Space Building/Expansion Game - Mid Complexity

clever id wrote:

I just bought Space Empires IV Deluxe on Steam so we'll see how it goes. VERY early on it seems like it could suit my needs. There also seem to be a decent amount of mods & mods (wiki)... some still updated.

e: I see a game called Distant Worlds was released yesterday (25th). It appears to be made by the same people who made Armada 2526, which was recommend already. It might have more of a combat focus than you want, but I can't say for sure and I haven't seen a demo anywhere.

Armada 2526 was made by R.T. Smith (by himself, believe it or not) and Matrix published it. Matrix is publishing Distant Worlds also, but they didn't develop it. For those new to the fringe strategy market, you'll find a lot of great games that Matrix publishes. Between Matrix and Shrapnel you could spend a lifetime playing their strategy offerings ... the only downside is that since they serve a niche market, their philosophy is to rarely put their games on clearance like Steam does. That's why something like Dominions 3 is still $55 a couple years later. It has gone on sale, but $45 or so is the lowest I recall seeing.

@ garion333 Ah, so same developer thanks for clarifying.

@ Robear The description of Distant worlds makes it even more intriguing... I may have to use some "birthday monies"

Check out the Matrix forums for more info.

Distant Worlds sounds exactly what I am looking for. I will be watching that very closely.

For me, it's all about interesting aliens (and is one of the major reasons I never got into Sins). As cliche as they were, Moo2 had my favorite aliens to date. Hopefully Distant Worlds offers something comparable.

If you want to go epic and old school, check out Emperor of the Fading Suns.

Creative Asssembly should take their Total War series to space at this point...

Budo wrote:

Distant Worlds sounds exactly what I am looking for. I will be watching that very closely.

For me, it's all about interesting aliens (and is one of the major reasons I never got into Sins). As cliche as they were, Moo2 had my favorite aliens to date. Hopefully Distant Worlds offers something comparable.

If you want to go epic and old school, check out Emperor of the Fading Suns.

Creative Asssembly should take their Total War series to space at this point...

Emperor of the Fading Suns was an incredible game, even with its many, many bugs. Sadly, I cannot get it to run on my computer anymore since upgrading to Vista

Budo wrote:

Creative Asssembly should take their Total War series to space at this point...

Well, that's pretty much what Sword of the Stars already is.

Sword of the Stars is also not too bad for having distinct aliens. They have fairly extensive backstory and explanations in the flavor text, and in gameplay they all have different FTL travel technologies and other technological tendencies that make them play differently. You sometimes don't get a feel for the character in the game though, as there isn't always a lot of diplomacy/non-combat interaction during the game.

Its a real crime none have them have been done right, MOO2 was the last space game to really get it right.

Galciv and Galciv2 have a seriously flawed economy. The whole game is simple and straight forward then once you learn the econ model you just want to bang your head on a brick wall for a few hours over playing it for another hour.

SOTS is a good game with an immersive map and tech tree and fairly simple econ model (though its flawed as well you find out after playing 100+ hours). It also suffers from pretty poor documentation as well as a steep, and unintended, learning curve. They meant for the game to be this pick up and play multiplayer game and it ended up pretty complex. I have logged probably 200 hours total in the game finished about 5 single player gamesand I am still learning stuff. Although 200+ hours also tells you its a pretty engaging game. If you have reload syndrome don't, the game is completly designed around alot of bad things happening and plans going totally wrong you won't enjoy it if your an oops I screwed up reload the game type of player.

Space Empires V is horrid, its beyond complex and on top of that it has absolutly horrific AI. If the AI worked and you could spend the time in single player to learn the game before going multiplayer it might be ok but in my opinion not worth it to find out. It also has insanely bad immersion as far as planet layout and stellar map go.

Armada 2526, no idea what the guy was thinking just stay away from the game.

