Endless Space

[Now updated with some titles I meant to include in the first place but forgot because it was late when I wrote this and I was tired and WHARGGGHHH. Or something.]

Space, they say, is big. Really big. There’s a whole universe of infinite possibilities out there, and being boring old humans we’re (mostly) stuck on this planet, unable to explore the great black beyond. We can, of course, observe it and take exciting pictures and footage, such as what we’ve seen from the recent Venus transit. But for the everyday person, exploration of space is the stuff of pure science fiction.

Video games are a great way to immerse yourself in that sense of exploring the great unknown. Plenty of games are set in space, obviously, but it’s a smaller subset that actively deals with exploration and discovery rather than simply blowing shit up. Star Trek as opposed to Star Wars, if you will, though I’m aware that’s a gross oversimplification of and a great injustice to both series. But never mind.

Here are some of my favourite space games.

Star Control II

What a fantastic game this is, well deserving of its classic status. Star Control II casts the player in the role of a human captain returning to Earth after a long stint on a faroff colony only to discover that our homeworld has been captured and enslaved by the evil Ur-Quan. Thus begins a galaxy-spanning adventure of diplomacy, combat and collecting lots of minerals.

Star Control II is one of those games that blends lots of different play styles together to create a distinctive whole. You have Asteroids-style combat incorporating ideas from one-on-one fighting games — each ship has its own “special moves” and is well-matched against certain other vessels. You have space exploration — the game tells you very little about where to find things, and God help you if you don’t note down the offhand mentions of alien species that some characters make. You have resource management in the form of keeping an eye on your ship’s crew, fuel and cargo space. You have RPG-style upgrading as you turn your ship into an unstoppable behemoth and recruit various escort vessels to accompany you. And you have adventure-game style dialogue trees as you make contact with the weird and wonderful races of the galaxy in an attempt to recruit them to your cause.

Best of all, you can grab the enhanced port of the 3DO version for modern computers here, or pick up the original version and its prequel from GOG.com.

Star Trek Online

Star Trek Online is an excellent Star Trek game, although it may be a little too heavy on the combat to be completely true to its source material. The game does successfully capture the feeling of piloting a huge vessel around the galaxy to seek out new life and new civilisations and all that jazz, though, and the fact that the game has a strong focus on user-generated content ranging from player-constructed alien races to full mission sequences makes it a great deal of fun. It’s not as polished as it could be and PvP is broken as hell, but it’s a free-to-play title that doesn’t gouge you for in-game purchases at every opportunity.

Find out more here.

I wrote a little about the upcoming 4X space strategy title Endless Space a little while back. The game is now in beta testing as it gets closer to release. I haven’t tried it yet but am planning to give it a go over the weekend.

Endless Space is less “personal” than other titles due to the fact that you’re not controlling your own individual vessel, you’re overseeing a whole empire. That doesn’t stop it from being full of the joy of discovery and exploration, however — finding a star system with planets rich in valuable resources is immensely satisfying, and successfully defending it against incurstion from your opponents is even more satisfying.

X: Beyond the Frontier

I haven’t played this game for ages, nor have I played its sequels and expansions. But the original game struck me as an impressive experience that truly made you feel like an insignificant speck in a massive galaxy that would most certainly go on with its own business without you. Over time, in true space opera style, you could make a name for yourself and work your way up to being an immensely powerful individual, but the journey was a long, slow, tough one — rewarding, though.

Grab it from Steam.

Spore

Having returned to playing this recently I had forgotten quite how excellent the space section of this game was — it’s certainly the most well fleshed out component.

After designing your custom race’s custom spaceship, you then take to the randomly-generated stars to colonise new planets, trade with other spacefaring races, toy with the natural order of things on developing worlds, discover lost relics, complete missions, mine for valuable resources, paint planets and carve obscenities into the ground using rivers. It’s very freeform in how the player can tackle it, which gives each game the potential to be completely unique.

Will you seek peaceful solutions to conflict? Will you only expand your empire to planets already capable of supporting life, or will you terraform barren rocks into new Edens? Will you go to war with rival empires or attempt to buy them out? And will you satisfy yourself with building out your empire, or will you embark on a quest to get to the centre of the galaxy and uncover the mysteries of the universe?

Grab it from Steam or Origin.

Starflight

I played this game on the Atari ST. It was brilliant. It was a relatively early title from Electronic Arts, and was immensely freeform in its gameplay. Taking on the role of a starship captain, the player was simply tasked with exploring the galaxy. This involved flying to new star systems, descending to planets, exploring in a “rover” vehicle, engaging in diplomacy between alien races and battling enemies. There was supposedly an overarching plot, but I never got that far when playing it as a youngster — I simply enjoyed flying around and exploring space. It may well be one to revisit with the eyes of an adult.

Space Rogue

A space sim from Origin (as in the software company, not the digital distribution platform) that cast the player in the usual role of a “privateer”, Space Rogue was interesting for the fact it wasn’t just about flying around shooting things and hauling goods from planet to planet. Landing at a base launched a top-down roleplaying component during which you could explore, talk to people, engage in combat against enemies and take part in a galaxy-spanning plot that, again, I can remember very little about besides a series of fetch quests that involved you ferrying messages back and forth between two sisters called Cebak and Tiwa. There were text-based adventure sections, too.

Space Rogue, then, was something of a precursor to the next game I’m going to mention.

