ZeroSpace is officially in early access, for anyone who misses good things Blizzard did in the past.

[Purple]

A few years ago, there was a real bombshell announcement of just how profoundly awful the execs at Blizzard were, and personally I just dropped all their stuff cold turkey. Not too too long after, a bunch of people who had previously worked on StarCraft 2 left the company, formed their own indie outfit, and started work on a new RTS that was pretty clearly using SC2 as a base, but trying new things. It was called Stormgate and it was an incredibly sad and pathetic failure of a game which barely launched before they admitted it was a total failure and shut the servers down forever.

HOWEVER! Around the same time a DIFFERENT group of former Blizzard people (as I understand it, mainly responsible for that crazy co-op mode in SC2 and Heroes of the Storm at its height of wacky ideas), along with Scarlet, the best SC2 player this side of Korea and a big influence in the overall balance of the game, plus that Giant Grant Games guy who did all the absurd challenge runs and basically funds the entire mod scene for multiple RTS games out of his own pocket lately ALSO got together and went indie to kickstart a StarCraft-like that ISN'T a complete joke, and three years of closed testing and seasonal demo events later, it's... still not finished, but finished enough that you can buy it and be able to play it all the time not just during Next Fests and such.

It is... Very StarCraft, but it also has a ton of crazy ambitious ideas that make it really neat... and the people behind it do a terrible terrible job both in and out of game of laying them all out. So... here's a smattering of cool concepts that are in this game:

- You pick a faction and a half each match. Along with the main faction you pick out of a whopping 4 (Space Marine types, trees-controlling-giant-bugs going all fey-reclaiming-nature, something halfway between 40k's chaos marines and the imperial guard, and robots that combine with eachother like Voltron), you ALSO pick one of... I wanna say 12 mercenary factions, covering all kinds of weird niches like Krogan from Mass Effect, crab worshipping shamans, enlightened space wizards, and guys who just really love hovertanks. They all work like the mercenary camps in WC3x or StarCraft 2, where you build their one base structure, and it slowly builds charges you can spend along with a hefty chunk of cash for the instant delivery of a little pile of units from several choices. They also affect some stuff with other mechanics, and generally just add so much variety to the game, letting you sidebar in stuff to cover what normally might be big holes in what your faction is all about.

- Acknowledging that honestly WarCraft 3 had a few cool ideas. Aside from the mercenary subfaction thing, you ALSO pick a hero at the start of a match, with various cooldown skills, who levels up a bit and lets you get out onto the map taking out neutral trash or doing early attacks right from the jump. Unlike heroes in say, WarCraft 3, they don't continue to creep up in power over the whole game, and by the late game they're just kind of an extra high tech tier caster in your big unit ball, but early on when you're still building up, they're nifty, and hey, 3 choices of what you're playing really keeps stuff from getting stale. Also, hey, neutral units guarding resources. And it might have been cut when I wasn't looking at least at one point in development there was an Upkeep like system curbing your resource gain if you build Entirely Too Much Infrastructure to discourage just totally swarming.

- You practically never have to click back over to your base. Instead of the usual build a base structure near the resources, crank out a bunch of workers, order them to go mine it approach, you just kinda build a resource extractor on a node, once. It slowly builds itself up over time, and replaces its outbuildings automatically. For the secondary resource, you can build up to 3 very Dune 2/Command & Conquer style extractor vehicles which generally manage themselves and queue up their own replacements when they die. There's basic hotkeys to select all your units, all your production buildings, and all your tech buildings to queue stuff up, so you can just kinda always keep your eyes on the fight, no going back to click buildings.

- Upgrades are all neat little choices. You've got 3 make-your-guys buildings, generally, and each has a matching upgrade-those-guys building. But instead of the standard "increase damage/increase defense" buttons on those, each individual unit gets choices like "Do you want more survivabilty, or do you want more splash damage?" or "Do you want more range, or do you want more jump jet distance?" And on top of all these, there's the secret third resource of experience, which levels your whole faction up and gives you 3 choices for a global upgrade every time you level up, 2 for your faction, 1 for your subfaction. Stuff like "want a hotbar option for a spell that permanently powers up units after they spend time in a cocoon?" or "want our space pirate tech that lets you steal resources when you attack buildings?" And oh yeah, there's top bar abilities. The 40k guys can do a mass sacrifice of all their fanatical cultists to summon their god emperor and such. It's neat.

- There's a LOT of stuff encouraging you actually get out onto the map early on instead of just kinda turtling up. That experience resource mostly comes from controlling towers that are all very much in the middle of the map, extra juicy wads of secondary resource mostly falls out of the sky in random-but-symmetrical spots at regular intervals, pressuring you to go all gold-rush with it. And basically every building in the game has a secondary function that's really handy to have towards the front lines. Barracks with healing fields, farms that double as guard towers, farms for another faction that act as fast-travel points, etc.

- Less unique and fresh since everyone's doing these lately but still neat: There's this whole "unified command card" thing where if you select just ALL THE UNITS at once, all their special abilities show up at the bottom, with no overlapping hotkeys, so you can siege up your siege units or activate all your jump jets or cast the big flaming fireball spell without having to tab around and find the right unit first. Also when you give move commands, rather than just click a point on the map, you can doodle a little line, and your whole wad of selected units will spread themselves to whatever shape you doodled. Make a big C for a nice concave defensive line, write out a little cursive message in teeny grunt units, whatever. There's also a system where you can queue up units and upgrades even if you can't afford them yet (which I actually kinda hate because I keep spending myself way into debt accidentally and take forever to get back in the green).

