Endless Space: What’s this now? What? HMMM

Hello there! Are you excited by space? Are you super into spaceships and vast galatic empires? Are you mildly aroused by the concept of controlling a vast fleet of warships that travel the universe subjugating civilizations?

Yeah me too.

So 4X games, set in space, are my bread and butter. Except they aren’t! Because many are super shit. In fact, of the ones I’ve played I don’t have a ton of favorites. AI War is amazing and everyone should get it, but I had the misfortune of cutting my teeth on the legendarily not very good Master of Orion 3, which cooled me on things. Alpha Centauri was fun but you know a distinct lack of warships. Galactic Civilizations felt like playing a German boardgame with a pride of mildly demented grandfathers. Sword of the Stars 2 was a goddamn atrocity. I got my money back, a first. It wasn’t even completed! Just sort of shipped hoping no one would open the box. I guess Star Ruler is actually getting super neat I should take a look at that… Star Chamber, a weird trading-card/strategy hybrid was probably the most fun I’ve had with the genre in a long bit.

So the point is a new thing popped up on Steam today, Endless Space.

Now, with all the starts being kicked recently I am getting slightly mildly suspicious when someone promises me a cool game in exchange for investment/preorder whatever. And seriously, I preordered SotS2 and it was so bad. But Endless Space intrigues me. It’s reasonably cheap, $27 for the most expensive version. It also has a neat sort of alpha/beta participation system, where when you buy the game you get  Games2Gether Points. Which sound really silly! But it’s not a bad idea, it’s a distinct developer-mediated methodology for getting fan input. Sometimes you want a wild font of ideas on a forum, it can be great. But sometimes a half-dozen people saying you should “allow people to enter the game like the matrix so that we can play like if it was the matrix” and you just want to take a reading on something more concrete. The examples up at the moment are competing logos for a faction design, and competing designs for a certain type of pirate ship. And I mean, why not? You’re guaranteed to nail down a few little features that don’t actually matter, and it creates an atmosphere of participation for fans who let’s face it are not always the most brilliant design mavens.

And that’s not all! It actually looks kind of really neat. I wish they had a real demo out, because it looks like it hits an amazing note of simplicity married to complexity that these sorts of games really need. It has a beautiful, clean interface (from the screens and videos I’ve seen) that just looks like a joy to observe while pretending it is a display on the deck of your command carrier. It’s unfortunately vague on a lot of gameplay specifics, because you know it’s a 4X so you… 4X things. It’s really hard to pin these sorts of games down without actually spend an hour or twenty with them, so that does make me pause. But fucking look at this:

It’s so CLEAN

And it’s all like that, just this slick as hell UI letting you do what you actually want to do: colonize, build, diplomacize, and murder. Also interesting is that the battle system seems a bit unique. Basically you make important decisions, but leave the actual to-do to mostly automated processes. On the one hand, I like telling everything what to do. On the other hand, part of the allure of being a Space Ruler is that you get to order people to do shit and make them figure it out. If the system allows for actually interesting tactical decision-making in the battles, it’ll definitely be fun. Particularly if new techs open up the field a bit more.

And I mean what a goddamn tech tree, right? Again: Clean, beautiful, functional. I love it when games like this realize that accessible UI is what you need to feel like an in-control ruler. If I’m governing by Excel I am not going to feel cool.

I am almost certain the top middle is some sort of sweater tech.

Anyway! There’s a very neat look at the Alpha build with some nice things to say at Space Sector, and in the meantime here’s a movie! I really think I might drop money on this. I mean, SPACE.

RUSE PC Demo is Out!

RUUUUUUSSSE

The PC demo is out! Single-player, but it will whet your whistle for the release in September!

Okay I know this is already a lost cause, I know that. Starcraft 2 has effectively killed any other game that is even remotely like it, squashing them before they even get a chance to show their colors. Like the inevitable -yet no less horrific for that very inevitability- consequence of taking your pet peacock to an industrial site.

But I want you to stop and think for a second: are you playing Starcraft 2 right now? Hell, do you maybe not even like Starcraft 2? Or RTS games? Or games at all? RUSE might be a great option for a fun time then. It is, in many ways, the polar opposite of Starcraft. It is slow paced, it emphasizes large strategic-level decisions rather than smaller tactical ones, and being quick on the draw is worth significantly less than having a solid idea of where you want to position yourself. It’s a very entertaining and different take on the genre, bringing in some much needed innovation.

RUSE is essentially a simulation of that scene in World War 2 movies where they push around little groups of army men on a board in response to intel. Except you know, prettier. It’s very focused on making your opponent make a mistake by playing with what information he or she has access to. To that end, in addition to the standard building of little army men to attack them, you can hide your units in forests and cities, and use command abilities called “Ruses” to make dummy units, cloak your troops, hide your structures, make your tanks look tiny… lots of fun little ways of playing around with perceptions. Backing that up is a pretty solid combat system based on simple hard counters with a couple of tweaks. What that means is that your infantry can always be killed by armored vehicles, your armored vehicles can always be killed by a tank, your tanks can always be killed by a bomber… etc. The tweaks -like infantry killing tanks if they get the drop on them in a city- add a quite a bit of depth to that. Each side (US/England/Russia/France/Germany/Italy) also have their own idiosyncratic troop types to add to the mix.

It’s also surprisingly pretty at any level of zoom:

Part of why I found it so engaging is that I can make very large scale decisions (I’ll try a feint here, supported by dummies, then push the main force around back under radio silence….) and ignore the minor decision-making of putting down an extra depot every time I want to make new units or clicking about wildly to keep things in position. Micromanaging is kept to a minimum and “skill” with the UI is a very small part of your victory. There’s something very satisfying about knowing that all it took to win was a good read on your opponent and a solid idea of what sort of army you’d need to crack their forces wide open.

I think that any person with even a vague interest in ordering around little army men, even those of you who aren’t generally into it, should give RUSE a try. It’s accessible in a way many modern games are not, and it’s one of the few games I’ve seen recreate the sort of fun I used to have with actual board games.

Also! For people who are way too into game news and hate DRM: they removed the Ubisoft DRM. No crazy DRM! You can purchase without worry!