HighFleet - Desert Russians Fight With Warships In Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland

[Infinitron]

Kaiser gonna Kaiser: https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/highfleet-review/

HIGHFLEET REVIEW
HighFleet is a frustrating mess and an impending cult hit.

Ask me what my favorite game of all time is, and on most days I'll answer Sid Meier's Pirates!, the genre hybrid and rollicking adventure published by Microprose in 1987. Microprose was a software company famous for simulations, strategy/wargames, and occasionally genre-bending experiments. That brand has recently been resurrected, and while most of the announced games are tilted toward traditional wargames, they're also releasing the hybrid HighFleet, described as a far-future action-strategy game involving airships fighting a civil war during the death of an empire.

The narrative of what you do in HighFleet sounds mesmerizing. You negotiate with local warlords for alliances! Crack codes! Design new ships! Fly them around in intense combat, dodging bullets and launching missiles! HighFleet is also cleverly put together, with a diegetic interface that has you accessing the different parts of the game experience through the window of your flagship. Want to intercept a message? Click the phone receiver at the top of the screen to get into the radio interface, then use your mouse-wheel to turn the dials and find the signals.

In other words, HighFleet feels like it's the product of a singular vision, consistently styled and with systems that all seem to fit together and channel players into its mindset. Under most circumstances, this is something I'd happily recommend as unique and exciting. There's just one small problem:

I hate this game.

There's a cliché about game reviews where if a reviewer doesn't like a game, but it seems to be the sort of game that other people might like, they say it's "sure to please fans of the genre." But that's not me. For one thing, there isn't really a genre like this. For another, if there was a genre we could squeeze HighFleet into, it would be right next to Sid Meier's Pirates!, my favorite game. So I am, in theory, that fan of the genre.

Just as HighFleet is bursting with systems, Pirates! was packed with mini-games that, tied together, created a story of swashbuckling pirates swinging across galleon decks to duel evil Spaniards and woo governors' daughters. These mini-games were fun! With one exception: In the original 1987 version, if you were lost in the Caribbean, you didn't just pull up an in-game map. No, that version of Pirates! had an astrolabe mini-game, where you'd use the historical device to figure out your longitude and latitude, and then look at a map in the manual. It was terrible—so it got removed from the version of Pirates! you've probably seen.

The core problem with HighFleet is that every mini-game has astrolabe-like obstacles. I get a tutorial that has me learn how to intercept transmissions, for instance, but once I start intercepting those transmissions on my own I have no idea what they do or mean. There's a whole system for launching stealth attacks, but I can barely even see how or why that matters. Some of this is down to a poor tutorial, where you're taught things you can do without learning why. But the confusion doesn't exactly abate in the main campaign. Every new system I encounter adds to my confusion, not my fantasy of playing as an airship commander—except the card and dialogue-based diplomacy system, which is straightforward and effective.

Let's take the all-important combat. Your fleet has a certain number of smaller ships, like frigates and corvettes, which you control during fights. You can have several of them, but you only actually control one at a time, in a twin-stick shooter-style piece of air combat; WASD to move, mouse to aim and then fire, with afterburners and missiles and flares and so on. There can be multiple enemies on-screen at a time, but it's only ever just your one ship which, when it gets destroyed or retreats, is replaced by the next one in your list, until every ship's taken care of.

Combat looks and feels great. There's neat weather effects, like raindrops hitting your viewscreen, wailing music to fit the Russian/west Asian vibe of the game, and booming gunshots. Controlling the ships is a constant tug-of-war with gravity, and reload times and ship damage are just on the edge of difficult and frustrating. The act of fighting fits the game nicely.

The problem is everything else associated with combat—the connective tissue. There's a massive dearth of information about what combat actually means. Is it OK to lose ships? HighFleet doesn't really have an answer until you've achieved some level of competence and expertise. Ships have crews which can be saved if you're losing the ship, and you'll get a marker of how many of them were saved at the end of a fight, but not what crews actually do, or how to replenish them systematically.

