34 years later, space sim Krellan Commander is back with a 2.0 release that's sort of FTL meets Dwarf Fortress
Original creator launches a new version of MS-DOS classic
At the time of Star Fleet II: Krellan Commander's release, I was still learning to spell and wrestling with the whole "going to the toilet independently" business, but if I'd had access to an MS-DOS PC between potty-training sessions, I dare say I'd have tried my hand at being an intergalactic warlord. Originally published in 1989 by Interstel Corporation and distributed by a little-known company called Electronic Arts, it's an absurdly in-depth and fiddly-looking space sim in which you fly around a randomly generated cosmos in your horrible Klingon-adjacent battlecruiser, blowing up or commandeering other ships, bombarding or invading planets, and generally speaking being a nuisance.
According to its creators, Trevor Sorensen and Mark Baldwin, the game had a rushed launch that led to a lot of technical issues. The developers released another, relatively bug-free version in 1991, which is the version you'll find on most retro game preservation sites. Then, in 2018, Sorensen decided to make a new 2.0 version of Krellan Commander using his original 486 PC, which finally launched this week on Steam and GOG.
I haven't given the 2.0 incarnation a whirl, but I'm fascinated by the trailer, which I would characterise for today's players as FTL through the lens of Dwarf Fortress, mixed up with chunks of Stellaris. I'm also interested by the underlying technology, which has been faithfully preserved in key respects.
"As this game came out in 1989, it has absolutely no multithreading of any kind," reads a blurb on the Steam page. "Therefore, due to the real-time nature of the game (although you can pause at any time), sometimes responses to your commands might be delayed a moment."
The 2.0 version does sport a few "modern" flourishes: improved AI and UI elements, various bug fixes and some quality-of-life enhancements such as improved key commands, together with new overlays for fleet command and probe operations. It also lets you access ship performance data not available in the older versions, and allows you to beam prisoners into stars to raise crew morale. These krellan ship captains only get more sadistic with age, it seems.
"Have patience with the game," the blurb goes on. "It's doing a lot at one time, from calculating AI for dozens of ships and even individual torpedoes, to managing your ship's systems and much more." Individual torpedoes! Now that's what I call a sim. Whether it's entertaining to play is another matter, of course.
The game includes eight tutorials to teach you about navigation, ship combat and planetary invasions, amongst other things, but it looks like it'll be an uphill struggle nonetheless if you come to it fresh from Stellaris. There's no mouse control, so you'll need to memorise a few keyboard shortcuts.
Did you play this originally? If you want to play an MS-DOS space sim but don't want to play a rampaging bad guy, I recommend Noctis, which is kind of Starfield if Starfield had been made by a Fluxus art collective.