be perfect for you if you’re travelling in a plain, train or waiting at the doctor. But it can also be a great joy to play a quick game at home, at work or at any other place where you have your PC or laptop.

If you’re a space strategy fan you have to try 10MSS. I guarantee you will not be disappointed, just be warned that it is a simple game so don’t expect anything too flashy. Even if you’re not a fan of Sci-fi 10MSS is still a good strategy game that surely deserves your time, after all it’s free and will only take you about 10 min to try it, so you really have nothing to lose have you?

Maybe in the future Goblin Lunatics will also do a tablet version of 10MSS. If that would be possible, or easy, it would be just natural to do that. However my advice to Goblin Lunatics is never to lose sight of traditional PC players, they are the backbone of players that play these kind of games, at least these days.

Goblin Lunatics deserves our appreciation for having developed this precious gem, and to letting us play it for free. I’m sure they will come up with ideas to monetize it, they surely deserve the credit for it.

10 Min Space Strategy	Space Sector score: 8.2 (about the score system)

There is a limited story that I picked up from the intro. We, Humans (you are a human…right?) finally created a ship capable of FTL travel and set off into the stars. Assuming that there was no other intelligent life in the universe we set off without weapons, and were attacked by the Hivers. The Hivers followed us back to Earth and nearly killed us all, but we managed to fight back and push them away. Now armed, we set off to fight against the other races; the Liir, the Tarkas, the Zuul, the Morrigi, and of course the Hivers.

Sword of the Stars Complete Collection has a total of six races in all, all listed in the last paragraph. SotS does a brilliant job of making each race feel unique, and you can tell that a lot of work was put into them. For example each race has its own version of FTL travel. Humans travel along node lines like in Master of Orion 3. Node travel is extremely fast, the downside being nodes can be few and far in between. Many planets don’t even have a node connections, forcing you into STL travel.

Tarkas can travel anywhere, regardless of nodes, at a constant rate. The downside being that once they’re in motion, their orders can’t be changed. This is pretty much the typical 4X FTL (MoO1&2, Armada 2526). You can eventually research Hyperspace Communication, allowing you to change orders mid-flight (you can also do that in Armada 2526 with a later tech).

The Liir’s FTL is similar to the Tarkas’, but it starts out ridiculously fast. As they approach their destination; however, it slows down tremendously. This makes it impossible for the Liir to sneak up on anyone, but at least they can travel through deep space quickly.

Hivers have the most difficult and interesting form of travel. In order to travel quickly, the Hivers must build gateways using special gateships, at the point of departure to their destination. You have to travel STL until you actually establish these gates, and it’s easy for your enemies to destroy them if they’re sent in unguarded.

Zuul are similar to Humans in that they also use node-lines. The difference is that the Zuul must create their node-lines with special mining ships. After boring a “space tunnel” they can travel FTL between planets. This eliminates the Humans’ disadvantage of limited node-lines, the downside being these “tunnels” must be maintained, and deteriorate over time.

Finally the Morrigi use traditional FTL travel similar to the Tarkas or Liir; however, the Morrigi speed is dependant on the size of the fleet. The more ships, the faster they travel.

It’s obvious that a lot of work went into making each race unique in its artwork, design, voice-work, and general gameplay. Compared to other 4X games, SotS goes above and beyond the required effort in creating unique races, and it pays off with a more interesting experience.

After starting the game and choosing your options the first annoyance manifests; the 3D Map. While a 3D starmap is more realistic, Kerberos would’ve done well to have put some thought into why it hasn’t been done en masse. There’s no scrolling, rather the game uses a focal point that you set. Double-clicking on any planet sets it as the focal point and makes it easy to then rotate and cycle the view.

While this makes it easy to keep your bearings in the vertical maps, it creates a major problem. When you have to traverse massive maps you have to double-click, double-click, double-click, you get the picture…just to get across the map. This alone is enough to make me wonder why they didn’t just stick to a top down 2D view with scrolling. If they had to have 3D they could have at least added scrolling for an alternative. Eventually you will get used to it, but it has the tendency to annoy you every so often, which is bad.

Fortunately, you see the game’s potential fairly quickly, which helps you put up with the camera. Research in this game is very cool. In order to cut down on surefire strategies, and to add to the mystery Sword of the Stars uses a randomized tech tree. While all the techs are the same, the computer randomizes which ones you get and which ones you do without. There’s a slight “problem” with this though. It’s easy for the randomizer to take away something essential like shields, which can seriously cripple your military. To me though, this figures greatly into the overall strategy. If you have no shields then it’s much more important to research point defenses and armor more quickly.

Another cool feature is immediate funding and “accidents”. You have the option to directly pour money into a research project. This greatly enhances its progress, but the more money you pour into it directly rather than through government finding, the higher chance you have of a research accident. While accidents on a weapon system could result in the entire research team killing itself, wait until you have an accident while developing Artificial Intelligence…just nasty!

Unfortunately 3D carries over into this interface as well. You have to rotate the view in order to see all of the techs, and zooming in allows you to actually read a particular technology’s description. While it definitely wins points for aesthetics, it suffers from the starmap’s problems. It gets annoying to rotate, rotate, rotate, and zoom, zoom, zoom, just to find the tech you want.

Now we talk about the most disappointing aspect of Sword of the Stars for me: Empire Management. Sword of the Stars borrows heavily from the orignal Master of Orion for its colony management system, most notably the sliders. SotS uses sliders for practically everything, which is both good and bad. In economics you’ll manage the Savings/Research slider, the Overharvesting slider, the Construction/Trade slider, and the Infrastructure/Terraforming/Shipbuilding slider.

The advantage of the slider system is that firstly, it forces you to make decisions. You can’t have it all so you have to choose what is more important to you and balance it. Secondly, it keeps colony management simple, which keeps the game flowing a helps out on larger maps. The problem with sliders is that for people like me (who want more control over their colonies), the system is too simple.

Overall though, colony management is quite solid. You’ll chose planets based on three things primarily; Size, Hazard Rating, and Resources. Size dictates how many people you can have on a planet, Hazard rating is how comfortable it will be on that planet, and Resources dictate how fast production goes. On planets the Overharvesting slider literally destroys your planets resources while greatly enhancing production. Terraforming lowers the Hazard Rating, while infrastructure determines how many people you can cram on a planet (High infrastructure is like skyscrapers). Like I said, not a bad system, just a tad too simple.

There’s one more thing I’d like to discuss before talking about the battles and ship design. The game is easy. Really easy. On the normal setting I’ve yet to be challenged in the game. Planetary morale is a snatch, with many of the “moral-boosting” technologies being superfluous. It’s seems nigh impossible to go bankrupt, with surpluses of money being common. You would have to try hard to lose this game. The only challenge comes from the random events. If you’re a 4X veteran crank those up and start on Hard.

Ship Design in Sword of the Stars is handled very simply and efficiently. Each ship is divided into three parts. Command Section, Mission Section, and Engine Sections. There are also three classes; Destroyers, Cruisers, and Dreadnoughts. After choosing the ship’s size and sections you add weapons. Each weapon slot has a firing-arc that it covers, and SotS’s combat engine makes it very important to plan your design (generally you want to put your best guns front and broadside).

Let’s talk about the ship sections. The Command section adds a secondary ability to your mission section, and generally carries the second chunk of weapons. For example if you choose the Deep Scan Command section you’ll be able to reveal cloaked vessels and see further, a good combination with the Extended Range Mission Section, which allows you to travel further.

The Mission section determines the overall purpose of the ship. A Tanker mission section means the vessel will be used for refueling, meanwhile an Armor section carries the most weapon slots. There are numerous sections that can be researched and added and it’s a good idea to use many of them in any given fleet.

Engine Section is pretty self-explanatory and dictates the ship’s range and speed, though it’s important to also balance the cost and other factors (such as turning speed) into your ship’s creation.

Designing ships is that simple. You can also add various components to sections such as armor, or engine boosters. While some GalCiv 2 fans may be disappointed by the lack of actual ship-modeling, there’s no denying that SotS’s system is easier and much closer to the Master of Orion games (besides, I never could design a good looking ship in GalCiv 2).

But you’re only designing ships for combat in SotS anyway. Before combat actually begins you have the option to try to peacefully resolve the encounter, auto resolve the encounter, or fight it out personally. There is a fourth option called fight manually if the opponent fights manually, which is intended for multiplayer. After the actual map loads, combat begins. Unlike Homeworld (where you could move ships vertically), combat in Sword of the Stars takes place on a 2D, horizontal plane. Ships will move vertically to avoid collisions if necessary, which looks cool and keeps things simple.

Battles take place in four minute rounds, where ships move shoot, and of course…blow up. If neither party wins at the end of a round, the battle is a draw and will continue next turn. You can decrease the round time to increase the importance of heavy weaponry (in order to kill targets faster), or increase time to make armor and shields more important (so they’ll last until the end of the round).

Battles also get rather large later on with the addition of CnC (Command and Control) ships. With the addition of the Command and Control ships, you can increase the ship cap for the battle allowing you to bring more guns to bear at once. CnC ships also allow you to set out fleet formations, which you’ll want to do in order to protect more vulnerable ships. Protecting your CnC ship is also important, as losing it mean you can’t bring as many ships in at once, which allows your forces to be picked apart piecemeal.

There are a few gripes I have with the system. For one it uses the same controls as the 3D starmap, which just like the starmap, can be a pain. As the battles primarily occur on a 2D plane, and the planetary orbits are much smaller the problem is not as magnified. The other minor quibble I have is that you can’t give orders in sensor mode. In combat you have the default view and sensor view. Sensor view is little more than a wireframe, but is a necessity for finding smaller ships. The fact that you can’t give orders in this mode makes it a pain to target those smaller ships after you do find them.

The last gripe I have is that the view distance in battles is pretty low. I do have all the graphics settings turned up, but regardless it can be impossible to see where enemy ships are until they’re nearly on top of you. It would be nice to have had better view distance, though at least you can follow the missile trails and guess where they are.