- Aside from giving everyone a "kill this to win game" main base to avoid playing whack-a-mole in the end game, the SC2 co-op/Heroes of the Storm roots really show in some interesting map gimmicks/alternate win methods. At least in the one mode out of 4 that's just "we're doing that SC2 co-op thing again" there's stuff like pushing a team shooter payload, or fighting a hidden boss that then joins your party, or dealing with waves of air strikes, or escorting a cool giant robot and so on, which is just neat. Oh and there's a whole control map territory for your faction MMO metagame thing attached to that too. There's also some roguelike-y wave survival mode, regular RTS mode, and the campaign which is... oddly ambitious?

- Yeah so their main inspiration for the single player campaign is wanting to be Mass Effect. Instead of just a big chain of story missions there is a whole thing where you have multiple destinations on a big map at any point and RPGish scenes where you can hang out with all the NPC friends you meet and eventually date some of them if that's your thing. And you know like moral/story choices and such. Last I had a look at that was in a public demo where it REALLY wasn't ready to show off yet (there's significantly more to it in the new early access version here I haven't gotten to yet), and I don't know if they really have the writing chops to do something really good with it, but... yeah I'll take a free side order of RPG with my RTS, sure. And hey, your dorky early game buddy put cute little star and rocket ship stickers on his power armor, so there's at least SOME sense of fun going on here.

 

[Daikaiju]

HMMM...

 

[Purple]

May as well ramble a bit more as I refamiliarize myself with things.

So, the first faction of the four is the Protectorate. They are pretty much your vanilla option, your basic space marine types, with the big shoulder pads and the guns and whatnot, but they have a few neat things going on mechanically. Their production buildings all have little healing buildings built in, and their supply buildings can wear 3 different hats for more HP, better vision, or a rocket turret, so even moreso than with everyone else, it can really be hard to tell if you're looking at someone's main base, or just some basic infrastructure that happens to be there as a side effect of guarding a choke-point or something, and they have this whole rank up system going where each individual unit can level up a few times if they personally get enough kills.

Their basic bread and butter is little squishy space marines with jump jets, so early in the game, they like to do lots of precious poke-y jump in jump out stuff, getting that experience, but once you're in the late game, they're too squishy to really get away with that, and you want to gradually shift over to their ugly slabby brutalist mecha and vehicles that last a bit longer, and have support stuff to heal them properly. But, you're still probably going to be cranking out your little jumpy marines the whole game because they only cost the basic easy to collect resource and not the fancy shiny one, so late game you probably want to start breaking out these ridiculous things:

(Forgive my potato graphics settings muddying up all the textures.)

You can build these big ugly robot crab things, just kinda out in the field, not from any particular building, which work as troop transports. They're kind of hilariously impractically big (seen here dwarfing the base I'm taking out) and awkward and floppy, but they hold a decent number of little squishy units, have big piles of HP to keep them from going squish, and not only can the passengers fire out the windows just fine, they've got one of them siege mode deals where they flop their legs out and the squishy pals inside get a damage boost. So tada, all those high level veterans of the early game get to stay in the fight and not just die constantly.

Personally I think it's kinda funny that these ugly box-y units were a super recent redesign from this old slick sleek look:

It's genuinely an improvement though. One of the sub-factions has way too similar a look to that, and lore wise, these guys are kinda dumb/a bit fash-y and it's just kind of amusing watching all their floppy cardboard boxes full of guns flailing around.

Another fun thing thee have going: Their top bar stuff is pretty much all about air-dropping stuff in. Proper airstrikes for one off big blasts, extra units you need right now, for free, a big giant robot that explodes after a while, handy in a panic.

 

[LBD_Nytetrayn]

Not to digress too much, but the opening just reminded me of when it seemed like Blizzard could do no wrong and everyone loved them.

Feels like we're pretty far removed from that now. I know BlizzCon is still a thing, but how much of the fan base is still there?

 

[4-So]

For Blizzard or just Starcraft? Not sure on the latter but the former? Quite a few, considering WoW is still the MMO leader and Diablo 4 seems to be doing well enough considering they are on the 14th season. I guess Overwatch is still a thing, too.

 

[Purple]

Not to digress too much, but the opening just reminded me of when it seemed like Blizzard could do no wrong and everyone loved them.

Feels like we're pretty far removed from that now. I know BlizzCon is still a thing, but how much of the fan base is still there?

For being a pre-release indie thing with very little budget, it really is polished to hell. Even before the kickstarter launched, they had a fun playable build going on with just the first two factions, too. The second of which has also been REMARKABLY unchanged since then despite absolutely massive overhauls to the others. On that note. faction #2 is the Grell. The high concept here is that we've got some race of really powerful and expansionistic trees and flowers and the odd sorta snakey dryad (technically this is another faction on its own, the Koru, but that's getting into nerdy lore at this point) who wanna spread throughout the galaxy, but seeing how they're plants, and there just aren't enough little flower shops they can influence by being strange and unusual, they instead worked out some sort of symbiotic relationship with a bunch of space bugs who do most of the heavy lifting for their big terraforming operation. So we've got expansionistic bug monsters in our very-StarCraft game, they can only build on the stuff they spread, and their cheapest unit is even a speedy little melee thing you can get a lot of in a hurry. So literally everyone comes in feeling like they're going to play like the Zerg, but to quote the devs "honestly if anything they feel more like Protoss." I'd say they combine some of the greatest hits of all 3 StarCraft factions honestly, but instead of comparisons, let's start with the vibes:

One of the things that first caught my eye with this game is the fact that it's not afraid of being pretty sometimes. This was way more of a thing with some of the placeholder art, but yeah, the freaky alien biome the grell spread everywhere is a lush green field of grass full of big pink flowers and fanciful trees. Even the intro to the campaign establishes that huh, this weird colonizing force here is really just pleasant and tranquil looking. Which is a neat change of pace. And their unit designs are a mix of bugs and planty-bugswhich mostly lean into the cuter bugs like mantises or these here fairy-winged ohmu I was using to mop up here, or these glow-y toothed Audry 2 looking things. They also have something that's functionally a Siege Tank from StarCraft (which does a lot to make up for almost everything else being melee attacks only), but visually, basically an Ivysaur.

