It’d be lovely if 1C’d finally settle on a release date for The Tomorrow War, though. Seems to have been “just about there” for the last year now. I mean how much longer do we have to wait for a game that’s not only been released in Eastern Europe, but also has a sequel/expansion?!?

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Also That Buccaneer game really has me hooked in, I am absolutely dying to find the last Chimera (a.k.a. “Other”) class of ship, as it’s the only one that I don’t have! It’s simple, it’s silly, but damn if I don’t enjoy sailing around and blasting everyone else out of the water. I’ve also found zero hints online, anyone have any advice on where to find the last ship that I need? The one that’s to the right of the “Iron Whelp”.

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Go to 1C’s website: http://www.1cpublishing.eu/
They’re publishing most of these games like Kings Bounty The Legend and Armored Princess, Fantasy Wars and Elven Legacy, plus a few other cool games. Strategy Informer does a fair amount of reporting on them, but most mainstream game sites don’t. If you check 1C’s forum though, they always post links to every little tidbit they can find that covers their games.

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http://www.direct2drive.co.uk/1/5806/product/Buy-The-Club-Download

http://www.direct2drive.co.uk/1/6519/product/Buy-Space-Siege-Download

Space Siege would be a joke even if it was free but The Club might work as budget.

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@Mil: I’ve only played Fantasy General in passing, so can’t give some conclusive decision on the matter, but FW does seem extremely reminiscent of it. And certainly any FG fans I’ve known have embraced it with open arms, so I’d say it’s a pretty safe bet.

And Sword of the Stars is excellent, doesn’t get anywhere near the respect it deserves. Doubly surprising when it was created by a core group of the team responsible for the much-loved Homeworld games. Homeworld, people! Give me that over the crushingly dull Sins of blah blah etc any day.

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You get the ticker, which you can click on to expand, plus a vocal cue for each event.

And a full events list tab that can zoom you to every event that took place during a turn. It’s easy to see how SotS got a reputation for hiding stuff from the player – the release version’s interface was a shambles, and they had a bizarre ideological stance on forcing manual player inspection of ships – but they’ve caved on many of the dumber decisions and made huge interface improvements in their patches.

I would recommend SotS not so much for a ‘beginner’ – it’s so unique that it’s not really a gateway – as for someone who’s not interested in full-on 4X complexity. SotS is a universe where THERE IS ONLY WAR, to coin a phrase. It’s about growing colonies you’ve conquered with your awesome spaceships, designing awesome spaceships, producing awesome spaceships, and moving awesome spaceships around in order to fight over colonies with awesome spaceships. You don’t use AI governers to tweak peanut butter production on Distantis IV, because you don’t tweak peanut butter production at all. You work with populations, and spaceships.

What SotS does better than any other game, for me at least, is generate story and drama; only Armageddon Empires and the Total War series come close, and all via the same contingency between strategic and tactical play. The polygon-collision combat model and four genuinely unique star drives sound like bullet points, but in reality they bubble up an enormous wealth of strategic implications from semichaotic events in each tactical battle – it’s possible for the green light on a whole multisystem offensive to hinge on the survival of a single particular ship. I wish GalCiv II felt to me like Tom Francis’ war diaries; SotS does, all the time and with every race. It simultaneously strips away the breadth of choices that often paralyse me in 4X and even ‘RT4X’, and loads up the remaining decisions with a hugely satisfying heft. (I admit I also eat up the alien races with a spoon – we see a lot of the same archetypes in video games and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but this game’s races are best described not as Tyranids or Eldar but as an Azad/Screewee hybrid, a grimly determineded Tnuctipun, and the Buggers without psionics.)

Lead designer Martin Cirulis periodically suffers from a low-grade case of Smartitis, but this prerelease interview illustrates the kind of narratives that just fall out for free when you take the time to create a game where little things make a big difference. The remainder of this comment is a portion of an AAR I posted in a private forum during my first spin with the game.

OK, that was pretty cool. I started out tactically inept, so going one-to-two on kills seemed normal,then improved my tactics and got up to one-to-one and at my peak, about three-to-two. Then, suddenly, most of my fleets started getting eaten alive again and I couldn’t figure out why. I was spending most of my time in tac combat zoomed out, but the game actually wants you to look at the pretty and get information on what’s going on; when I finally got good enough to start targeting individual sections, I focus-zoomed in and discovered the trick. After our first few encounters, I’d settled into a simple two-group structure of plasma torpedo boats (arty) and a “Zapper” bristling with UV lasers. The Zappers had absolutely chewed up a few fleets at medium range, as they were designed to do, but I should have noticed that enemies were suddenly surviving to close range. The bastard had done that adaptive analysis thing they were talking about, started tricking out all his fleets in reflective armor, and being the Tarka, his forward and side armor’s excellently angled. Maybe 80% of my shots were just ricocheting off.

Fortunately, the planet smasher fleets which are about to arrive at his two forward strongholds happen to be heavily biased towards an older design using gauss and missiles. Heh heh heh.
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He turned aside my first planet smasher, which I had expected to be a cakewalk. I failed in part because I tried to be a clever dick and incorporate a returning prep fleet, screwing up my reinforcement orders thanks to the stupid fleet management, but mainly because he reinforced and a Size 9 planet is very large and difficult to kill with destroyers to an extent I had not previously understood. On the plus side, I inflicted some very serious pain on his fleet and got a great shuttle run in to knock the planet down to an effective Size 6 or 7 for a few turns. He also completely stripped his other biggie’s defences to reinforce this one, leaving it open for my other stomper which arrives in just a couple of turns. Call it Coral Sea, I guess – I’m certainly not entirely happy, but I think in the long run it was a significant victory.

I’m suddenly a lot less sanguine about my third stompy fleet’s chances on the other side of the map, though. I might be stretching too much by building to pound three strong points at once, but it does seem to be keeping his shipyards busy on home turf; he’s only sent one medium attack fleet so far (with Plague Missiles, the rat, which got my planet but also seemed much less effective than I expected. Maybe my defsats shot a couple of them down first; I was busy) Fortunately I just finished researching fusion drives and retuned all my classes, so my next waves will arrive much faster with nearly double the firepower per ship.

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You get the ticker, which you can click on to expand, plus a vocal cue for each event. Should be more than enough; it even breaks down combat results into how much damage each weapon type dealt

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@Ian: not true at all. 72% percent at most.

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I mean, there’s a lousy little scroller at the bottom of the screen (or, again, was), but it’s not a substitute for proper reporting.

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