The game graphics are pretty nice. 4X games aren’t exactly known for graphical prowess, but SotS does have very nice visuals for a 4X game. Models are detailed and battles look great with all the effects flying around. Some texture work is lacking, but even Sins of a Solar Empire, had some blurry texture work. There is some great art direction and each race’s ships look magnificent. The actual loading screen artwork is pretty bad though (imho), ranging from cartoonish to ridiculous. Space Empires V had some magnificent artwork and I would’ve preferred SotS to have shot for an equally serious look.

Sound is pretty lackluster. Compared to other 4X games, races have a lot of charm, with plenty of voice work and audio cues. That being said they’re not particularly great, though I get the feeling that they were intentionally shooting for a cheesy “feel”. Still, after a while it get’s really annoying, despite the fact that the information they deliver is a must. The main menu theme was great and the good variety of instruments and themes gave off a Battlestar Galactica feel. Unfortunately, only one track exists for the actual star map and it’s not that powerful or atmospheric. It is easy; however, to add in your own music assuming it’s in the .ogg format.

Lastly I should mention that besides the sandbox game there is multiplayer and scenarios. The scenarios aren’t really that great, but I’ve never been a scenario guy finding them far too restrictive. They’re basically smaller sandbox games with special rules and objectives. There’s no real story besides the starting text and no cut scenes of note, so there’s definitely better options out there for Scenario fans. Multiplayer is smooth and easy due to Drop-In, Drop-Out capability, and definitely makes battles much more enjoyable. All the normal options are included, and you can put time limits on Strategic Map turns to keep the game moving.

Sword of the Stars is a solid 4X game that I would recommend to fans of simpler games, or perhaps newcomers. For people who want more control over their empire management, there are better options. It reminds me of the MoO1vs.2 debate. SotS is like MoO1, so if you preferred the second you may want to pass this one by.

Sword of the Stars: Complete Collection (Buy at GamersGate)	Space Sector score: 7.3 (about the score system)

Zachary Cryer has been a SpaceSector contributor since May 2011. Besides having written this review he also did a Q&A of Sword of the Stars 2 with Chris Stewart (SotS2 Producer and Designer). Zachary has done many other reviews on his Gamespot page.

The story revolves around a special resource nick named REZ, and the two main factions trying to control it.  The militaristic UTA, and  the civilian population that has expanded so fast it is beyond manageable.

You are an aspiring Space Pirate that is also in search of rich REZ deposits, which happen to be located in the Core of the Galaxy you create, which can be between 150 stars to 300 stars.  As you travel towards the core you have the choice in each system to side with the Civilians or UTA, and these decisions do not carry over to the next system.

Depending on which side you join, you can dock at their Starbases to purchase that last blue print piece you need to start building that large cruiser you sorely need.  You will not be able to dock if your relations are too low, so you can run missions on their side to improve them.

While doing missions, and some storyline elements, you notice that the UTA has been dumping toxic chemicals in the environment.  This is where the Zombie element comes into play, as these toxins are causing ships to be infected.  There is no way for you to cleanse them, and must be left behind.

As far as indie titles go, the graphics and effects are well done.  The development team of three put this game together using Torque, which custom scripts that numbered more than 50,000.  They have notified me that they are currently working on transforming the script to code, which will optimize the game even further.  However, it is simply amazing what they have achieved from an off the shelf game engine and scripting.

The combat mechanics are well balanced, and actually make learning the game a challenge.  This is the fun part, in trying to configure your fleet to specific situations.  You have to manage two main resources which are REZ, and Goons (Crew).

REZ allows you to purchase blueprints, more ships once they are destroyed, and goons. Goons are required to crew your ships, and having a fuller crew gives your ships a bonus to it’s performance.  Goons can also be traded for faction standing improvement, or for REZ.  Some have complained that obtaining Goons is hard, and this has been addressed in the latest patch which will increase the chance of a Goon joining your crew.

When you destroy another ship, crew pods are ejected to safety.  That is until you either shoot the pods, or pick them up.  When you pick up a pod, you make the “Walk the Plank” or join your crew.  If they choose “Walk the Plank” (So to say), you see a nice animation of them being ejected out of your airlock into the harshness of open vacuum.  It is the attention to detail that make this game rise above the rest, which background radio chatter, and signs posting a speed limit of say “54,000” m.p.h.

The depth added to game comes from the tactical and strategic decisions a player can make while attempting to reach the core.  You have a Mothership that is upgraded by unlocking the storyline, and a line-up of ships to unlock by picking up pieces of blueprints from destroying that type.

This was a challenge for me to acquire the blue prints to build my first Large Hull “Right Hook”, because you have to take it down with ships that are outclassed.  I accomplished this by acquiring maxed out resources of Credits and Goons, and spamming rebuilds into the mission, eventually collecting enough blueprints to build my own “Right Hook”.

This element of the game can feel grindy, as you have to sometimes fall back into a safer mining system and configure a mining fleet and collect REZ for the next mission.  Or you have to go on “Hotel” missions and intercept Goon drop offs at Space Hotels, and impress the crew into a life of Piracy or show them “The Air Lock”.

When taking into context that SPAZ is an Indie game made by three people, and is priced at a discount for the Beta at around $15, I would recommend this game to fans of the genre.  While I have personally made comparisons to Star Control II, SPAZ has certainly earned its own place among this type of games.

Space Pirates and Zombies (v1.0) (Buy from GamersGate)	Space Sector score: 8.5 (about the score system)

Kyle Rees “Lordxorn” has been a Space Sector contributor since May 2011. Kyle is a credited tester on games like Distant Worlds: Return of the Shakturi, and Panzer Corps, and an avid World of Tanks player. See all Kyle’s posts here.

You see one of my main drives in this site is to be able to talk about one of my passions: Space Strategy Games (or Sci-Fi Strategy Games if you prefer) and to get the opportunity to talk with people in the industry and get the chance to review games, play games and keep people informed about all this. And although Distant Worlds is an important 4x game, that clearly deserves a comprehensive review, I get so bored playing it that I could never find the motivation to do it. But for respect and interested of the community here it is now.

Distant Worlds Review

Distant Worlds is a highly complex game. For you to understand better how complex it is I can tell you that it feels to me more like a 4x simulator than a 4x strategy game. When playing DW you get the sense of being in control of a government, not an empire, in the terms we are all used to. This means that you don’t have all the power. And this is a serious problem.

There is a clear distinction between public and private sector in DW and you control the public sector only. It’s something like being in control of NASA, making all the exploration, spaceship design and spaceship building and then the Private folk, eventually, follow on your footsteps. Although this does not seem to be a bad idea at first it turns out that not being in full control of your empire violates a fundamental requirement on “4 Reasons Why We Like to Play Space Strategy Games“.

Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of stuff to do in DW, so much that you must choose where to focus on leaving all the rest automated. You can focus on military aspects, ship design aspects, exploration, colonization, tourism, mining, you can (try to) control everything or you can even decide not to do anything at all and just watch the game unfold in fully automated mode.

The other DW downers for me, besides not having full control of my empire, are the Graphics and the User Interface.

Graphics are seriously outdated, poor and distracting. In the planet view you sometimes have so many ships on top of each other and so many lines and circles (remember that DW map view is 2D) that is really eye bleeding to watch all that. Ship’s rendering in specific are particularly awful. Planets and galaxy graphics are not terrible but are not good either. This is what you get when you choose to mix Spaceships RTS battles (tactical aspect) with galaxy/planetary view (strategic aspect) together in a bad way:

I find this confusion of ships, this constant overlapping totally unacceptable. Many times it’s very hard to select the ship you want and you keep selecting a planet, another ship or a starbase. Terrible. Or you choose to go all the way like Sins of a Solar Empire or Star Ruler did in providing a full 3D model of your world or you stick to the two separate perspectives (tactical and strategic) to give a clean galaxy/planetary perspective to the player and a nice 2D or 3D tactical battle perspective in separate like Sword of the Stars or Armada 2526 did. Trying to mix the two without a proper 3D engine simply doesn’t work, you have to agree with me on this.

But it gets worse. The User Interface is probably the worst aspect of DW. I did not tried the latest DW patches and the Shakturi expansion (probably they may have already fixed some of the issues) but in the original version of DW the user interface was really bad. Let’s start with a screenshot.

Distant Worlds: Ship Design Screen

The user interface has way too many buttons, drop-down choices and information (that sometimes is hard to read) and so it gets too overwhelming to remember what everything does (remember the simulation aspect I introduced earlier?). Another issue is the user interface presentation itself. The interface graphics lack beauty and are very WindowIsh. Let me summarize it this way, I’ve seen business software applications that are more appealing than this game’s user interface.

But it’s not just the presentation aspect, the overwhelming and hard to read information and the buttons that make the user interface bad. The user interface does not help you get where you want and does not provide any visibility of things going on and so you easily lose track of things. This is another serious issue.

For example you send a scout somewhere, or you forget about a mining base you sent to some system or a building order you did on some planet. In DW it’s very easy to lose track of things and to move around. You are constantly clicking your way through system to system and ship to ship because the user interface does not provide a monitoring panel of some sort telling you where your ships are. (If this is fixed by now please let me know so that I can add that note to this review).

The best example I can give you of a complete and successful opposite is the Sins of a Solar Empire UI monitoring panel (see red circle in the picture below).

Sins of a Solar Empire Trinity Screenshot

As you can see in a small corner in your screen you can keep track of dozens of ships and planets at a distance of a click, in DW just forget about it. It’s click fest (where was my ship again? What was I doing? err)

Another annoying issue I had with the DW user interface is that fleet management was a mess. I created a fleet then gave an order to go somewhere. Next time I noticed the fleet was disassembled and I needed constantly to recreate the fleet again and again (I seriously hope that they have fixed this by now, let me know if that is the case).

