Posts Tagged ‘Gratuitous Space Battles’

Shiny Bang Boom: Gratuitous Space Battles 2 Released

'splode-o!

It’s always nice to have a demonstration what a complete fool you are and how poorly you think things through. Humbling. Gratuitous Space Battles offered that experience with huge spacefights where your input ends as soon as the battle begins, and all you can do is watch as the plans you laid, the issues you ordered, and the ships you designed failed spectacularly to deal with the enemy’s far superior plan. Or maybe you were good at it. I don’t know.

Either way, you may get something out of Gratuitous Space Battles 2 [official site], which launched yesterday.

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RPS Feature Pusherman

Bad Medicine, Good Money: Hands-On With Big Pharma

I’ve never much thought about what goes into the little white tablet I swallow when I’m hungover, have the sniffles or another bout of Geek’s Disease.* It’s just chalky magic, right? Well, no: it’s the result of millions of dollars, aggressive R&D, production facilities of breathtaking size and precision, ruthless marketeering and impossibly sinister downplaying and mitigation of side effects. While medicine-themed management game Big Pharma doesn’t go for pharmaceutical industry’s jugular, Goldacre-style, its pills-as-merciless-industry approach is certainly a welcome change from the bland, smiling, comfortable faces that advertising tells us medicine are all about.
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Gratuitous Space Battles 2 Trailer Comes In Peace

Gratuitous Space inspired gratuitous Wikipedia information.

I’ve spent untold hours watching back replays of my own Supreme Commander games, taking the opportunity to slow-down or speed-up time, watch maneuvers by my opponents I missed the first time around, and to marvel at the bombastic laser wars that eventually decide each match.

Gratuitious Space Battles is that whole process as an entire game: you build a fleet, design the ships, and then click go to watch a spectacular hands-off space battle. The sequel seems determined to make those battles more spectacular than ever, as demonstrated by this new trailer. Such pretty lasers and explosions.

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Laser Days: Gratuitous Space Battles 2

The conflicts in Gratuitous Space Battles 2 are certainly deserving of the adjective applied in the game’s title but the new video below brings several other descriptives to mind. ‘Colourful’, ‘cunning’, ‘extravagant’, ‘fabulous’ and more besides. Like it’s predecessor, GSB 2 is a game in which players construct fleets, position them and then watch as they do battle. Remember the text crawl that sucked all the excitement out of you like a joy vampire at the beginning of The Phantom Menace? “The taxation of trade routes to outlying starsystems is in dispute”, says Star Wars. GSB says, “BOY HOWDY THE PURPLE SHIPS ARE SHOOTING THE EVER-LIVING CRAP OUT OF THE GREEN SHIPS YOWZERS!”

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Gratuitous Announcements: Gratuitous Space Battles 2

Zap zap!

Gratuitous Space Battles was not a game of masterful tactics. It didn’t allow damn fool gambits. GSB was won or lost long before then. GSB is played in the planning, the design and customisation of a huge space fleet and the careful behaviours you order them to follow. Once your ships are ready to launch, it could run the numbers and say if you won or lost, but that would be somewhat against the name. The eponymous space battles are gratuitous, with cruisers and fighters and lasers and missiles and drones and so many explosions for you to simply watch.

Expect more explosions, as sequel Gratuitous Space Battles 2 is now officially announced.

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Play Gratuitous Space Battles For Free This Weekend

I know many of you will be spending the weekend tending to your winter-blasted shoots as you celebrate the feast day of Serenus the Gardener, or perhaps remembering Red Army Day by engaging in tabletop recreations of the Battle of Kiev or, for the more ambitious, Operation Bagration. Commendable pastimes, I’m sure, but if the dusty red blocks that represent Soviet armoured divisions are lost in the attic, or Serenus’ spirit is locked in the frozen turf, then you may be interested to hear that Gratuitous Space Battles is free to play on Steam until Sunday 9PM GMT.

