A Taste of Things To Come

by on July 22, 2011 at 12:42 pm
Posted In: Computer games

Review crossposted from VGG.

The ideas for the 4X genre of games appear pretty early in computer history, with the early ‘70s computer-moderated play-by-mail game StarWeb. A number of games (that I don’t know much about, other than their existence) based on colonizing and conquering the stars appeared throughout the late ‘70s and the entire decade of the ‘80s in various small (often shareware) releases.

1980s powerhouse SSG released the first true commercial computer space 4X game in 1983 on a number of platforms, and with two further editions of the game. I first ran into RFTS on my family’s Apple II clone; I believe that was the second edition. Both me and my dad were deeply impressed by the game, and played it often, including a couple of hot-seat sessions against each other. When we finally went over to the PC platform with a 286, we quickly got a copy of the PC version of the new (1988) third edition.

It was the same game—and it wasn’t. The graphics were noticeably different, and had some odd quirks. At the same time, Third Edition added the Advanced Game as an option, and it was also quite different from the default game, with some very interesting ideas.

I would like to talk about the two versions in tandem, but my memories of the Apple II version have gotten exceedingly vague over time. So, I will just be talking about the PC-DOS version.

Interface

Opening Graphic (adjusted)

RTFS for DOS has one of the oddest control schemes I’ve ever seen. I know the Apple version was a lot better.

First of all, do remember that is from the age before mice.

At all times, there is a main menu of various functions across the bottom of the screen (which includes such important items as Next Turn, Save Game…, and Quit) is accessed with the Escape key. Once inside of a menu, it uses the expected arrow keys and Enter.

The interface uses various windows; you can tell what the active window is by the four-line bar across the top (as opposed to the two-line border). While inside of a window, the Escape key will take you its menu bar. If you want to get out of a window, you use the Delete key. To cycle through which window is active (and you can have zero active windows even while one is showing), you use the ‘-’ key.

Once you’re used to it, it works quite well, and the Status menu has some very handy reports.

Worlds

The RFTS galaxy has a fixed number of 53 stars in a 23 by 34 hex grid that wraps around in both directions. There is a standard pattern for these (and a photocopyable map was included in the game with this setup), or you can choose to have a random setup for the stars (and a blank map was provided for that). Either way, the planets around the stars are random, although influenced by the star’s color. There can be from 0-3 usable worlds in a system, though zero is fairly rare.

Task force and world windows

Note that I said usable. The game doesn’t show any others, but it does give just what number in the system each world is, and it is not purely sequential. Not needed, or used for anything, but a nice little touch in a necessarily minimalist game.

Each world has a three pairs of numbers separated by a slash: population, industry, and environment. Each set is the current value followed by the maximum value. The amount of production at each planet depends on the population and social environment to a small extent, and multiplied by the available industry. Production capacity not used during a turn will be available at any planet in the next production phase, so saving up production at the home planet will help establish a colony much quicker, though there are some limits on how much can be produced at a time. Systems with enemy ships in them are interdicted, and cannot access the global bank.

The industrial limit is a hard limit, but the population limit can—and will—be exceeded, though the excess population will die off, self-limiting the growth.

The environment shows as one number over another, like with the other categories, but both can be improved. The first number, or social environment, will go up on its own, but it wise to raise it in the early days of a colony, because when it is under 40 the population of the planet will die off; this happens especially quickly under 20. When the number is over 60, the population will start to grow. The second number, or planetary environment is not a hard limit, but the social environment will want to fall back down to it. Improvements to the planetary environment are the only thing which will stay if a colony fails, so if you think that will happen, but you will be able to get more transports there, raise the planet environment as much as you can to make the second attempt easier.

Planets come in four types: Primary, Secondary, Tertiary, and Hostile. Generally speaking, as you go down the scale, the average industrial capacity goes up, but the planetary environment and population limits go down.

Turns

RFTS has an interesting turn structure. Production happens every other turn. So even numbered turns are just concerned with movement and colonization. (And since it will generally take a turn for the transports to get to their destination….)

Combat occurs whenever two or more players have ships at the same system. It proceeds in a number of rounds until only one player has ships left, whether through destruction, or withdrawing. Afterwards, you have the option of bombarding or invading any enemy-held planets whose system you have ships in.

Once all combats are done, a menu comes up with a list of all four players in the game. (Computer-controlled players are grayed out of course.) Selecting one and hitting Enter starts that player’s turn. On odd numbered turns, this goes straight to the production screen for one of that player’s worlds. Once that is done, it goes to the normal movement segment, where movement and colonization orders can be given.

Once all human players are done, the turn ends and there is a period of time where you can see each player’s ships showing up at systems in turn. (Since you cannot see the whole map at once, just where you focus the map at the end of your turn can be important.)

Ships

In RFTS there are six types of ships. There are scouts, which are fast, but have zero ability in combat. There are transports, which take one unit of population, and can colonize a planet, creating one unit of population there. Or, they can be used to invade a planet, and garrison it.

