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Thursday 6 March, 2008
GAMEPLAY
While playing through my second session, I tried a new faction. I prefer this faction as it gives me access to more fighter craft, which I like to watch swarm over enemy positions. This is distinct from the first faction I had tried which stressed using fewer stronger ships.
I also had more experience dealing with the pirate faction in the game which is not playable but can be influenced through bounty. I got much better at “sniping” the bidding war which comes every fifteen minutes or so much like one would snipe an eBay auction. This made it much easier to pull ahead of my opponent as he had to deal with pirate raids while I colonized new planets. In fact it seems that on a small map such as I was playing, pirates may be more dangerous than the opposing team. They get stronger over the course of the game and essentially get fleets for free.
The games empire management is much simplified over most games in its genre, because players don’t have time to pore over screens of statistics. No longer must taxes be adjusted and such. This is an improvement in my opinion, especially since I am more of a fan of real time strategy games and I prefer to focus on commanding my forces.
DESIGN
The art aspects of this game are excellent. All of the graphics and ship designs are beautiful as are explosions and weapon effects. The civilizations all have a cohesive tone which represents their respective philosophies well. The Advent which I am currently playing is meant to be a more decadent society with themes of ascension. As such, its ships are much more ornate than those of the other races with curves invoking sea shells or rams’ horns.
The music is also decent. It sets the mood well and changes tunes according to what’s happening on screen. It hasn’t gotten annoying yet, which is also a point in its favor.
One final thing that the game does well is give the player control of his or her forces throughout the star system. With a simple scroll, a player can go from a close up of a fighter smoothly to an overview of the empire. The game abstracts the units more and more as the player zooms out, progressing from full 3D models to icons to an image of the planet with three bars representing player ships, player structures, and non-player ships. Each of these things will show an infocard with more details when moused over. There is also a so called “empire tree” which can be expanded to show lists of units and structures at any planet which the player can see. Players can select and even target units through this tree.
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