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Brand New Worlds: Gratuitous Space Battles

The release of the conquest mode for Gratuitous Space Battles caused me to reinstall and lose a couple of weekends plotting and planning. Conquest provided a campaign to sit alongside the standalone bouts of ship wrecking and, lo, it was good. A few months ago, unbeknownst to me, a clever sort who goes by the name Pendra on the Positech forums released a random galaxy generator, providing Endless Consecutive Contextual Gratuitous Space Battles. There was an update to the generator this morning, which Cliffski mentioned in the Twittersphere, and I’ve copied some details into the emptiness below.

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Gratuitous Space Battles No Longer Fully Gratuitous


The point of Gratuitous Space Battles was that it was a fleet manager, not an RTS. So while you watched the space battles play out, you didn’t actually influence them – you were the admiral who had designed the ships and decided upon the tactics. And that made the actual battles gratuitous in terms of the gameplay. That, however, is no longer necessarily true. Cliff from Positech has sent word that he’s continued fiddling with the game, and has released a free patch to allow players to get involved with the battle-action. Cliff says: “It’s only an ‘optional’ feature, and only works in single-player offline games, but from patch 1.60 (which is now live, steam copies will be updated soon), the player can select ships and issue movement and fire orders mid battle, and even edit the ‘standing’ orders for ships in the middle of an engagement.” There’s a video, which explains it in a bit more detail, below.
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The RPS Bargain Bucket: One Free

Lewie’s away being fitted for birthday hats and I’m all alone in the Savy Tower this weekend. I wasn’t sure what to do with myself. I was racing the bargain-bots down the endless stairs when Lewie appeared to me in a text message. ‘Tony, you should probably find cheap games’ he said – in an impressive hat – so here I am. If you are in London on May 4th, please do come celebrate five years of Savygamer, more details and daily deals are on SavyGamer.co.uk. Hats welcome.

In the bucket today: Syndicate (the fab one), Gratuitous Space Battles, Total War packs, Serious Sam 3 and, oh, all sorts.
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Next Humble Bundle Leaks, Is A Goodun

He approves. Of meat.

Details of the next Humble Indie Bundle have once more leaked, because Steam’s Content Description Record Viewer Thingamie is so ludicrously easy for people to spy. And it looks like it’s going to be a bit of a corker, as spotted by DIY Gamer. In the pay-what-you-want collection it seems there will be Super Meat Boy, BIT.TRIP.RUNNER, Jamestown, Nightsky and Shank. That’s the first wave, and then there’s even better to get added in.

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Host In Space: Gratuitous Space Battles DLC

Lots of people think ivy is a parasite. It isn't.

Observant eyes may have noticed that there’s a new expansion out for Gratuitous Space Battles, the fleet building slice of indie goodness from Positech. While this fresh bit of DLC doesn’t add any new game modes, it does add 10 new ships, three new pieces of equipment and a new scenario. The new ships belong to the titular Parasites faction, who sound very unpleasant indeed. Swanning around the galaxy looking for host species to grow their larvae in? It’s not on. There’s a trailer showing some particularly gratuitous space battles below and a new pic from Positech’s upcoming Gratuitous Tank Battles for your eyes to look at.

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Gratuitous Space Battles: Galactic Conquest

Hurrah! Cliffski‘s announced that the Galactic Conquest expansion for Gratuitous Space Battles is now available for purchase, although the expansion isn’t actually out yet and technically the £5 you’re dropping is a pre-order that gets you access to the beta, which may have a bug or three.

Galactic Conquest is a big ol’ update, adding a brand new campaign mode where you battle for planets and gradually build up fleets using captured shipyards and academies. As Jim pointed out, a campaign mode surely makes all those space battles much less gratuitous. Less Gratuitous: Space Battles, that’s what Cliffski should have called it. Full, lengthy features list and video after the jump.
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Laser Chat: Gratuitous Space Campaigns


If there was a significant problem with fleet-management game Gratuitous Space Battles, it was that it was almost too gratuitous. There were a lot of space battles, with nothing to link or contextualise them. To fix this black hole in the space-time of his creation, Cliff “Positech” Harris has been constructing some DLC, a “massively single-player” non-linear campaign, which is now nearing completion. I had a quick chat with him about this development, which you can read below.
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Gratuitous Payment Options: Nomads DLC

Wherever I lay my enormous space battleship, is my home.