One more annoyance. Ships need to refuel in DW, and I mean a lot. I can say that perhaps 30 to 50% of the spaceship’s decisions you have to make are based on fuel. Sending a ship somewhere is not sufficient, you have to make sure that the ship really arrives at the destination with the amount of fuel it has. And the problem is that the decision cannot be made upfront, you need to monitor the ships all the way to see if their fuel is enough to reach the destinations.

This fuel thing is another unacceptable design decision (or bad implementation) for me. When fuel is up you need to refuel the ship with specially refueling ships but first you need to remember where the ship was headed and again the UI problem of not being able to track things. How less fun can this be? I seriously hope they have fixed this annoyance by now.

Bottom Line

Distant Worlds is a nice attempt to create a huge living universe full of things going on and also a good attempt to allow the user to choose the degree of control he wants. And although I find the concept appealing in my opinion the game failed to achieved that.

DW failure is due to an unappropriated and incomplete user interface, a bad design choice to separate the powers into public and private sector (in 4x empire building games we want to feel like we manage an empire not a realistic earth like government), poor graphics, a very steep learning curve and some bad design decisions along the way. All this culminates in a dry, sterile, overwhelming, boring and ultimately not fun game to play.

Having heard so many good things about this game (mostly from people in the game forums, now I get it) I felt compelled to play DW and like it, however the result was very different from what I expected. I got very quickly frustrated playing the game which resulted in the worst negative 4x gaming experience I had to date since Master of Orion 3 (that bad).

I recommend Distant Worlds only to hard-core fans of 4x sci-fi strategy gaming, and even here not for all. If you’re a less than hardcore fan of these type of games or if you are a casual player stay away from Distant Worlds.

[* Update 29th March 2011]: This review is based on Distant Worlds “vanilla”, i.e. the released version (Mar 25, 2010). The game is much better now after the patches so take the final score below as the score that reflected the state of the game right after release. Codeforce has released many patches since then, which have improved the game significantly. So by all means try out Distant Worlds as it stands now, including the Shakturi expansion. You will get a much better product that the one released in 2010. There is no demo available unfortunately. I invite you to read the Distant Return of the Shakturi review (1st DW expansion pack). It is a complete new experience.

Distant Worlds (Buy at Matrix Games Store)	Space Sector score: 5.0* (about the score system) See Distant Worlds: Return of the Shakturi review

Civilization 5 is the latest installment of the Civilization series and while the matrix of the series remains intact this sequel promises to innovate in one important aspect of the game, the combat system. Combat is no longer fought in squares but in hexagons but most important of all you no longer stack units in single tiles, now the approach is 1UPT (1 unit per tile) which makes all the difference from the strategic and tactical point of view.

For the newcomers that never played the Civilization series I invite you yo read my article Sid Meier’s Civilization V Preview that includes an introduction to the series.

Now let’s see how successful was Sid implementing this new combat system and the rest of the features of Civ 5. First, and this being a sequel, let’s start with the differences from its predecessors.

So what are the major differences in Civilization 5?

The Major differences in Civilization 5 from its predecessors, apart from overall better graphics, are the introduction of City-States and the revolution of the combat system by introducing the 1UPT (1 unit per tile) approach.

City-States are minor and independent powers normally reduced to single cities (as the name suggests). They do not compete for victory as the other civilizations but can be determinant to victory as they provide important bonuses that can make the difference in the long run. There are three types of City-States: – Maritime, Culture and Militaristic. The first provides food bonuses to your empire, the second provides culture bonuses and the third provides you with regular gift units. It’s up to you to know how to handle city-states. Sometimes they will make requests of you, if you comply you can get a boost in relations with that city-state. You can just conquer city-states and gain access to their nearby resources or you can make allies with them to benefit from the bonuses described above. It’s up to you.

Overall City-States are a very nice addition to the franchise as they provide more depth to diplomatic relations, more decisions to be made and ultimately are a fun feature that is undoubtedly a major plus for Civ5.

The other major difference in Civ5 is 1UPT. This is a completely new way to place and move troops. In its Civ predecessors troops could stack to a very big amount in a single map tile which sometimes resulted in the famous SoD (stacks of doom). Now in Civ5 a tile can only old a single military unit. This is a revolutionary feature that dramatically decreases the number of military units present in the world. To allow 1UPT the Civ5 mechanics changed significantly, for instance there is a limit of units you can build now, at least the ones that require special resources. To build swordsman you need iron, but if you only control 4 Iron resources you can only build 4 swordsman, in contrast to Civ4 where if you control a single resource of iron you could build an unlimited number of sword units.

With 1UPT tactical and strategical combat changes dramatically and gains a new meaning. Now each unit must be placed with care since only a handful of troops can attack a city or an enemy troop in the same turn. The units are now more valuable so you will not want to lose them so much. To add to this archers and siege units can now fire 2 to 3 tiles apart which enhances tactical combat even more. Maybe you will want to keep your archers in the back while you attack with swords in the middle and cavalry from the sides. It’s up to you to make your formations. Combat has evolved to a new level in the Civilization series. 1UPT is another plus for Civ5. I just have to remark that although 1UPT seems wonderful the AIs don’t seem to master it too well, at least at the time of this review. Maybe this will be fixed in future patches.

What about other changes, are there any?

The introduction of City-States and 1UPT were the really major differences of Civ5 in relation to its predecessors in my opinion but what about other changes? Apart from a different user interface, different music and new graphics is there any difference? Yes, there are plenty of differences.

In Civ5 they removed (from Civ4):

• Random events
• Local happiness management
• Health concept
• Maintenance concept
• Tech trading
• Religion
• Civics
• Espionage
• Corporations
• Foreign trade
• Map trading
• Culture assimilation
• No need to have naval transports for embarkation
• No need to have a road or river nearby to access resources
• Economy science/gold /culture sliders

They added:

• Global happiness management
• Social Policies
• Research Agreements (instead of tech trading)
• Pact of Cooperation (now declaration of friendship in new patch)
• Secrecy Pact (now replaced by publicly denounce in new patch)
• Increased building times
• Can buy land to expand borders
• Naval units can now bombard units and cities (present in Civ3, removed in Civ4)
• Archers, Catapults, Artillery can now attack 2 to 3 tiles away
• Cities now defend themselves even without garrisons
• Science is mostly a direct output of the number of population and not a function of money (as in Civ4)

There are other differences that I cannot remember now, if someone wants to note others feel free to point them out, I’ll add them later on.

Civics are now Social Policies

In Civ4 you could choose civics. These were special measures that you could adopt in your Empire to gain some benefits. You could adopt civics in Government, Legal, Labor, Economy and Religion aspects. The choice of the civics influenced diplomacy (if you had the same civics as the other civs they would like you, makes sense). Now in Civ5 civics were removed in favor of Social Policies.

The concept remains, you can choose between several types of rule styles and ideologies like Liberty, Tradition, Autocracy, Freedom, among others. The good thing is that you can now have a mix of these, like you can adopt a Liberty measure and a Tradition measure but some are incompatible like Autocracy and Freedom (makes sense).

Social Policies have trees for each policy so in a sense they are like mini tech trees of their own. Social Policies are a nice addition but they don’t qualify as major additions in my opinion since they are more like a remodeled Civics feature.

Diplomacy is now more … mysterious

To explain how the diplomacy has changed nothing is better than listening what the Civ5 lead designer Jon Shafer has to say about it (this clip was taken from Sulla’s “What Went Wrong with Civ5 article” that you can read here).

Here’s what Jon Shafer said in an E3 interview: “Our goal was to make diplomacy feel more like interacting with other players or world leaders, rather than a system to be min-maxed. No longer are diplomatic modifiers shown since this used to give away pretty much everything your computer-controlled rival nations were thinking. That’s one way of doing diplomacy in a strategy game, but we wanted there to be more mystery in the interaction. Some leaders will work behind your back, and showing the numbers would either give everything away or provides a misleading sense of security.” And in another interview: “One of our early goals was to improve the diplomatic experience in the game. In particular, we want there to be a sense of mystery to it, where the player doesn’t know exactly what to expect from the other players.”

Well the intention seemed good but the result was not that good. Remember about the diplomacy positive and negative modifiers (numbers) that you got in Civ4 that told you exactly how each leader feels about you? That is no more. In fact after successive complaints by the fans Jon Shafer receded a bit and in the new patch (1.0.1.141) you can now see some modifiers, not exactly quantitative numbers, just some subjective positive and negative sentences. The problem was (and still is) that diplomacy became .. well .. too mysterious, to the point that it can be considered as erratic, random or illogical depending to whom you talk. But one thing is certain, it does not matter which civ fan you talk since all of them will tell you that they don’t like the way diplomacy behaves, and even after the new big patch (1.0.1.141) there are still many things that need to be corrected.

For instance sometimes the AI will tell you that you are expanding too much near him while you are far away from that Civ, the AIs after some point start to be hostile to you without any good reason and many times all at the same time. Sometimes you liberate a Civ, and it becomes naturally friendly with you but in 5 turns it starts saying you are a bloodthirsty leader and they became angry with no apparent reason. And there are more of these erratic behaviors.

Diplomacy is perhaps one of the worse aspects of Civ5. The intention was good but it did not come out right. Maybe they can fix this with future patches and expansions.

Happiness management is now Global, is that a good thing?

In Civ4 happiness was managed locally in each city. A building you create in a city influences that city happiness alone. You needed to manage each city individually doing what you could to keep it happy. Now in Civ5 happiness is managed globally. Every resource you gain access to but more importantly every happiness building you create contributes to the global empire happiness status. You can argue, as I do, if this is logical to start with. What does a coliseum built-in city contributes to global happiness, shouldn’t that building influence that city alone. But apart from how the concept gets abstracted there is another aspect of global happiness that needs to be addressed.