Sins of a solar empire, great game, only problem is that the current expansion is a dismal failure at the moment if you play entrenchment its a blast. Immersion wise its pretty good except stars and planets make absolutly 0 sense if you know anything about real space, and I literally mean anything.

Spore, I'll include spore here because the only game part of spore is the space stage and spore's engine and immersion is phenomenal the way planets orbit their stars, instellar objects, the galaxy map, are all easily the #1 feature of the game. The actual game part of the space stage is mediocre at best though and the rest of the game, well its actually pretty hard to qualify the rest of spore as a game its more just a toolset.

Wish i could help you out more alot of us have been looking for the next great turn based space game it just hasnt been made yet, SOTS 2 is going to have carriers and instead of a single planet per star it will have fully realised solar systems, so in my book its easily the next game to look out for in the genre.

Distant Worlds sounds exactly what I am looking for. I will be watching that very closely.

It's out as of Friday.

So after an hour or two of play, it's apparent that this game is indeed more like EU3 than MOO2 or SotS or any of the other previous ones. Most space games seem to me to be designed to be played "bottom up"; that is, starting with each detailed module and proceeding up to the strategic level. So you design your ships, tweak your government, assign all production and tech research, organize fleets... basically do every micro-managing task in the game before you can properly grab a fleet and tell it to do something.

In DW, much of that (not all of it) starts out automated. So you can hang around at the sector level at the start of the game and only zoom into systems and info screens when you need to do something. The system will handle a lot of the tedious stuff, you do the strategic choices and also anything out of the ordinary - diplomacy, additions to your military fleet, fleet ops, etc. As you get more familiar, you can take on more and more of the details, but it's an interesting way to design the game (and it fits with the truly huge scale of the game.)

I don't have enough time in to say whether it's real genius or not, but so far I'm having fun fighting off pirates, exploring and colonizing. (What a relief to have a screen that shows you all of the possible choices for colonization, lets you pick one and push a button to build a colony ship and colonize it. Why did no one else think of this?)

Combat in the game reminds me of Gratuitous Space Battles in that it can turn into a pretty big mess where your actual tactics don't really matter. Have you played enough to get a feel for the battle system? In the video you can clearly set tactics for the ships, but the actual battle videos just look like massive clusters of ships and it's hard to tell whether or not winning or losing is simply a numbers game or whether tactics play an important role.

Keep us posted on this. Also, this may sound petty, but the only thing that turns me off about DW so far is the lack of bells and whistles. Great, it can run on any system, and kudos for being created by probably 1-2 people, but if this game plays great, I would love to see what this would look like with a Sins of a Solar Empire/GalCiv2/Spore team behind it.

DW actually seems what the developers of Moo3 had in mind (and colossally failed at): create a huge universe that in reality a head of government/emperor would be completely incapable of running and micomanaging except at the highest "huge sweeping-mandates" level. If this is done right, it would give your empire more of a sense of autonomy, of life, instead of just more details.

DW also sounds like what I hoped Spore would do. At the space level, Spore has great ideas that just get buried in the tedium of pirate attacks and protect your planets from invasion and harvest your spice to sell it. But the fact that the Spore galaxy is equally huge and filled with EA/Maxis/player aliens is still damn appealing. In fact, if DW works well, EA should just rip off these guys when they make the space level for the unannounced-but-inevitable Spore 2.

No, I have not done more than one-sided battles. I gather that the tactics element consists of setting rules for ship types, then letting them execute. But I don't see formations. So certainly that creates an unusual tactical environment. Still, adaptation is what humans do.

I'll be gone this week, so I won't be able to comment much beyond tonight. But what sort of "bells and whistles" did you have in mind?

Robear wrote:

I'll be gone this week, so I won't be able to comment much beyond tonight. But what sort of "bells and whistles" did you have in mind?

Oh I just meant the graphics, music, overall production values. Armada 2526 has really average production values, while GalCiv and Sins are finely polished, for example.