The grass of course is something of a creep-like mechanic, of course. Their bases spread it around them, their harvesters for the secondary resource, which... I'm just gonna start calling Flux because that's what it's called and it's way easier to type (the primary is Hexite for what it's worth) spread a little around them too. Otherwise, since bases can ONLY be built over Hexite deposits, you need to plant these little pink flowers constantly to carpet over the whole map if you ever want to have forward bases on those experience towers or Rich Flux when it pops up (you can see some of that by the way just north of the SW tower on my minimap, in game it kinda looks like pink rock candy). Aside from needing grass to plant your other buildings, which again are all these fanciful fairy flowers and trees, non-grell get a vision penalty from the grass, which is nice for the grell, because like I said, they're mostly all melee and then have some screw you siege cannon flower-butt bugs. Reduced visibility means... well not getting the drop on people because the grass is pretty conspicuous, but you still have less time being shot at before you close to chomping range when you're in your literal home turf, and harder to spot siege units have some obvious upside too.

The other thing the grass is important for is... OK so I should probably have mentioned this before, but FOR THE MOSTPART ZeroSpace doesn't do worker units. Everyone has some kind of harvester to run out and grab flux, which are hilariously independent and will even all come back from the dead on their own like hero units once you commit the resources to building them, and are mostly pretty good about searching the map on their own (again, the're very Dune 2 spice harvester), but you don't train guys to make your buildings. The Protectorate and Legion just kinda have absurdly good untargetable sky cranes and can basically just build whatever anywhere, with a cap on how many construction projects are happening at once, the Xol also have kind of a creep thing going but can just pop buildings out of their nanite/liquid-metal/ferofluid stuff at will, but the grell are kinda stuck in normal RTS land, where their base structures pop out Seedlings like they're Zerg eggs. Seedlings are... well, seeds, with little planty spider legs, that have to physically walk over and plant themselves whenever you want a building. They're speedy enough you mostly forget this is even a restriction, but they get ouchy feet when they have to walk on not-grass, slowing them down and damaging them, so even when you're setting up new Hexite outposts, you need to make a grassy path at least most of the way there first.

Anyway though, playstyle. The main thing that sticks out to me about grell units is that they are all hyperspecialized into a particular niche, and very much built to play off eachother. You've got your swarmy little pokey bugs early on for getting out onto the map but those largely become a distracting force at best later, but the rest all kinda slots together. Big tanky bugs go here, bugs with vine whips stand behind those, then we've got some supporty casters and those siege ivysaurs in the back, and if you really get up their, the fairy-wing ohmu are real good air-to-ground option for the late game (Grell probably have the best air game of all the factions by the way mainly in that they have one AT ALL before the very late game). With the rest you can kinda pick one thing and really lean on it, but Grell work best if you just kinda maintain a big variety and make use of that handy combined command card thing to use all your nichey abilities without dropping the whole big bug ball.

Also, they just get some fun top bar stuff. Early on, you get a pretty cheap spell you can point at any unit you control (and that includes your mercenaries, or I think 2v2 allies even) where they go into a cocoon for a few seconds then come out bigger and stronger, permanently. And a later level-up option lets you do it a second time (you'll notice I only hit MOST of my end game army here with the second one, so there's some relatively tiny things in the mix). You kinda want to use that liberally on anything you paid a lot for, and it combos real nice with some of the mercenaries that are already just A Really Big Tough Thing. Especially early on. And then you get a choice at the higher levels between "deep tunnels" where you just rip open a hole in the battlefield that a bunch of extra squishy low tier bugs pop out of, or the Tree of Life, which you can drop for like a good minute or two of stupid good regeneration on everything in range, and even resurrection of things that died within a few seconds of first dropping it, which is the better option if your end game build looks something like what I have here with all the expensive commitments.

 

[Purple]

Continuing with these faction overviews, next we have the Legion (of Truth). Now, both the Protectorate and Grell very much feel like remixed StarCraft in a whole lot of ways, but these guys, these guys feel like a remix of factions from Dawn of War. Specifically, they feel like what it'd be like to have Chaos Imperial Guard. I'd probably have a lot more lore here if I wasn't still procrastinating on playing the current version of the campaign, but basically, the legion are a bunch of wacky cultists who love their god emperor and hate robots. Apparently at one point in time, they were fanatically devoted to this ancient space empire, worshipping them as gods, and after they all suddenly died, they figured it was because all the robots they built, (the Xol) went rogue and killed them, so they went full Butlerian Jihad, particularly against them. Accordingly, they are very low tech. Mostly, you've got vaguely War Boy-esque thralls, and lots of them, 3 bigshot heroes (and they can bring all 3 out at once), and some boars and mammoths. They don't even have a proper harvester. They just hand thralls a bunch of pickaxes and have them march out there to get their hexite (each being basically 1/3 as good as a real harvester, but also they're cheaper, so it works out, but it just looks so sad). Also while other faction's hexite mining bases grow like extra drills on the sides or whatever as they work their way up to full strength, the legion just kinda... strap more zealots to the walls like some kinda Sisters of Battle mech.

Now, I say they're opposed to technology, but they make one very very notable exception- stupidly huge tanks. Much like the protectorate's ridiculous carrier crabs, these are Entirely Too Large, and just kinda built out in the field rather than coming from a proper production building. They also have an awful turning radius once they're out there, and it matters, because in addition to how a really stupid huge tank is inherently a good thing to have when your army is otherwise composed almost entirely of malnourished twinks with silly voices, the 4 corners of a Terror Tank each have a hard point on them, and on each of those hard points, you can build one of 4 different flavors of bonus module. Flamethrowers for crowd control, shield generators to make the tank more tanky, major armor piercing guns, and uh... the 4th one I always forget. You can mix and match these however you want, they can be individually targeted and rebuilt. It's a big cool unit that has up to 4 other units just kinda riding on it, and that's just neat. They also have a flying variation, which is handy but less cool by not being a stupidly huge tank covered in flame throwers.

