Recent reviews by KoiChamp

space crack got me good

FOR THE EMPEROR!

Arrowhead: Nerf. Nerf. Nerf.

Us: This sucks. Arrowhead, we want to enjoy the game and have fun.

Arrowhead: THE NERFING WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES.

This is the update cycle, it never gets better apparently.

It's morally wrong to not own this game.

It's so good I went out and forcibly infected some Phillipino boys with the Zombie Virus so I could live my dreams of being in this game.

The tactical gameplay is genuinely great. If you're looking for a multiplayer 4v4 Skirmish TDM set in space with 3 dimensional controls, and deep gameplay. Then I wholeheartedly recommend Nebulous to you. It is truly a fantastic game on that front.

So why is my review negative? I bought into Nebulous not only for it's interesting fleet-building mechanics and tactical gameplay. While I have enjoyed those aspects immensely, and will continue to do so, I primarily bought it on the promise of a high-level strategy/operations mode, as stated in it's full version plans:

“A high-level strategy mode involving the manoeuvring of multiple fleets to achieve control of a solar system via multiple of the above skirmishes."

Everything I had seen in the devblogs, which I've religiously kept up with and watched multiple times, told me that this was coming. And oh boy, it was everything I wanted. Complex logistical challenges surrounding crew, ammunition, rations, maintenance and general fleet upkeep. A deep intelligence and EWAR aspect that I haven't seen in other RTS-style games. Multiple systems for the OSP and ANS to fight over. Everything that I'd ever wanted was coming to Nebulous, and I thought it looked and sounded fantastic!

Imagine my surprise when the dev dropped a video recently stating that, in effect, the core gameplay and mechanics behind Conquest were rotten and that he was going to be pivoting to working on Carriers and Strikecraft with a look to reviewing a campaign mode in the future, but that the conquest mode as I currently know it is effectively dead. A huge surprise and a massive disappointment, I honestly thought he was onto something special. Especially given us space fans are starved after the utter "meh" that was Homeworld 3.

Personally, I felt his video was too short. He didn't really give concrete reasons as to why Conquest was intrinsically broken/failing. Only made overtures towards the fact that it didn't mesh with Nebulous' tactical skirmish gameplay and that he was going to be focusing on that instead given that "there are players with 1,000's of hours in current Nebulous".

I genuinely fear that the dev has been led astray by the vocal, but multiplayer obsessed, currently audience. Ignoring all of the inactive players who have been waiting for conquest. (And the reviews and comments are proof of the fact that many WERE waiting for Conquest/Campaign.) I fear that he is catering to a small, niche PvP community, if that is the case then I never see Nebulous going beyond what it is, nor above it's small 140 average player count. (It's surprising to see more than 3 lobby's full on any given night.)

I've seen some testers state that the strategy aspect dominated the conquest mode and that you could curbstomp players and AI alike by devoting to spam/swarm fleets or one particularly OP strategy. To which I say, okay? There are gameplay mechanics that could be put in place to counter that, if that's really the core issue with strategy then it's honestly NOT that much of an issue. Many other strategy games have solved that issue before and Nebulous definitely could've learned from them.

Oh well. If you want a fun 4v4 multiplayer space game, it's great.
If you wanted something more, any level of persistence, crew & resource management, etc. Don't even bother. It'll be at least 2-3 years before Mazer even starts to re-review a campaign/conquest mode.

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My response to the publisher. (Worth noting, I still love Hooded Horse.)

It's reassuring to hear from the publisher than the singleplayer campaign is still an integral part of the games plan. What irks me more than anything however was the communication on this subject. I'm in the discord, and there was even zero indication that a complete scrapping of current plans (something which will likely set the conquest back a solid year, two, most likely more) was on the books at all.

Everything from the developer, his devblogs and statements, indicated that it was going well, that he was happy with what was being implemented and that there was no problems.

It was how this suddenly came out of the blue that was likely what has led to such a strong reaction. One second, all was fine and dandy. And then suddenly? Bang, gone. Everything we'd been hyped for over the past year and a half.

