Missing the gold tiara. Awk. Awk.
Critter in the picture above looks like a de-canned whole canned chicken.
(Obligatory gif)
I enjoy this game baked. But why won’t the space hamsters dine on senators? I’m a rabbit, we’re practically cousins.
MY EYES. The goggles do nothing.
I’m liking the idea of this, but it just feels like…something is holding it back.
One immediate aesthetic blunder: why is the peaceful dogooder Senate colored blood red and not my evil tyrannical forces? Instead I’m peaceful powder blue? Any why the Bucky O Hare troops? Why isn’t THIS the color and unit appearance I see each game? https://i.imgur.com/DqZOA5H.png
Some of the random encounters and senate projects can be ridiculous. MOST of the senate projects are minor annoyances that aren’t worth going out of your way for, but agitators is a guaranteed game over if you don’t immediately delay and detour to quell it. That seems really harsh for an RNG. But my real keyboard flipping moment came when I spent over an hour in a game, an agitator project spawned, and when I moved my fleet next to it to quell it next turn, a wormhole event teleported me to the opposite end of the map. It would take them at least 7 turns to get back, and 5 turns for a new homeworld fleet to reach the agitators. Instant game over. Fuuuuuck that.
Space Tyrant is what us boardgamers call “swingy”. If you don’t like dramatic events for better and worse, this isn’t the game for you. I can understand your frustration, and I’ve had the same sorts of things happen to me. But it helps that the pacing is so breezy. Can you imagine the sort of thing you describe happening in, say, Stellaris or Civ IV?
Hmm, I guess it depends on the situation, doesn’t it? I disagree that agitators are somehow exceptional. A lot of what happens in Space Tyrant is contextual. The victory condition on a map is going to have a huge impact on how things play out, which applies to Senate projects. The layout of the map can make a big difference in terms of how easy it is to reach agitators. Different races have different strengths and weaknesses. Different admirals with different schemes and different equipment have different ways to deal with unrest.
In other words, sometimes the unrest caused by agitators is a big deal. Sometimes it’s not.
-Tom
Space Shark sucks.
I’m trying to figure out the worth of carriers and battleships right now.
Carriers it’s hard to judge since their attack damage value is hidden. But boarding parties seem awful? They’re slow to damage, don’t do a lot of damage before they’re gone, and take FOUR energy! They don’t seem to do much more damage than a frigate volley. The only upside is you get to choose the target but still doesn’t seem worth the energy and I only ever use them if I have nothing else to spend it on. The other thing is the cruiser upgrades seem a lot more useful while the ones for carriers are either obtuse (+1 fighter?..okay?) or focus on boarding parties which aren’t that great.
Battleships I really don’t see a place for them. Twice the cost & space as a cruiser, twice the health, but only 20% more attack damage. Their only upside is their special attack but it still doesn’t seem better than 2 cruisers. Someone says they get really good with tech upgrades, but you’re better off putting upgrades towards the ships you can afford early on. By the time you max those out and try to focus on maxing battleships out, the mission is over.
Reached the last missions and I don’t see how to beat it. Your commanders’ starting fleet size is too small to have any chance against the Senate fleets, so it’s a race to level them up on neutrals first but then your planets get run over (not to mention that &%%^ slug attacking you). When you level your commanders, you can take on a senate fleet but by that time they’re spamming huge militia fleets all over the place and overwhelm you. The closest I came was avoiding combat or delaying while I snuck a fleet around the side, capturing barracks worlds, then tried to sneak attack the homeworld with 3 invasion dice per turn. I bombarded it down from 25 to 11 before an enemy fleet instantly spawned and wiped me out.
According to the developer, you’re not meant to be able to win until you’ve done a bunch of failed campaigns and unlocked better stuff. Can’t say I’m a fan of mandatory power unlock grinding in roguelikes. I’m more a fan of the FTL approach where new unlocks are just additional options for variety. The biggest hurt in early runs is only having 1 overlord so losing a single mission makes you stuck with that crippled penalty the rest of the campaign.
For real. My current mission had a planet with an agitators project right beside my starting planet, but on the wrong end of a one-way hyperlane. Going around the long way was about 10 jumps, one of which was a space monster.
This looks very intriguing - sadly, I’ve been burned before, since I apparently don’t quite share mr @tomchick s enthusiasm for games that plays more like boardgames than regular computer games.
