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)

Cryptstone Games has just released a demo for Star Prospector. Star Prospector is a sci-fi real-time strategy game with some RPG elements. The demo gives you full access to all of Star Prospector’s features and unlocks all the missions available in the first star system. The missions are randomly generated. Tried the demo for a few minutes and I was quite pleased with the game’s look & feel. Gameplay seems to be quite straightforward to master. Built a bot factory, a soldier bot and killed some alien creatures that were wondering around. Very simple stuff but quite fun.

For more information check out a small Star Prospector preview: Explore the Galaxy with Star Prospector – Coming Soon Space RTS for the PC. Have a look also at Star Prospector’s recently available video below. It is a tutorial video Cryptstone has assembled for us, to guide us on building our first base. Star Prospector costs $19.99 and is being sold exclusively for the Impulse digital platform. Have fun prospecting the galaxy!

(credits for these shots go to GameSpy)

Screenshots added on Dec 28, 2011

(thanks to sporemaster for bringing these up on the SoaSE forums!)

For more information check: Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion Announced

I’ve just received word from Cryptstone Games that Star Prospector was released today, and is now available for purchase on Impulse/GameStop. Star Prospector is part of the Space Sector’s sci-fi/space games to look for in 2012 list, and it is also the first of those to get released.

Star Prospector offers a gameplay mix of strategy (real-time) and RPG elements and I was intrigued not only by that but probably most of all due to its curious gameplay features. At first glance Star Prospector does not seem to be like your typical RTS game, and it seems to have something to offer for everyone. See this clip taken from the 2012′s sci-fi games list about Star Prospector, that I think describes well my thoughts on the game.

“Star Prospector features a mix between RPG and real-time strategy elements and your mission, in the role of a prospector, is to mine, salvage and build bases on remote planets in search for resources, technology and adventure. In the good tradition of RPG games you also get loot drops from your foes and skill points that will allow you to get access to new units, buildings and items. Although certainly not like StarCraft 2 in terms of graphics, Star Prospector seems to be a decent title, that intertwines some 4X elements and RPG elements. I’m curious to see what Cryptsone Games has assembled for us.” ~Adam Solo (Space Sector)

Star Prospector is available on Impulse/GameStop for the Windows PC starting today, for a launching price of $19.99 USD.

Steam has announced the release of Unstoppable Gorg, a casual sci-fi tower defense game from Futuremark Games Studio. Futuremark describes Unstoppable Gorg as a “Thrilling space defense game inspired by vintage sci-fi”.

Gameplay sounds simple, as usual in tower defense games, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t fun. For more than 40 levels you have to defend the solar system using satellites you send into orbit around planets, moons and space stations. You need to create a defense perimeter by rotating orbits to move your satellites into the best positions. Your job is to defeat Gorg’s plans and save the solar system, all in a classic sci-fi films from the 1950s setting with an appropriate storyline. The game is available on Steam for the PC and Mac with a 10% off promotion for the next week. It is also available on the App Store for the iPad. finally it will also be available for the Xbox Live Arcade soon.

I’m really feeling a bit nostalgic these days :) Syndicate, the original sci-fi strategy game developed by Bullfrog in the 90′s surely had some kind of magic to it. The game unfolds on a sci-fi cyberpunk setting where mega corporations have corrupted all the way to governments. Yes there’s plenty of violence in Syndicate, and immorality behind all that you do in the game, but there were few things after that that made me feel more powerful then when I used that Minigun and that Flamethrower to eradicate everything in my path. Hehe, it’s a game so there’s no problem in having a bit of fun :)

Good old Games (or GoG for short) has managed to bring Syndicate to their DRM-free collection of old video games. In two days GoG will start selling this great sci-fi strategy game masterpiece for $6 USD with some additional bonuses: the game manual, dark SF artworks, and avatars. In the meantime they have launched a contest to keep you in the loop.

A new Syndicate will come out this February 2012, but (un)fortunately (depending on your taste) now on a shooter form.

So, feeling in the mood to blow up buildings, shoot stuff and light everything on fire, all that in a sci-fi noir Blade Runner kinda of way? Then join the Syndicate and lead your cyborg mercenaries through missions to get the job done. Accidentally killed some innocents and half the city was left on fire? Well, that’s ok, it will take the Syndicate just a phone call to fix all that :)

No, it’s not a post from 19 years ago :), XCOM: Enemy Unknown (yes, a new true X-COM installment with the same name as the original title) was announced today by Firaxis and 2K Games.