I'll change my review when an actual conquest/campaign experience is being worked on that has the same level of strategic depth and complexity as what was planned appears. However, I have my doubts.

Fantastic follow on from CS:1. About as much as I wanted it to be! Still a few things need touching up and adjusting. Give us the option to delete zones from a road for instance!

Performance isn't great, but I had a solid 40FPS all the way through to 12,000 citizens. Not gone past that yet.

So, I've played a bit of The Great War now, not a huge amount but enough to get a decent understanding of the game and have completed a campaign on the medium difficulty. Imo the base is there for a great game. Hopefully modders will pick it up and do something amazing with it. But the actual game itself is just... No. The footage in those trailers is slowed down for sure.

Campaign wise: Each turn is a month, so the war **FLIES BY** so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ fast with little time to actually prep up attacks and ♥♥♥♥. You can see too much of the enemy without using intel so it's dumb easy to counter where they are. Moving troops is instant when it should take a turn. The Great War was a war of logistics, and while all the necessary mechanics are in place for this, they're just so poorly balanced and implemented at the moment. 48 turns, 2 research a month. That's 96 research points, and there's 250 points required. (Great, you don't even get all the goodies.)

Battle wise: The trenches are persistent but the emplacements aren't. Tanks are "roflstomplmao i rolled into ur trench and ur all dead keklmao" levels of OP, which would be fine if they weren't blazing a trail at 60km/h. The battles being time limited sucks ass. **Everything** moves too fast. Arty hits too fast. The entire game just needs slowing the ♥♥♥♥ down. Barbed wire is insanely expensive for some reason? Balloons are kinda useless.

The only pro here really being that the building system is honestly really good, I like it. Very good indeed. I just wish you had more time and more supplies to have GRAND battles, rather than having to make do with what feel like skirmishes.

It's not bad by any means. And If I could I'd give it a "buy later" rating. A heavy dose of realism injected into the game would probably make it much, much more to my personal liking. Right now it's too fast, too arcadey. I wanted a RTS/T game and feel more like I got a mobile game?

Cracktorio got me good.

It's good.

Stellaris is exactly what I wanted in a space game, and it does an excellent job of meshing 4X with Grand Strategy.

What I love most, and expect many love most about the game, is the create your own species which allows you to choose your traits, FTL type (Warp, Hyperlanes and Wormholes), ship look, government type, species ethics, appearance even ship prefix. It will alter your entire game and your playstyle for that game. It's probably what makes Stellaris great to be honest.

After having set up your species and started the game, that initial burst of exploration and expansion is executed almost perfectly. Sending out your science ship to survey and explore other systems isn't just some mindless task of clicking from one system to the next as anomalies and research projects pop up in your situation log. This leads it to be far more immersive than any other 4X space game I know of at the moment, leading to weird and sometimes exciting events such as a brand of ultra-reactionary religious quacks breaking off from your empire to take a stand against your purging policy. Or your scientists finding a ceramic pot drifting around a sun that they just.. Can't explain. All this means that exploration isn't just "oh. a planet to colonise, great. NEXT SYSTEM."

The land grab stage is also done incredibly well as you aim to cut off your opponents in a desperate grab for planets and minerals. Establishing frontier outposts and desperately trying to build colony ships in order to expand your borders. But make no mistake, there is no need for you to grab as much as you can. I've been three times the size of the AI and they've STILL had superior tech and equivelant fleet power/capacity to me. It's possible to build not just wide, but tall and that's done so well in the this game, in comparison to other games such as Sins of a Solar Empire where it's alllllll about the wide.

Colonising is a relatively simple affair of sending your colony ship to X habitable planet, then settling there, waiting a year or two for it to be established and then bam, you have your colony; planets however aren't just things that set down borders, they'll be your main income for science/minerals/energy if you min/max one or the other. Every planet has a planet surface tab, which is divided into multiple squares consisting of as little as 5 up to 25 and this is where it starts to look a bit like Civ. Each tile has a natural resource within it which can either be exploited or ignored and built over to provide a different resource, in order to harvest said resource the tile requires an active pop be living on it; which are grown through the amount of food you have (Currently there is no point to having a surplus of food on a fully popped planet). Pops can be resettled between different planets within your core sector allowing you to keep your eithical bloodline pure.