Invading and conquering other people’s planets, instead of just blasting away all the population and colonizing it yourself is something that’s not always seen today in 4X games. However, [i]RFTS[/i] handles it well. Transports become the garrison for the planet once the initial invasion is over. The game notes both the current and original owner, and it is possible that it will revert back to the original owner if anything happens to the garrison. And if the garrison is too small compared to the population, it will rise up and start eliminating the garrison. If the population of the planet is in trouble, all you can do is boost the social score, because all further transports landed on the planet will just add to the garrison. A further complication is that everything costs twice as much on a conquered planet. But it can be easier than eliminating the entire population, and a conquered planet can be a great source of VPs.

The other four ship types are the military ships. The game has no special abilities or anything for ships. There are merely the Mark 1, Mark 2, Mark 3, and Mark 4, and researching each improved type is all the technology there is in the game. Each one is about twice as powerful in combat and twice as expensive as the previous version, and moves faster.

Graphics

Other than the opening screen, the DOS version of the game has no graphics.

Main Starfield

Now, it’s not all numbers and figures. There is a map display with twinkling stars and little ship icons. Stars with a friendly colony at them have a distinctive look, with a hollow diamond symbol. The hex grid is not explicitly shown, but the cursor wanders along the grain as you direct it with the arrow keys.

I always thought it was odd that the screen showed the full map from right to left, but only half of it up and down, especially since the cursor was oddly elongated. As a relatively simple game, I pondered exactly how it was done quite a bit as I took programming courses in college.

In the middle of my assembly language class it came clear. Assembly language is an extremely low-level programming language, one step removed from the actual 1s and 0s the computer actually operates in. This being a primitive language, and taking place before the advent of Windows 95, much of the class focused on text-mode operations, the most primitive, and easy to manipulate display mode of IBM computers. A lot of things were centering around how to block off portions of the screen, and manage text-mode ‘windows’ for display and input forms.

This was starting to seem awfully familiar. The window boxes were obviously text mode constructs. But what about the field of stars?

Then the instructor told us about how text mode saved video memory by using a shape table that held all the symbols in ROM, and was referenced by the graphics card to see how each character block should look. And that you could define a pointer to a shape table of your own, and override part of the symbol set for text mode.

The entire game was done in text mode. They had just defined a bunch of star shapes and some ship icons and displayed them, and made the stars twinkle by cycling through different characters really fast. The cursor was oddly shaped because each space on the map was a 2×2 area in text mode (so there was a position to show each side’s ship symbol in).

RFTS has no graphics. It has a font.

By the way, if you have the DOS version of RFTS and would like to see this in action, just start it up on a Windows 32-bit operating system, and force it out of full-screen mode. Windows will warn you that the program may not operate correctly in this mode. Indeed, it will become unable to redefine the shape table, and you can see the extended ASCII characters flickering by in place of the stars.

Artificial Intelligence

I got a chance to talk to one of the two main guys at SSG (I forget if it was Keating or Trout) at a con in the early ‘90s, and asked quite a few questions about RFTS in particular. The AI in many early SSG games was celebrated in the industry as very good, and RFTS in particular has a very nasty AI. Even at my best, the Veteran level AI can grind me into the dust if it is too close to me at the beginning of the game.

One of the things that makes SSG AIs nice is that the computer players do not all have a mysterious truce amongst themselves so they can pick on the human (a common AI behavior at the time). The RFTS AI players will happily fight amongst themselves, much to my relief on occasion.

According to SSG, the AI does not cheat. It’s just that good at maximizing the efficiency of all its actions. Actually, they did say that the tutorial mode AI cheats. It was the only way they could drag the AI down to the level of a first-time player. I’m not entirely sure whether the ‘no cheat’ provision applies to the Enhanced Veteran option, however.

Advanced Game

In the Third Edition, or version 3.0, SSG introduced a new mode: the Advanced Game. This was an amazing rewrite of the basic game engine.

Overall, everything got a bit more expensive. However, a planet with a high Social Environment will see it’s industrial maximum start rising, up to an eventual limit of 200. This tends to slow down some of the initial stages of the game, as a bunch of the homeworld’s budget will get eaten up by building industry up to the new maximum. Also, the population limit will also slowly rise to an eventual 100. Another early problem is that population maintenance starts costing more as the social environment gets close to 100 now.

Planetary defenses consist of two parts now. Armies, which fight invading transports, and defensive satellites which fight enemy fleets before they can bombard or invade a planet. Satellites are limited to two times the current number of garrison armies. Constructing armies comes out of the population, and can therefore limit the construction of transports.

Scouts are gone. Exploration must be done with regular ships. Instead, there is now a range limit on how far ship can go from a colony. In this case the AI does cheat, as they have a one-hex range advantage until final level of range technology, where the human range goes up by two, to catch up to the AI version.

And yes, there are now multiple technologies to research. Three in fact: Ship technology, navigation technology, and industrial technology. The last improves the industrial multiplier to production, causing large boosts to production when reached.

The fact that all planets will eventually reach the same population and industrial levels takes a certain uniqueness out of planets, but the rest of the game is a much richer experience, and I have mostly stuck with the Advanced Game ever since getting version 3 of the game.