There was always a mechanic in civilization games to detract an empire to become too big too quickly and turn completely unstoppable, and to avoid the player from adopting the infamous ICS strategy that is basically to create as many tiny cities as you possibly can. In Civ3 it was corruption, in Civ4 it was maintenance, in Civ5 it is global happiness. Unhappiness is generated by the number of population and number of cities so if you want to expand you need to access more resources and build more happy buildings. but there is a catch or more a side effect that the designers didn’t foresee.

Building more cities generates more population and subsequently more gold and more science completely in contrast with Civ4 where for every city you built you suffered a substantial economy impairment that could only turn over in the long run. If you expanded too much in Civ4 you could stale very quickly, ICS was not viable in Civ4. In Civ5 if you expand too much you can say that you are going to become unhappy but that is not such a big deal since the penalties of becoming unhappy are not so important. So in Civ5 you can adopt ICS and expand a lot without penalty. This is not what the developers intended, they intended us to build big cities but it has not turned out that way. This has been addressed in the new patch (1.0.1.141) but it’s still not completely fixed.

Buildings take too long to build and there is not so much to do …

One thing that I started noticing while playing Civ5 was that buildings took too much time to build and another thing that I experienced was that I was not building most of the structures available to me (in contrast with Civ4 where I built most of them). You may argue that this is ok since you don’t need to build every structure available to you, but the thing is that I probably don’t build around 50% of them EVER. It is a very strange thing to me still that I don’t bother with many buildings, first because they take forever to build, second because they just cost too much money to maintain and third simply because I just don’t care. Something does not feel right about this and again ask to any game fan and they will tell you the same thing. Some mods already exist to address this (because now forests only provide 1 hammer, and mines provide also less hammers) to help solve this issue a bit.

This leads to my next big issue with Civ5, there seems not to be enough things going on to keep you entertained.

Everybody knows that the franchise is famous by its “just one more turn” syndrome. This happens because the game is very addictive, simply because there is always much going on, and in a single turn much can happen and this keeps the gamer glued to the screen full of excitement and expectation anticipating what’s coming next. I’m sorry to tell you but Civ5 does not feel so addictive as its predecessor, simply because there is not much going on to keep you engaged. Some people call this immersion factor, it is a state where the player forgets about time (about everything) and just keeps playing and playing and clicking end-turn fully engaged in the game.

The problem in Civ5 is that so much as been removed that not much is left to keep the player entertained. Sure the battles are fun and keep you entertained, but Civ is not only about war is also about the feeling of advancement (the next building, the next unit, the next policy, the next tech breakthrough, etc). The player needs to be given constant options so that decisions can be made. With so many things removed like religion, random events, local happiness management, tech trading, espionage, health, foreign trade, corporations, culture assimilation, map trading etc. What are we supposed to do between turns? Many will say that Civ5 is now more a war game and if you want to take the full out of it you must engage in war, unfortunately there are many gamers (like me) that prefer the peaceful-occasional-war style of play. For those the game feels a bit boring.

Multiplayer

I did not tried multiplayer in Civ5 yet but judging from what the community is saying it seems it is still half-baked and full problems. For example there is no Hot Seat :| (yet)

Graphics, User Interface, Sound and Music

In general Civ5 improved the graphics of its predecessors in almost every way. The terrain, see, lakes, forests are now more believable than ever. A remark on rivers that don’t look so nice.

The user interface is good and functional. The leaders animations in the diplomacy screen are specially nice. Only a remark on the building queue system that is not so good as before and to a nice feature now gone, the multiple selection of cities (clicking Alt key in a city would select all cities in Civ4).

Music is nice, I specially like the Greek soundtrack however and in spite the music is ok I still prefer the Civ4 music. Sound is also good. The sounds of rifles (like a firing squad), the artillery sounds, naval units, nothing to complain here.

Conclusions

Civ5 is generally an enjoyable good game but it does not live to the expectations of the most hardcore fans (like me). Just search the forums in CivFanatics for example. It’s true that the stakes were very high since its predecessor Civ4 Beyond the Sword was already the culminating peak of optimizations to the franchise, and so it would always be very hard to meet the fans expectations.

For Civ5 to be completely successful it needed to evolve and to be able to surprise and re-engage the fans. The addition of City-States and 1UPT were very nice evolutions and promised to lead the franchise in the good direction but unfortunately there are many problems with Civ5 that has disappointed the fans. Things like the diplomacy problems (that the game cover introduced as “improved diplomacy”), global happiness shortcomings, long building times, boredom (not much to do) undermine the game to the point where it cannot be named a classic (yet).

Some things may and will be fixed in future patches and expansions for sure. If we remember well Civ4 was far from perfect when it was launched :)

If they can fix diplomacy, provide more things to do, decrease the building times and provide more justifications to build many structures I think the game can still become the best of the series. If that is possible only time will tell but will not be with the same lead designer. Jon Shafer left Firaxis (don’t know the details) so maybe Sid Meier himself can supervise the evolution of Civ5, I certainly hope so.

You can buy Civilization 5 from Amazon here (box). If you’re interested in the download version go here.

Sid Meier’s Civilization 5 (Buy at Amazon)	Space Sector score: 8.4 (about the score system)

Star Ruler sets you on a vast galaxy

Star Ruler lets you set as many systems as you like. Well that’s just theoretically, in practice I tried to set 15.000 but the game became really slow and eventually crashed so you should stick to up to 5000 (the nominal amount is 150). You can also setup the number of opponents (0 to 10) and the difficulty level (0 to 5). You can also set random research (random links) on/off, although sincerely I’m not sure how random links work.

Planet screen lets you manage your buildings and ships

When everything is set you start your game and you’re presented with your homeworld. If you double-click on it you’re presented with a building queue that you use to manage your buildings and ships constructions. You can also see in this screen which structures are already present in the planet and some more bits of information about the planet economy like the amount of labor, minerals, metals, advanced parts, electronics, food, citizens mood, etc.

The economy in Star Ruler seems to be complex although it is quite hard to grasp what each material is for and derived from. For example you don’t know up front how much an item costs to build, or which materials it will consume, unless you actually issue an order to build it on the building queue (then you can see the amount of resources needed to build the item). That is odd. (This was fixed in V1.0.0.8)

The economy figures are not very intuitive, or at least there is not sufficient information about them on the tutorial to debrief us on the details. You know however that Metals are built from Ore if you have a Metal Mining Factory built on your planet, Electronics are made from Metals if you have an Electronics Factory. Metals and Electronics put together make Advanced Parts. The level of these facilities dictate their output and the level of their capacity.

Randomized but confusing Research and Tech Tree

Star Ruler offers quite a confusing tech tree. Techs, or research areas, are structured in a flat way with no apparent connections between them. You have research areas like General Sciences, Particle Physics, Energy Sciences, Economics, Ship Construction just to name a few, that all sounds nice. Many other research areas are locked, represented with a question mark however it is not evident how you unlock such research fields. To my best guess you unlock these if you focus your research on a certain research area on the “hunch” or “guess” options.

As said you can focus or direct your research to a particular field by making of what is called a “hunch” or “guess”. That will consume quite a  lot of research time but is not evident what it will actually do or unlock. I tried making such specific research focus and the result was a link between two existing research fields. Another time however the result of such action was the unlock of a new research area.

But in the case of when there is a link between two already known techs what does that do? Will making a link between two techs unlocks a special tech after a certain amount of research? Will that make both techs cheaper, sincerely after what I’ve played I can’t still figure it out. Again Research is a very confusing part of the game and will take further time to understand, which is not a good thing. That is not to say that it is not well thought, it’s just that it is hard to grasp without much more play testing.

You can negotiate with other empires

In the Empire screen you can see your opponents.  You can see which ones have sent you deals or treaties, that is marked with a scroll and a question mark. Alternatively you can send them treaties by clicking on the scroll without the question mark.

When you propose a treat the window below will appear. You can propose Peace, make a Trade Agreement, Share Research or Declare War. You can demand resources (Trade Resources) or demand a specific technology.

Diplomacy and Negotiations are a plain simple but effective feature of the game.

You can design ships

Star Ruler lets you design your ships using the “Blueprints” screen (that you can see in the image below). You start by setting a Hull type (standard or station). You then choose from a set of different options from Control, Support, Engines, Defense & Armor, Weapons and Subsystems.

The design screen has an assistant that gives instructions for advice or if something vital is missing (e.g. “Engines are Missing” or “Insufficient Life Support” – seen on image above). Right after you save your designs and can build them through the planet screen. The ship design screen seems solid and is a good SR feature.

Music, Sound and Graphics

SR music does a good job on setting the right atmosphere, the sound track is varied and appropriate. The sound is basic, but in this type of games that is acceptable. Graphics are sub-par, nothing really extraordinary. You have nice models for the built-in types of ships (scouts, cruisers, dreadnaughts, fighters, etc) however. The starmap and planets graphics are ok. So in summary SR aesthetics are fair.

Bottom line

Star Ruler provides all the ingredients for a fair 4x space strategy game but fails in many ways in providing solid,  interesting and fun features. Everything in the SR world is somewhat flawed, starting from the User Interface. The 3D star map is flashy but not really very navigable, it is very easy to find yourself struggling to go from a particular point on the map to another and is very easy to lose your planets from sight and hard to find them again.

The Research is another area of the game that is not very well done since it is not easy to grasp how it works. This is a perfectly good example of how a probably good game design feature has been poorly executed. There are not enough tool tips to inform the player on how the “hunch” and “guess” works nor what links between research fields will do.

Taking into account that the game was developed by an Indie company we can’t really say that Star Ruler is a bad game but we can’t say it is good either. There are many other titles out there in the market that make far better than SR (Armada 2526, Sins of a Solar Empire, Galactic Civilizations 2, Sword of the Stars) so one has to ask if SR is really worth it. If you’re a hardcore fan of the genre probably you’ll want to give it a try but if you’re a fan but not a hardcore one probably it is not a good idea to enter in the Star Ruler Universe just yet and wait for a couple more patches.

You can buy Star Ruler at GamersGate (digital download).