Am I correct in assuming, this is more of a board game made digital? Does it even make sense what I am asking?
There’s some boardgame influence, for sure, but it’s still a 4x at heart, with realtime space combat and lots of explosions.
The answer to ship specific questions is always “it takes tech to make it work best” and “it’s also entirely race dependent” and don’t underestimate the latter.
With all upgrades the Hoplite carrier is still a mediocre ship, I agree. As you note, it’s got less health than a cruiser and fighters have the drawback of taking more time to get their damage out (both because they are a DoT and because it takes awhile to fly across the battlefield). The cheaper special ability (it drops to 3 energy) doesn’t make up for it not being a great damager. There is a possible campaign tech upgrade (the ones you get from winning missions) to increase your fighter count by +1 but really the other options are a better choice (it’s always 2 choices of a possible 3, you won’t know what you roll until you get the upgrade choice).
But when you unlock the Bees, oh will you ever learn to love carriers. Their ability is a buff to their active fighters for X seconds. There are upgrades to the duration and amount of damage increase. There’s an upgrade to add extra fighters (the fully upgrade Bzzerk carrier has 6 fighters in a wave, IIRC). They get shields to boot, which is a god send (although the situation is rare, if a fleet has to fight multiple times in a turn shields fully heal between fights while hull does not). Bee fleet of carriers with Destroyers in front can take a bit of pounding and dish out frightening damage. I am talking “lol that space monster so cute” levels of damage. The bees are a much more carrier friendly race. The carriers are so good you’ll want to use them even with cap ships available. But not so much the Hoplite carries.
If you don’t get cruisers because of the mission perks (or whatever they are called) Hoplite carries can carry you to better ships. If you don’t have any of the cap ships unlocked. . . hugs, because that sucks hard. Although going fully small ship can work. The Hoplite frigates are a terror fully upgraded.
Once you have more cards (which for Hoplite will include quite a few nice free tech upgrades), the tech can roll in more quickly and even a single battleship can be effective. The thing is, they’re never better than the Dreadnought. The Hoplite Dreadnought should be named “Death Walks Among the Stars”. And the quirky aspect of the game is that you can unlock the Dreadnought before the Battleship. I did it with both Hoplite and Bzzzerk. Not on purpose, it’s just how it played out.
The thing is, you can run into situations where missles aren’t cutting it. Even a fully upgraded cruiser fleet is going to suffer against decently teched up Mollusk ships. If the BB is all you have to make it better. . . well it will. Combined arms can be very effective in this game. But you’ll also be at the mercy of the RNG. You can control which region you are doing a mission in (to a point, eventually you clear a region). You cannot controll rolling extra black holes, or whether a given mission allows cruisers, etc.
With upgrades the Hoplite battleship is pretty good. IMO, the Hoplite Battleship’s biggest issue is not that it takes upgrades to make the special good. IT’s the underwhelming base damage. Which it’s a little slow to dish out for my tastes (seriously, the rocks rotating to shoot blasts make it feel like the slowest of the race BBs for attacking). You could do worse than mixing in one or two - even without upgrades - with cruisers even without upgrades to the BB when situation dictates. The first Hoplite overlord gets a free BB as one of his powers and you’ll trigger it most battles. It’s useful in a pinch, to help bolster losses.
The Bee Battleship is better, IMO. While I am probably wrong about this I felt like it did more base damage (it has a “larger” base attack; that is, it shoots more blasts) and I felt like it got its blasts out more quickly. Although it is also outclassed by it’s DD (these things also matter less because luuuuul the Bee carries. So good).
Know that this too is somewhat race dependent (Bee fleets start 1 category size bigger; and they have the economy to handle starting with more slots to fill without much trouble). And my own experiences are based on normal difficulty. I did the final mission on my first try with both Bunnies and Bees, which I attribute somewhat to luck and this is not a “lol it was easy” or “get gud” comment. As Tom says randomness can really swing this game and it can be frustrating that you can get that far and have it swing the game away from you. I should also note it took me a long time to even get within sight of the final mission on the Hoplites; at least a dozen failed campaigns before I was within a few missions and several more before I finally got to take a stab at it. By the time I got there I had a lot of stuff unlocked. Not just the ships and Overlords but cards, tactics, etc. So I had plenty to help.