The strategic level of dealing with combat is off-putting as well. HighFleet provides a tutorial for how to launch ships away from your fleet to fight on their own, but either I lost most of the ones I sent off or I couldn't figure out how to call them back—only landing my flagship in the same place as them seemed to work. Ships take damage and can be repaired and customized in a shipyard, but this takes time and money, and it's unclear when the risk is worth the reward. And then there's the nightmare of landing ships, one-by-one, in specific docking areas for slight repair advantages.

In other words, I feel like I never have any idea whether I did well, well enough, or disastrously in any given combat. HighFleet also operates as an ironman game with a single consistently updating auto-save, except for immediately after combat when you have the chance to fight the whole battle again. Which means that after every combat I have to decide, without strategic context, whether I need to try this again.

The act of playing HighFleet is like having a bunch of alarms going off telling you're in big trouble, but you don't know what the alarms are for or why they're blaring. It's like getting a hot take retweeted by a famous person on Twitter: suddenly everything you do is wrong and there's no way to calm anything down.

Under most circumstances, this would still be something I could work through—with experimental games like this, there's an expectation that there will be moments of confusion as you try to unpack its complexities. But there's one other tiny problem: HighFleet is hard, or at least feels hard, and more importantly, it doesn't have any kind of difficulty settings. It's a simple, vicious cycle of fighting, replaying fights, becoming increasingly frustrated, and then finding more fights to lose. It's all a constant stream of irritations and stress without relief.

You might have the patience to puzzle out these systems. The clever interface and appealing style may bring you in and inspire you to figure out what each part of it means. Maybe you're a twin-stick jockey, and combat makes perfect sense to you. There are lots of components that could appeal to the imaginary player in my head…but that player isn't me. The me who actually played this game cannot wait to be done with it.

THE VERDICT
59

HIGHFLEET
HighFleet has appealing vision, but breaks down due to opaque systems and lack of difficulty options.

 

[agris]

TLDR; reviewer came to pop-moles and got popped. HighFleet is pure

despite the technical problems.


edit: so I guess he never made it out of the prologue? That's like.. 3 hours I think? I would expect somewhat higher standards at PCG, although I know that's naive in 2021.

But there's one other tiny problem: HighFleet is hard, or at least feels hard, and more importantly, it doesn't have any kind of difficulty settings.

 

[agris]

Why is that Retardo ?

 

[Nutria]

There is clearly some bigotry against Slavs here. I haven't played the game, but to get such a low score, you know what's going on. This is like the goddamn final frontier of racism.

 

[downwardspiral]

Diffinitely not a CMANO, dangerous water type of game.
The radar/sonnar/ECM interface is mostly a gimmick like object in space.
You don't need to actually analyse those data to identify it is leading or tailing and things like that.
The BVR (global map) combat is also very limited.




But the game does have some interesting dynamics in combat and more interaction than many arcade shooting game.
Especially when you start to design your ship you have various type of ships.
Since you can only send one ship into the battle at time.
You could have ship battle sequence like


1 Light armor missile ship, launch all missiles then dodge enemy attack awhile to waste their missiles or fuel then retreat.

2 Fast speed low caliber gunship to take down enemy agile ships then retreat.

3 Fast speed high caliber gunship to take down enemy larger ship

4 If above failed then send Heavy armored ship to finish them off.

Retreating is always an option.
You want to minimize your damage since they cost money and spare parts.



The shooting combat itself is quite satisfying.
It is very arcade but the idea of using smaller gun as a range finder,
Then use bigger gun to demolish enemy in several well aimed hit feels very nice.

Enemy give you hint before they shoot.
Their targeting is leading your movement.
To dodge their attack is to change your movemen's leading.
Because the battlefield is rather small, there isn't much room for you to move
so it is good idea to stay still and wait for enemy to target you then use afterbunner for 1-3 sec, just a bit not too much, don't waste too much fuel.

Since if you stay still your enemy will shoot mostly straight and you just need a bit of burn to dodge all of their attack.
If there are multiple enemies, you can hide behind one of them that has weaker weapon to dodge the stronger one.


