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The good: Combat is fun. Set on a 2d map, each turn you give a movement order and a shooting order. Pick from 3 weapons to focus on shields, armor, or a burst weapon for groups. Divert power to shields, weapons, or engines as needed. Each battle you start with a set number of powerups that do things like launch a massive attack on one ship, take out groups of small ships, call in fighters to support you, restore your shields, etc. Deep diplomacy system. 7 unique races that each have their own mechanics and preferences. Tons of diplomatic and hostile options. A large research tree to work through. But... The bad: Confusing as all hell. You have all these diplomatic options, but it's never clear when or why you should use them. It's not even always clear if they're helping at all. Each planet has an environment, health, public order, and economic score. Then each planet has a residential, commercial, and industrial score. Then each planet has a terraforming score. Each of these scores somehow influences its rate of research, spacecraft production, ground troops production, and trade goods production, but I have no idea how. I have no idea which scores to prioritize, when things are bad enough to intervene, or what the optimal methods for improving these scores are. Half the time the scores are changing faster than I can even influence them. If I don't understand what's going on in the game, why should I care about it? Tedious as all hell. It's not just that I don't know how to influence the scores. The scores are influenced so slowly. You can spend in-game months working on one score to have it only go up by a few points out of a hundred. As an example: to form the Federation you need at minimum 2 races to like each other at 300 points. That is, race A must have a +300 attitude towards race B, and race B must have a +300 attitude towards race A. You can improve this by setting up trade routes between these races, brokering diplomatic deals between them, or doing a specific mission to raise relations. The first two ways I mentioned cost diplomatic points, which are generally ground by doing favors for the races. The last is a mission that takes years. A full year of a race relation mission might raise their attitude by 3-5 points. Out of 300. For one side only, as in only A to B, not reciprocated for B to A. loving bullshit. The ugly: This is put out by Arcen games, best known for AI War. But they're also known for notable flop A Valley Without Wind (1 and 2). What went wrong with AVWW 1? The mechanics were confusing and clunky. So they put out AVWW 2. What was wrong with AVWW 2? The mechanics were confusing and clunky. At this point I'm convinced that this studio got lucky with AI Wars and otherwise can't put out a playable game to save their lives. They are on patch 16 (17?) at this point since release, which was a month ago. Every patch seems to change the game mechanics drastically. And in a game like this, changing one mechanic will likely have far ranging effects. There's no way they're properly testing what they're doing, and I'm not even convinced they know what they're doing at this point.
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May 14, 2014 18:29
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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 21:38 |
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