Generally, the Legion gameplan is to really heavily rely on their heroes, and just kinda keep swarms of thralls around as meat shields for them. If you want, you can have some of them ride on mammoths too, but personally I prefer to keep my flux around until I can build and kit out a few tanks. Seriously, they're real real good. And of course, you almost certainly want to just be hording thralls for a while because in addtion to spells for reviving dead guys or summoning even more thralls, if you get your level way up there they have this fun little ability called summoning ritual. You target an experience tower you control (if it's some weird map like the co-op ones and that's not an option you can just plop it wherever) and make a big ritual site. Then, you just throw as many thralls as you can into that ritual site, to both speed up and supercharge the summoning ritual that eventually gives you a "projection" of that aforementioned god emperor of theirs.

The Protectorate also have an ultimate type top bar ability where they can summon a big robot, sure, but that big robot isn't actually all that great. Kinda slow, not SUPER tough, fun to toss out now and then sure, but nothing upsetting. THIS guy though? The silly giant man with a sword you throw away most of your supply to get? Yeah this is very frequently a win button. I think they've toned it down a bit. Seems like there's a cap on just how many thralls you can dump in, but when you power it up as much as you can, you have a damn near unkillable plenty fast guy who kinda does Yes damage, and it is just real real fun to stomp around the map like that.

There's probably other valid paths to victory, but this one feels kinda special. There's fun counter-play to it too, because yeah normally you want to focus down the real targets like the heroes and tanks (and in the above example, those mercenaries with the flamethrowers I remembered to get for once are no joke either), but if you take the time to throw a well aimed spell or two at the big ball of useless losers, I'm much less able to throw them down the summon hole.

As it stands, these guys are easily my favorite faction. Not my favorite to PLAY necessarily, I'm kinda cold on their mid-tier stuff, the thrall ball's kinda boring, and they need to summon dedicated obelisks for their guard towers/healing stations rather than having it built into their farms and such, but personality wise, they are just goofy goofy cartoon villains and while voice acting is an area where the game is still really unfinished, I'll take some high pitched voice going "choooooose meeeeeeeee!" over generic marine grunts any day.

 

[Purple]

And let's just pull the bandaid off with the last main faction, the Xol. With the caveat that the Xol are extremely not done yet. As previously mentioned, the Legion really hate the Xol for being horrible robots that turned against and genocided their creators, but... that didn't actually happen. Their creators were just like messing with black holes and such and had a big oopsie. The Xol are actually the sweet innocent unambiguous good guys of the setting, just being all collectivist and forming Devastator, the most powerful Decepticon.

Now's as good a time as any to mention that ZeroSpace for the mostpart has VERY simple tech trees for everyone. You've got your main base/hexite grabber, which also produces your flux harvesters and little map scouts if you're that sort. Then you can make farms, and maybe some similar bit of basic infrastructure to spread creep/be dedicated guard/healing/vision towers. Farms unlock your barracks. Your barracks unlocks your Thing That Upgrades Stuff From The Barracks and your Midgame Unit Building. Your midgame unit building unlocks your Thing That Updates THOSE units and your late game unit maker, which, you guessed it, unlocks a thing for upgrading THOSE units. There's some minor exceptions but that's basically how it works for everyone... except the Xol.

Here, you've got your farms, which spread Xol flavored creep and build absurdly fast (with a level-up perk to make it literally instant if you're real impatient), and then you've got... 3 buildings that each enable production of exactly one unit each. We've got little rolly laser balls, whcih die if you look at'em funny but swarm real good, guys with blade arms, who are tougher melee types, and casters, who do some casty thing. Then we've got a tower type building that does... nothing at first, but starts doing one of three different things if you load one of those 3 basic units in, then two tech buildings, one which just kinda goes "more damage more range more armor more shields more speed more MP, pick 3" and gives those to all your stuff (and I guess doubles the bonus when near it), the other lets you convert a unit to a variant, like making your laser balls become explodey balls instead. And once you've built one of those, you get the new ability to mash robots together (and maybe pay some resources) to get a new higher tech unit. And a late game level up lets you mash 3 together for your tier 3 units.

They hemmed and hawed about how to handle these forever and eventually decided everything just combines with itself. The melee things become way tougher and faster melee centaurs, the balls become hover-y caster orbs in raise shields and "engage slowing gravity field" flavor, and the casters turn into weirder casters. The most visually interesting is a beholder looking thing that can grab handfuls of the regular laser balls to hurl across the battlefield, which is pretty cool on principle.

They also have a hero who can eat any of the basic units, physically transforming and getting updated with their basic gimmick, you can set a rally point anywhere on your creep and units will just straight up spawn on it making the actual production buildings' location irrelevant, and I guess the unit mutator is also just an open vat of magma enemies get damaged and maybe consumed by.

Honestly, they feel really half-baked... which they are. The other three factions have been seeing a LOT of play over the past 3 years in various limited demos and a long long period of people who backed at higher tiers just being able to play whenever. The first playable (and only in certain modes) Xol build came out... Monday. As it stands, there seems to be way too much incentive to just spam out the basic units and swarm with them, not really having a good Flux dump, because merging them together is just kinda awkward and a dubious trade. I'm sure they'll feel better after some unreleased stuff comes out and people play with'em a while. Conceptually though they're super rad, and they look real real nice in motion with their transforming and rolling out and their funky bismuth looking buildings.