You can also send some harassing ship to strike enemy then retreat.
Once you start to play around ship design, there are some interesting combination and tactics to use.
Like high speed tanker + low profile agile fast strike ship.



My current complain is that the game doesn’t seem to support several missiles in one salvo.
So BVR missile is too easy to defeat.
I wish Ai missile can overwhelm player in a large salvo that you can’t defend it with simple 37mm CIWS. So it forces player to treat BVR salvo more carefully.


It is best to treat this as an arcade shooting game where you can lower difficulty by using global map tricks.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

This reminds me of Last Exile.

Spoiler

 

[Tyranicon]

I've been keeping my eye on this one. Is it worth a buy as is?

I can't help but think the game would've been better as a turn-based, tactical grid game. Not a huge fan of arcadey fights.

Edit: Wait, you can only have one ship in battle?

 

[agris]

I rarely say this, but you really need to see a video to understand it. No matter how many enemies are on the "fight board" you only face 3 of them at once - and yes, you only field 1 of your own ships at once. As you kill enemies, if there are more than 3 total, new ones join the map until their forces are spent or it reaches 3 in total on the map.

You have a "retreat" zone that you must use to cycle in your next ship. At the outset of combat you see the number and composition of enemy forces, and get you decide your ships' action queue and weaponry loadout. This is the strategy part of the arcade-y combat, knowing that there's no more than 3 enemy ships on screen on a time, you can be strategic about when you use your faster/lighter attackers vs the big behemoths.

Frankly most of the game is in the strategy "map" with the radar, ECS, etc so this arcade-style section is like an aperitif at the end of a meal. By no mean does it constitute the majority of gameplay, and by virtue of being a contrast to the mostly intellectual loops its quite enjoyable.

It's almost an inverse of X-com; where the tactics are light (the arcade-like combat I described) and the strategy layer is the real thick, deep part of the gameplay. But there's also a ton of depth in the ships that you field for combat, and you can do some ship-to-ship combat in the strategy layer through the use of aircraft carriers and long-range missiles.

It's dense and varied, not a one-trick pony Tyranicon

 

[Lithium Flower]

I've been waiting for this guy for a long long time now, having greatly enjoyed Hammerfight. I think it is a shame most non-Rushan speechers will miss the subtle poetry of that game, given that the author wrote the entire thing in the imitation of an ancient epic/scriptural tone, such that each line of dialogue and exposition "flowed" into the next, but I digress.

As others have pointed out, Highfleet combines a cerebral strategic layer with a breathtaking physics-basede dogfighting minigame extremely well, with the latter, as in Hammerfight, striking a very comfortable balance between intuitive arcadey controls and a breadth of tactical considerations. However, I do worry that people are getting the wrong impression from other posts, that this game requires a genius mind and hours with a manual to understand. I believe this game is designed to be understood experientially, thus possessing the oldschool charm of being initially scary and overwhelming but gradually becoming increasingly comfortable and interesting as you peel back the layers of its mechanics and understand the strategic options you have on hand. The game's roguelike structure being very forgiving on a macro-level contributes to the ease of experimentation - while it is indeed rather easy to put your campaign into a position where victory is impossible, the score earned by each failed run contributes to the budget of all subsequent runs. In many roguelikes, there is a sense that, beyond gaining additional knowledge, a failed run simply stole the player's time. This is not the case with Highfleet, as even by failing terribly, you will be earning yourself a leg-up for all future runs.

Therefore, I believe that another of Highfleet's virtues is just how comfortable it is to play at your own place, figuring game mechanics as you go, in spite of how complex some of the game's systems are. Feel free to ignore radio interceptions, various radar settings, the infrared detection system, etc on your first few runs - I sure did! But perhaps you will instead focus on familiarizing yourself with the dogfighting mechanics, or begin forming a solid fleet doctrine to base your runs around. Since every step - even your last one - brings you forward, Highfleet simultaneously encourages optimal play, without demanding that every run be as optimal as possible.