[* Update: 23th June 2011]: Star Ruler has evolved a lot since its release. I wrote the review for V1.0.0.6 but the game is now on V1.0.7.81.1.0.0. Many things have changed since the review has taken place, judging from the extensive changes described in the patches change logs. So please take the score below with a pinch of salt. Star Ruler may be far better than it was at the time I wrote this review. I also understand that the developers rushed out the game to cover expenses, it’s surely not easy to be an indie producer. So by all means try Star Ruler out. Check out the demo.

[* Update 28th September 2011]: Made a re-review of Star Ruler (v1.1.0.0). Have a look here.

Star Ruler (v1.0.0.6) (Buy at GamersGate)	Space Sector score: 6.0* (Re-Review here) (about the score system)

In Gratuitous Space Battles you assign your ships, arrange them into fleets, give them upfront orders of engagement and then site down and watch the result of your deployment strategy: It’s all about wondering if all the decisions have been done right and if you can come out victorious from battle.

Ship Design

Spaceship design is the heart of the game since the construction decisions you make can ultimately mean the difference between victory and defeat.

Gratuitous Space Battles: Ship Design Screen

You begin by choosing a Hull for your ship, that can be a Fighter, Frigate or Cruiser, these are the three ship hull classes available in GSB. Each hull contains a certain number of slots that can be of two types: standard modules (squares) or hardpoints (exagons). The hardpoints can be used to put weapon modules, the standard slots are used to insert the other type of modules.

Spaceship Design Modules

When designing your ships you can insert several types of modules. These are: “Weapons”, “Defenses”, “Engines” and “Other” .

GSB: Weapons Modules

In Weapons you can insert several types of missile launchers, and a collection of energy beams (lasers, plasma, proton beam, etc). In Defenses you can insert several types of Armor and Shields.

GSB: Defense Modules

In Engines you can choose from a variety of engines, but beware that the bigger and the faster they are the more crew and energy they will require.

GSB: Engine Modules

Finally there are the Other modules. These vary from a range of modules like crew modules, energy modules, tractor beam, auto-repair systems, etc.

GSB: Other Modules

The Races

In the original GSB there are 4 races the player can choose from: The Federation, the Rebels, the Alliance and the Empire. Each race has its own art work which reflects into different hulls and different modules styles. This variety alone is enough to provide a different game experience to the player.

(Races from left to right: Federation, Rebels, Alliance, Empire)

Spaceship Combat

Spaceship combat is the core (and probably the single) gameplay mechanic of GSB. This is where everything happens. The player can choose from a set of missions that will be unblocked as soon as the player finishes the previous mission.

GSB: Fleet Deployment

There are three difficulty levels to choose from: Easy, Medium and Hard. The harder the challenge the more enemies you have to fight for to win the battle. In the Harder difficulty level you aren’t even allowed to know the size of your opponent.

Combat is not tactical but all about Strategy

Once you hit the “Fight!” button the battle begins and all you can do is watch it unfold. All your decisions have to be made upfront before everything begins in the fleet deployment panel. Decisions to be made account the types of ships you will use, the formation of these ships, the specific orders you can set to each ship and the amount of ships you will ultimately use. However the more ships you use the less honor points you receive. Honor points can be used to unlock new modules, ships and races as I will explain next.

GSB: Spaceship Battle

Among the different orders you can assign to your ships for instance you can instruct your fighters to escort your frigates and tell your frigates to protect your cruisers. There are many orders you can issue: Rescuer, Protector, Formation, Vulture, Escorter just to name a few.  So that’s why GSB is more about strategy than tactics since all decisions have to be made before the battle begins. After you start the battle you cannot instruct your ships to attack A or B neither you can give orders to specific modules of the ship, albeit you can see what each module status is, what they are aiming to, recharge rate, damage, etc.

You can unlock Modules, Ships and Races

As said above the player can win honor points if he fights battles with lower odds and came victorious (that is if he wins battles with less spaceships than the ones he was allowed to use). The player can trade these honor points later in the game Fleet HQ.

GSB: Fleet HQ Screen

The Fleet HQ is a panel screen where the player can trade his honor points to unlock new modules (new weapons, more potent shields, stronger armour, etc), new ships and new races.

Three Expansion Packs: Tribe, Order and the Swarm

Since the original GSB came out three expansion packs have already been released. These are called: The Tribe, The Order and The Swarm. Each of this expansion packs brings a new race with corresponding fighter, frigate and cruiser hulls, new modules, ship bonuses and new scenarios to fight for.

(From left to right: the Tribe, the Order and the Swarm)

Aesthetics: Music, Sound and Graphics

The Music score of GSB is certainly a plus feature. The battle sequences music transmit a dramatic feeling which helps the player to forget that he’s just watching the battle and not really taking any action. The sound is also good. From the big cruiser beam weapons firing to the small fighters blasters. Graphics are also good. In conclusion aesthetically GSB sounds and looks nice which is very positive since if this would not be the case the game appeal would drop significantly since the battles don’t require the player actions and the player must be kept entertained by other means.

Bottom Line

GSB ultimately is a fun game to play. Since I begun reviewing the game I may have fought now 90% of all the available scenarios straight on so you can get the feeling of how addictive the game really is. Most of this addictive factor comes from the honor points and the desire to trade them for new toys and new races. The introduction of the three new expansion packs have brought another degree of depth to the game since now there are more ships to fight with, new modules to unlock and new scenarios to fight.

Considering that the game has been developed by an Indie company and the fact that the gameplay is quite limited, since you cannot fight your battles but rather take only the decisions and design your ships, it is quite an achievement for Positech Games to have developed such an enjoyable game that will keep you entertained for many hours. Haa.. and I almost forget, you can also play online by establishing challenges and then connecting your friends to them which is another good feature that indeed enhances replayability.

For more information on Gratuitous Space Battles check the official GSB site at positech games.

Buy Gratuitous Space Battles Collector’s Edition	Space Sector score: 7.5 (about the score system)

Since then Ntronium Games has released a new Armada 2526 patch (v1.02), that brought some nice new features and overall improvements to the game that undoubtedly contributed to a more finished and solid product. So the scope of this review will be to give a more in-depth overview of the points that I did not grasp in the first impressions, after many more hours of game play, and will also concentrate in providing you with information about the races, AI aspects, game setup customization, victory conditions, game balance, v1.02 enhancements, overall conclusions and game score.

Armada 2526 Scope

Armada 2526 follows on the footsteps of games like Master of Orion 2, the Space Empires series, Galactic Civilizations, Sword of the Stars, StarTrek: Birth of the Federation and many other sci-fi TBS titles. In this sense Armada 2526 provides the traditional 4x TBS space strategy gaming experience.

The Races are diverse and charismatic, but there is no central game story

Armada 2526 offers 12 races for the player to choose from. There is no race customization option so you’ll have to make your pick according to your liking since each of them has its own specific traits, victory conditions and gameplay styles. In spite having no race customization the races are sufficiently distinct, charismatic and in a sufficient number to give you more than enough options to choose from. Each race will play much different due to their distinct traits and pursuits for victory however they all share the same technology tree and are allowed to build the same buildings and most of the available spaceships.

The story in Armada 2526 is … well there is no story in fact, only a background story for each race. And although this might be ok and even pleasant to the hardcore fans of the genre, in the sense that people may come up with their own stories, this may shun the less core fans or other gamers that are novice to the genre. So the game has no intro cinematic or background story, the player is thrown into the galaxy where he is expected to start writing his own tale from that point forward.

Game setup customization is rich and flexible

When you start your game you have the option to choose to play the tutorial, play a scenario or chose to customize your own game. If it is your first game you definitely should start from the tutorial. After that you probably will choose to generate your own custom game. Customizing a game is simple and Armada 2526 does a very good job providing you with lots of options. You may choose the amount of stars of the galaxy or the way they are distributed. You can set your galaxy size, the map type (condensed or disperse), the enemy races, the number of turns you would like to play and the difficulty level.

Victory conditions variability add depth and re-playability

In Armada 2526 you win if you eliminate all your rivals or if you get the best score (victory points) when the number of turns you set at the beginning run out (you may continue to play after that point if you like to). Each race has its own traits, both negative and positive, but most importantly they have different victory conditions which leads to a different path to victory and ultimately a different style of play. This is good because at the same time that this variety of victory conditions provides more gameplay options it also increases the game re-playability value which is a rather important feature every good game should always aim for.

For example playing with the Human race you get an unrest penalty and a psychic and hyperspace research fields penalty however you get a general research bonus. Your earn victory points if your population is happy enough and if you accomplished glorious victories during your game.

If you play with  the Unn Pirates you get radically different traits and victory conditions. When playing with the Unn you get extremely low population penalty and suffer from high unrest and low-income however you get more money from loot and have biological immunity. You win with the Unn if you can get lots of money from booty and if you can achieve a decent amount own population.

The AI does the job

Generally speaking Armada’s AI plays well. Rival races really do well on wars and are good at the negotiating table however at times the races do behave a bit erratically. For example the races sometimes reject extremely favorable deals and are very reluctant to accept some types of deals (like trade offers) or some times just start doing very repetitive behaviour stating demands that the player keeps refusing over and over. During war the AI sometimes tends to create too many ships of one kind, like transports ships, colony ships or small ships.

With the intent to reduce high-micromanagement stress the game offers very nice automation options to the player. If you want you can set colony management to automatic and set the development policy you’ll d like to set up for that system from that point forward (you can change automation policy at any time). For instance you may set a system to develop the military (that will create more war ships), to develop defenses (that will create more troops, missile bases and starbases), to develop research, improve income, increase population or just use a balanced development.

So in conclusion although there are some minor deficiencies the AI in general does a very nice job and is quite coherent. For instance the AI races seldom attack you with no clear reason, and will trade favorably with you if they like you and attack and reject deals you if they don’t like you.

The Music helps setting the right atmosphere

The sound effects of Armada 2526 are not spectacular but the music is very good. Some scores are even brilliant and really help setting the mood, especially during the exploration and expansion phases were you don’t know who lies beyond and which systems you expect to find.