So my roommate gave me his copy of Sins of a Solar Empire - Trinity for the weekend and after I played the 4 tutorial sessions, I tried a few 1v1s and 2v2s against easy AI. I was stomped every single time. And worse than that, I was sitting there with the feeling I had to do something (I have a rather long Starcraft/Warcraft history), but I couln't find anything to do to help my ships or advance in any other way. Everything takes forever. The travel, the fights, getting enough materials to finally research that defensive thing and so on.
Then there are these outrageous claims both allies and opponents make so when I fail to "destroy 6 civilian buildings of enemy x" (of course the one that is 4 jumps away and in the meantime has colonizes half of the planets in the game) within the first 30 minutes of the game, my AI ally gets pissed and after another demand I can't meet, it disbands the alliance I am on my own.
I did pick the TEC every single time, since the Wikia race page claims they are the easiest in early game, but even then I got my arse handed to me every single fight.

Just so confusing even though I can feel there may be some potential for a great game. A short campaign for one or maybe one for each faction would have been nice, because the both the existing tutorials and the tooltips don't help with much with weighting what research options are useful and which ships do what.

I'm looking forward to Robear's return and further update on DW. In the meantime I've found Eve Online has done a decent job of scratching the spaceship building/design side of my itch.

I can already tell that the MMO rabbit hole here goes far, far deeper than WoW or EQ ever did though, so I'm still hoping for a nice single player experience to fill this niche so I can extract myself before the inevitable divorce papers arrive

This "interactive AAR" on the QT3 forums is awesome.

I must get Distant Worlds.

I played Eve online 3 years ago with a friend, enjoyed it a fair bit. The real scary part of that game is how you can spend all this time and effort building up your ship, and then if you venture out into 'Zero Security Space' it can all go 'poof' in a nuclear flash as a pirate group hunts you down and kills you. My group ( me & 2 friends) were always very nervous going into low security space :). I think our Corp still exists.. should still have a couple billion isk in there too.

From what I've read on the newsletters they've improved the game a whole lot since. I've been tempted, but Aussie pings to Iceland tend to make the gameplay a lil' too laggy.

Forgive me for this wall of text that may seem to jump around illogically but, I wrote it over the course of a morning jumping between things...

So I started playing Distant Worlds last night. I didn't get a lot of play time in, but I was able to spend about 1.5 - 2 hours with it. I started with the tutorial to just get a real basic idea of what things did, but I didn't finish it as I prefer to learn through failure. So I restarted a game in a tiny galaxy (which still had 100 or so systems). I went with no pirates, a sandbox game, and no automation just so I could take my time and experiment. I'll point out that my computer is the equivalent of a '85 Yugo (barely meets required spec) and the game still ran well enough.

First let me reiterate that the game is a RTS not turn based. The good news is that it has a pause button so you can pause and spend as much time in menus as you'd like… which I did :). The more I think about it, it feels like a fast Hearts of Iron time management system (more than a standard RTS like Age of Empires).
Initially I thought that the game was very confusing because there were instantly a bunch of ships shooting around doing things that I didn’t order them to do when what I expected was more of a planet just floating in space. Most of the ships were private vessels which you have no control over. Once I took control of the 4 or 5 state vessels that you start with (as defined by my starting settings) I was able to get into the game pretty quick, figure the basics out and actually do some simple things.

It's definitely not as deep as some of the 4x space games around (it’s not shallow either) but the ability to delegate portions of the game play to the AI is WONDERFUL. Personally, the combat is not what I'm looking for so I planned on being the guy who builds the fleet but let's the AI control it. I mainly spent my time last night tinkering around with exploring systems and expanding my empire into 3 systems with a total of 4 or 5 colonies. I like the fact I can queue up ship orders (explore, X, explore Y, refuel, explore Z) and then unpause and burn some time while I sit back and watch events unfold. Last night, I let the AI tell me it thought I should build more military and then I'd approve it and I didn't even mess with research. I didn't bump into any other races yet, so the espionage or diplomacy didn't come into play. I did run into some "space monsters" that harassed my exploratory ships and I sent frigates out to destroy them, pretty standard go there and kill it RTS feel.