Here are is a tip, granted my play time has been a modest 9 hours. After a few runs of playing the game at your own pace, try the ship editor. Pay attention to where the armor and other components are on the ships you typically use in the campaign. Then try making the design more optimal, run it against the enemy using the "test" feature, see how ships handle, find optimal angles of approach and firing solutions. After being comfortable with your custom-made ship, save it to the roster - any ship saved in the editor in this manner will now be available to start the game with (and I believe you might find them procedurally as well, though I am yet to confirm this.) So, with time, you might very well have a roster of customized ships from the get-go, just bear in mind that ship cost/speed/fuel consumption is affected by its components, so you can't just cheese through the game with custom uberships and should adhere to common sense and a good sense for budgeting when designing each build.

General thoughts which will hopefully be helpful to fellow new players:

1. Prioritize mobility over defense in corvettes, and do the opposite for cruisers. Defense via maneuver will always be more optimal than taking hits on the armor. However, large ships are simply less capable of doing so. Hence your cruisers should be heavily armored, while the corvettes should have no armor as they are more than capable of dodging enemy salvoes with enough skill. Frigates are naturally somewhere in the middle - my strategy is to only armor the top of the ship, as in most cases it will be advantageous to approach enemy ships from their bottom.

2. Interpid is a bit of a trap. As per the above point, you will find more success with faster frigates, and the interpid compromises its speed with heavy armor for its class. Instead, customize a Navarin. I have found a lot of success swapping out the stock Navarin's engines/armaments for the romani model and 130mm guns respectively. The result is a level of firepower between a corvette and a frigate, with interceptor-like speed and maneuverability.

3. Rook is likewise a bit of a trap. You can fit 4 bombs on a rook, the dedicated bomber corvette, but interpids and navarins carry 3 on their own while being competent combat ships which rook is not. Rook is very cheap indeed, but you would be better off getting a custom Navarin vs stock Navarin + Rook for the same price.

3. Experiment with horizontal missile placements over the classic vertical ones. I find that makes the missiles harder to disable, both while they are on the ship (since they can be less exposed when cradled by other ship components) and while they are in the air.

4. You will want at least 1 dedicated anti-air ship for mid/late game. Don't worry too much about this at the start, but when planes and long range missiles start entering the fray, they will fucking murder you if you don't have a decent amount of countermeasures in the fleet. You don't have to get super fancy - worst case scenario, simply getting a ship or two packed full of low-calbre, high ROF weapons (Archangel, or even Wanderer) is far far better than relying purely on the Sevastopol.

5. Easy rule of thumb to stick by for battle order is matching the ship class of the enemy force. Ie, fight corvettes with corvettes, frigates with frigates, and save the Sevastopol for enemy cruisers. It may seem really cool to deploy the Sevastopol against a horde corvettes and utterly obliterate them, but you will quickly see that doing so is economic suicide - corvette armaments are not a big deal, but Sevastopol has zero ability to dodge anything. As such, every hit taken by the Sevastopol is a hit that another ship could have dodged. So a few skirmishes and you will be spending thousands of gold repairing Sevastopol's expensive-ass components, even after fighting nothing but corvettes.

I will post more if I can think of anything. Please post your impressions of a good custom frigate, as I have trouble hacking one of the stock ones to my taste. Wanderer's proportions seem too awkward, while the Gladiator is almost perfect but the exposed fuel sections on its sides really hurt its viability.

Lastly, I was very interested to see if the game, given that it's author is a bit of an outspoken Orthodox Christian, (cuck-rection: the author is a protestant, which probably explains a thing or two in a Russian context) wouldn't come off as too preachy for my sensitive secular-liberast taste. In my experience, among fellow slavoids of that religious persuasion you either get a pretty nuanced belief system injected with EARTHLY SLAVIC WISDOM, or strange fellows who think that Putin, Stalin, Nick II, and Jesus Christ were somehow the same person. So far I found the plot to be well-written and tasteful, with the religious subtext subtle and enhancing the otherwise fairly derivative setting with a Dune-esque element of mystical intrigue. I do wish the player was presented with a more comprehensive view of the setting and its characters, but perhaps some of that stuff is a mixture of information discovered in game and found in the manual. Regardless, really looking forward to exploring more of this world.