The User Interface is ok but fails to provide enough control

Information is control and this is probably one of the aspects where Armada 2526 fells short. But this is not saying that the User Interface is bad, far from it. The UI is successful on providing basic functionality like colony management, research management, feature rich charts, good diplomacy screens and good system overview, however the UI does have its weaknesses.

When Armada 526 was first released (v1.01) it had serious problems regarding the UI (that you can read more about it in “Armada 2526 – New 4x space strategy game – First Impressions“). There were lots of information shortcomings. For instance not knowing which fleets are stationed in a planet, not knowing enough details about each building (which are the dependencies and which are the improvements), not knowing what the diplomacy indicators meant or how they are affected (the manual was also poor explaining this). Some of this issues were solved in v1.02 current version (released in early March 2010) while others were not yet sufficiently addressed.

There are also some basic functionalities missing in Armada 2526 like a planet list screen to present the player with all explored systems details: the planets that are colonized, not colonized, its mineral abundance, presence of asteroid fields, etc. This is a key feature that is missing in my opinion since it becomes essential at some point to provide this information to the player so that he does not lose track of things, specially during the exploration and expansion phases of the game.

Another poor UI functionality is the fleets list management screen. The fleets list really provides .. well the list of ships, but does not categorizes or merges them in sufficiently meaningful ways. For example you cannot sort the fleets list by type or by colony. So what happens is that at late games, when you have dozens or hundreds of ships, you tend to lose control on them. I speak by gaming experience, I tend to forget completely about the fleets list functionality in my games and this is not a good thing.

A word about patch v1.02

As said above Ntronium Games released a new patch for Armada 2526 early March 2010. Among other fine-tune enhancements and fixes the patch provides a new automatic population transport system that alleviates the burden of having to micromanage population immigration between systems. This was a nice improvement in my opinion. It works well and relieves the player from unnecessary boring tasks of relocating population almost every other turn.

Some research and economy tweaks were also performed like an option at game start-up to set the research speed (to solve the issue of research techs running out too quickly) or an option to reduce or eliminate the bureaucracy effect completely (a found annoyance by many players).

But one of the most important features introduced by this patch was the overall improvement of information about the game mostly done via tool-tips improvement which now includes a way to see the number of ships stationed in a designated area just by pointing the mouse cursor to it, among other information additions like the amount of discount on production an asteroid mining enterprise employs or the amount of pollution a technology complex produces among many other pieces of information. For a complete list of patch features please check the Ntronium Forums v1.023 Full Changes List.

Bottom line

Armada 2526 is a very solid game, it is well designed and provides a good gaming experience to the player. However it may not be for everybody, and in fact this is in line with the actual Ntronium philosophy which in its own words “targets  the discerning minority of hardcore strategy fans, rather than the mass market”. Armada 2526 is coherent with this motto, its non-linear sandbox mechanics allows (or forces) the player to make up their own stories and reduces the amount of micromanagement generally needed to accomplish some tasks. The game also puts gameplay before graphics, which are nothing too fancy but just ok.

Another good aspect about Armada 2526 resides on the high-involvement of the player during the development process and the continuous improvement of the game by its developers. The Armada 2526 game forums are very active with vibrant game discussions. The developers are always willing to hear the player and most of the changes introduced by patch v1.02 were in fact in response to many suggestions and bugs reported by the community.

So in summary if you’re a hardcore fan of Sci-Fi TBS (in the line of Master of Orion 2, Galactic Civilizations 2 or StarTrek: Birth of the Federation) or simply a fan of 4x strategy games in general this is the right game for you to try next. If you’re a fan of strategy games in general you may also like Armada 2526, but the chances are that if you’re not into this type of games probably this is not the right title for you unless you want to start being a fan :)

You can buy Armada 2526 from Iceberg Interactive (boxed version). Alternatively you can buy Armada 2526 from GamersGate (digital download version).

Armada 2526 Buy at GamersGate	Space Sector score: 8.0 (about the score system)

Sins of a Solar Empire does all that but in real-time, but this is not really a novelty since Imperium Galactica and StarWars Empire at War are also 4x RTS games. Sins provides a very interesting mix of real-time and 4x mechanics which results in a much more tactical game like Starcraft or Command & Conquer but still preserving a good depth of strategic options. So Sins is nothing like Master of Orion 2 or Galactic Civilizations but much more like Homeworld, Imperium Galactica or Star Wars: Empire at War.

But enough of comparisons, now its time to talk about Sins of a Solar Empire.

The Story and the Races

The game offers three races for the player to choose from. These are the Humans, the Advent and the Vasari. The intro cinematic is quite good and unveils a bit of the game story. The adventure takes place somewhere in the future were Humans control now several systems and operate trade among them. The Advent is a race that possesses mystic powers and want to spread their religion; the Vasari are the nasty Aliens that just want to take control of everything and everybody.

In terms of gameplay the races are “skins” of each other with respect to units and the infrastructure that can be built though however the research path is substantially different and the capital ships powers and other small details are also different. Albeit all that the three races do offer a different and unique experience to play and possess specific sound effects, music and concept art.

In the Beginning …

Like in a regular 4x space strategy game you start with your home planet. You then start to collect additional resources (metal and crystal in Sins) nearby and develop the infrastructure to increase population (in order to increase credits). In Sins you can construct labs, trade centers, refineries, resource extractors and other military and civilian infrastructure.

Regarding warfare you can build three types of spaceships (in increasing order of size and importance): frigates, cruisers and capital ships. You need to pursue your way through research to unlock many of the spaceships prototypes but the types of ships that certainly will catch your eye are the Capital Ships.

Capital Ships are the Queens of the Sinful Empire

Capital Ships are the backbone of your fleets, they possess special powers that you can unlock with time as long as you allow them to survive and gain experience from battle. And this is one huge fun factor in Sins. Not only they are gorgeous, big and powerful they can gain experience and level up. In this sense Sins offers a certain degree of RPG element to the gameplay.

You tend to really care about your capital ships since you cannot build many and so you tend to look at them as special, as your heroes in the battlefield. Their powers bring a lot of strategic and tactical depth because their special powers are diversified and serve specific roles. Some powers are for fleet carriers, others for bombing capabilities, others for support, others for offense. You have to think wisely how and where to deploy these ships and when or not to use them in the battlefield because their loss may cost you the battle.

Playing Sins is Fun

A lot is going on and lots of decisions can be made when playing Sins. And being an RTS all this happens in real-time in a nicely balanced tensed environment. Yes, RTS is more for the gamers that enjoy the adrenaline over comfortable chair experience.  When you are not developing your infrastructure you may be thinking in evolving your research. When fighting battles you may need to take control of your capital ships powers or acquire new powers as soon as they level up. If you’re not fighting wars you may, and should be, preparing for them and building ships.

From time to time your foes will give you quests and you should pay special attention to those since they may bring you closely to an opponent and prevent an imminent war. When you successfully complete some quests for a specific opponent he may be willing to agree on a cease-fire with you or even to accept a peace or trade treaty. And although the diplomatic options of Sins are basically these, until Sins Diplomacy expansion was released at least,  they are sufficient to give you enough strategic options when grouping and forming alliances to decide who to attack or not next.

Another fun aspect of Sins is the Pirate System. Pirates are a third-party opponent that is generally present in all games. As pirates you expect them to be treacherous, they don’t takes sides, their single purpose is to profit from bounty. Throughout the game players may put bounties on other players and Pirates will be driven to attack those players. So one interesting side-plot in the game is to fight this bounty war with your rivals since you can raise the bounty and in an instance divert the attention of the pirates from yourself and use them to strike your rival while you happily mass up your fleet to attack him next .

The User Interface gives you great control and is very functional

You may find all this overwhelming, and so did I thought at first, but surprisingly Sins plays very smoothly in an almost comfortable pace. The game is so well-balanced that you never feel too overwhelmed while battling or developing your empire at the same time. And part of the blame for this nice balance is the User Interface.

The UI is very well-built to help you achieve your goals as it provides you a great sense of control and overview over your empire. And your empire can be quite big with lots of planets and lots of ships fighting diverse battles. Planets and fleets are organized  in a very useful way and so you are as far as a button click from a fleet fighting a battle as you are a double-click from jumping to inspect a planet or give a construction order on another planet. Therefore it’s easy to give navigation orders to fleets, to retreat or to engage a determined planet all almost at the same time. In summary all these inter-galactic orders can be obtained at a distance of a single or double-click mouse button which is quite an achievement.

Graphics, Music and Sound

Sins looks and sounds great. The ships and structures models are really well done that even when you zoom in the maximum they still look fine and even have interesting details like bleeping presence lights. The User Interface is also beautifully well crafted with the information well in place with pretty icons.

The sound effects and dialogue also do a very good job. The music also helps establishing the right atmosphere depending on if you’re in peace times or war times.

A word about Entrenchment

The first expansion pack developed by Ironclad and Stardock for Sins was Entrenchment. They call it a micro-expansions mainly due to the small amount of changes it adds to the game and the fact of being sold for a relatively low price (~$10).

As the name suggests, Entrenchment brings new defensive options to the game. And these are good additions since sometimes you do feel a bit nervous about leaving your planets undefended while you strike the enemy, and splitting fleets is not always an easy decision. To alleviate a bit this stress Entrenchment unlocks Starbases, Mine Fields and new Tactical Defense upgrades. Entrenchment also allows you now to increase the speed of the game.

Starbases are very powerful and albeit expansive to build and upgrade they do take care of the job pretty decently. A single starbase can some times defend a planet single handed. Minefields are also a good defensive addition. The tactical defense upgrades also enhance substantially the global planetary defense network.

A word about Diplomacy

Diplomacy was the second and last micro-expansion to be released for Sins and as the name suggests it brought new diplomatic options to the game. Among the additions are a completely new technology tree specifically devoted to diplomatic options. Diplomacy finally unlocked one aspect that was surely lacking in the original title: – the capability to launch missions or quests to your rivals, this is surely a nice new feature.