 

[Daikaiju]

The Xol are actually the sweet innocent unambiguous good guys of the setting, just being all collectivist and forming Devastator, the most powerful Decepticon.

 

[Falselogic]

I hear he might be inferior...

 

[RT-55J]

I am enjoying these write-ups.

 

[Purple]

I am enjoying these write-ups.

Guess I'll have to keep going with the mercenaries soon then. May be a day or two since I have a lot going on and... also I am just really really bad about remembering to actually use my mercenaries. Also I got mixed up earlier, there's 6 now, 7 planned for real launch (plus one that seems to have vanished from the list and may return some day), and it's heroes where the target is a dozen.

 

[Purple]

So yeah, as previously stated, when you start a game, in addition to picking a main faction from those four groups above, you ALSO pick a Mercenary sub-faction. I'm not going in-game and grabbing screenshots of these because they don't really have the same screen-filling presence. Again, you get one single mercenary producing building, it slowly builds up charges over time, you hire a little group all at once when you cash in a charge and all, and if I'm actually playing those are mostly gonna get lost in the huffle. But I'll double up in these posts, and throw in the actual official lore blurbs. Today, let's have a look at the two where look we're not being subtle about trying to give the campaign Mass Effect vibes.

Marran

I'm not going to pretend that Hel, the Marran hero, isn't just Garrus with horns. Also he's not a cop, so he's got that going on. Did I mention that all the Mercenary groups come with a hero, by the way? The general eventual goal is that when you pick your hero, you have a few choices based on your main faction, or the leader of whatever mercenary group (or you know, the power trio for the Legion, one of whom you can swap out for your merc hero).

Aside from your cool sniper pal here, you can get little sniper teams, who can lay down on the floor, limiting them to attacking in a cone, but doing better at it, and your other three units are hovertanks, hovertanks hovertanks. One heats up after fighting for a bit and does more area damage, one's shieldy, and one does big piercing shots. Their building is also a big ol' hovering Mothership, so you can take that with you to the frontlines and not have your sniper teams have to schlep on out to where you want to plant them, which is nice. If I recall it can also fight a bit if you really want to risk that.

Additional level-up choices they grant: More XP, more range on everything plus some faster top bar charging, and upgrading the mothership a lot while also letting it plunk out bigger snipers.

They play pretty nice with the Protectorate's squishy meat boys transitioning to tanks strategy, with range helping early on and splashy tank damage being nice later on, and I'm fairly certain you can load the snipers into the big crabs. Most of that is also true for the Legion come to think. The Grell are normally so melee-focused the extra range is real nice, and there's kind of enough variety to the Marran toolkit to make up for the Xol's early game being sort of inherently "pick one unit and spam it." Good general all-rounders really.

Valkaru

We also have off-brand Krogans! Also I kinda lied about each mercenary having a hero option. With the Valkaru you get a pair, Mondar and Torq. Just two bros hanging out, sharing joint custody of their big freaking hammer. Seriously, one of them is always holding a hammer forcing them into melee and you have a button to fling it over to the other, hitting people along the way. You can get skill-shot-y there if inclined, but mostly these guys are the pick when you just want big pricy beefy jerks on the field.

We've got big dinosaur boys with flamethrowers. Big dinosaur boys with shotguns. Big dinosaurs, mostly hold the boy and only trust your claws, Big dinosaur good-boys (they call them "hounds" but that is clearly a stegosaurus), and big turtle tanks that heal and have grappling hooks to yoink people.

Additional level-up choices they grant: Free "hound" with every purchase, everyone gets tankier, and all your Valkaru get angrier when friends die (something the heroes do out of the box by the way).

Personally, this is my go-to pick if I don't have a better idea. I am still really bad at both using my mercenaries in general, and properly spending resoruces, so big pricy brutish units are great to just kinda bust out when I do remember. Everybody eventually gets tanky stuff of their own, sure, but being able to toss'em out right away is also nice. And of course I particularly like pairing these with the Grell so I can throw that permanent evolution buff on expensive crowd control thugs (as I could have sworn you could see in my above screenshot, but no, I was trying these new guys there. Couple Valks in the Legion shot though). Nice for the Xol too because they can't just instantly crank out their big tough stuff and need to merge for it normally.

I swear, the rest of these aren't just Mass Effect races.

 

[Purple]

Today's pair of mercenaries, the ones I should really feel out more!

Free Corsairs

Look, you can't be teaming up with little mercenary factions and NOT have one of them be scrappy space pirates. Their leader Yearl can just freely step up and down cliffs, throw bombs that stick to units for a bit before exploding, or cloak up and hide mines. Pretty bread and butter. Feels like someone StarCraft 1 might have had.

Past that, we've got some other space pirates also sporting welding masks, being particularly good at taking down harvesters, a longer ranged variation, some Mad Maxish cars that can shoot on the move and shoot faster if you rush up for quick drive-bys, and a flamethrower tank which feels weirdly overly represented in this game overall. It's not a super strong factional identity honestly, but I guess there's some value in having one mercenary option that's just very vanilla you can just A-move with without thinking too hard about things.

Aside from a generally handy ability set on Yearl there, the real appeal here is the extra level-up options. Bonus Hexite from taking down buildings and harvesters, near double vision range for everything with a side of move speed, and an option to field a whole 3 of their buildings instead of just the one, and have your free corsairs pile back inside them to use like StarCraft bunkers. It comes online a bit late in the game, but if you want to go hard on your main faction's pricy late-game stuff, these guys can step in as your cheap spammable trash on the field.