TL;DR

Why the FUCK are you not playing this game right now?

 

[Lithium Flower]

Also,



Nothing mindblowing, but GODDAMN does this shit SLAPP when you overlay artillery fire, panicked radio call-outs, and impact effects over it in the course of battle. Given that this track consistently plays when the Sevastopol gets ambushed by the enemy strike fleet, it injects an almost electrical feeling of desperation directly into your URETHRA.

 

[agris]

Lithium Flower great write up, I think I overemphasized the cerebral parts of the game. You do a good job highlighting the flexibility to play as a savant off his meds, or discover systems through experimentation.

I must say that it seems as if you’ve gotten a lot further than I have in 9 hours, I keep trying to fit a square peg in a round hole with the arcade dogfights, getting mad at the peg, and pushing harder.

 

[Lithium Flower]

Got my first save point on like the 5th restart, in an okay logistical situation. Could this be The Run?

My current Holy Grail is trying to recruit the special forces cossack dude. He fucking hates everything, except Kindness and Strength and maybe Fear, so he is a rather hard individual to persuade. Lost him on this run, unfortunately. I wonder if they move around so you can find them again after failing to recruit them?

Lithium Flower great write up, I think I overemphasized the cerebral parts of the game. You do a good job highlighting the flexibility to play as a savant off his meds, or discover systems through experimentation.

I must say that it seems as if you’ve gotten a lot further than I have in 9 hours, I keep trying to fit a square peg in a round hole with the arcade dogfights, getting mad at the peg, and pushing harder.

You did a great job summarizing the game's unique flow.

I heavily recommend putting together the aforementioned Navarin build in the editor (replace engines with NK-25s and the guns with D-80 Molots) and just practicing dodging volleys and landing shots. That is what I needed for the combat to "click" for me. As others have written, try dodging by holding down shift for just a second (more on heavier/slower ships) right before the enemy starts firing - the souped up Navarin should be able to evade almost every type of projectile this way, save for radio-detonated fragmentation shells which are naturally the bane of quick unarmored craft. Careful, though, because in my ridiculous Navarin modification, your crew will be regularly blacking out from the G-forces - all the better, as it will train you to fight blind.

In most cases ships will be most vulnerable on their bottom (engines, fuel, lack of armor generally there) so approaching them at nearly point blank from that direction between their volleys and unloading everything you've got is generally a surefire way to kill most corvettes and certain types of frigates in just one or two salvoes.

The D-80 Molot is just a fantastic workhorse anti-ship gun considering you can fit one on a corvette with minimal modifications in most cases, and they work just as well when massed on frigates. It is quite poor at point defense however, and less forgiving in general than a high ROF cannon, so you can try using it almost like a shotgun and firing from up close as described above until you get better at leading your shots.

 

[agris]

Lithium Flower I’ll try that build, thanks.

In the main campaign, it rustles my jimmies that the D80 costs/sells for 4000 but it also costs 4000 to mount. That’s insane, and that mechanic - cost to install is cost of part, making all ship modifications functionally cost 2x list - has kept me from modifying ships during campaign outside of mounting missiles and bombs.

 

[Lithium Flower]

In the interest of BALANCE, so far I am finding the defense v missiles/planes sections to be extreme jank that does not really fit in with the rest of the game. Travel through a missile salvo or a bomber team and you will get interrupted over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again for a short vignette where a selection of your fleet equipped for anti-missiles combat will have a brief window to stop the missile/planes or else get their shit kicked in.

I admire that even these heavily detached segments are simulated in the game's combat engine, but ultimately, your chance of successfully stopping missiles/planes mostly depends on your fleet composition and whether or not you choose to use consumable countermeasures like missiles etc. Besides the large problem of your ships inevitably causing unpreventable friendly fire in these segments, the spread on your low-caliber guns will basically take player skill out of the equation (in this particular section of the game only, mind you,) so you are effectively playing out a tiny QTE that has a random result. It is a little more dignified than that, but rather than the janky current system, I think I would have preferred something along the lines of a tiny text adventure. Could even be a pop-up on the screen that expires when the missile hits you, forcing you to react quickly.