Among the additions you also account a new panel called “relations” that gives you a nice overview of your relation status with each rival and also relations between themselves. There are lots of modifiers that affect your relations, as examples: – resources given in the past or the size of your fleet. Many more factors will affect the overall relations.

The Trinity product, this that is being reviewed, includes both the Entrenchment and Diplomacy expansions.

The bottom line

Sins of a Solar Empire – Trinity – is a very nicely done game. It excels on providing a rich gaming experience that will no doubt entertain you for many hours. Ironclad and Stardock deserve an applause for having created a game that successfully mixes the RTS mechanic with the 4x genre in such a fantastic way.

Sins of a Solar Empire is a very fun experience and I strongly recommend it to all Sci-Fi fans that love Real-Time strategy, this is a must title for you guys. For the Sci-Fi Turn-Based fans that enjoy more the traditional 4x experience I also recommend you have a try, I include myself in this last bunch and I can assure you that I have a lot of fun playing the game.

Sins of a Solar Empire – Trinity  (Buy at Gamestop/Impulse)	Space Sector score: 9.2 (about the score system)

Released in 1996 by Microprose, Master of Orion 2 Battle at Antares is undoubtedly considered the reference for 4x space strategy games. But what made this game so popular that after 13 years of game design innovation, better computer resources and way better available graphics no space strategy game seems to be able to surpass MOO2 success? It is true that the game represents a generation of gamers in a time where these games were a rare commodity. Nostalgia surely helps explain a bit the vote intention, nevertheless I think its important to examine the game thoroughly to try to reveal its formula to success.

The Story is simple yet compelling

MOO2 back-story presents a race called Antarans that were imprisoned by the Orions race (here the connection is made to the original Master of Orion game) in a long war that devastated most of the galaxy. The Antarans found (somehow) a way to escape imprisonment and immediately started a terror campaign against all races in the galaxy. With time the Antaran attacks become more frequent and violent and the races will need to decide if they continue to fight each other or if they put an end to this threat.

To stop their menace a race needs to find “a way” to get to the Antarans homeworld (Antares) and stop them once and for all. The race that is able to do this first wins. So it is literally Master of Orion: Battle at Antares.

The User Interface is clean and cohesive

All there is to the game fits in one screen. This is undeniably one of the game’s great assets. In so many games, since MOO2, you get not so streamlined menus that connect to sub-menus in not so much intuitive ways. It’s not hard to get confused or lost in some of today’s game user interfaces. In MOO2 the player has full control of its empire from a single screen, the sub-menus have a total depth of N-2.

In opposition to today’s great visual 3D effects, everything in MOO2 is 2D. Ok so the stars don’t shine, you cannot rotate the galaxy nor zoom-in or zoom-out but MOO2 does offer enough star and planet interactivity to keep the player happy by providing a simple to manage star map and a closeup screen, after clicking on a star, that summarizes the planets present on a given system in a very slick way.

The Colony Management screen is user-friendly, concise and sufficiently informative

One of the greatest leaps of MOO2 from its original Master of Orion game predecessor was the introduction of the planet micromanagement screen. In the original Master of Orion game all the planet management was extremely simple, basically all the player could do was to change the ship building/production/research/waste sliders (in a direct function to planet population and quality) to manage a colony output (pretty much like in Sword of the Stars, a recent 4x game).

In MOO2 the player is allowed to build structures, and these have a direct effect on the colony (and overall empire) economy, production capability, research output, population bonuses, military buildings, planetary defenses, terraforming, etc.

The introduction of this level of planet micromanagement brought a new flavour to the Orion gaming experience. The player has now a much richer experience and relationship with the planets as he can decide to specialize colonies to be research centers, industry plants or commerce/tax farms. With this level of micromanagement the player has the opportunity to see their planets slowly grow which is nice since this establishes an emotional bond between the player and the game as also provides the player with more refined control on what should be built.

The Economy system is simple and intuitive

As can be seen in the colony screen picture above the player can allocate the planet’s population to one of three main fields of the game economy: food production, industry output and research. For every million colonists there is one unit that can be allocated to one of these three economy items. Without food the planet population will starve to death, so to maintain a planet above starvation level some of its inhabitants must be allocated to farming business. The rest of the population can be allocated to industry output which can be converted into spaceship and buildings production, or to research that will generate research points required to unlock new technologies. The economy sounds simple and is indeed. To note that all the industry and food produced in the planet is  entirely diverted to that planet itself in contrast with [edit] food, [/edit] research points and money produced by taxes and trade, these two three resources sum up to the overall empire stock. [edit] Note: Excess food is transported to starving planets by freighters. [/edit]

MOO2 has no overall production/research empire sliders (like in Galactic Civilizations games), so you must manage each planet production individually which provides the player a lot of control (although also a few headaches as well – further explained below).

Space Combat is streamlined and enables the player to have full control (if desired)

If the player chooses the “tactical combat” option during game setup the space combat experience is completely tactical, which means that the player has full control on all its spaceships moves in a turn based fashion. All ships are ordered to attack and/or move in a one by one basis and the player is also allowed to choose individual weapons of each ship alone, attacking multiple targets if required.

The information presented onscreen is detailed without being too overwhelming. The graphics are basic but quite pretty. The options provided are sufficient.

Ground combat is basic (as it should be) but still fun and scoped

In contrast with spaceship combat, planetary invasions are not tactical. The invasion outcome is auto resolved in a direct relation of ground troop number, technology rank and available equipment. The more troops you bring with better guns the better are the chances you will win the day.  I think this is a very good approach for this kind of games since the gaming experience is really about colony management, spaceship design, spaceship combat and research rather than ground assault.

I find the MOO2 invasion mechanics quite simple but elegant giving the player a glimpse of its invasion outcome without turning it into a complex and off-scoped experience. After all it is just a planetary invasion, a minimum degree of atmosphere is required to give the player a sense of accomplishment but no more.

In-orbit space ships can bombard enemy colonies

One interesting aspect of planetary invasion in MOO2 is the option to bombard a planet. Many games in the past completely forgot about the usefulness of fleets in planetary invasion: therefore the bombard feature is a big plus for MOO2.  If the player did not forget to bring troop transports he is allowed to invade a planet but before he does that  all the planetary outer defenses, which includes any fleet defenses and starbases, must be defeated first. In a next stage the player is offered the possibility to invade the planet with his ground troops. If the player forgot or just does not have at hand troop transports he simply can order the bombardment of the planet (like a siege) to harass the planet colony for some turns or to destroy it completely, as the player decides.

Nothing can be more frustrating than having a full fleet of dreadnoughts orbiting a planet and not being offered the possibility to use all that firepower to some good use and just have fleets around doing nothing just because you forgot to bring some troop transports. Not in MOO2.

The spaceship design screen is user-friendly, intuitive and flexible

The MOO2 spaceship design concept is very simple and flexible. The player can choose one of the 6 types of hulls offered (Frigate to Doom Star) and is able to fully specialize its fleet.  The bigger the ship the more it can carry, the more damage it can inflict and take on and the more it costs.

In contrast with other recent space strategy games, [edit] most of the spaceship’s hulls don’t need to be researched  (like in GalCiv2 where most need) [\end] nor need to be confined to special types of hulls/missions (like in Sword of the Stars). MOO2 provides full design flexibility which provides another level of micromanagement to the player.

Races are charismatic. Customization really makes a difference and enables game re-playability

MOO2 provides 13 core races and the ability to fully customize a race. Many traits can be tweaked to the player flavor. The number of special abilities are enough to provide sufficient game re-playability with substantial gaming experience variety.

For instance if a player decides to be “creative” (one of the most expensive special abilities), all the potential research technologies (normally 1 to 3) can be  learned at once (this is the special core ability of the Psilons race). This gives a significant advantage on technology capability to that race. However this trait is expensive (8 points as can be seen below).

If the player decides for the “Tolerant” trait (the most expensive trait of them all: 10 points) the player is able to colonize all kinds of planets without the need to research the technology normally required to do that. does not suffer production losses due to pollution, and the planets can hold more people.  This is a huge advantage for a race for obvious reasons since when in the eXpansion phase this race may be unbeatable. The silicoids race has this trait built-in.

If however the player decides for the Lithovore (one of the most original traits, also the most expensive as Tolerant: 10 points) the player race does not need to “eat”, basically does not need to allocate resources for food production and obviously can reallocate these normally necessary resources to industry or research.

Remark: The silicoid race is both Tolerant and Lithovore which makes them one of the most ferocious races in early stages, if not stopped early they can become overwhelming in numbers and unbeatable at later game stages.

Of course that being Lithovore and Tolerant is very nice however the player needs to think twice before choosing these traits since  a lot of compromises need to be done due to these two traits high-cost. You will probably need to be repulsive, uncreative and/or low-G race for example just to be able to choose those 2 very interesting traits.

What makes the MOO2 race customization so brilliant is its option variety, imagination and balanced trait trade-off points scheme. It’s fascinating because the player can actually experience quite different gaming experiences just by choosing one or two different special abilities which favors a lot for game re-playability.

Diplomacy options are effective and stick to the point

The MOO2 diplomacy options are straightforward but quite effective. When proposing a treaty to a race this can be one of Trade, Research, Peace, Non-Aggression and Alliance, how more straightforward can it be. The player can make demands, make offers, exchange techs, declare war or surrender.

The strong point in MOO2 diplomacy options reside in the menu simplicity, the relevance of the options provided and the ease on using these options in a very concise way. Consider the diplomacy options of Sword of the Stars game for example, how more confusing can a diplomacy menu dialog be than that? It’s ok to be able to provide a lot of diplomacy options to the player but it’s not ok to provide a rather complex, non-intuitive and confusing user interface when delivering all those diplomacy options.