Conclusion

This is the foundation upon which Master of Orion was built. This game was the standard that defined the 4X genre for over a decade. It represents an earlier model of how to do things, leaving out the tactical combat that is practically part of the definition of a 4X game today. It was at the height of its particular form, and within its realm, it does not have any particular weaknesses, and continues to be an old, well-worn, favorite of mine to this day. Something none of the modern breed of 4X games has been able to pull off.

What it lacks in features, it makes up for in simple elegance and replayability. Speed is also very good, and a complete game takes a fraction of the time that a modern 4X game takes. This is helped by the fact that the game can be set to end on a particular turn, with a winner based off of a victory point score. In fact, that is how RFTS tournaments were done at conventions back in the day. Everyone would play a 150-turn game (it would take less than an afternoon) against the AI and the highest score would win that round. I don’t play it very often these days, but I do still come back to it, decades later, and I give it a 9.0 (Excellent).

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You Got Chocolate In My Peanut Butter!

by on July 17, 2011 at 10:04 am
Posted In: Computer games

Review crossposted from VGG.

Sins of a Solar Empire is an interesting hybrid game: It is pretty much a pure RTS game that is centered around delivering the feel of a space 4X game. Since I got it a mere week or so after Sword of the Stars, many of my thoughts about it are in contrast to that game.

There have been two expansions (Diplomacy & Entrenchment) released since Stardock published the original in 2008, and I believe a third one is expected soon. However, I only have the base game, so this review will not cover the expansions at all.

System

The scale of Sins is a lot smaller than is usual for a 4X game, with most maps depicting several planets inside of a single solar system. The ‘huge’ maps go up to six systems. Ships move between planets by FTL (Phase Space, a hyperspace system by the GURPS Space categorization), reducing travel times of hours or months to seconds. FTL does not function inside a gravity well, so each planet is a mini-arena where ships must maneuver and fight at ordinary sub-light speeds. Nearby worlds are connected by lines denoting FTL paths, though the ships don’t need to be terribly close to the actual line to use that path, they just need to get to the edge of the gravity well.

There are four types of terrestrial worlds that show up: terran, desert, ice and volcanic planets. The first two are colonizable initially, and one faction does better on desert worlds, while the others require getting a second-tier technology to settle. There are also asteroid clumps that are colonizable (this may be the only 4X game that does this!), though they are much more limited. All of these worlds will start with neutral defense forces that will need to be defeated before the planet can be colonized, which is an effective way of making the early game much more than a ‘race’ to all the best spots.

In all cases there will be 2-4 nearby asteroids for mining resources from. There are occasional single asteroid gravity wells that can’t be settled, but can be mined. There are also a few ‘oddity’ types that are generally empty gravity wells.

One of the bodies in the system will of course be the star itself. The scale is apparently variable, as it and its gravity well don’t appear all that much bigger than a terrestrial world’s. Normally, this is no more than a hub for a few jump lines. In large multi-system games, a technology to allow you to use longer jump lines is needed to get from system (but you’re part of a government that already has interstellar travel…), and these are accessible from the star’s gravity well.

Resources

Like almost all RTS games, resource gathering is a large part of how the pace is regulated. In this case it is designed to be constant and dependable, as there are no gathering units, nor waits for the resource to be delivered somewhere appropriate. (Kind of like the Total Anniliation model, actually.)

There are three resources in this game: Credits, Metal, and Crystal. Credits come from the population of your planets, while the other two come from asteroids that are scattered about the various gravity wells. Of course, planets normally wouldn’t have asteroids near them, and no true moons show up in the game. (Unless some of these planets are really moons of a gas giant, but there’s no gas giants shown in the game at all….)

All of these resources are unlimited, and are cheap to begin production of; the limit is on the number of places where they can be gained. Crystal is the rarest resource, and is needed to conduct research, and build the more powerful ships. The standard frigates however, just need credits and metal.

The entire model is definitely designed to keep anyone from being completely cut off from anything. Part of that is also the fact that there is a black market where you can buy and sell metal and crystal, allowing you to convert a surplus of one resource into any other, at a suitably inefficient exchange.

Units

There are three races in Sins, with zero options for customization. This would be disappointing in most 4X games, but is perfectly understandable in an RTS. The manual notes that each one has it’s own strengths, but I must admit I have yet to really notice them. They all have the same general types of units with different names to do the same jobs. There is more seeming variation in the tech trees, but I’m not sure if it’s real, or just terminology changes.

Planets themselves can be developed for better population growth and taxes (in fact, a completely undeveloped world will cost you money), better protected from bombardment, explored for special qualities, and upgraded to be able to support more logistics and military structures.

Logistic and military structures are deployed throughout the gravity well and are constructed by automatically generated specialist ships. The logistic structures include the resource extractors (which are nearly free), shipbuilding structures, and things like trade posts (extra money) and cultural centers (strengthens loyalty of your planets in the area, and interferes with others colonizing nearby, akin to culture in Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords), and research stations (each one you have unlocks one ‘level’ or ‘tier’ of technologies). The military structures are of course mostly defensive weapon installations, and also includes a repair facility.

There are three different types of ships, built at two different facilities. Frigates are the most numerous type, and are small specialist ships. Cruisers are larger ships built at the same place, and are usually specialized around a role (like carrier) that the frigates can’t handle, as well as being much tougher to kill. And then there are the capital ships, which are extremely tough to kill, and have extra layers of complexity.