Like I said, this isn't a pick you make for their units, it's all about Yearl and the level-ups. If you really want to play with a constant harassment strategy, running all over messing with your opponent's Flux gathering and taking down forward bases, these bonuses really make that work (I have a hard time spending all my hexite most of the time, but you get diminishing returns to the point of worthlessness if you just try to spam bases everywhere, so the looting there is a rare method to actually out-build). Personally, I find this to be a boring half-faction, a bit too similar to the more tactically interesting Marran, but again, sometimes boring is nice. This game has a LOT of moving parts and combat's real fast.

Cha'Kru Kingdom

This is the real wildcard faction. Crab worshiping Space Mesoamericans. I'm really looking forward to seeing how they work into the actual campaign when I quit procrastinating on it. They've got a whole earth vs. water elemental thing going on which early in development forced you to commit to one or the other, but these days mainly seems to be expressed by their hero Loi'Kru switching between two forms while running around, either passing out shields or healing people... although they still have two buildings (expect me to edit this post after getting more experience with their current version).

Past that, we've got a couple flavors of really festive colorful giant crabs, in the flavors of exploding ghost, tanky, and REALLY tanky plus ripping big gashes in the ground to block movement for a bit, and then we've got 3 flavors of buff shirtless headdress wearing crab priests/luchadores, in speedy, heal-y, and ground pound flavor.

Their extra level-up tend to be a bit selfish- Cha'Kru units that revive at their temples (I wanna say just once but that's not nothing), lifesteal and a bit of armor, and both a general major damage buff to these guys specifically, and a new top bar ability to do some crowd healing.

The Cha'Kru have gone through a lot of changes over the development of the game, and while visually and thematically they are just 100% the best, go team crab, I've never personally had a super good handle on their deal or the commitment to really figure it out. I should though, they're just rad, and a big source of that bit I said where this game isn't afraid to get all colorful at times.

Also I know at least one person has been reading this and getting ready to nervously ask, but one of the big design leads, Paulo "CatZ" Vizcarra (nice friendly guy by the way) is Peruvian, so yeah this is a case of "lemme squeeze in some personal cultural representation" and not some weird exoticism thing.

 

[Purple]

Let's round out out mercenaries (for now) with some eldrich space wizards!

The Arandi

Oh wow, I think that art is from back before the Kickstarter, that's gonna change I'm sure. Anyway, the Arandi have kind of an interesting hook, in that they're this super advanced ancient space wizard society from before anyone else who's currently around was on the scene, but they never had any sort of galaxy spanning space empire because... they just didn't wanna do that? Makes them kinda weird to have as a mercenary faction, it's kinda more "oh hey kids! What? Someone on the playground is messing with you? Sure we'll give them a talking to." And... yeah there's no getting around how their hero I'olin is 100% one of those Cool Sexy Space Girlfriends like the entirety of the Asari from Mass Effect or the Syrens from Ur Quan Masters. Hopefully this whole faction gets an art shift more towards their basic unit design. Because look at this little guy! Just kind of an egg with a big floating cape! Love it!

Anyway yeah, like I said, Space Wizards. All about folding time and space. We've got blackhole bombs and teleporting around on our hero, we've got floating capes with big gun wands that shoot you and then you go slow, we've got an egg in a cape that can mind control enemy units and when stuff dies near it they get replaced with hallucinatory versions so you can pretend your army is totally still alive. We've got this super adorable little Portal turret looking chibi mech with devil horns that fires slow piercing shots. We've got a little floaty robo-ball that can teleport friends to itself and throw out a big slow field. And much like the Marran our one "building" is actually a mothership that you can freely move around. It doesn't fight or anything but it will abduct units that happen to be under it now and then, you know, for research purposes.

Our expanded level-up options here include just having a couple free harvesters and a general flux gathering bonus, a boon to spellcasters where everyone gets more range and faster cooldowns, and because this is kind of the general pattern a big ol' upgrade to the mothership where it moves faster and does that abduction thing every 15 seconds instead of every 2 minutes. Also like every mercenary's level 6 upgrade option gives you a couple special elite honor guard type units I just keep forgetting to mention those.

The utility these big floaty capes bring to the field is pretty generally handy for anyone. If you're the sort of person who loves stuff like the Arbiter in StarCraft or going heavy on priests/mages in Warcraft, tada, here are your support casters. There are Some spellcaster types in the main factions (heroes in general, and remember Legion gets 3 of those, and some tier 3 tech stuff mainly) but it's fairly rare, so this is a pretty interesting flavor to mix into anyone's stew if you like that sort of slow/stun gameplay.

Endari

When you've already got a very 40k-coded faction and straight up space wizards, it'd just be weird NOT to have cosmic horror tainted eeeevil space wizards, so in retrospect it's kinda surprising that up until the official start of early access here, this faction did not exist as even a hinted thing. Their hero She Who Stalks, looks way better in her actual in-game model I swear, with giant claw hands each the size of her torso and crawling around all feral, going cloak mode, leaping onto people, and now and then you can have her transform into... I need to come back with a screenshot later. It's like a more tentacle-y were-crocodile, but like, the crocodile boss from Parasite Eve. She honestly looks real neat.

The rest of the Endari units are basically a big pile of demons with a general strike first strike hard theme going. We've got a big guy with swords for arms. We've got a floating 4 armed torso that does big bursty needle swarms, We've got that thing in the closet in House that does little strafing runs down a line, and we've got just big big big slimes that wander up and swallow things whole, or puke on them if they can't get close enough. Also their "building" is called The Deep One, and I don't know how I didn't notice this because I did they them once, but oh, that is just straight up Cthulu hanging out as a production structure. And when you play the Endari there's a whole day/night cycle thing, where at night Cthulu here can get up and fly around.

Level up bonuses include just unlocking a new Endari unit called Shadow Leeches which seems pretty straightforward, quicker cooldowns and higher damage, and making night longer darker and home to a more actually dangerous Cthulu-that-spits-out-demons.