So, Firaxis Games and 2K revealed that our dear sci-fi strategy series is back. That’s right, this fall (hopefully) we’ll have a new good old X-COM game to dive-in and lose ourselves doing your best to stop another alien invasion. Will lobster navigators return? Perhaps the flying flowers-of-doom are back? Or the tiny insectoid-like creatures hidden in someone’s backyard doing gods-know what kind of experiences on we poor humans.

Now, this was the sort of news that I was needing to lighten up my day. Boy, I’m so excited about this. The X-COM games are among my favorite games of all time! And it couldn’t get better, I guess. A new (true) sequel to X-COM that is currently being developed by Firaxis Games, which is undoubtably one of the best strategy producers out there, and we don’t need to wait years for having it! It’s ironic that this gets announced now when XCOM, a tactical shooter (not to be confused with the real-time and turn-based strategy title we are talking about here), is coming out this spring, curiously brought also by the same publisher (2K).

Steve Martin, Firaxis Games president, said “It’s been a dream of ours to recreate X-COM with our unique creative vision. We’re huge fans of the original game and it’s a once in a lifetime opportunity to re-envision a game that is as beloved as X-COM,”. Steve added “We were careful to keep XCOM: Enemy Unknown true to the elements that made X-COM such a revered game while delivering an entirely new story and gameplay experience for both die-hard X-COM fans and newcomers to the franchise.”

From left to right: X-COM: UFO Defense (aka UFO: Enemy Unknown) from 1993 , X-COM: Terror From the Deep (1995), X-COM: Apocalypse (1997). Credits for the images for Gamespot.com.

The original X-COM series offers a mix between a real-time strategic view where events unfold (new UFOs sighted, intercepted and crashed) and turn-based combat, where all the alien hunt fun began. Let’s hope both views are kept from the original installments, now (hopefully) with better graphics, improved gameplay and more surprises.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown will come out for the PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 this fall. Keep tuned-in for more information on this as it comes out. Thanks, Game Informer.

I’m excited to share with you that the L3O team has announced that they will resume development of their 4X space title, Horizon.

Horizon is a turn-based 4X space strategy game where combat is also set in turns and interestingly also not in a separate phase but always in the same tactical view, where all the gameplay unfolds. With so few 4X titles going turn-based these days Horizon is a great hope to bring back the good old “one-more-turn” feeling, that we like so much.

In a forum thread update the devs announced that they’re committed to “put the development of Horizon back on track”. They plan to increase the L3O team and for that they’ve also announced that they’re looking to “add a couple of experienced game developers to the team“. They’re looking for a game programmer and a 3D artist. If you’re interested in joining the team you can contact them here.

Regarding “when the game will be ready” L3O’s team made a tentative release date to before the end of 2012.

See L3O’s full announcement in the L3O forums.

To know (almost) everything about Horizon I invite you to read a small preview we did some time ago presenting Horizon’s features and inspirations, and an interview we did with Horizon’s designer and producer Raffi Parsekhian. In the interview Raffi speaks about Horizon’s characteristics, features, innovations, background story, spaceship design, combat, bombardment and much more. Don’t miss it!

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)

After a bit of a rough start, due to lack of players, Tindalos has evolved the game’s business model and Stellar Impact has now a much more solid player base. When the game was first released players were only allowed to play a limited amount of games. Now the limit is how much you can level up your ships.

Stellar Impact is free to play however there is a premium account (a single and final purchase) where you will be able to unlock much stuff and above all that be allowed to level up your ships further. For more info checkout the Stellar Impact review.

New Trailer

Anno 2070 is the new game of the Anno series that takes place in an Earth’s near-future where the sea’s rising level has destroyed the coastal cities. The player will need to gather resources, engage in diplomacy and trade with competitors in order to build a new society.

The player is offered the choice between two factions, that represent the two extreme ideals that we now face in our present time. The player may choose to play with the efficient and proven technology moguls called Tycoons and the eco-friendly sustainability seeking members called The Ecos.

You can grab the recently available demo to get a taste of the game. You’ll be able to play the first two missions of the campaign mode.