There are six types of frigates, of which three are available at the start (being the scout, colonizer and general combat versions). The other three have to be researched, along with all the cruiser types.

All five types of capital ships are available at the beginning of the game, and the first one is free to build. The catch? Well, there’s two actually. There are two separate limits on the number of units you can build, and the capital ships hit both of them. First, there is a ‘fleet supply’ capacity, with different ships consuming different amounts of the supply. Frigates use from 3 to 12 depending on type, cruisers use from 5 to 14 (hmm, I need to try the ‘support’ cruiser, at only 5 supply it makes a lot more sense), and capital ships use 50. There is also a hard limit on how many capital ships you can have at one time, using the idea that the crews take an especial amount of training, and those crews are limited.

At the beginning of the game, the two limits are 100 supply, and 1 crew. Both of these can be expanded by investing in them in up to eight steps, each of which is not exactly cheap. At max, you can have 2000 supply and 16 crews. A nasty extra consideration before upgrading the supply situation is that levels beyond the base 100 will consume a percentage of all income (75% at max). Worse, there is no way to ‘dial back’ your supplies if things go bad, and you want your income back to rebuild a shattered empire and fleet.

The bonus to the capital ships, beyond just being large and tough to kill, is that they have experience levels. Each ship kill will provide some experience, and at each level there is some bonus to the hull and shield strength, and the ship gets a new special ability point. Each class of capital ship has four special abilities, which it can purchase as it levels up. The fourth ability is usually especially nice, but can only be purchased at level 6 and above.

I have to say that I really like the interplay of the different ship types, and while the leveling system could have gotten annoying, the capital ships are rare enough that it doesn’t, and really points up how special they are.

Interface

In general the interface is very nicely done. Over on the left side is a menu of various units and objects, including your grouped fleets. These can be folded up to just show the main subject (planet, fleet marker, etc) and dots for the number of ships there, color-coded by player, or expanded to show everything.

There is no fixed ‘focus’ as in SotS, so scrolling with mouse nudges against the edges of the screen works as normal. Of course, despite being 3D rendered, the entire game takes place in a 2D plane, with no acknowledgment of the third dimension outside camera controls. When zooming in, the screen will focus on where the mouse cursor is. This takes a little getting used to, but works really well, and zooming out and then zooming in to another area is very easy.

Ships are realistically small in the vastness of space. (Well, they are somewhat outsized compared to the planets, but not too egregiously.) Most of the time, you have a bunch of color-coded icons representing ships and structures on the screen, but if you zoom in close enough, you’ll start seeing the actual ships show up. Zoomed really close in, the game can look stunningly pretty, but at any common zoom level, you’ll just be seeing the capital ship’s models at most.

There are a number of problems with the interface, however. I have yet to discover any way to make planet names show up short of hovering over or clicking on the planet. Since messages will go by mentioning that forces near ‘x’ are under attack, this would be extremely handy. And no, you can’t just click on the message to go to the location, or highlight it.

The only way to get the full statistics of an object is to hover over it. Selecting it will provide an extremely abbreviated form in the bottom control panel, but nothing else. Since a ship could be moving at speed, this hover could be hard to maintain. Hovering over the icon on the side menu will also work, but it may not be obvious where it is in there until you click on the unit in the main screen, making it a two-step process.

Pausing the game brings up a message that it is paused… which then fades away. I have managed to forget if the game is paused or not on occasion.

Finally, there is the scroll-wheel ‘bounce’. It might just be my settings or mouse, but when I’m zooming in or out (which is constantly), the zoom has a habit of ‘bouncing’ back in the other direction at the end of the wheel motion. Since this even happens while just going one notch to correct the last bounce, this can become quite aggravating. I’ve seen it happen elsewhere, but I don’t think that was my current system, and I know that SotS does not suffer from this on my current setup at all.

Conclusion

Sins is a very interesting experiment in melding two distinct genres of games. In a way, it’s kind of the opposite of SotS. SotS is a 4X game with a lot of RTS combat feel, Sins is an RTS with a lot of 4X strategic feel. I’ve long felt that the RTS genre really stalled early and did not produce much more than variations on the same theme, so seeing something that tries for a whole new outlook on the genre is very refreshing to see.

Overall, I must say I like SotS far better of the two. This is interesting, as Sins has many points of technical excellence and polish where it far outshines SotS. Notably, the controls and general interface are decidedly better done in Sins. But it comes down very heavily on the ‘I can’t think as fast as the game’ side of things that annoy me with almost all RTS games. I always find that my attention is one of the resources I’m managing, and I’m far too contemplative of a person to take that for long.

I’ll also note here that that ‘reality’ takes a back seat to the demands of gameplay in pretty much all cases here. The solar systems presented in the game are a completely at odds with how they are likely to work; that is, there’s far too many inhabitable worlds, and a complete lack of gas giants (though it is the first game I’ve seen that goes for colonizing an asteroid—long a staple of SF). Considering how important relatively short-distance hops inside a solar system are, I’d expect relative orbital motion to start having an effect (I’m assuming that there is some compression of the time scale, and a game that takes hours to play, would happen over a couple months—at least—of ‘real time’.) I don’t insist a game hew to ‘reality’, especially if it helps make it fun, but there’s enough different structural oddities that it does get my attention.