I'm pretty glad these overviews have me sitting down here and reading all these in game tutorials, because I straight up did not notice that just for this one mini-faction we tossed in the whole WC3 night elf day/night mechanic. That's super rad. Anyway, in terms of what the Endari bring to the table as a compliment to your main faction, it feels like the answer is quick first strikes, and maybe having the blob eat something very annoying here and there. And there's some use to that. Most main factions kind of move into the late game with some big expensive stuff in the back and some cheap swarmy stuff out front. Being able to just kinda lob in some space demons when a fight first gets started to smash stuff in the back row or quickly drop a hero at the point they're still relevant is pretty handy. But also look sometimes you just want to bring in the edgelords.

Extra bonus Mercs from the past and future:

The Endari here kinda slid in and snagged a slot on the roster away from the Koru, the probably-evil plant-fae power behind the Grell. For a lot of early demos you could throw them in as a mercenary group, get some like poisonous mobile flowers and such, have the sort of viney naga gal who I believe is still currently the main Grell hero available no matter who your main faction is. I always thought it was super weird lore wise. Maybe they'll pop back up in the future, who knows?

And at one point kickstarter backers got a poll on what to have as mercenary faction #7 when the game officially launches, and the winner of that was the Sanctuary, so at some point in the next few months they're honor-bound to throw in some field medic robots. Still think people made a weird call with that because especially at the time I swear every faction had like 3 or 4 things that healed stuff, and we are more on the StarCraft side where fights go by QUICK than having 2 armies stand there slugging it out a while, but hey.

I guess now I have to actually play modes that aren't quick skirmish matches against the AI to really talk about those. I just wanted to hold off a bit for some patches because last I checked they really really pushed my computer to its limits and I wanted to see if I can like, get screenshots where textures are all loaded properly this time.

 

[Purple]

With all of the above, it's pretty clear that ZeroSpace here is a game by some ambitious weirdos, but we've only really covered one of the three ways they are putting way too damn much into this game. Everything to this point has been explaining the deal with your standard PvP (or comp stomp) sort of skirmish, which for a lot of people making RTS games is the main event they care about. There's also the campaign which has the whole "make it like Mass Effect" level of ambition going on, but then there's the real heart of the passion of design going into this, Galactic War mode.

Quick story time. Once upon a time, there was a company called Blizzard, who made some RTS games I'm quite fond of and also an MMO spinoff of those a lot of people are pretty fond of and some mouse based roguelikes (also The Lost Vikings, everyone forgets about that). They're pretty dead to me at this point, thanks to the actions of some truly monstrous executives and employees... but in some alternate reality were that wasn't the case, there's a good chance I'd be sitting here gushing about the secret coolest and last non-Diablo thing of note from them, a mode kinda tucked away inside StarCraft 2 called Co-Op. You'd be forgiven for assuming that's just an alternate way to set up a big ol' skirmish with people divided into teams or something, but no, this was its own crazy thing that really was essentially straight up StarCraft 3. Rather than picking one of the standard 3 factions, you and someone else you were teamed up with picked from a whopping 18 commanders, each of which was basically half a faction. For the simpler ones, this was literal. You're limited to a pool of like half the units from one of the main factions, plus some special abilities to make that work for you. Others were wild experimental things with entirely new unit designs only seen in this mode, like the infested terran faction with bunkers sprouting legs like a turtle and walking around and betentacled tanks grabbing zombies out of the horde to throw across the battlefield, or the one where instead of any unit production buildings you just build a bar from which you can hire a small selection of special hero units. There was also a whole level up system where you go from SUPER restricted to having a clear neat identity for each.

Then you and your partner would share half a reasonable ammount of resource production and randomly play one of 15 missions that are like even wackier gimmickier versions of the sort of things the more gimmicky maps in the main campaign brought to the table, and then just for some real absurd amounts of replayability, there was this wacky difficulty system where aside from just making the AI harder it'd start stacking up randomly selected "mutators" doing stuff like making everything explode on death or meteors raining down or whatever else on top of things.

It was a hell of a lot cooler than anything else StarCraft 2 had going on and could probably have printed money for several years selling new commanders as DLC or whatever, but higher up people had zero interest in supporting it, which is why it was practically a secret feature, and if I recall, called the developers for it away from SC2 entirely to put those wacky map and character making skills to work on Heroes of the Storm, back when they were supporting that. Anyway the reason I'm explaining all this is the team behind StarCraft 2 Co-Op is, specifically, a significant subset of the ZeroSpace team, and a big part of what motivated them to make the game in the first place is wanting to recreate that mode as their own independent thing. So that, at its core, is what Galactic War mode is. A thing you can dive into whenever you have like 15, 20 minutes, with a friend/stranger/surprisingly decent AI partner, and do some wacky gimmicky missions with specific hero-lead mini-factions.

The heroes aren't much worth mentioning just yet, very much being just 3 faction's main hero with some of their faction's kits missing, forcing you into certain strategic directions you might not otherwise go with, but there's a good 8 or 10 maps in place already with nice varied goals like defending a big city while trying to strike out at things, escorting a giant robot across a map to eventually have a big Pacific Rim type fight with the Legion's emperor, handling an evacuation of big plants while a giant death laser looms across the map, fun stuff.

And because we still aren't done, we ALSO have this big Stellaris looking map, where you commit to one of 3 teams for a season of some number of weeks or months I don't recall, and every time you win, based on your difficulty selection, you get X% more control of whatever planet you're in orbit around, with those giving extra little perks to the controlling team, and/or personal boons if you win enough missions on a given one. A bit like the later Dawn of War 1 expansions' deal.

At the moment, this is very much the star attraction of things, and yeah, it's pretty fun to mess with already. Should be even moreso when there's a wider commander selecton.

