Not quite back into economics land yet, as I continue to be assaulted by a combination of illness, business, and laziness that prevents me from doing the extensive data collection and modeling I need for my next article.
For the moment, a review of a game most of you have probably never heard of - Distant Worlds.
Distant Worlds is a 2010 game released by Matrix Games, who are also responsible for the more well known Armada 2526.
In a sentence, Distant Worlds is a space RTS with the scope and complexity of a TBS.
That is, the game occurs entirely in real time, but has a scope and complexity even greater than, for instance, any of the Civilization games.
You might think this would lead itself to a game that's impossible to play, or at least one with an incredibly steep learning curve. However, Distant Worlds has a number of well-implemented features that allow the game to be easily playable right from the beginning - despite the possibility of 14,000 or so star systems and upwards of 40,000 distinct planets, asteroids, and whatnot.
Chief among these is the excellent automation. Virtually every action can be automated to varying degrees, from complete automation to fairly consistent direct advice to complete player control. This includes research, exploration, making and deploying ships and fleets, constructing mines, colonizing planets, and proposing treaties with other players.
At the beginning of your first game, nearly everything is automated, and it is automated well. You're not going to lose just because of the automation, and it is entirely possible to play a game without lifting a finger.
Perhaps most importantly, you can leave the automation on and still impact the game by giving direct orders. This does not interrupt the flow of the automation at all, meaning you can leave large portions of your empire to grow and develop naturally while you focus on what you believe is the most important or interesting aspect of the game.
In addition to this, your empire's entire economy is managed privately. You construct mining stations and tourist destinations and that sort of thing, but private citizens construct and operate your freighters and passenger ships. You directly control only the state portion of your empire, which generates income by taxation and direct charges for the use of your space ports for constructing ships.
This interaction is both very interesting from a strategy perspective and ensures that you don't get bogged down by the difficulty of shipping around all of the incredibly large number of different sorts of resources in the game.
Continuing the Civilization comparison from up above, I believe Distant Worlds has a number of things that put it ahead of Civilization as a game.
It's in real time, has zero learning curve because of excellent automation, and is more realistic in how you manage and interact with your economy. There are a number of cases where Civilization has more going on than Distant Worlds does, but those are pretty few and far between.
Another major point Distant Worlds has over the Civilization series is how you win the game. In Civilization, you have to complete the entirety of one of four single tasks to win the game. In Distant Worlds, victory is a continuum. Having a strong economy, large population, huge territory, or completing a number of race-specific goals brings you closer to victory, but none can bring you all of the way. You need some combination of the four, but can usually largely ignore one of them which, at least in my mind, adds a great deal of depth to the end of games that Civilization lacks.
Distant Worlds is not, of course, without its problems. Its graphics are not particularly great, and I usually play so zoomed out that sorts of ships are denoted only by polygons on the map. The AI, while not bad, is not particularly difficult on even the hardest setting. It has just enough emphasis on exploration to make you hopeful that discovering things will be exciting, but you are eventually let down by the lackluster and invariant galactic history that the game produces.
On the plus side, Distant Worlds has truly epic scope, excellent automation, unique interaction between the economy and government, emphasis on multiple paths to victory, and distinct style of play for each available race.
The only real downside to the game when compared to Civilization is the cost - the game is only really good when you have both expansions, which will run you a total of $90.00. If you like the setting and genre, though, the game is excellent and well worth what you put into it.
Also, it has dinosaurs. In space. I mean, really, what else can you ask for from a game?
Damn, that sounds awesome. As a big Civilization fan, I've been hoping that they would make a new space one
ReplyDeleteIt is pretty awesome, I can agree.
ReplyDeleteAnd, though far be it from me to promote them, there are always ways to try the game out without purchasing it. $90.00 is a pretty steep price to pay for a game that I would consider fairly niche, regardless of how excellent it really is, as you have little way of knowing if you are in the niche until you play it.