Key Features

• Build massive cities
• Choose between two factions: the industrious Tycoons or the environmentally-friendly Ecos
• Evolving and dynamic world. You decisions directly affect how the game looks over time
• Sea depths exploration. (e.g. algae farms, tidal turbines and oil exploration)
• Multiple game modes. Story-driven single player campaign, sand-box mode and multiplayer and online features
• Forge alliances with your opponents
• Smuggle goods between cities

Trailer

Screenshots

[Edit 29/10/11]: Apparently there were some problems with the release. The word was that it was something to do with wrong versions uploaded to Steam by the devs and the publisher. Checkout the state of the game post done by Fredrik Wester, Paradox Interactive’s CEO. It’s appreciated the way Fredrik admits the mistakes. Hope they fix this soon.

[Edit 30/10/11]: Martin Cirulis, Kerberos Productions’ CEO/Creative Director also made a statement about SotS2′s current state and what’s expected to be done in order to fix the problem.

For more information check Paradox Interactive’s website.

System Requirements

(as in the publisher – Paradox Interactive - website)

Operating system: Windows 7 64-bit
Processor: Core2 Duo or equivalent
Memory: 2 GB RAM
Hard disk space: 2 GB free space
Video: 512 MB DirectX 10
Sound: Any Windows Vista compatible sound device, stereo speakers or head phones
DirectX®: February 2010 or newer (DX10)
Controller support: 3-button mouse, keyboard and speakers
Internet required for online play.
LAN required for local multiplayer. 8 player multiplayer.

Matrix Games and Code Force announced Legends last September 2011. The list of additions to Return of the Shakturi (DW’s first expansion) is very promising so I decided to write this Legends’ preview to try and condensate these changes and present them in a nice wrapper for you guys, so that you know a bit more about what to expect in November 2011, current Legends’ release date target.

So, what’ll be new in Legends?

The major additions and changes to Return of the Shakturi, that I could take note of, are:

- Leaders / characters
- Influence spheres
- New ships models (around 600!) with better graphics
- Ability to track where your ships are heading (ship vectors overlay)
- Potential colonies, scenic and research locations shown on main map (more overlays)
- Expanded technology tree (e.g. cutting lasers, 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, memory usage decrease and sharper graphics

Wow! Where to begin.

The major new addition of Legends is no doubt the new character system. Legends brings Leaders, Admirals, Generals, Ambassadors, Governors, Agents and Scientists to scene. All of them with their own skills and traits with the opportunity to advance and improve them along the way. The character you start with, in the beginning of your games is your leader. Leaders have effects that are empire-wide, that is, they influence your entire empire, every planet, base, etc. Some factions are more likely to get certain types of characters than others. Characters can be lost along the way though due to violent events, accidents or retirement.

Each character has some skills. Next to each of these skills there’s a progress bar (0% in the example below), that measures progress towards the next level in that skill. You can increase skills (or acquire new ones) through experience in areas related to those skills. Characters also have traits. Your characters may start with one or more traits and may acquire more based on their experiences. You may start with additional characters. For example Randul Shokia (seen below) is a special scientist character.

Randul provides bonus to research, in the research base you decide to put him in. In the example above he adds bonuses to all types of research fields. If you assign Randul to a particular Energy Research station with a +15% bonus to Energy Research, his +34% would add on top of that to give you a combined +49% bonus to Energy Research at that location. Besides skills Randul also has a special trait. Randul is methodical which means that your empire is less likely to suffer critical research failures (critical research is a new feature in Legends, which can give you a spontaneous crash program or a boost in a research area). He gives more reliability to your research in that sense.

One feature I found particularly interesting in the character’s system is that some characters remain mysterious until you actually use them and find out about their abilities. In the example below Kweeki Woppit has known traits but unknown skills. This is an interesting touch in my opinion since it adds an element of surprise and gets the player a little curious (two essentials elements in 4X strategy games) of what to expect from their characters.

Kweeki is a Colony Governor. You can assign Colony Governors to a particular colony and their bonuses apply only to that colony. Similarly, Fleet Admirals are assigned to a particular Fleet or Base, Troop Generals to a particular Fleet or Colony, and so on.

You can assign more than one character to a particular location and bonus from them will add up, though they may not be purely additive. In Erik Rutins’ own words (one of DW’s main developers) «(…) if for example you have a Fleet Admiral who is great at combat and another Fleet Admiral who excels at Fighter Operations, assigning both to a fleet that has Capital Ships as well as Carriers can lead to better results than just having one or the other. However, since you generally will have fewer exceptional Fleet Admirals than fleets, you have to weigh the benefits of having one exceptional fleet against the flexibility of having two fleets that are each pretty good».