"Yo, missile's here, what do?
>Use anti-missile missile (uses up consumable but nullifies threat)
>Shoot that dude (runs some sort of equation using different hit chance and damage probabilities based on missile type, modified by the point defense capabilities of each individual ship)
>Brace for impact (auto-hit on one of the ships in fleet at a reduced damage, Plan B for fleets with shit-poor point defense)"

Yes it would suck to lose some simulationist goodness which is why I doubt this change would ever get implemented, but I do feel like this would be a far more smooth way to represent effective the same underlying mechanic - this particular part of the game is just too janky bordering on grating to my taste.

Even though I am grouping missiles and planes together in my big brain analysis, I think latter encounters would be okay to represent as-is, as planes will come at you in a group as opposed to each missile individual missile interrupting you. That and you can still represent nukes the current way for dramatic effect. But I think I would have preferred something simpler for regular long range missiles along above lines.

Not a game-breaking issue to me, though. The winning move is not to get caught by fleets with carriers or LRM in the first place. I would appreciate making the fleet immune to friendly fire during the sections at the very least, as otherwise you are getting fucked twice, but due to the damage model requiring multiple consistent hits on the same part of the target friendly fire is less of an issue than it sounds.

 

[downwardspiral]

After finishing the game. This is probably one of the best game this year and something very different in recent years.
It has a bit of everything but not too much. It is there. Enough dynamic in everything but not too complex yet enough to keep things interesting.
And the freedom in campaign is great no hand holding or forcing you to do thing their way.
Thinking outside of box help a lot, unlike many games today.

It is indeed a very retro sandbox arcade sim.

I can imagine myself keep playing this game in following years. It is quick, fun and deep all together.

I initially think there is too little control on BVR and carrier plane options.
But It might be intentional since this somehow force me to use gunship a bit more. Otherwise I am mostly a carrier guy.
I can find an usage for every type of ship. It is tricky to keep gunship useful in a game where BVR missile and carrier exist.
Some form of handicap is probably needed.

Highly recommend this game if you like strategy shooting game.

 

[Lithium Flower]

After finishing the game. This is probably one of the best game this year and something very different in recent years.
It has a bit of everything but not too much. It is there. Enough dynamic in everything but not too complex yet enough to keep things interesting.
And the freedom in campaign is great no hand holding or forcing you to do thing their way.
Thinking outside of box help a lot, unlike many games today.

It is indeed a very retro sandbox arcade sim.

I can imagine myself keep playing this game in following years. It is quick, fun and deep all together.

I initially think there is too little control on BVR and carrier plane options.
But It might be intentional since this somehow force me to use gunship a bit more. Otherwise I am mostly a carrier guy.
I can find an usage for every type of ship. It is tricky to keep gunship useful in a game where BVR missile and carrier exist.
Some form of handicap is probably needed.

Highly recommend this game if you like strategy shooting game.

Spoiler

I've a few questions if you don't mind, although if you could keep spoilers outside of these topics to a minimum that would be great.

1. Approximately how much of the game is left after taking Hiva? I bumrushed it with my fleet and only Sevastopol survived, only to be pleasantly surprised that the game did not end and that it was effectively a Pyrrhic victory since I did not have anywhere enough ships to take all the possible missile launch cites.

2. Does the eclipse/temperature drop ever reverse itself or is it effectively a hard time limit for the campaign? It seems like you'd be spending 75% of the game fighting in darkness which is a bit weird.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

unexplainably, w10 only.