Cliffski really does have a knack at this. He’s just released his latest bit of Gratuitous Space Battles DLC, introducing the Nomads, a whole new race with ships, weapons and similar. Oldest race in the galaxy, according to the GSB fiction. But the trick is the spin he’s given to this. There’s two editions of the DLC you can buy. One is $5.99, the other is $2.99. There’s no difference between ’em. It’s simply an experiment, to try and cater for the people who say they can’t afford that amount of money. Look at your life, decide what you can afford, then pay it. He’s also keeping a running tally of the results. Currently, 28 $5.99 editions and 10 $2.99 editions. And if you’ve never played GSB, you can try the demo. Oh – the new trailer follows.
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Gratuitous Space Battles Gets Campaign

It's not a 4X game, more of a kind of stratego-tactical web of space-eminence, say experts.
There was a problem with the rather clever space-battle fleet manager game Gratuitous Space Battles. It was this: there was no campaign mode. I’ve no idea how you would fix a problem like that, but fortunately one man development army Cliffski has plenty of ideas. One of them is relevant: he’s going to add a campaign mode. He explains: “The GSB campaign is a singleplayer ‘conquer-the-galaxy’ style game, where you build up vast space fleets and kick interstellar ass. Rather than set, pre-determined fleets to battle against, the game utilises the fleets designed by other GSB players to provide an endless variety of opponent, so you will be pitted against real carbon-based intelligence on every step of your path to galactic dominance.” Read more about this extraordinary move here. It will be paid DLC, price TBC.

Cliffski Asks: Why Don’t You Buy My Games?

Too many lasers?

Cliff “Cliffski” Harris, creator of Kudos, Democracy and Gratuitous Space Battles, is launching another survey of his Positech customers to learn about their purchasing habits. Or more specifically, their lack of purchasing habits. He’s asking people, “Why didn’t you buy Gratuitous Space Battles?”

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Gratuitous Line Extension: The Swarm DLC

A space bird on the map is worth two not on the map..

Positech’s popular hands-off build-and-release strategy game Gratuitous Space Battles have just released an expansion pack. How does it expandier the game’s expansosity? Well, for six dollars you get a whole new race, 2 scenarios and a cent. The aliens in question are the swarm who deploy masses of fleets with smart bombs and focusing-in disruptor beams. All the while looking like the big gold bird out of Mysterious Cities of Gold. And a trailer follows! Yes! No, really.
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Gratuitous Space Expansion: The Tribe


Blimey, space-fleet management game Gratuitous Space Battles already has an expansion, called The Tribe. Creator Cliff Harris says: “The pack adds an extra playable race to the game, complete with shiny new spaceships to blast apart in gratuitous slow motion. As well as new ship hulls, the game adds two new missions and a scattering of new tribe-specific modules to reflect their emphasis on ‘strong hulls and weak shields’. It also introduces the first use of kinetic weapons.” There are also improvements and changes in the pipeline for the vanilla game.

The Tribe is out now, and it’s $6. (Trailer below)
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Gratuitous Space Battles Add-On Ahoy!


News of a mini-expansion for GSB arrives over on the Positech blog. Cliffski says: “…current plans for the pack are to introduce a new race to the game. It will have the same variety of ships as the other races. The ships will also have a few race-specific modules, and some quite drastic ship bonuses. It was a relief to work out that ship bonuses can be negative, meaning this new batch of ships will have weak shields, weak armor, and very strong hulls.” He’s not yet decided on a price for said expansion, claiming he only wishes to recoup the cost of making it.

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