You do pick the weirdest examples.
Why not pick X-COM? A singleplayer game with many similar features to Space Tyrant, where the player is indeed punished (often quite hard!) for losing a mission, making it harder to go forward.
You guys are terrible at editing jokes! :) Seems like chess is the go-to for when you want to talk about classic game design that has held up for a thousand years.
I mean, I can’t stand chess, but I got the joke!
Also, I wouldn’t take @Balasarius’ declaration of terrible game design too much to heart. He’s an old grump like me. We tend to harumph a lot when we disagree with design decisions. You guys want me to rail on about my whole thing with difficulty levels?
-Tom
Wait, you mean the three races? If you’ve only just picked this up in the Steam sale, you probably haven’t unlocked the insects and slugs yet. That’s where the real variation comes into play. You’ll see.
-Tom
So this is why you can’t stand chess!
You should totally take it to heart, because Balasarius is right. Losing a mission is punishment enough. You don’t punish the player by making it harder to succeed going forward. Why would should I bother continuing playing?
The XCOM analogy is closer, but it’s still not as punishing as Space Tyrant before you get a second Commander. If you fail a mission in XCOM and lose the whole team in the first hour or two of gameplay, you can recover pretty easily because those guys were Squadies at most.
Because you’ve unlocked stuff you can use in your next playthrough! It’s the same formula that drives rogue-likes and, to my mind, it’s solid game design. There’s a reason there are so many rogue-likes out there. :)
-Tom
And, as someone else mentioned earlier, you can sometimes be cruising along a little too easily. A few bad decisions and/or a couple of bad breaks can turn that around and you are really struggling. Some of my favorite moments in Space Tyrant was persevering with an injured commander. I don’t think I’ve ever won a campaign with one, but I’ve had heroic defeats.
Picked this up during the steam sale and have just started playing it. Really enjoying it even though I’m apparently really bad at it.
Reporting back, still quite bad at this one, I’m enjoying the heck out of it but so far see no way I’m ever going to actually win.
Anyone out there steer me in the direction of a guide (watching people play sort of works, but since they’re typically not explaining much while playing it that’s not proving terribly helpful)? I’ve looked around and I guess not enough folks played it for anyone to bother with a good guide unless I missed it.
You should be seeing some progression as you gain abilities after every campaign, win or lose. Only a few really sharp players were able to win on their first attempt. Off the top of my head - look out for the prison planet that is usually close to your home planet. Getting that second fleet as early as possible is very helpful. If I remember right, the rabbits have much better small ships than big. Most scenarios, can be won most efficiently without big ships. I think maybe a couple cruisers to provide healing to the small ships was good for the rabbits.
Learning the best strategies for beating the different types of scenarios is probably the most critical aspect. Often, you’ll need to focus on Research in one scenario, but then focus on Cash the next. Don’t play it like other 4X. So, I hope you normally aren’t a turtler, because that won’t work if you want to be a Space Tyrant.
Thanks for the tips, I’ll see about applying them next time in!
The role space monsters play in this game is just RNG bad luck that can basically wreck an engagement. Not impressed with the design element at all.
After fighting an entire campaign to lose the last battle because I have the misfortune of repeatedly being the one a flying hamster and space shark decide destroying my entire fleet repeatedly rather than the AI’s is just BS. I have zero control over this. Spent 15 hours of pretty much perfect play never losing only to be handed defeat by something I can’t do anything about doesn’t feel very tactical or strategic, just random.
The space monsters never attack the senate forces deliberately (though you can sometimes bait them into it).
The algorithm seems to be:
- If there’s a player fleet adjacent to a space monster (which is in its home base) at the end of a turn, the monster gets a red exclamation mark symbol.
- Next turn:
- If there’s a player fleet adjacent to the space monster, it will attack one such player fleet. This doesn’t have to be the same fleet as triggered the attack last turn.
- If there’s no player fleet adjacent to the monster any more, it moves to the node it was triggered from anyway.
So you have pretty much full control over when and where the space monsters will attack. The only time they should cause a real headache for a mission is when they completely block a key access route to the rest of the map.
I have noticed a few oddities when loading a game with a space monster already triggered.
I had four of them floating around my section of the galaxy where I spawned. Full control, haha.
Fired up a new one, hopefully the RNG gods will smile more favorably upon me in the last battle.
I call fake news on beating the rabbit campaign on the first try. Unless you pour over a wiki before even starting and achieve some major statistical outlier for RNG results. You don’t have any of the good cards or abilities unlocked. You only have 1 commander, which means you never lost a single scenario (instant game over when you only have 1 commander) your first try? Before knowing which units are good and which are useless (rabbit carriers)? Before knowing which encounter choices will screw you over? Before knowing how space monster movement works? Or the effects of each crises? The game changer approach of the final battle?
I don’t buy it. I’d have an easier time believing that someone beat FTL on their first try.
(they easily could have made this game ten times better by giving the senate the blue+gold color scheme, and your forces the black+red one that you only see in the loading screen)
I’m with that other guy though. The RNG can screw you over way too suddenly for a Roguelike where the runs are that long. There’s been a real slew of too long rogue games lately (this, Darkest Dungeon, They Are Billions). That’s why FTL worked; around 2 hours should be the limit.
The scenarios themselves should be about half as long. A big part of that is having to sit through the encounter & invasion animations.
I beat the first two campaigns on my first try. Working on the third. I lost one scenario and limped along with an injured commander.
Fifth Fret the space tyrant god! Tough being a god when the mortals won’t worship you. ;)
To the mortals, I’m in the 2nd run through, about 1/2 to 2/3’s through, we’ll see how the final battle loads out this run.
Nah, FTL is actually hard – this was just tedious. I beat the rabbit campaign on the first try – also the only try because the game got shelved for good right afterward.
In answer to your objections: Because I didn’t have any of the advanced stuff unlocked, I just picked all the options that stacked bonuses on basic frigates and destroyers, and ignored everything else – it seemed to work out well enough. I did fail one mission, but by that time I had already unlocked a second hero. I briefly tried out the other units, but quickly came to the conclusion that the carriers were pointless, and just kept sending massed frigates and destroyers. I got plenty of negative effects from encounter choices, but none that screwed me over to the point of being unrecoverable. I never learned exactly how space monster movement worked, just gave them a wide berth and moved away when I saw they were about to move. I almost lost the final battle by going for a quick decapitation strike and getting clobbered by the infinitely spawning reinforcement fleets, but eventually stabilized and wound up laboriously conquering every damn system on that map over the course of three stultifying hours.
100% agreement with you about the color scheme and the campaign being way too damn long, though.
I’m still quite enjoying this one, finally beat the rabbits and about to start in on the next race.
I’ve never sorted the pattern on space monsters either and just work to avoid them. I wish when you do have to tangle with them and occasionally end up defeating one that you got something significant for the trouble but it didn’t pan out that way for me.
I like the color scheme, the art and pretty much all the choices you have to make a long the way. The campaign is a bit long if you lose as I did the first go as you’re stuck then starting from scratch, but I like the length of your standard engagement, I play one of those in an evening and then call it a day for the game and then return tomorrow for another. I like that.
To me this has proven one of the more entertaining games I’ve played so far this year. This and Battletech.