My personal rating is a solid 7, putting it equal with the original MoO, but below SotS and the rest of the MoO series, and also equal with Total Annihilation (the RTS I’ve spent the most time with). However, I must say that for an RTS fan, this rating should easily be much higher, unless they disliked the 4X aspects for some reason, and I strongly recommend any RTS fan give Sins of a Solar Empire a close look.

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Good, With a Side Order of Flaws

by on July 12, 2011 at 6:38 pm
Posted In: Computer games

Review crossposted from VGG.

Sword of the Stars is a space ‘4X’ game; that is, you start with a fledgling empire in the great unknown, and explore, colonize, negotiate, and eventually conquer your way to victory. In the main, this genre is best known for the Master of Orion series, which has defined most expectations of the genre for the last one to two decades. SotS itself is pretty much a fastball straight down the center of these expectations.

Complete Collection title screen

The game was developed by Kerberos, and the original version was published by Lighthouse Productions in 2006. Two expansions, Born of Blood and A Murder of Crows, were released before Lighthouse went bankrupt in 2009. The series is now published by strategy game developer Paradox Interactive, who published a ‘micro-expansion’, Argos Naval Yard in 2009, and the Complete Collection with everything in 2010, and now SotS II is due out later this year. I am only (partially) familiar with the original release, and the Complete Collection, so I will mostly be talking about the complete game, and not when certain features were added in this review.

The biggest thing to note about this game is that it is kind of the ‘anti-MoO3‘, since it is pretty well dedicated to simplifying and streamlining most elements of play, whereas MoO3 was roundly blasted by many fans for being too detailed, and too full of micromanagement. No building individual structures, no multiple planets per star system, ship design has only three sizes, and is streamlined with the use of ‘modules’. Some of the missing complications I mourn, but I am generally a fan of ‘less is more’, and I think the simplifications are overall well chosen, and they gave me a very favorable first impression of the game, once the initial shock wore off.

It also lets you start building a competent (if primitive) navy straight off the bat, whereas most space 4X games make the initial ship building horribly expensive. The ability to terraform most anything (slowly) off the bat was also a surprise, but a nice way to further streamline the game. This game does not fool around with trying to get the action going as fast as possible.

The second thing to note is that there is a limited number of races in this game. Usually, in a modern 4X game, there’s a fair selection of races, and often the choice to mix-and-match abilities to create your own take on how to conquer the galaxy. SotS only has four races, with two more introduced in the main two expansions. This limitation is important to the game, as each race has its own method of FTL travel, which are generally different enough that playing the game is a generally different experience when playing as a different race. With such a fundamental difference lying at the core of each race, the need for a limited number of choices is evident.

Unusually for this type of game, it also comes with a number of scenarios. I’ve only really tried one of them, but I certainly like the idea of that one, which references the background of the universe of SotS; I wish the set of scenarios had been laid out into a rough timeline of events, but that’s just a small missed opportunity to strengthen the background of the game.

Systems

The first place that the design policy of keeping the game simple shows up is with how stars and planets are handled. While many space games recognize that any stellar system is likely to have all sorts of bodies floating in it, [i]SotS[/i] goes for the simple formula that one star equals one usable planet. Indeed there are not even any empty systems in the game; any star shown is going to have something there. (Hardly unique—MoO I and Emperor of the Fading Suns both did this, but it is somewhat uncommon. Meanwhile, MoO3 had the most detailed system accounting I’ve seen; moons still weren’t directly depicted in the game, but they did add to the ‘size’ of the planet.)

Not all planets are the same of course, though they are all considered to be at least somewhat terrestrial in composition; gas giants and asteroid belts do not appear in the game at all. The three primary physical attributes of a planet are its size, its ‘environmental hazard’ rating, and its resources. The first determines the eventual maximum population of the planet, the third determines eventual industrial output, while the second one tells you roughly how hard it will be to terraform. A last statistic on an uncolonized world is how much it is going to cost to develop it.

The empire’s budget is the sum of the output of all worlds, which then goes into savings, research, ship construction, ship maintenance, or supporting worlds that are not producing enough to support themselves. New colonies will generally be sucking down large amounts of cash trying to terraform the world and build up infrastructure. The more unfriendly the environment, the larger and longer the drain will be.

As I mentioned before, unlike many other modern 4X games out there, SotS does not present you with a bunch of different buildings to construct on a plant to boost its abilities, like a city in Civilization. Instead, everything is boiled down to an infrastructure percentage, which affects both monetary and industrial output. In some ways this is too simple, but I find the ‘building’ model can become tiresome after a while, so don’t really miss it here. I’d like to see a game where worlds can be industrial powerhouses, or economic hubs, or places where innovation naturally occurs, or otherwise differentiated, but otherwise be about this simple.

The expansions add an extra wrinkle to the game: planets now have an ‘Imperial’ population, and a civilian one. After playing the game for a while… I still don’t get the point of the split. Colonists come out of the civilian population, and they seem to be the main tax base, while the Imperials operate the industry. Civilians also have morale, and might revolt if things are bad. But I still don’t understand the point of it, and what it was meant to add to the game.

