How else am I supposed to vote for dialogue wheels and romance options?
Hey guys, y’all can pre-order this now on Steam:
Whoop, also a new trailer:
Indie space strategy? You have my money, devs.
Yay!56
It’s not by chance that is today in Steam, it seems the alpha will start today.
Its impossible not to Get This , could be I’m getting old and desperate , or not
Just watched that video…and I’m picking up the pieces of my shattered jaw off the floor. See the smoke in my wallet? That’s how quickly the card came out of it.
Hahahahaha
The last thing I need is more time-suckers in my backlog, but this just looks so good.
I really like the design of the ships. I would really love to play a homeworld-like game with these ships. But a XXXX game? I dunno, these games are like a civi game configured in “marathon” mode. Phalanx vs Phalanx for 146 turns…
What is this “500 G2G” that is part of the preorder? It’s voting currency? Wha?
I think so, for that Games2Gether thing? I’ll know more when I try it out myself.
The currency basically lets you “invest” in areas of the game you’d rather the devs focus their time on. It grants you votes that you can cast on their site. Would you rather they implement random events or update ship textures? That kind of thing. You vote for what’s most important to you in the game. More points = more votes.
I’ve been playing the alpha build for a bit and have been really enjoying it. Combat was especially surprising, given that it’s pretty hands-off. You get a choice of Battle Action cards to play for each of the three phases (long, medium, and melee), and then you just watch the two sides duke it out in non-interactive cinematic sequences. I wasn’t sure about that at first, but I can’t seem to get enough of massive ships hurling kinetic rounds (thump thump thump) at each other. And it’s terrifying to see a missile volley close in on a formation because something is going to go down in flames.
There’s only one playable race and five included (of eight) at the moment, but that should be expanding shortly.
Thanks for the impressions, Ryan! Can’t wait to try it.
Will you stop it? I sorta halfway convinced myself to swear off pre-release alphas anymore. You’re not helping.
Well, it might help that the last time I played, which was about four days ago (might’ve been updated for the Steam launch), there was no adequate way to defend a system. This would lead to the enemy zipping past a docked fleet and making their way deep into friendly territory. This wouldn’t be too serious a problem if it didn’t happen so often, so you never really know where to dock your fleets since the enemies seems to pop up everywhere. I’m hoping they include a sort of intercept feature, kind of like how Shogun 2 triggers a combat option when the enemy gets near a city. The AI is also being worked on heavily, so you won’t get much help during your campaign – the opposite, actually, with everyone going to war just because you’re the player. Development seems to be going along briskly, so these might not be relevant excuses for too long.
Hero units are actually pretty cool. Each has a backstory and a set of traits that play a role in whether you assign them to a system (as an administrator) or to a fleet (as an admiral). They unlock the same optional perks as they get experience, which has the benefit of you being able to make hybrid heroes who might excel at combat but still be a decent administrator if the need for a quick production boost arises. They can also unlock options to buy more advanced Battle Action cards, which comes in handy when the enemy brings out some of the more advanced vessel types.
Oh, and there are also random events. I’ve had a corruption scandal bring my entire empire down by 20% in everything (food, production, research, dust/money) for a few turns, and a massive boost in trade because, unbeknownst to me, I had a slick diplomat in my services.
I’m really looking forward to see where Amplitude takes ES.
I think this game might just scratch the itch way better than SOTS 2 even though it may be a more complex game, this game has you making decisions that matter atleast.
Combat is decent, you get your flashy show of space and some input, which may get tedious after a while, but there is always autoresolve.
I agree. I kind of miss the tactical combat, however, having some meaningful input to the fights works.
I’ve enjoyed my time so far. Should be interesting to see the other races.
I finished a game last night (about seven hours ago, in fact [oops]). My humans were slow off the line, and ended up holding a grand total of two systems without any route for expansion. I was at least at peace with the green guys, the only empire bordering my own. The orange guys declared war on the green guys, and before I could decide if I wanted to backstab the green guys, the orange guys declared war on me. Human industry spooled up, and when the war with the orange guys was over, I’d more than doubled the size of my empire. Then the blue guys, who had heretofore been content to beat up only on the orange guys, decided that I was getting dangerous, so I had to keep the insane pace of military construction going.
Rather annoyingly, the blue guys had every single source of Titanium-70 (the strategic resource required for any hull larger than a destroyer), so I had to make a daring, off-the-transit-lines raid to secure a source so I could start building battleships. At that point, given the two massively industrialized systems I’d captured from the orange guys, I just had to win a few large battles and it was over.
[ul]
[li]Presentation-wise, it’s very polished. The interface is pretty, the music has a Bear McCreary sort of vibe, and the ship models we’ve got are well-designed if not particularly highly detailed (I have no idea if we’ll see better ones later or not). The smallest human ship promised a WH40K Imperium aesthetic that sadly didn’t really hold.[/li][li]The interface could use some work on functionality. Nothing’s buried too deeply, and it has the sort of empire management screen (namely, one from which you can actually manage your empire) that’s an absolute necessity for a game where dozens of systems is a possibility. The research screen has a search box, which is nice, but I found it difficult to find research topics that did the specific thing I wanted, and (as with all the other queues in the game), there aren’t any obvious features for managing queue order. Also, the RMB working like Android’s back button was kind of annoying.[/li][li]Speaking of research, it seems like a lot of the interesting things are a long way up the trees. On top of that, there are a lot of interesting things to get. I won at 320 turns or so, and still hadn’t gotten to the technology for forming alliances.[/li][li]Combat is fun to watch, and the card mechanic is inspired. It’s the right amount of control. The autoresolver works well. At the end of my game I found myself only bothering to manually control combats where I wanted to do something specific (e.g. just spam my admiral’s Ultimate Defense ability).[/li][li]Speaking of admirals, heroes are interesting. Unfortunately, like fleet size cap increases, they’re a loooong way up the economy tree, so I only had three even at the end of the game. On the other hand, each of my two governors could turn a system from just scraping by into an ecstatic center of culture and production, and my well-seasoned admiral was more than doubling the attack and defense efficiency of his fleet by the end of the game.[/li][li]It’s cool having multiple worlds per star. It’s not too much to manage, either; most production is done at the system level. You’ll need to do at most four things to one planet to get it from fresh to fully developed.[/li][li]Fleets and the military, however, can get to be too much to manage. Every space 4X ought to look at GalCiv2’s rally point system and then copy it wholesale.[/li][li]Mid- to late-game technologies permit traveling off of the tramlines between stars, which makes defense a lot harder. Someone in this thread said an intercept radius would be a good solution to that; I agree. Being able to define a front line, no matter how unrealistic it is, is important if you don’t want to have to garrison every world or every couple of worlds. Invading planets does at least take a while, so you can get away with garrisoning strong points and sallying the fleet when you need to.[/li][li]The design is pretty purpose-built to handle multiplayer well. You have a timer on battles to select whether to autoresolve it or play it out manually; if you’re in a battle already, it’ll just tick down to zero and that battle will go on automatically (from your perspective).[/li][li]The endgame got a bit tiresome after I broke the back of the blue fleet, but it didn’t drag on for too long like they sometimes do.[/li][li]I won’t really criticize the AI in an alpha build, but its willingness to send in fleets piecemeal was pretty bad. I probably wouldn’t have won if it followed proper Mahanian all-in doctrine.[/li][/ul]