Gratuitous Space Battles

By: Derek Yu

On: November 18th, 2009

In Positech’s Gratuitous Space Battles you design ships, place them, give them vague orders, and then… watch. At that point, the battle is out of your control – as the big man with the plan, you merely watch your cruisers, frigates, and fighters duke it out to the last crew member. If you lose, you go back and redesign either your ships or your placement of them. If you win, you gain honor that can be used to buy new ships, components, and even alien races to play.

Watching the battles can be quite enjoyable – the graphics are gorgeous and do a great job of capturing the look and sound of any epic space melee I’ve ever seen on television or the movies. Giant cruisers crawl slowly across the screen but are armed with powerful weapons and shields, while tiny fighters dart around them going pew pew! By the end of each battle space is littered with the burning wreckage of destroyed ships.

But even though they look and sound good, the battles in GSB are really lacking the impetus of the ones in the movies. Mostly because there’s no context to the fighting, not even the thinnest story or briefest of mission briefings before each battle. Comm-chatter displayed at the top of the screen is funny but very repetitive – and besides, it’s just text. Where’s the heated exchange on the viewscreen before the battle begins? Or the cadet in uniform nervously awaiting your orders? These are neat space battles, but it’s hardly a space opera, and as such, I didn’t have a lot of incentive to see the next level.

The other problem I had was that the strategy felt shallow to me. Most of my battles ended up in a giant ball of ships in the middle of the screen – pretty, but uninteresting. Also, even though there are dozens of ship types, weapons, shields, engines, and other components, many of them are simply upgrades of each other, or have barely noticeable differences. Ultimately, it’s easy to find a winning strategy through trial-and-error. “Oh, their fighters nailed me that time – I’ll add some of my own fighters, or I’ll add anti-fighter guns.” “Their shields are strong, I’ll go for strong shield penetration.” Find the antidote, and win. Harder difficulty? Add more ships. It worked for me.

I very much enjoy the idea behind Gratuitous Space Battles – that you spend a lot of time setting up and then just watching a marvelous space battle unfold. And I liked tinkering with ship designs. The fact that it’s so easily moddable is awesome, too. But in my opinion the game is suffering from what a lot of casual games suffer from – it lacks depth.

TIGdb: Entry for Gratuitous Space Battles

Gratuitous Space Battles Beta

By: Derek Yu

On: September 24th, 2009

I’ve been meaning to mention that the Gratuitous Space Battles beta is open for people who pre-order the game for $19.95. You can follow the development of the game at Cliffski’s blog.

I thought this was neat:

GSB: New Gameplay Video

By: Derek Yu

On: July 4th, 2009

Here’s a new preview trailer of Positech‘s upcoming strategy game, Gratuitous Space Battles. Man, this looks so beautiful. But I can’t help but feel like the opening tagline, “Imagine tower-defense with space fleets,” is doing a bit of disservice to the concept…?

(Source: Steve Swink, via his Twitter)

Arrrrrrrrrrrr?

By: Derek Yu

On: August 15th, 2008

Cliff “cliffski” Harris certainly caused a stir recently when he went around the interwebs and asked software pirates why they, you know, do what they do. Harris, the developer behind Kudos, the Democracy games, and other “real life” sims, drew some interesting (if not necessarily epiphanic) conclusions from the hundreds of responses he received. Your mileage may vary.

Probably the best thing to come out of this is the resulting discussion of piracy and its roots, including a great (and slightly heated) thread on TIGForums. I’m also glad to see that Cliff is being so proactive about his troubles, going as far as to say:

That’s definitely the spirit!

(Image Source: NineInchNachosII, via Flickr)