 

[Mefi]

I had a go, expecting downwardspiral's comments to be highlighting where I'd find it a bit offputting. And, yeah, it's beautifully styled, it really is. Wish I could love it more for that to get past the 2d arcade minigames. Sadly not but hope the dev has tons of success for those who want to play the blend of things he's offering with it. I wouldn't say the difficulty is particularly high, it's more that the systems are obscure until you figure out what's going on with them as others have commented. I can see how you'd play it as part of the experience of the game. There's definitely an old school late 80s/early 90s vibe to the minigames - had flashbacks with the combat to a very old game called NOMAD which had a similar thing with needing to factor in gravity, leading on your targets, and ducking out of the way of return fire. All it needs is to put it into space and have three more walls and momentum to worry about too.

Would really love to see this done for old farts like me who prefer a more sedentary pace to combat in our old age. The setting and the art and the way it's all put together is very, very well done indeed.

 

[DraQ]

unexplainably, w10 only.

I think they are trying to patch W7 support in?

 

[agris]

The electronic warfare aspects are really sublime. The manual needs to document them more, but once the interplay between radar, IR and ELINT clicks - you really realize how open to different play styles the game is.

 

[agris]

unexplainably, w10 only.

I think they are trying to patch W7 support in?

Sorry for double post, but as someone who found the lack of Win7 compatibility - this is something that took them by surprise right before release. They're working on it. This actually drove me to install Win10 LTSC 2019, which if anyone is holding out, works wonderfully well on my mix of 7 to 10 year old hardware. And if you find the right "version", it comes with prepackaged updates, office 2019, activated* etc.

* with a legal key, of course

 

[Lithium Flower]

do NOT squish the ant that crawls on your desk in a random event ok

it comes back at the end of the game to join you as a secret bonus tarkhan with strongest ship (sevastopol mk2)

 

[downwardspiral]

Spoiler

I've a few questions if you don't mind, although if you could keep spoilers outside of these topics to a minimum that would be great.

1. Approximately how much of the game is left after taking Hiva? I bumrushed it with my fleet and only Sevastopol survived, only to be pleasantly surprised that the game did not end and that it was effectively a Pyrrhic victory since I did not have anywhere enough ships to take all the possible missile launch cites.

2. Does the eclipse/temperature drop ever reverse itself or is it effectively a hard time limit for the campaign? It seems like you'd be spending 75% of the game fighting in darkness which is a bit weird.

Spoiler

1 You hunt down two nuclear missile ships then it is over. It could take a while depends on how quick you find and hunt them down.
You should be able to recruit free ally from cities nearby. Nuclear ship fleet itself is not that tough but you need to find some ways to deal with nuclear missile.
I use allies who just joined as meat shield.
Try to use a fleet that has high endurance and fast speed to lure SGs away from your assaulting fleet when you try to rush Khiva.


2 No idea, I think it is a soft time limit. I rushed khiva before it went too bad.

 

[downwardspiral]

I had a go, expecting downwardspiral's comments to be highlighting where I'd find it a bit offputting. And, yeah, it's beautifully styled, it really is. Wish I could love it more for that to get past the 2d arcade minigames. Sadly not but hope the dev has tons of success for those who want to play the blend of things he's offering with it. I wouldn't say the difficulty is particularly high, it's more that the systems are obscure until you figure out what's going on with them as others have commented. I can see how you'd play it as part of the experience of the game. There's definitely an old school late 80s/early 90s vibe to the minigames - had flashbacks with the combat to a very old game called NOMAD which had a similar thing with needing to factor in gravity, leading on your targets, and ducking out of the way of return fire. All it needs is to put it into space and have three more walls and momentum to worry about too.

Would really love to see this done for old farts like me who prefer a more sedentary pace to combat in our old age. The setting and the art and the way it's all put together is very, very well done indeed.

Strategy + 2D shooting.
It is a strange combination.
But if you like both parts then the game merge it quite well.

The best part of the game is,
It doesn't really force player to excel in any particular elements of game.
You can downplay the part you aren't good and gain advantage in other sections of the game.
Like if you are very good at dodging and shooting, then you could use a light armor fast speed ship armed with few heavy guns to slowly take down SG by shooting their weak spot.
You could always retreat once fuel run low and then send second ship to strike it again.


