Seems interesting, I'll keep an eye on it, especially as it looks like there's a mac version, though steam only lists it as being on PC. I'll wait till closer to final release before buying though, would rather get the final balanced experience. Plus I have plenty of playtime left on AI War: Fleet Command which is an excellent space-themed strategy game. Edit: Looked through the list of all the races. All overly serious, and then The Horatio - hilarious
I finally had a chance to put in a few hours in this. Incidentally, started playing at midnight last night and time flew by really fast. So far it's probably the closest thing to the 4x game I've ever wanted. It's clearly inspired in some ways by Sword of the Stars, but also by the Civilization series and probably a lot more different ones. What I like about it is there's a lot of micro management. (some could argue too much, but I prefer micro over macro.) When you colonize star systems (here each star has multiple planets, randomly generated, with different types, anomalies, etc) In fact I'll post a screenshot. You can also have special resources, more when you discover techs ala Civilization. Each planet has an exploitation type you can put on it to boost its inherent output, but all the improvements you build apply to the whole solar system. That screenshot was when I had just started a game so there isn't much to see. The combat is pretty unique in that it's largely automated, but you play "cards" or whatever they are named for 3 rounds. If you counter the opponent's moves yours become more powerful. I haven't gotten the hang of it yet. The combat itself is really well rendered and pretty spectacular. All that would make me happier is even more random events, a randomized tech tree. Overall, highly recommended, it's in alpha but more polished that a lot of released games. They just released a huge patch yesterday that fixed like a hundred things. Also, Space Amoebas.
The game has grown on me a bit, and the recent update was definitely welcome. I did try it again recently to see what had changed. I like that you can now interdict ships (that was a major problem). Did they speed up combat a bit? Because it seems a little bit faster now, but I could be wrong (that was something I complained about). BTW, those space Amoebas look more like birds. They aren't from the game are they? Because I have yet to encounter them.
They're the next faction, not in yet. Also there's a new small patch first: I don't know if they sped it up or not since I didn't play before yesterday's patch.
FYI, the beta was just released and there have been a fair number of changes (including the adding in of the 3 remaining factions, plus multiplayer). Here is a link to the patch notes (see the two last posts in the thread): http://forums.amplitude-studios.com/showthread.php?446-Playable-Alpha-Release-Notes
Sigh, and a surprise 5gb GW2 update took me by surprised, not sure when Im gonna be able to update this since I need to download for like 5 days.
FYI, the new DLC for ES is coming out on Wednesday. Here's a summary of the features: http://www.amplitude-studios.com/Articles/EXPANSION-PACK As I may have mentioned, I've become a fair bit of a fanatic about this game, so I'm looking forward to it. It looks like the big changes will be with regards to combat and ship design.
Just to let you know, I just started a game with the new ES expansion. I'm playing as the new race "The Harmony" and it's... weird... That's the best way I can describe it. Playing as the Harmony is unlike playing as any of the other races. For one thing, the Harmony doesn't use dust for anything. Dust, if you don't recall or know it, is, essentially, the game's currency. And they don't use it at all. That means that you can't rush-build anything. You can't produce wealth on a planet (instead you can produce extra food, which, as it turns out, you REALLY need to do). The tax rate, instead of increasing dust income, creates a trade-off between food production and research. And there's no unhappiness whatsoever from taxes. So I have no idea now what I'm doing -- I want to have a food surplus on all my planets so that their population grows, but consequently, research slows to a crawl. I don't know how the other races have been scaled to this crazy thing but apparently they have been (I think) since even at the slow rate, I seem to have been the first to discover the Cassimir effect (the tech that allows you to use the warp lines, or whatever they are called, connecting different constellations to travel along). Without the ability to rush-build stuff, I'm not sure how I can deal with planetary invasions (formerly, if a planet is attacked, I could rush-build defenses, unless the embargo prevented a required resource to get to that planet). Oh, and I can't hire heroes/leaders because... no dust. no joke. Oh, and also, The Harmony start with this really truly slow travel movement. But they get a tech early on that they can research to double that. But they do get bonuses to strategic and luxury resources (I think you can have a monopoly with 1 less of them, so you only need 3 instead of 4, which is cool). Anyway, I feel like I'm playing blind and that maybe to start with, I should have taken a race that I was already familiar with, or played on an easier difficulty level. But we'll see how it goes.