As far as the State v. Private part of the game goes, initially I was somewhat discouraged by the expansion of the private sector seemingly without any direction from me. As I explored the game play and expanded my empire with colony ships I noticed the private sector shifted to utilize my expansion and basically acknowledged a new source of resource X . What was happening was that the private sector started utilizing "my" resource mines and spaceports rather shipping resource back to the main colony on its own, not really complex idea but the shift did help me feel more in control. The more I thought about it the more I realized it did have the Simcity feel of independent growth through my action, definition or delegation. Now I really feel like I can set the framework for the expansion of the private half of my empire by paying more attention to the resource demands of my empire.

I'll mention that the game looks great, even on my Yugo of a system. Stars are animated, and planets slowly orbit their stars and their moons orbit them. The expanse of space looks nice as well. Ships and monsters look nice and have Mass Effect “Reaper” look.

I think I'll go back tonight and restart a game with pirates and see how that hamstrings the growth of the private sector. Based on that AAR thread I'm guessing it will only add another bottle neck to the private sector which should help give me more of a feeling of control the private section via military protection, and less of a runaway feeling.

Overall I think Distant Worlds is going to be a pretty good purchase for me. As I play it more I'll get you a little more feedback, but feel free to ask any questions and I'll answer them if I can. Also, If enough people get into this game we might consider creating a Distant Worlds Catch-All (if there isn't one) for Q/A so as not to focus this thread too much and let it focus on the original question at hand.

clever id, how would you say the game compares to Master of Orion 2? That's kind of my base point for all space game comparisons.

For those interested I created a Catch All for Distant Worlds. It seems we have a discussion or two regarding the game so I thought I'd try to streamline the conversation.

@ Quintin: Fearing loss of any "gamer cred" I may or may not have, I'll admit to never playing MoO 2, so that's a hard comparison for me to make. I'll share some more thoughts later in the catch all. Sorry.

Tamren wrote:
MoonDragon wrote:

There was another game I remember playing a long while ago that was basically a colony builder. You had to collect resources, manage the colony, research, etc. Ultimately you had to build a new colony ship to send it off. It was not Alpha Centauri. I do not recall there being combat in this game.

Oh, and Space Colony can be had for 2.99 through Amazon.

Outpost? I still have the disk for Outpost 2 in my house somewhere. I played the sh*t out of that game back in the day.

MoonDragon wrote:

Yes, I think Outpost (2?) is it. Thanks for remembering. :)

The first Outpost had no combat, it was a pure space colony builder, there was a set of "Rebels" on your planet, but since you were all that was left of humanity on a barren world there was no weaponry or tanks, you coexisted peacefully or reabsorbed them peacefully. Or they all died off because they didn't have your awesome leadership. You could probably do a couple sneaky things to them like arrange for a plague outbreak to hit them, but mostly there was no combat.

The sequel was much closer to a typical strategy game, it was real time instead of turnbased, and many of the city building elements were removed (leaving it only slightly more complicated than the base building in a typical RTS). Combat was introduced, with an early experimentation with customizable units (three chassis with different properties were equipped with any of 7-8 weapons). The gameplay centered around two campaigns from either the viewpoint of the rebels or the original colony, they are fighting each other over the limited resources of the world so that they can escape, turns out that it is very volcanically active and they accidentally made a super metal-eating plague, so it's time to abandon ship. Some of the levels were more economically based than others, with you needing to quickly build up a food or metal reserve so you could flee further from the plague or lava flow, without fighting against other humans.

I never finished it (I was quite young and it was way too hard for me) but I liked it quite a bit. It's hard to find it online now because I keep finding the Outpost Anti-Virus instead. Several months ago I was finally able to track down the first Outpost and get it working, which made me very happy.

clever id wrote:

@ Quintin: Fearing loss of any "gamer cred" I may or may not have, I'll admit to never playing MoO 2, so that's a hard comparison for me to make. I'll share some more thoughts later in the catch all. Sorry.