Space Rangers 2

An utterly bizarre yet lovable game from Russia, Space Rangers 2 takes players on a wild ride across the galaxy, taking in turn-based strategy, real-time strategy, third-person shooter combat, text-based adventures, trading, RPG-style levelling up and all manner of other crap along the way. It’s an absolute Frankenstein’s Monster of a game and all the better for it. It’s almost futile to describe the experience of playing it, particularly when you can check it out for yourself for super-cheap thanks to GOG.com.

As I believe has been well-documented on this very site a number of times, I am not very good at strategy games, be they of the board- or computer-based varieties. I have trouble prioritising what I want to do, and as soon as I do decide upon a course of action, some asshole other player comes along and beats the shit out of me before I have a chance to follow through on my master plan.

So it was with some trepidation that I decided I would give Endless Space a go. I’ve been playing a bit of Starbase Orion on iOS recently and, having recently won my first game (against one Easy-level opponent) I felt I wanted to investigate the space-based 4X genre a little further.

Aside: If you, like me, constantly forget what “4X” stands for, it means “explore, expand, exploit and exterminate” and is used to describe strategy games that involve a combination of building, expansion, collecting resources and military conflict. They’re typically (though not always) turn-based in execution due to the amount of micromanagement necessary to keep an empire running smoothly, and depending on the game, victory can generally be attained in several ways. Sid Meier’s popular Civilization series is one of the best-known examples.

With me? Good. Endless Space is an upcoming space-based 4X game from French indie developer Amplitude. You can preorder the game right now and jump into an impressively-complete alpha build and, in an interesting twist on the usual development cycle, participate in the decision-making process as the game gets closer to release. I shan’t go into detail on that side of things right now (though I may in the future as it’s a very cool idea to get the community involved in development) but I will talk a little about the game itself and how I’ve found it after a few hours of taking it for a spin earlier.

Endless Space, like many other games of its type, takes place in a randomly-generated galaxy. You’re given a starting colony and a meagre supply of ships to get yourself up and running, and from there it’s all about the empire-building. Scout out new systems, send colony ships to the richest-looking planets, then build, expand and conquer until you are the undisputed ruler of the Universe. Easy enough, right?

Unlike some similar titles, Endless Space’s map is based around specific routes between star systems. (In Starbase Orion, for example, ships can move between any systems that are in range via the most direct route.) Because of this, it’s much more straightforward to figure out how to defend yourself because attacks will only be coming from certain angles. Blockade your systems that are on the front line, then figure out a pathway through your opponent’s defences that will whittle them down piece by piece. In some ways it reminded me of the excellent board-game adaptation of Blizzard’s StarCraft, which is well worth a punt if you have a few hours (and a very big table) to spare.

The basic mechanics are similar to the classic Civilization titles. Each colony under the player’s control produces food, industry, science and “dust”, which is the currency used in the Endless Space universe. Food leads to population growth. Industry is used to build things — the more industry, the quicker things are built. Science is used to research new technologies. And dust is used for all sorts of purposes — hurrying production, upgrading ships and all manner of other things. Each colony in a star system adds to that system’s pool of food, industry, dust and science (referred to in-game as “FIDS”), and each system may then use said pools to upgrade its population, contribute to the empire’s overall research progress, build ships or build improvements to that specific system. It’s simple to understand in practice, particularly if you’ve played Civilization before.

An interesting twist on the usual formula comes in the form of “hero” units, who are generated every few turns and may be hired for a fee of dust up front, then paid a salary each turn. Heroes come in two main forms: system governors and admirals. The former provide various bonuses to FIDS and morale in the system they’re assigned to, while the latter may be used to take command of a fleet of ships and make them more powerful. As they do their jobs, they level up and may be customised with various abilities to specialise them or make them better generalists. They can be shuffled around the player’s empire at will, too.

Combat, too, takes an intriguingly unconventional approach. Rather than going outright real-time such as in Sins of a Solar Empire, or almost completely hands-off as in Starbase Orion, Endless Space’s combat takes a curious “cinematic” approach. A combat encounter unfolds over a set period of real time which is divided into several phases. There are a few seconds at the beginning of combat while both fleets approach each other, then the battle progresses between long, medium and short-range phases. The player may play a “card” on each of these three phases which provides numerous special effects. Cards have categories, too, and certain categories cancel out the other player’s abilities. This gives an element of uncertainty to the combat, though the “combat preview” window, which estimates the player’s chances of victory prior to the combat unfolding, is a pleasing addition, as are the Battlestar Galactica-style cinematic combat sequences (complete with ethnic instruments) and ability to completely skip the combat scene altogether if it looks like being a complete whitewash.

I haven’t played a game through to completion yet, but I’ve been enjoying what I’ve tried so far. I don’t feel overwhelmed with things to worry about and I don’t feel I’m being “left behind” by the computer players. (I may feel differently if I get stomped on by one of them — my closest neighbour declared war on me just because I forcibly removed one of his scout ships from my border system with a fleet of destroyers.) The “hero” mechanic adds a cool sense of progression and the way the game is presented is simple, clear and easy to understand while remaining aesthetically impressive, with smoothly-animated, attractive UI elements, excellent background music and atmospheric sound effects.

If this is an alpha version, I very much look forward to seeing how the game evolves over the coming months. If you have the slightest interest in the turn-based strategy genre, I’d strongly suggest you give it a shot — and thanks to my good buddy Alex for the recommendation.

Check out the game here and preorder on Steam to get access to the alpha build.

Tag: Endless Space

#oneaday Day 870: On the Exploration of Space Via the Medium of Video Games [UPDATED]