You can also try to use heavy armour and bigger gun to go head to head, if you design your ship very well, it could take SGs and sustain a manageable danamge.

Doing good strategy movement on map will save you alot of trouble. Make shooting part much easier.
Notice how morale = arcade shooting retry chance.
The more you allow your crew to rest the more life you going to get in arcade shooting mode.
You could also completely dodging most of the combat and just go stealth.

And if you doing good in all aspects of the game then it isn't that hard.
I like how it doesn't try to be just hard by limiting player's options like many games today.
It allows you to beat the game the way you want. A very sand box style game.
Freedom over Difficulty seems to be the design principle of this game.
But yes, I think it is best for people who accept and love the 2D shooting combat instead of treating it as 100% strategy.

The more I played, I love every bit of the game(except the bug), even the landing mini game part is not bad.
Because how you design your ship also affect how easy you going to get the repair bonus through landing.
Not to mention how many time my landing gear was blown off in combat so I need to do hard landing with my rocket engine.
It felt pretty epic to land a half broken ship from a deadly battle.
I will try to design my newer ship with better landing gear and probably some side skirt armour that can be use as emergency landing gear.
And ofc, you can also design your ship without landing gear to reduce weight if your ship never need to go through serious repair.
It is very arcade but they make it connects to other parts of game instead of just being an isolate mini game section of the game like landing in other arcade games such as Ace combat series.


The more I play I prefer this 1v3 shooting combat over all vs all 2d command battle with small tactical map (somethign like airship conquest or master of orion type of game)
Because the biggest problem of those 2D ship battle is distance and small map.
In games like 2D tactical game such as MOO2 or Airship, the combat distance is often too short. There is no tactical maneuver of your battleships.
If the game really want to go for the non-action style battle, I think it is best to follow CMANO or Rule the waves type of game. Where battleship gun shooting range is also beyond visual range and fight directly on the global map instead of a separate tactical battle map.

The 2D shooting combat is very methodological. In a weird way, it reminds me the time I play IL-2.
Where I use 20mm cannon to rip enemy airplane apart. In this game, 100mm and 130mm are wonderful.
You don't want just spray the bullet. You want to position you self and aim for their fuel tank and bridge then use MG to probe a bit, if the trajectory match, then fire the cannon.

You could also use boom and zooom, don't shoot in long range, just dodge then fly pass enemy and only shoot in close range.

 

[Van-d-all]

Played around some more through the weekend, and definitely the arcade part is a major loophole in the entire game.

It can be approached seriously with matching ship classes like a NAVTAG proper, but it's quite easy to design a lightly armored ship with some major guns (like a modified Gladiator with armor all around and guns pimped to 2x 2A37 for infinite point defense + 2x Mk-2-180 for killing) that's faster than most other ships (330kmph+) and with just a bit of skill (I'm not an arcade player by any means) can take out pretty much anything solo, including the strike groups. Pair it up with modified Skylark (radar + fuel tanks) and you have a 2 ship strike squadron for <$50k meaning, if you ditch the Sevastopol (!) you start with four of those.

Sure the missiles, the bombs, and the airplanes are fun to use, especially combined with ELINT elements, but they present a constant resource drain - given their external mounts, they are usually first ones to get destroyed, so they need to be fired and used up either way just to get bang for buck. But in a resource management game, it's far from optimal, and there's also replacement availability issue on top of that. It's just easier to strip them off. Just like every non essential system.

And lastly - bugs. Undo a ship modification - infinite money. Plethora of crashes with different carrier/aircraft returning scenarios. Merging main fleet with strike squadron in a city cancels repairs. Missile attacked prize ships disappear. Custom blueprints can't be deleted because the GUI switches to ship description. Are just the few I remember.

All in all it's still a fine game, but honestly it's just as good as you LARP it - there's an arcade game underneath and it can be played as such. IMO it would've been better if the battles were more tactical, eg. with active pause where you'd get to give vector orders (direction/speed + firing solution) to the entire fleet, possibly with added complexity of command points like Starsector.