Research concept is solid with sufficient depth and variety

The MOO2 research concept is quite dissimilar from its predecessor. In MOO1 the technology tree was dynamic in the sense that the research could get random at times. After researching Shields IV the player could be able to research Shields VI but not V. In MOO2 the random effect was abandoned in favor of a concept built on top of the creative and uncreative race traits.

As I have already explained above, in the race customization topic, being creative allows the player to unlock all 2 to 3 technologies under a designated research field. Lets take Ion Fission Power above as an example. If the player neither has the creative trait nor is uncreative it is allowed to pick which technology is to be researched. In this example the player choice was to research Ion Drive. By making this decision the player will skip Ion Pulse Cannon and Shield Capacitors in favor of Ion Drive. If the player is in the other hand “uncreative” it will not be allowed to pick the tech from a set of 2 or 3 but a random technology will be unlocked for him. If the player is “creative” it will get all 2 to 3 technologies when researching a particular field.

As you see just by this trait choice alone (creative/uncreative), and the need to make a choice between potential technologies to research from (when the player is neither creative or uncreative), the player is already being given a lot of strategic options which is a great plus for the MOO2 research concept.

Spaceships have leaders, and so have planets

One very interesting concept of MOO2, that was recently mysteriously abandoned by all space strategy games I’ve played since then, is the Leaders concept. The Leaders are special people, Diplomats, Administrators, Experienced Captains, Helmsman, etc, that can be hired by the empire to enhance certain traits. For instance an experienced Helmsman can provide a significant defense bonus to a particular spaceship, a diplomat leader, as represented in the picture below, can provide a bonus to the diplomacy trait.

I don’t present here all the classes of Leaders because they were a lot of them, but I give you some examples:

• Environmentalist: Decreases the pollution level of all colonies
• Farming Leader: Increases the food grown by farmers
• Instructor: Increases the amount of experience per turn gained by all leaders and ships
• Science Leader: Increases the research that scientists can produce in a system
• Financial Leader: Increases each colony income by a percent
• Assassin: Has a chance of assassinating an enemy spy
• Commando: Increases the Ground Combat strength of all troops in the system
• Famous: Increases the chance of leaders wanting to join and decreases their hiring cost
• Trader: Increases the income earned from trade agreements
• Engineer: Increases the restoration rate of the ship’s shields and overall damage repair in
  combat
• Fighter Pilot: Increases the defense and beam weapon damage of all fighter craft used by the
  leader’s fleet.
• Weaponry: Increases the Ship’s Attack (of the ship assigned)

You may ask, as I do, why was the Leaders concept abandoned by recent games? I don’t have a clue why, this was certainly one of the best and most interesting features of MOO2. This concept must be brought back.

As everything in life MOO2 does have its flaws

Sometimes space combat can become a very tedious process. If the player decides to get tactical he must assign all ships one by one (and there can be many of them) in a very tedious point-and-click endless process that can take many minutes in later game stages. The game does offer an auto-play feature, however even with that the process can still be quite tedious as big battles require a huge number of turns to finish. To overcome this flaw Microprose released a MOO2 patch (v1.3.1) that somehow softened this problem by introducing a super-quick auto mode, but even there it still could be monotonous to watch.

The level of micromanagement provided by MOO2 is pointed as being at the same time the best and worst of its features. The player can have full control of its colonies however due to the lack of effective governors that could automate the more tedious tasks the player spends most of its time, during late games, assigning buildings for construction in all its planets one by one  turning the gameplay experience in a complete nightmare.

Graphics are obsolete for contemporary standards, however they were (more than) fine at the time.

Conclusion

Master of Orion II is simple, intuitive, user-friendly and fun. These are the principal ingredients for it being one of the most successful games of all times. In recap Master of Orion II provides the following formula to success:

• The Story is simple yet compelling
• The User Interface is clean and cohesive
• The Colony Management screen is user-friendly, concise and sufficiently informative
• The Economy system is simple and intuitive
• Space Combat is streamlined and enables the player to have full control (if desired)
• Ground combat is basic (as it should be) but still fun and scoped
• In-orbit space ships can bombard enemy colonies
• The spaceship design screen is user-friendly, intuitive and flexible
• Races are charismatic. Customization really makes a difference and enables game re-playability
• Diplomacy options are effective and stick to the point
• Research concept is solid with sufficient depth and variety
• Spaceships have leaders, and so have planets

How to play in Windows XP/Vista, MacOS and Linux:

Download the DOSBox DOS operating system emulator. The installation is simple and the games run smoothly, exactly as they did more than 13 years ago.

Master of Orion 2: Battle at Antares (Buy digital at GamersGate)	Space Sector score: 8.9 (about the score system)

Playing Ogame is like a breath of fresh air brought to the space strategy 4x gaming experience since it offers the possibility to play anywhere I have an internet connection while offering a rich and free multiplayer experience.

Other popular games of this type include:

• Travian: One of the most popular Antiquity – Empire building game;
• Earth 2025: Contemporary / Country Building
• Hattrick: Contemporary / Soccer Team
• You can find here a comprehensive list of other browser games.

Another excellent source of browser games I recommend is the Galaxy-News website.

Ogame is developed by Gameforge and is a space strategy game 4x like any other but you play it using solely your web browser. It features all the 4x essentials: research, resource gathering, colony management, spaceship building, fleet management and space combat but in real-time strategy style, against the traditional turn based gameplay, which means that everything in the player’s Ogame universe is happening real-time for all registered users. One can start researching a technology in the morning before breakfast, start building a spaceship during lunch time break from work and launch an attack on a nearby player right before bed time.

Ogame is free? What’s the catch?

There’s really no catch at all. The majority of these recent browser-based games are free of charge. Anyone can register and start playing them in a few minutes. In spite being free these games do have their own limitations (sounds like catch alert to me? .. not really, keep on reading). Many browser-based games you will find are completely free of charge, others offer free play with advertising, others still offer free play with micro-transactions or optional paid subscriptions. What this last type of games offer are bonus packs, extensions or exclusive add-ons that are not available in the standard game features and are only granted through small additional payments. Normally this is not a big deal if you want to play the game free of charge because usually this does not hurt the game experience too much. At least for Ogame that happens to be the case, I’m playing it for almost 3 months by now and I don’t really find the need to pay for any extra features (but others may find it useful of course).
You can find a list of many browser-based games of the different charging categories here.

Now back to Ogame: The game basics

When you register and start playing Ogame you start with your home planet empty. No mines, no technologies, no ships, no nothing. All you have is your tiny planetary base production needed to bootstrap your first production buildings: mines for metal, crystal  and deuterium (your three main resources). You

have a wide range of planetary improvements you can start building like a shipyard: required to build spaceships and planetary defenses; storage warehouses to store resources and the research lab to research new technologies. Each building can then be upgraded by constructing successive additional levels. So you start with your buildings all at level 0 and then you go on evolving them one by one for more production capacity, more research capability, etc.

Things take a looong time in Ogame

As I mentioned above Ogame is not a regular PC space strategy game 4x, where one can play for five hours straight just by clicking the end-turn button. This is a game where everything happens in real-time with hundreds and hundreds of players playing simultaneously, so you will end up needing to wait for your metal mine to finish, which can take you, for example, 1:30h to complete, or your battleship that will take you about 3 hours, or a technology that will take 24 hours to research. At some stage of play all is done at that time and you simply log off. Then you login later to check on your empire status.

Research and Technologies

The technology tree is complex enough to keep you busy wondering what to research next. There are plenty of technology dependencies. You can make breakthroughs in several categories: New buildings, research fields, spaceships and new planetary defense systems. In the left you can see an image for the Weapons Technology that boosts the spaceship weapons efficiency in 10%. Each evolution of this technology will add another 10% to weapons efficiency.

The Spaceships

Building spaceships will require you to unlock specific technologies and construct the appropriate building levels. There are several types of standard spaceships available for you to build: colony ships, transports, drones, regular fighters, heavy fighters, cruisers, battleships, destroyers, bombers, interceptors and even a dreaded Death Star. There is no spaceship customization, you have these models at your disposal and that’s it. However the process of unlocking all the spaceship models is complex enough to keep you busy for a long time waiting for your next space toy to be available for production.

Fleet Management

Managing fleets is quite easy as the interface is simple but effective (considering that the user interface is a browser). You can move your ships around; set them for colonization, spying missions, raids and transports of materials.

No Diplomacy?

Well, in Ogame there is no concept of Artificial Intelligence as there is no computer AI to compete with. All the players in Ogame are Human players (or at least they should be) so the diplomacy features offered to players are practically nonexistent. Basically players can forge alliances with other players or other alliances of players and all the rest must take its course via normal human-to-human message interchange from there.

Tips and Strategy Guide to get you started

You can find many tips and all kinds of information regarding Ogame in the web. You can have a look at the official OGame forum here. Another simple but effective source of tips and faqs can be found at GameFAQs, a strategy guide/FAQ maintained by Xeigrich. However if you’re aiming for a single source of condensed information you can also have a look at the “Ogame Tips Strategy Guide” e-Book published by “OgameTips” that you can get here.

The Good

• Free of charge
• Simple to register and start playing
• Very suitable for players with not much time in their hands that want to play occasionally
• Portable technology which allows the game to be played practically everywhere (only internet with browser availability required)

The Bad

• Not enough depth for the more demanding
• Not much going on, specially on early game stages
• Slow paced game not suitable for players eager for instant action

Conclusion

Considering that everything is done via a web browser client and that the game is free of charge Ogame is a space strategy game that at least deserves you to have a look at. The game may not be for everyone but could be for many of you that simply don’t have much time in your hands and cannot keep up with the micromanagement needs of most 4x space strategy games. If you’re a fan of space strategy gaming you will like to try this lightweight space strategy gaming experience that is Ogame.

You can find more information about Ogame here.

You can register and start playing Ogame now by clicking here.

OGame: Free Internet Space Strategy	Space Sector score: 6.5 (about the score system)