Another important aspect in Legends is that the devs state they’ve implemented a better memory management method. This should allow for better performance and memory usage decrease. They also state that this has allowed them to remove the compression mechanism they were using previously, on many of the ship and planet graphics. The result is that Legends should look better, or at least sharper from what I was lead to believe (less blurriness that you could spot in RotS here and there).

In addition to sharper graphics Legends shall also feature 22 new high resolution ship sets (added to the existing ones from Distant Worlds and Distant Worlds: Return of the Shakturi), all obtained from one of Distant Worlds’ players and modders, artist Martin Wood. Here’s an example of some of the new Teekan ships.

That’s approximately 600 new ship/base images right there in Legends! (if you didn’t use Martin Wood’s mod before that is). This was one of the weakest points in Return of the Shakturi in my opinion, and now that seems to have been properly addressed. Big plus! Don’t know if planets and ruins have also been worked at or not though. We’ll have to see.

Legends also brings spheres of influence, or borders. The actual use for them is still a bit unclear to me. My best guess is that they tell how likely foreign colonies are to flip (turn to other empires) if they are inside an empire’s influence sphere. In that regard I think they serve as cultural/influence borders but I’m not sure of their full scope. In Erik’s own words «Spheres of influence are not quite the same as the way we think of borders here on our planet. They project from your colonies and define the space that you could control. Systems within your sphere of influence that you have at least explored are considered under your control. Borders in space are enforced within each controlled system but not in the deep space between systems. Also, building a mining station (for example) outside of your sphere of influence does not give you control over that system (though colonizing it does)». 

An interesting feature would be for these influence spheres to represent a race’s space territorial dominance. Aggressive races would tend to get annoyed if their space was trespassed or if other race’s colonies or mining stations are built inside their influence zones, but I’m just speculating here. It would be cool to have that kind of territoriality though, although I now that theme is a bit controversial and would not be appreciated by some.

In addition to all this Legends will feature new faction-specific victory conditions that can completely change how a faction plays, to faction-specific special events and resource bonuses. In the example below the Ugnari have 4 particular victory conditions: two of them (as examples) are to get 25% most trade and 25% most mining stations.

Another aspect where Legends devs invested a bit was on a new UI system that provides overlay information directly on the main map. At the choice of the player it shall now be possible to switch on/off layers for ship vectors, i.e. see where ships are going, potential colonies, scenic and research locations all in the main map with no need for more actions and clicks through secondary screens. This is a brilliant new addition that could be exploited for even more overlays that may be considered useful in the future.

Potential colonies shown directly in the main map are a particularly interesting feature to have in my opinion since they’ll surely help late game expansion, where there are simply too many planets to look in the expansion planner and what you simply need is a quick way to see where are the potential worlds for suitable colonies in favorable strategic locations. I was very happy to see these new overlays. The UI accessibility was already very good in RotS, now it will be brought to the next level.

Besides all that has been described already there are more things new in Legends. Examples are the expanded technology tree, the improved fleet management and automation (including fleet postures), the improved modding support (including full race and character modding), the improved refueling system (more intelligent fuel management is also a big plus) and the improved diplomacy system with refueling and mining rights and immigration policies (which should provide even richer diplomatic experiences).

Bottom Line

This preview is by no means thorough. Believe it or not, it is more a sneak peak on major changes. Legends adds much more stuff (judging from what I could understand in the game forums, from what I didn’t have access to and others I couldn’t find in detail in my digging). The preview was based on information provided by the devs and the DW’s community on matrix games’ distant world forums. If you want to get more information on Legends, or Distant Worlds in general, that’s the place I suggest you have a look at. I’m sure I missed a lot of things but judging from the changes featured in this preview alone it’s amazing the amount of new things this new expansion will bring, on top of so much RotS already offered.

I am really looking forward for Legends. And if you’re a 4X space strategy game lover, as I am, I think you cannot afford to miss this one either. I think they’re making history here. In my opinion Distant Worlds Legends shows enough potential to be running for the best 4X space strategy game ever made. That’s a very controversial and bold statement to throw I know, but I’m totally convinced that Legends may be that good.

\Edit (23/11/2011): Legends is out! Get it here.