Now, many 4X games descend into tedious micro-management of -every- planet and system that you own, which obviously a lot of people aren't all that in to. Some like spreadsheets, some don't. Stellaris attempts to alleviate this with something I've not seen in other space games as of yet, it allows you to break up your empire into "sectors", the number of sectors allowed is based on your population and planets owned. This sector is essentially an AI which will manage and govern the area you portion out to it. You can choose to assign each sector a governor who will convey specific bonuses to the entire sector. The sector doesn't just micromanage the planets though; you can allow it to redevelopment tiles on planets, and set it a specific function; such as military, minerals, research or credits. The sector AI will then attempt to do it's utmost best to supply as much of the chosen function as possible, except for military sector AI who will build military stations and strengthen their borders with space-station defenses, defending armies, etc. A lot of people have moaned that the sector AI seems woefully incompetent and doesn't really seem able to balance itself out; now this is incorrect, at the start you may notice that it is minus on energy credits for a while, this is because it doesn't have it's planets infrastructures built yet; simply pour minerals and energy into it and you'll see it even out, and eventually it'll even surpass itself. I've been provided with up to 400+ minerals by my sectors alone at times. They really do become incredibly good.

As time goes by it starts to morph into a GSG more than a 4X game, with an emphasis on war and diplomacy. They're not as fleshed out as a lot of people were hoping for. I was expecting what we got since I read all the DD's and didn't expect anything more. War is a very set in stone thing. You declare war for specific wargoals such as cede X planet, and liberate X planets. Then it's simply a march to your wargoal (gained through winning batles, capturing planets, etc). 90% of the time the AI will surrender and hand it over to you should you be utterly stomping them. If they're winning however, they will go on winning unless you surrender and give them your systems. This is a rather brutal AI in that respect. Many however have complained that the AI seems overly passive, and while this can be the case it's more luck of the draw and power than anything. They'll only go to war with someone they're superior over, which is just basic sense really isn't it.. And they're less/more likely to go to war based on their ethics and government aswell.

Diplomacy does need some work as it's rather basic right now, reminds me a lot of Sins of a Solar Empire with how basic it is, but I expect expansions and future content to change this. It's a relatively simple affair of alliance, rivalry, star charts. Trading is simply energy credits or minerals in an instant transfer or monthly. It's lacking basically, but it's more than sufficient for the game at current. Alliance blocks can turn into federations, with one nation that leads them which switches out every 5-10 years to a different nation.

Research and tech. Boy, did they outdo themselves with this one. This deck-of-cards research system is simply amazing. I've found tech in some games I didn't know existed, only to never see it ever again in any other game. Basically it's split into three categories; physics, society and engineering. And within each category you'll get 3 techs to choose from, you pick one, research it, and when you go back to picking 3 again, it'll have shuffled and present all new options. Some are weighted to appear simply so you can advance in the game, such as colony ships, and spaceport upgrades, which makes sense otherwise you could get shafted hard. If your science ship surveys debris and finds certain tech then it will appear as a permanent tech option, below the normal three, that you can pick regardless of how many different techs you research.

Overall, this is the game I've been waiting years for. It's exactly what I wanted in a Space 4X game, and it's growth into a GSG over time is well executed as it turns more to war/diplomacy. I want to note that this game isn't missing any features, it's just not fleshed out certain ones enough. Such as diplomacy, trade and managing factions. All of which are pretty basic right now, but that's to be expected when you think of the sheer scale this game has gone for. I'm all too happy to pay PDS money for DLC since I know that when they bring out expansion, it's actually an expansion for the game. I'm confident they'll continue to polish and add to this game for years and years to come just as they have for all their other titles/series: Victoria, Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis'

Sorry if I missed anything, the games just got so many features and so much content, I'm sure I did miss something but hell, there's almost too much to write about! xD