Ships

As with most modern space 4X games, space ships are one of the major focuses of the game; not only are they needed for exploration and combat, but there is a rich design system for creating custom ships for your navy. The usual idea in these games is to have a number of standard ‘hull sizes’ that systems must be fit into. The number of these hull sizes varies from game to game, though around five sizes is fairly typical. MoO3, as usual, went for the maximum number of things to do, and uses fourteen hull sizes; SotS has again decided to simplify as much as possible, and there are only three hull sizes available.

Ship design is streamlined in general, with all ships having three modules: command (front), mission (middle), and engine (rear). Instead of fitting specialty systems and weapons into the available space, modules are picked for the ship’s mission, and the number of weapons allowed is dictated by the modules. This is streamlined, but does have some problems. Notably, you have no choice about where certain functions go, and you cannot combine certain functions as they take the same module slot, and some modules can never go on certain ships, because there’s no module for it at that size.

For the most part it works out, since all the logical modules are there. However, the number of them does get fairly large as the game goes on, and it can be a bit confusing. The main thing that leads to module proliferation is that weapons mounts are directly tied to the modules, so a combat oriented one that specializes is large, forward-mounted weapons is a new module, as is one specialized in small defensive weapons.

The interface suffers at this point too. If you click a weapon mount on the ship diagram to check weapons options, you see the location of the mounts light up on the main ship display. It also shows you firing arcs for the mounts. However, since the default view on the main display is a side view, and combat all happens in a single plane, all you see is an unhelpful, flat, easy to miss, line, unless you remember to rotate the view on the ship display.

Finally, ship design in SotS actually shares a problem with MoO3. Many technologies offer new ship abilities, some of these are automatic upgrades to everything, some of these are new ‘checkbox options’, and some of these are new modules. The last is fairly clearly marked on a technology description, but the first two cannot be told apart from the descriptions, forcing you to check the design screen to see if anything new showed up. Also, I find I get annoyed that I might want to update a design purely because I have a new checkbox to choose. At least it is nowhere near as prevalent as it was in MoO3.

Combat

Obligatory random encounter

Combat in SotS can be skipped over (presumably when it will be a boring one-sided fight), but is ordinarily played out as an RTS mini-game. This fact becomes the crux of most of my problems with the game.

I’ll admit I’m a traditionalist, and I greatly prefer turn-based to real-time systems for just about anything. However, I don’t automatically turn up my nose at RTS games, they can be great fun. The problems here lie directly with the interface, and several things that the game seemed to promise to me, and did not do.

The crux of the trouble is that I had to treat it very much like a normal RTS game. In the main display, ships are always in fleets, which you can change around easily enough through drag-and-drop. This is mostly administrative, and allows you to group tankers with your fleet, so you can reach stars more distant than your normal range. However, you can also build command ships that allow you to define what formation your fleet is using. It’s pretty simple, and kind of neat to fiddle around with.

So, with all of that, I expected that I would be able to hit a button in combat that would select the entire fleet, and use it as a single cohesive unit. This doesn’t seem to have crossed anyone’s mind. Selection is either clicking on a single unit, or using pure drag-select techniques. If you have a fleet formed how you want it, and you want to engage something 90-degrees off of where it’s facing, you have to either have a circular formation, or be ready to do a bunch of individual clicking to reorient the elements of your fleet. If you tell a bunch of ships to go to a new location, they will maintain their relative positions, including any half-done re-working of their formation. To me, it is a real shame that there’s all these ways to set up fleets outside of combat, and it is pretty much wasted inside of combat.

The irony here is that all these gripes come after being spoiled on the relative simplicity of MoO3’s combat.

Needs to be 20% cooler.

Also, there’s no fire discipline. If there’s a friendly ship in between the target and themselves, they’ll fire anyway, doing damage to their own side. Since combat is still generally all on one plane, this can be a real problem. This just adds to a more endemic problem: combat has a decided tendency to turn into Electric Football, with ships (literally) shoving into each other, which points up the problem of scale: to make the ship models visible at reasonable distances, they are rendered all out of proportion to the scale of everything else (to judge by the size of the planet anyway…). So tight little formations of ships slamming into each other are frequent occurrences, and I’m not sure what causes the game to show the ships passing above/below each other, or just shove into each other (not actually ‘colliding’, just shoving the opponent ships around).

As a final gripe, I’ll note that sensor ranges can be a bit short, and the only fix is to have a specialty ship, which still doesn’t entirely alleviate the problem. This can lead frustrating hide-and-seek sessions as you try to figure out where the last enemy ship has decided to park itself. One hint I can give, is that if neither side controls the planet/system the battle is at, the opposing fleet will almost always be directly to your left (no matter where the systems they came from are relative to each other). Also, the planetary defenses (automatic heavy missile launches) seem to always be able to know where the enemy is.

Beyond that, there’s an interesting bit: There is a limit on how many ships each side can have in combat at one time. One of the points of the command ships is they raise this number, and the screen that establishes the formation also establishes what ships you start with. If you’re ‘over budget’, new ships will join the combat as old ones die; whether they’ll appear where your ships are now, or where they started the fight seems inconsistent. I’ve seen notes that there is a technology that allows you to set up the order reinforcements come in as ships die, but I have yet to come across it.

