Comments on: Now Blossoming: Eufloria

By: Schaulustiger

Schaulustiger — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 19:25:09 +0000

Wow, that was an extensive write-up, thank you Mr. Anonymous! :) I'm gonna give it another try tonight. I guess the problem was my impatience, so I always engaged the grey masses too early.

By: lalahsghost

lalahsghost — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 18:44:26 +0000

I can’t imagine paying $20 for a polished flash game. I’m sorry. I could buy like three good/great SNES cartridges for that price….

By: Anonymous Coward

Anonymous Coward — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 18:36:35 +0000

As a rule, you can’t beat the grey juggernaut. The gigantic grey swarm in that level is made up of stronger-than-normal seeds, and it will easily chew up regular groups thrice its own size. Just leave it alone, hope that it attacks the colored teams, and keep conquering little planets. Any time that you don’t see a likely candidate for takeover, upgrade your planets, starting with the best ones — try to use wimpy seeds for this, but don’t waste lots of time this way. You can definitely take planets faster than the AI can — once you have one band of 100-150, you can start carefully taking out the colored enemies. When the big gray cloud shows up, just leave and go take another planet (say, an undefended gray planet). It stinks if they happen to take your prize planet, but that part’s just about luck. Once you’ve taken 2/3 or so of the map, you can think about trying to take one of the big planets; just keep in mind that gray is going to swarm to defend it, and the planet’s own defenses are much more formidable than any others in the game; even without defenders, it can take several hundred average seeds to weather the defensive trees’ onslaught and whittle down the planets’ 500+ hit points. Dealing with the swarm comes near the end, when you’ve got 750-1000 seeds to send at it. Grey’s weakness as compared to the colored enemies is that it doesn’t regenerate seeds quickly; any time you see a group of 20-30 grays floating by themselves, kill it if you can spare the time; even if you have to retreat from the planet, that’s 20-30 seeds that AREN’T reinforcing the juggernaut. Those defensive laser flowers are very good for fighting off smaller groups of enemies, by the way. I’d build at least one defensive tree on your best planet just to get a fast, strong laser flower. Just don’t waste time deploying it against planets with numerous defense trees; it doesn’t attack the bombs, and it’s quite likely to get killed in a random explosion.

In short, A) take little planets, B) don’t fight the big gray swarm, C) only think about finishing off the big planets and swarm when the rest of the map is under control.

By: Schaulustiger

Schaulustiger — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 17:49:26 +0000

I totally agree with the anonymous guy. I also played it at night before going to bed and it was relaxing in an absolutely wonderful way. Would have wished for a more aggressive AI, too, it was way too passive for most of the campaign. And when the AI plays a bit better, the game is quite strategic. Btw, how did you finish the last mission? It's the only one that I can't get a foothold in. Those grey dudes from their superplanets destroy me wherever they go, even if I have an army three or four times the size of theirs.

By: Anonymous Coward

Anonymous Coward — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 17:16:35 +0000

Finished it. The perfect game to get you to sleep at night. I mean that in the nicest possible way.

The graphics are simple and well-done for what they are. My 2 year old computer had no problem running with upwards of 5000 seedlings in play. I’ll step out and say that I actually enjoyed the control scheme; I wound up navigating almost entirely by rolling the mouse wheel down, which didn’t bother me. The music is formless but fluid, and fitting for such a slow game. The randomness factor wasn’t severe, but it occasionally sent a pretty strong windfall to the player, especially by placing high-quality poorly-guarded asteroids near the starting location, and it occasionally did the opposite, pinning a weak start location between heavily fortified large asteroids; however, I never encountered anything close to a no-win situation. The big difference between the old Dyson versions I played and Eufloria was the addition of “flowers,” which allowed you to either upgrade the seedlings produced by one tree or to force one defensive tree to produce a movable anti-seedling laser-flower thingy (I forget its name) — basically, slow-moving destroyers that annihilate seeds but cannot fire at trees.

The chief complaint I have is the meagre difficulty of 95% of the game. First, the engine supported scripted events, but the functionality was almost never used to any meaningful effect. On one level, a beefed-up invading fleet shows up and attacks the rest of the cluster; that was the first time I had to restart, but that was a good thing. Mostly, the script simply put up messages when certain asteroids were touched, but to no effect. Second, the engine allows for relatively aggressive AI play, but this toughness doesn’t show up until the very last campaign level. That was the second and last time I had to restart the level. Limits on total seed count (say, only 30-40 seeds total per asteroid controlled) would have added a tricky dimension to the game, instead of making it a game of a quick early expansion followed by massive turtling. Plus, it would have made the power differences on the various asteroids more meaningful; after the first 100 seeds, there was really little point in paying attention to which ones were stronger or faster. Additionally, while the flower upgrades were kind of fun, they were universally overkill; a laser flower with any backup whatsoever could take on many, MANY seedlings, since the AI wasn’t exceptionally prone to target the flower first, and enhanced seedlings were fairly beefy themselves, especially if produced from a good asteroid.

This is not to say that Eufloria wasn’t enjoyable. It’s a great play-while-you-relax game, whether relaxation includes chatting, reading something light, or watching a video. The interface is clean and intuitive, and the gameplay is quietly entertaining for awhile. Don’t go in expecting the moon, and it’ll probably entertain a casual gamer for at least a single playthrough.

By: Lambchops

Lambchops — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 23:55:36 +0000

The demo was a great time waster for an hour or so but I’m not inclined to buy the game.

I just find the pacing problems mentioned by kieron to put me off a bit. It’s slow to get going at the start of a level, about spot on in the middle and then all too quick and easy at the end.

By: Alexander Norris

Alexander Norris — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 21:02:11 +0000

Soooo… Guess who just made the Eufloria newspost on Steam as the primary review quote?

Here’s a hint: it may have something to do with the blog post I’m commenting on.

By: GreatUncleBaal

GreatUncleBaal — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:02:36 +0000

I really like this game and will pick it up in the next couple of weeks. I still find it vaguely sinister though – this silent swarm descending on worlds and claiming them – it reminds me of the end of the short story “Galactic North” by Alastair Reynolds.

By: Tei

Tei — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 12:06:44 +0000

Galcon, and all Galcon clones are broken, I say. The faster win, or the one that can mass more units win. Is like a big game of Tic Tac Toe in real-time.

Could be that this Eufloria is adding more gameplay elements to un-broken the Galcon gameplay? I ask for a demo! :-)

By: Tei

Tei — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 12:04:26 +0000

You could play any game Postal style, where you are evil, and everybody is good. Or you can buy a “B&W” moral monitor, that only paint two colores: White and Black. But I have read that people get tired of the monocolorism really fast and ask for grey.

By: Maniac11919

Maniac11919 — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 09:36:45 +0000

exactly what i was thinking. this is identical to galcon, just with a different interface and perhaps a bit more depth… galcon with flowers and a slow place is still galcon though…

By: Stense

Stense — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 09:33:49 +0000

From what I’ve seen of this, its pacing and minimilistic style reminds me, in passing, somewhat of Defcon. Which is no bad thing in my opinion. I’m probably wrong in such a comparison, but that was my initial thought upon seeing the game.