Planet layout in the last mission is very crucial. I had booming economies (200+ iirc) in both my starts. I had enough other planets to facilitate various other activities. And in my Hoplite game, I had great positioning for the cannon planets. I didn’t need them with the Bees (seriously, the carriers and the occasionally DD. . .) it turned out. But they were crucial with the Bunnies. And I had campaign tech upgrades that boosted cannon damage so they were really chunking fleets. I had three cannons working for a few turns. I love the Hoplite DD and they were a big part of my strategy but I didn’t find it too hard to afford them in that mission. Part of that, again, might have been the start I rolled (it’s not clear to me if the types of planets you have are fixed).
It also helped that I was able to down the first few enemy fleets (I mean the actual senate fleets) easily (again, cannons) and take out some other sneate worlds. A lot of worlds will build militia and if you can cut the projects off it really helps. I was able to swallow something like 4 militia project worlds in the first 5 or so turns and that seemed to give me some breathing room.
I don’t mind it. That said, I kind of wish you could use the cap ships from the get go but not research upgrades for them until you unlocked the research. The exception I would make: the cards that give you a free, random, research should still impact cap ships even if you can’t directly research them yet.
Also agreed on the 1 overlord thing. I wonder if it would be better if the overlord “healed” after a mission or two. As it is, if you’ve cleared out the 1* missions and lose your lone overlord the campaign is probably done (ti certainly is if you’ve got to do 3* missions). It’s not just losing the Overlord powers - you carry a permanent debuff to all ships. If you don’t have cap ships unlocked you’ll just get completely railroaded against enemy fleets that have them.
I encourage you to stick with it. While the randomness can be frustrating it’s a pretty good game overall, I think. I didn’t like having to repeat the “grind up from nothing” process 3 times, although I got to the final mission on Bees more quickly than I did on Hoplite, but it still takes quite a few failures unless you luck out on one of those gold 3* missions and get cap ships or a great overlord quickly.
Thanks. Great explanation.
So much this. Not a huge fan of including games with needed-to-win unlockable content in the rogue-like genre. They’re more like grindy-likes. The ability to win really shouldn’t depend on how many things I unlocked, but how skilled I am with the game. This really sours me on any game that does it, to the point of refunding some recent purchases which did this.
Maybe I’m just being pedantic about terminology, I don’t know.
Same here. I was seriously considering picking this up, but I can’t stand that design philosophy.
I gave the Senate a good run for the money on my first campaign, with a wounded commander, some bad luck leading to me rushing the final fight(s) and I think some less than ideal final maps.
I wouldn’t be surprised if you (@Thraeg) could win in your fist campaign, as you probably wouldn’t make some of the bad decisions I did.
I am only a couple missions into my second campaign and the residual bonii from the my previous campaign are making a big difference. I don’t know that I’ll win this campaign for sure, but who wants to know that. Also, I love the scenarios enough I’m very much enjoying them on their own. The campaign-specific power progression and the inter-campaign power progression are just icing on a delicious cake.
It’s not really true that you need to fail lots of campaigns before you can win.
Once you get a feel of the game mechanics you’ll be able to advance much faster with the campaigns without the full unlocks.
I managed to obtain wins with the 2nd and 3rd races without their unlocks in my second attempts.
Yeah, I agree with this. The idea of having to “fail” repeatedly is an unfair way to characterize it. I suspect whoever said that was misquoted or taken out of context or whatever.
Basically, you have to unlock stuff to unlock stuff. I imagine it’s theoretically possible to unlock the next race on your first play-through, but the structure is that of a rogue-like. It’s a 4X with permadeath. To beat the big baddie and unlock the next “class” (i.e. second and then third of the three empires), it might take a few playthroughs, but on any given playthrough, you’re going to unlock tons of stuff and therefore make plenty of progress. Space Tyrant knows how to dole out its rewards and it’s plenty generous.
That’s just the way rogue-likes work: permadeath means higher stakes because failing is part of the experience, but persistent progression offsets the sense of frustration for failing.
-Tom
I see why you systematically list progression in your Ps, but to those with masochistic tendances, such as myself, this is really accessory. I know you know it (you discussed it with the Deep Sixed designer lately), but I always want to voice it so there you go!
Really wished I could play this game, sadly it is much more demanding than it looks.