ABOUT:
Take a control over a faction & vehicle design deploying units of various sizes, weapons, propulsion systems and electronic warfare capabilities, manage resources and laws and survive in politically fragmented sci-fi galaxy. Or disable survival. Or play battles. Or skip 4x and play missions on home planet.
Real time tactics - without base building or units "spawning" during battles. With turn based campaign in galaxy map.
Single-player, indie.
Realism inspired battle systems mixed with "more traditional RTS" where vision, accuracy, target size, terrain, weather or electronic warfare can be important in addition to damage and hit points.
The game focus is more on complex mechanics and larger unit count in battles. Less on detailed graphics.
FEATURES:
Component based vehicle customization
Playable with pre-designed faction units or using custom component based vehicle designer where dragging slider can increase / decrease vehicle size, component size, internal space available.
Unit designer is about selecting a propulsion type (tracks, wheels, rotor, spaceship, building, ...) and then adding components to it that define what the unit is.
Internal components like engines or fuel tanks are not visible and fill up the internal space. They are destroyed when vehicle hitpoints deplete.
External components that cannot be directly covered by armor including fragile radars or wheels or wings. These can be destroyed when physically hit presenting weakspots and making fragmentation and flak ammo useful vs. high armor units.
Weapons and missile customization includes various guidance types and ammo types.
Vision based warfare
Seeing enemies before they see you is important.
Using EW or sci-fi camouflage fields. Standing in bushes or trees.
When an unit fires its weapons their VisibleAt% and signature is raised increasing the distance that it can be detected.
Units have dynamic radar and emi-heat signatures governing the detection range of enemy sensors.
In practice stealth situations are not common but possible.
Realism inspired balancing mixed with hitpoints and damage
Large vs small units & weapons is a cost-efficiency design choice.
Larger units may have larger signatures with larger hitbox.
Larger weapons have less damage per second per volume dedicated to weapon as their smaller counterparts while costing more ammo or power to fire. They tend to have larger reload time and range.
Armor is more likely to block smaller weapons because they tend to be lower damage per shot.
Different front/side/rear/top armor values for hull and blocks/turrets.
Player - AI behaviours
Units can automatically retreat at low hp or ammo, attempt to scout, seek battle, keep range and/or rotation to target.
Non cheating battle AI
AI has exactly the same vision rules as player during battle. It knows player approximate start position the same way as player knows Possible Enemy Location markers.
Campaign focused on survival or 4x
Campaign experience is without goals or quests. There is no win condition.
The single defeat condition is loss of home planet.
A typical campaign is about holding stability on owned planets while building up vehicle roster and engaging in battles via. missions. Money can be used to purchase nearly everything. But for more effective faction a management of minerals, materials, tactical ops. and similar is required.
Technology is divided into 5 tiers where single technology unlocks multiple components.
Tier 1 is pre missile age, tier 2 is current era and tier 3 is sci-fi with bubble shields.
Campaign can be customized to not feature faction vs. faction wars or raids or to feature only space, ocean or land battles and relevant vehicle designs.
Basic Logistics
No advanced logistics management is needed but it can be feasible.
In most battles, making sure that the design has enough fuel/power to reach
enemies while having ammo for a few minutes is enough.
Most units need power, fuel, ammoM (0-99mm), ammoX (100-199mm), ammoXL (200+ mm). And there is possibility of supply depots.
But as the battle drags on, situations such as artillery running out of ammo or radar planes turning off their active radars because running out of power can happen.
Right click order modifiers
E.g. R click with Q is rotate instead of move. R is reverse. Ctrl is attack move. Alt to lower aircraft flight altitude or submarine surfacing. These combinations can be used together.
WORTH MENTION:
NOT a voxel vehicle builder game
Designer allows up to around 50 resizeable "blocks" with custom front/side/... armor to be attached but this is not the focus of this game.
These "blocks" are addition to hull of the design.
Bad pathfinding
Terrain is semi-procedural and its up to the player to determine whether their land units should attempt to climb that hill or not. But beware as flipped vehicles can sometimes get stuck for the rest of battle, auto unflip feature may work for units not in combat.
Pathfinding around bodies of water is not yet properly implemented.
Simple physics
Not a physics simulator game. Physics are approximated, simple and designed for performance.
Demo
Demo is an older version of game that also ends the campaign after 1.5 year in game time.
No music
No FPV kamikaze drones
Realism setting is mixed with "traditional rts", these drones could easily break balance as imo irl they are counter to vehicles and this game is about vehicles.