About Heart of the Swarm

Heart of the Swarm is the first expansion pack to Blizzard’s sci-fi real time strategy game, StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty. Heart of the Swarm continues Wings of Liberty’s story with 20 new missions now focusing on the Zerg race and the female hero character Kerrigan. New multiplayer content is also expected to be included in the expansion, as well as new features and upgrades to the Battle.net online platform.

StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm is being developed for Mac and Windows. There are no current plans for any console platform. Current release date is still TBA.

I thought it was time we had another contest at Space Sector. So, I’m proud to announce that Space Sector has teamed up with Paradox Interactive and we’ll host a giveaway contest at Space Sector. Paradox will offer 10 copies of Sword of the Stars 2: Lords of Winter, this 28th of October. But that’s not all. Paradox was generous and in addition to the 10 SotS2 copies it will also offer 20 copies of Sword of the Stars Complete Collection (the entire SotS original series).

This means that the lucky 10 will get Sword of the Stars II and Sword of the Stars Complete Collection. The next set of 10 lucky ones will receive a copy of Sword of the Stars Complete Collection, which is a great way to enter in the SotS Universe also. So, in total there will be a total of 20 prize winners in this contest.

How to enter in the contest

1. Follow on twitter: @spacesector, @swordofthestars, @PDXinteractive - OR – like Space Sector, Sword of the Stars and Paradox on facebook
2. Tweet for Sword of the Stars. Example: “I will eXplore, eXpand, eXploit & eXterminate the universe! @spacesector @swordofthestars @PDXinteractive to win a copy” – OR – share this blog post URL in facebook
3. For the social network non-users out there (that don’t want to join these networks) you can still enter the contest. You folks can forget about points 1 and 2, you just need to subscribe the Space Sector newsletter (in the sidebar to the right) and Paradox’s newsletter by registering in their forum. This is not a big deal to ask I guess, and you can unsubscribe both newsletters later at any time if you wish. Although I think you’d lose a great opportunity to stay in touch with Space Sector’s news ;)
4. Make a comment in this blog post below. Submit your name and email in the comment form (we’ll use that email to contact you if you’re one of the winners). Let us know also what you’ve done regarding point 1,  2 and 3. Don’t forget to include your twitter id or facebook id (for points 1 and 2) or the username you used to register the Paradox forum (for point 3).

I will give examples of how you guys should post your comments to become eligible:

@<your twitter name here> has followed @spacesector, @swordofthestars and @PDXinteractive and tweeted

Another example:

<your facebook name here> liked Space Sector, Sword of the Stars and Paradox and shared this post in facebook

One more:

Registered Space Sector newsletter and registered in Paradox’s forum with username [the username you used to register in paradox's forum here].

We’ll pick the winners on the 28th of October 2011 at 12:00 am EST. I’ll check those to see if they fulfilled all points, if they shared and what it was. Edit: I forgot to mention. Contest closes on 27th October 12:00am EST. After that point you can no longer enter the contest. I’ll signal that by changing the contest status to [CLOSED].

The contest winners will be generated randomly with the help of random.org

Games will be provided via Steam.

Games’ info:

• Sword of the Stars 2: Q&A with Chris Stewart
• Sword of the Stars 2: Opening Cinematic Sneak Peak
• Sword of the Stars 2: New Video Interview With Martin Cirulis at GDC
• Sword of the Stars Complete Collection – Review

Good luck!

Cheers

Adam Solo

GTB is expected to be released sometime in Q1 2012 for both PC and Mac.

Trailer

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

There is no release date announced yet but there is already a gameplay trailer and some screenshots that you can find below. For more information checkout the game official website.

Features

• Simple and addictive game play: explore, discover, build a fleet, conquer.
• Turn based fleet combat.
• Galaxy Map helps you navigate your fleet through many constellations.
• Stunning universe dominated by four civilizations.
• 80 one-on-one turn based battles in stunning 3D space constellations.
• Fleet combinations consisting of Laser, Missile and Repair spaceships.
• A dozen special attacks, each with stunning visuals.
• Over 20 mother ship turn based card battles.
• Crystal Mining mini game to find crystals needed for special attacks.
• Search For Life mini game with 5 levels of achievements – each with a crystal pack reward.
• Simple crafting panel in the space station.
• Achievements panel “Hall of Fame” with medals and ranks.
• Boost your leadership status to become an admiral.

Gameplay Trailer

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)