Gratuitous Space Battles

[Mr. Oragahn]

You may want to check this out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfRXJFrPubs

[2046]

I've played that before. It's a decent waste of time, but not great. You design your ships and lay them out, then give them orders and watch helplessly as they fail to follow them to your liking, or otherwise fail to adapt to the situation.

It's similar to the battles from Stars! 2.0, except whereas the older token-based small map system was forgiving enough to allow battle orders to actually be followed, this game's setup of a large-feeling 2-D map with turning ships and whatnot just sort of seems to do whatever the hell it wants to while you sit back and cuss at it.

Suffice it to say, as an improvement I would much prefer a staccato battle system like that of Birth of the Federation, wherein you gave orders regarding like five seconds of combat at a time (as did your computer foe, presumably), and then the battle would run forward until the next order-giving interval. Alternately, real-time control.

But, for what it is, it's a fun little way to spend a couple of hours. But being a stingy SOB, I wouldn't be likely to pay for it in its present state (especially given the program errors I kept seeing, like not being able to save ship designs).

[Mr. Oragahn]

Oh, I dig interval stragegy games, it allows for micro management as well as complex macro management, while also giving you full cinematic sequences, even if they're short. There are very few of them, but they're a nice middle ground between mindless click and shortcut fest like the DoWs or SCs, and the really slow turn based ones, like, huh, Advance Wars, a good series but very short on the unit variety.

There's a very simple action game, with a notch of strategy, that works by intervals, called Steambirds. Not too bad.