In all, the combat is kind of pretty, kind of neat, and really needs rethinking from the ground up.

Technology

Near the beginning of the game.

As with any self-respecting modern 4X game, there is a complex tree of interlocking technologies to research and use. The presentation format is fairly novel: you are in the center of a cylinder that has the eight categories marked on it, with known and researchable technologies marked, with lines going up from the base to the more advanced (and expensive technologies at the top of the cylinder.

The tech tree is pretty good, though from the format, I expected to see more crossovers between adjacent fields; instead you’re more likely to unlock things on the opposite side of the cylinder by getting a key technology. In the original release, there was no cue to new technologies when there is no line between them, and you have to keep a closer eye on what’s available everywhere than you should have to. Somewhere in the line of expansions, the ticker of status updates started giving a list of new technologies made available, and they would glow in the research screen for that turn, which is a big help.

However, it would be nice to just be able to get a list of everything currently available to research and how long each would take; currently the decision making info is very scattered. It’s also disappointing to see industry and C3 exploding into dozens of technologies, while Star Drives and Power technologies remain stubbornly stuck at two to three.

A nice touch is the fact that in each game, random technologies will be taken out of each player’s tech tree, to keep you guessing about whether a certain branch of research will really get you what you’re seeking.

Interface

I’ve touched on pieces of the interface already, but there’s a few consistent elements that need going into. The most notable thing is that the game is 3D, but the controls for navigating around a 3D space are a bit primitive. You can swing the camera around very nicely, and a mouse scroll wheel works very consistently (I’ve seen some games where spinning the scroll wheel will generate a ‘bounce’ where it goes back in the opposite direction at the end). However, all of this is around a ‘focus point’ which is troublesome to change. In the main screen ‘focus points’ are either systems or fleets between systems, and you have to double-click to change the focus point to that location, which seems to be a bit touchy. If you want a ‘focus point’ away from any actual objects, tough.

Camera control in combat is much the same. Your ‘focus point’ will be one of your ships, and will follow it around, which is fairly good, especially since [tab] will also cycle you through your ships. Of course, if you’re the defender, it will also cycle you through your defense satellites, which isn’t nearly so handy. And, if your focus ship is destroyed, your viewpoint will naturally halt, and you will have to shift it to a new ship if the action continues moving.

(And a final odd note: If you try taking a screenshot while the game is in the normal full screen mode, you just get a shot of your desktop outside of the game. To get a screenshot, you have to go into windowed mode, which has a single fixed resolution.)

Summary

In general, Sword of the Stars is a good space 4X game, and all fans of the genre need to give it a real look. If you were unhappy with MoO3, you should especially give it a look, since it seems to have been designed with a goal of going in the opposite direction from that game.

However, I cannot consider it a landmark game in the genre, despite several very well thought out bits. The combat and the interface in particular are serious marks against the game. I will also mention here that the interface has improved over time. Just the last patch to the base game (before any expansions) helps the main interface with some new features, and the expansions also include some tweaks that help.

Right now, I’m rating the original Sword of the Stars as a 7.5, with the Complete Collection as 7.6, and I don’t think I’m going to shift that rating any further. It doesn’t merit as ‘Very Good’ from me because of its issues, but is quite solid in spite of that. This notches it right above MoO3, and a bit below MoO II, which I also consider to be good 4X games with their own troubles.

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Here We Sit

by on July 4, 2011 at 8:21 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Mark came over for gaming on Saturday. While we’ve generally been managing the group meetings, this is the first time Mark and I have gotten together for a game since last September (yikes! that long?). There’s a large number of things that were contemplated, but Mark finally settled on trying out Here I Stand with me in the 2-player version. We think it’ll do well with the main group, but we want to get a feel for it first, so the entire group isn’t flying blind.

The two-player version narrows the game down to the struggle between the Protestants and the Papacy, with a certain amount of automated interference from the rest of the powers. Mark took the Protestants, leaving me to be the Papacy. As I somewhat expected, things began well for me, but started seriously eroding later. The initial spread of Protestantism is difficult, but as further reformers come on board, it gets easier. Also, there isn’t a whole lot else for the the Protestant player to worry about, so he can spend most of his attention writing treatises until he succeeds.

Meanwhile, I was plotting how to gain control of an extra key or two for VPs and a card draw. We usually try to get a read through on rules ahead of time, but this time neither of us had gotten very far, so it was a voyage of discovery. The first thing I discovered is that all troops go back the the capital or fortresses for winter, so starting a siege as part of your last action doesn’t do any good.

Something that I didn’t discover until I was going through the rules after we were done is that the number of cards specified for each power isn’t the hand size, but the actual number drawn. So I had thought that the three cards for the Papacy included the two Core Cards, really cutting down on the number of actions, and making me desperate for four keys to be able to get a fourth card, as I thought I had Papal Bull, Leipzig Debate and one other. Good to know for next time….