BTW, my game crashed at around turn 120ish or so when another faction tried to attack some of my ships. So it seems to have some stability issues right now. Also, they reworked the ship design screen -- The advantage of the change I suppose is that you no longer have to scroll to see all of the different kinds of items you can add to a ship (and yes, there's a lot more stuff there now). But if you've been playing for a while, you were probably used to it, so the changes are not for us. Maybe they'll make the game more friendly to newbies, but since the tech screen is still as random and confusing as ever to newbies, I don't think that the change will especially make a difference.
I want to say now that after spending some time playing the game with the new expansion, I'm not loving it at all. Going to war is now a tedious affair due to new AI tactics. You could still get stalemated before, but now you can get stalemated by inferior forces consisting of swarms of tiny fleets composed of scouts and colonizers. I have a post here with my suggestions to the devs in case you want to read it. http://steamcommunity.com/app/208140/discussions/0/846957366842235131/ BTW, my suggestions are in a later post (sorry, it linked the entire thread not the specific post i wanted to link).
Yeah, I picked this game up recently and can agree with most of your points Hal. It seems to me that most of the cheapness could be countered by system defenses that can fire on fleets instead of simply modifying the system defense value. A passive improvement that does a small amount of damage each turn would work wonders in deterring these kind of stupid tactics and would be useful against larger fleets though not enough stop them without intervention from your own fleets. (think orbital missile platforms or ground based anti ship weapons) This would also have the added benefit of making improvement smashing bombs more useful. So far I haven't seen much use in dropping those things on systems I intend to occupy.
The biggest problem I ran into was just. Like. The reworked how weapons and ranges and defenses worked, to the point that I actually have no idea what they actually DO, especially the defenses, which tell give you a bunch of stats that are not exactly meaningful, and the difference between the different phases (like I get the different stats between melee/long range/medium range variations but how do those stats actually relate to the respective phase?) Plus I ended up with the AI invading a system and retreating if I tried to chase them off... but staying in the system and continuing the siege without any way of driving them off so. Holding off until some patches. (Really I think a lot of the tactics I've seen--swarms and then retreat to just hold ground far longer than you should are probably a good example of AI tactics that are completely reasonable and GOOD in terms of working, but terrible in terms of actually fun to play against. Unless you're the Sheriden I guess?*) (As far as dealing with invasions as the harmony, I'd assume you'd build ships constantly and just stockpile them since there's no maintenance limit going on--the only cost to stockpiling ships is the opportunity cost in colony growth lost when you built the ship, and that's not even an issue if the system's population is full; as well as like. Expand everywhere that doesn't have high Dust to take advantage of your lack of expansion disapproval so you have a lot of planets producing those ships. No idea how well it works in practice--see "holding off until some patches"--but that'd be my guess in theory.) *I'm pretty sure I misspelled that, too tired to look it up. ...also given the Horatio I keep thinking the faction must consist entirely of clones of captain Sheridan from Babylon 5 >.<
I understood what you were trying to say. You meant (and I'm guessing at the spelling now also) the Sherrydin(?), the guys who cause fleets to die when they try to escape. EVen that is not foolproof, since they don't always group the ships (which is what I'm talking about), so only single ships would die each time. In other words, to counter their tactic, you'd have to break up your fleet, and have a dozen or more combats every turn. I'm not talking about fleets of weak ships as much as non-fleeted swarms of weak ships.
Yeah; that wasn't the issue I ran into but that definitely sounds really annoying too. Also looking it up it appears to be "Sheredyn". >.<