IMAGE(http://rps.net/QS/Images/Smilies/no.gif)

Quintin_Stone wrote:
clever id wrote:

@ Quintin: Fearing loss of any "gamer cred" I may or may not have, I'll admit to never playing MoO 2, so that's a hard comparison for me to make. I'll share some more thoughts later in the catch all. Sorry.

IMAGE(http://rps.net/QS/Images/Smilies/no.gif)

It would sure be a shame if someone gifted me a copy.

I picked up my copy in a used bargain bin. Don't know if Gamestop still has those for PC games though.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

I picked up my copy in a used bargain bin. Don't know if Gamestop still has those for PC games though.

Nope, no used PC games.

clever id wrote:

It would sure be a shame if someone gifted me a copy. ;)

Based on the image GOG put out a few weeks ago, it looks like MOO2 will be making its way to the service at some point.

billt721 wrote:
clever id wrote:

It would sure be a shame if someone gifted me a copy. ;)

Based on the image GOG put out a few weeks ago, it looks like MOO2 will be making its way to the service at some point.

IMAGE(http://www.flashpointsocialmedia.com/Area51/Orion/Images/o_rly.jpg)

Awesomesauce.

You can order Master of Orion 2 for download here: http://www.atari.com/games/moo2_batt...

However, I wouldn't recommend it. I just ordered it there for $5 using the discount code "atari50" but there was an error at the end of the order process. My $5 order is now "in review" and I have to wait 24 to 72 hours for an email to download something. Meanwhile, my credit card was already charged.

Since Outpost was mentioned I have to ask, did anyone actually ever complete that game? I'm referring to the original.

Quintin, I'll put more time in this weekend. But I think the SimCity feel to the expansion part of the game is on the mark. You send explorers out and they investigate systems for you. A quick look will reveal the star and maybe a large planet; it seems like spending more time reveals more. Then when a planet or moon you can colonize is found, it appears in your list of potential colonies (no more having to remember where that uber-rich planet you found in the middle of a war got to). You can click on it and that will automatically build and send a colony ship, and private investment follows.

You can choose where to build your military and government infrastructure and bases, and of course where to station your fleet. But the point I'm making is to me, so far, the feel is fundamentally different from MOO2. I'm sure part of that is just that I'm still in the very beginning, having explored maybe twenty systems. But another part is that the AI delegation and private economy with which you co-exist allows a far larger scale than Moo2 ever could. I'm sure that will come into play soon; I've already met two alien races and a "lost" human colony, as well as two singleton alien colonies (colonies not backed up by an interstellar civ can be taken over to take advantage of their infrastructure, but you might have some trouble with diplomacy after that...)

As I expand, I've noticed that pirate factions harass my explorers, gas miners and the like, so I'm building a small roving fleet to fly to hot spots as needed. I'm considering station a destroyer/frigate combo at one of the frequent targets, and I've destroyed one pirate base so far. You can negotiate with pirates to hire them, buy info, or just buy "protection" for a term of time if you don't feel like hunting them.

So the tasks that take your attention are different from those in MOO2 and similar games. Sure, you can design new ships, but unless I'm missing something research proceeds along essentially outside your control (although I need to read up on that to be sure), so you'll be waiting for new components before re-designing ships or creating new designs.

I'm hesitant to say, but I think DW is possibly more of a literal empire builder than a planetary exploitation sim. So far, it's more top-down than bottom up, if that makes sense to you. More big picture and less detail, designed to allow truly huge games that won't take two years real time to finish. It's a cool attempt. It's certainly not putting me off.

I'll know more when I get some time in this weekend. Right now I'm still in the Kingdom of the Mouse, and I fly home tomorrow. Till then it's the DS for me. lol