On the second turn, I successfully took neutral Florence. After that, we started figuring out how the non-player major powers were supposed to work, and I had problems. I had drawn Spanish Invasion as the first turn diplomacy card. Not a problem, I just needed to wait until it would target the Protestants instead of me. But on turn 2, Mark used Diplomatic Pressure to swap cards, giving it to him, and the Spanish promptly invaded me on turn 3.

Despite my efforts to resist, the Hapsburg navy defeated mine, and they successfully assaulted Rome. Technically, getting peace with the Hapsburgs was as simple as waiting for the auto-alliance at the end of turn 4, but I realized that once that happened I had no way of getting Rome back (and its one free unit per turn, plus 2 VPs), so during turn 4 diplomacy I excommunicated Charles V to force peace and get Rome back, giving Mark a VP in the process. Sadly, Mark then played French Constable Invades, seriously boosting the French forces in Italy (France begins the game at war with the Pope, but we hadn’t paid much attention to the available troops). This lead to the loss of more Papal troops and Florence.

Meanwhile Mark had finished the German translation of the New Testament, and with that and another boost, most of the HRE had converted. There were three debates during the game, all initiated by me. The first one had gone well, and had allowed me to knock out the only two Protestant spaces there had been at that point in the first turn. The other two backfired. My debater was disgraced in the second one (just a one-pointer…). And despite my clever plan to guarantee seven dice to four, I still lost by two hits on the final round. (I used Leipzig Debate to pick Eck and debated in English, which only had the two-die Tyndale.)

In fact, we noticed that the red dice tended not to roll sixes at all, while the blue dice in the set were a lot more even. There’s not enough rolls to be statistically significant yet, but they were very consistent about it.

Anyway, we only got to the end of turn 4, and Mark had managed to get enough points to avoid a Dominance Victory by me. (Actually, he had held on to Copernicus to make sure of that, and would have presumably used the 6 CPs next turn, now that he knew he was safe.) It was a good game, though I think the pure focus on the religious battle in the two-player game falls a little flat. I definitely want to do this with the group next time.

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Republican Wrangling

by on June 19, 2011 at 5:20 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

The latest monthly gaming group day was yesterday. Managed to get four of us together for another stab at Republic of Rome.

It would really help if Valley Games had managed a good rulebook instead of an almost-decent one. The rules are generally pretty clear—once you find them. The ‘turn order’ organization is not a bad idea, but you still end up with things being explained in odd places because they impact more than one part of the turn. And then there’s the lack of references, the references to the wrong rule, and the occasional missing rule. (At least I’ve never found an explanation of just when a concession [other than the armaments and naval ones] go to having a corrupt tag.)

And it’s a real shame because it’s a fun game other than the need to spend longer than necessary pinning down a rule.

Anyway… we went with the Middle Period scenario this time, to make sure we got to see provinces in action. That was a great decision, since they add a nice flavor to the game. They generally add some income to the state treasury, they can add some influence to a senator, they can cause corruption for that senator, and they change a faction’s voting strength, since the governor is no longer in Rome.

I think we got a bit shy of four turns done, which is actually a bit better than we’ve done before, and with the provinces, we were doing slightly more. We started with the Macedonian war active, which we didn’t manage to do much about the first turn, thanks to a manpower shortage (caused by a poor State of the Republic speech; we tend to awful luck with those…). Then the 3rd Spanish revolt came up, giving us a second worry.

I tended to stay in the background, I bid on most of the extra rounds, but not outrageously, and I think I only got two of them. Dave managed to keep the Rome Consul within his faction most of the time. HRAO actually passed to Jason at one point when the Rome Consul died of an epidemic. This shows again how our group doesn’t do a lot of infighting. We generally like the idea of it, we just don’t do it very much.

However, I got Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus Cunctator as a senator. Along with a good military rating, his ability to reduce casualties was a big plus, and getting in as Field Consul was easy. Almost as easy as fighting the Macedonians. After that, everyone was of two minds about him. He was too valuable a general to get rid of, and too popular (especially after he held some games in Rome) for anyone else’s piece of mind.

One of the moderately capable military men was sent out the next turn with a very sizable army, and took care of the Spanish Revolt, even with a leader attached, and just in time, because the 2nd(?!) Revolt was waiting in “Imminent Wars”, and it was thoroughly taken care of the turn after. I’m a bit surprised we weren’t drawing more wars than we did, considering that we were almost never rolling ‘7’s for the initiative, and therefore burning through the event/forum deck at a pretty good clip.

I actually scored a narrow second when we counted up influence at the end of the day; Dave had a fairly commanding first, though that probably would have been limited over the next couple of turns as it was just getting to the point that people were truly concerned about it.

Overall, we had a lot of fun, though Dave has announced that he’s not really up for it again. This didn’t surprise me too much, as he’s not really interested in larger, fiddlier games. Personally, I’d be a lot happier if there was just some way to streamline the voting tallies; the little dials Valley Games provided tend to drift on their own, and are not helping. Otherwise, it’s a fine game and a lot of fun to maneuver for political position. Dave certainly likes getting into character and making impassioned speeches (a good reason for letting him keep the Rome Consul actually…).

With luck, Mark will make it over again next weekend, and we can finally start trying to do something about the backlog of 2-player games we’ve been building up.

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