“Peacefully populate the galaxy by any means necessary.”
Space Tales has justlaunched on Kickstarter. Providing Saigon Dragon hit their funding targets, it’ll offer a 16-mission campaign with optional side missions, in which you can research army improvements and build up a squad of side-characters.
What do I mean by optional side missions? Well, apparently there are larger, docile alien lifeforms who can be hunted down for bonus resources and so forth. Who are you, exactly? Some guy called Xander - no, not Xander from Buffy, alas, but the son of a celebrated general of the Intergalactic Planetary Expansion organisation, whose goal is “to peacefully populate the galaxy by any means necessary”. If that premise sounds a bit dark, know that this is explicitly a “satire of imperialism/colonialism”, to quotethe Steam page.
In terms of how it stands apart from other real-time strategy games, there’s mention of a hub power system, with larger generators linking out to smaller wireless nodes that decide what you can build where. The major tactical wrinkle here appears to be that if one smaller hub gets trashed by those pesky xenos, any other hubs and production facilities connected to it lose power. Stretch out your power grid too far and you’re asking for trouble, but I’m guessing the game will tempt you to do so with scattered pockets of resources, and so forth.
It all feels veryStarcrafty. Battles mix together smaller rank-and-file with larger support units, and base structures are summoned from orbit. There’s the option of capturing rather than killing the aforesaid larger, initially non-hostile alien wildlife, allowing you to summon them as beasts of war. You can scry the team’s previous experience on There Are Billions in the wave-defence feel of the encounters, though the bodycount isn’t nearly as high - so far. Here’s the trailer.