There's also a big ol' wave survival mode, with mutators, if that's your thing. Pretty sure that explains itself though. So that's probably all the rambling I have before playing through the currently existent first third of the big ol' 30 mission long campaign.

 

[Purple]

OK, so. There are a number of reasons I've been putting off the campaign mode in this until now. Legitimately, I haven't had anything at all close to the time for it, but also the last time I had a look during a demo it was reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeally rough. Barely functioned, full of bugs, made the game look real real bad, and you couldn't save it. Also, I can just BARELY run this game and have to crank the graphics way down, so in-engine cutscenes look real real bad. Especially everyone's hair. ESPECIALLY back then when the artists were still really figuring hair out. But they've honestly polished the hell out of it since, and I'm actually really shocked by just how good some of the writing and almost all of the voice acting is. Like, better than most AAA stuff, and this is an indie game with a kickstarter by RTS grognards. Go figure!

Presently, we only have the first third of the campaign, but they're really not messing around with it. The plan is for 30+ missions for this campaign JUST focused on the protectorate, like the StarCraft 2 model, with expansions focused on the others down the road. But as has been mentioned, they also really want to make it like Mass Effect, so the first third we have here is, on its own, about what I expected from the entire thing once its done. Very meaty! Anyway keep in mind all these screenshots look like muddy garbage only because I'm playing on absolute potato settings, other people have streamed it if you want like... textures and eyebrows and such. Also I... just accidentally closed the file where I had all the official mission names, whoops. Look this took all night and I'm tired.

Missions 1 and 2 (which really feel like they should just be one chunkier mission) are very tutorial-y. Here's how to select guys and make them move around and all that, but they're also pretty good for setting the scene. We kinda start off in media res, with some Protectorate pancake ships invading the planet Fern Gully because the cool magic plants basically make the spice from Dune and humanity's pretty addicted to the whole warp drive thing. I like that there is no effort at all made to pretend that humans are not straight up the villains in all this, broadly. The actual playable characters are all pretty likeable and nice, but the people in charge of things are rapaciously greedy, corrupt, nepotistic, cultist-compromised, and really into ancient Rome in a low-key fashy sorta way. Anyway they also forgot that the happy hippy plants have the best artillery units in the game, so the whole invasion fleet gets shot down, very few survivors, and you do a bit of guerillaing around the jungle grouping back up before a big A-move push on some plants and bugs.

The first big pleasant surprise is if you aren't in potato mode the game actually looks real good, nice fancy cutscenes and expressive facial animations and all that. And the next big pleasant surprise is a lot of these characters are really charming. Especially the protagonist's old buddy here Kris Dias. I genuinely think he's great. Mechanically, he is the super huge and bulky heavily armored Heavy Guy With A Big Gun, but personality wise he is as far from that stereotype as you can get. In addition to having a bunch of stickers on his armor like it's a nerdy teenage girl's laptop, he's just this real light-hearted goofy guy. With a family somehow. You just don't get characters like this in games like this. Anyway you meet up with him, kill a hell of a lot of space bugs, and find a giant pink glowing gooey fetus-y thing before reinforcements come to set up a proper base and get you out of there.

Mission 3, in true StarCraft tradition, is one of them hold out while a colony evacuates missions, but it's actually a pretty neat one.

Instead of the usual deal where here's your little walled off base in the corner, you're kinda right in the middle of things. There's a lot of choke points from cramped cliffs, a couple optional side objectives, and the reason you have to play defensive is that again, the Grell have a REALLY good artillery unit and they aren't afraid to give'em a great high ground setup for them. The real thing that makes it fun though is remembering that you're playing as the Jetpack Marines, you don't need to get workers somewhere to build, and your farms double as your guard towers. So you can get some real clever high ground defenses of your own. Also you aren't here to rescue your own people, you just got a distress call from some space cowboys who kinda hate your faction (for a hell of a lot of valid reasons), and there's kind of a weird choice at the end where there's only enough transports to get the civilians out or the space cowboys. The result effects how a couple factions treat you at the start here, and it's a good example of this game liking to give you dialog choices without making it clear what, if any gameplay effect they'll have. Also when you get a bunch of topics to ask someone about, you're picking one, we're not exhausting dialog trees. So you're kinda just forced to commit to an attitude and ride it out.

Mission 4 is a very plot-y affair where your ship is boarded by Proud Warrior Race Guys, and I should really get into your ship.

Between missions, you get to hang out on the bridge of your personal big awful slab of a ship, starting with being given command of it as a reward for the whole conquest of Fern Gully bit (between missions 1 and 2 you hang out in one of those big crab transports). Here things really do feel very western RPG, giving you a chance to have meaty conversations with all your friends. So far that's Kris, who again, rules, Mera, kind of a snooty aristocrat with JUST THE WORST OUTFIT who likes to dash around with a sword and has a chip on her shoulder about how she totally didn't just get a high ranking position because her parents own the giant mech factory, and Hel, the Marran ambassador/comms guy who I also like a lot.

First off, hey, the cat mouth is neat, his voice is really distinct, and he's got this whole kinda philosophical long view thing going on, so if you didn't play around with the marrans at all prior to the campaign, it probably would be an actual surprise when he shows up halfway through this mission with a big ol' sniper rifle all "well when I said I wasn't a warrior I didn't mean I don't know how to protect myself." Anyway, mission's a big "have you mastered your special abilities?" bit wandering through tight spaces and jumping to catwalks and sniping explosive barrels and such, ending with a pretty decent boss fight against one of the hammer brothers as he jumps all over the place keeping the high ground. This is followed immediately by a fight with his brother which is exceptionally stacked against you in a you're supposed to lose way, so we can have the big tragic self-sacrificing moment of Kris distracting him as he closes in on you and getting his head flattened by a big ol' hammer for his troubles. RIP best character in the game, but he's pretty clearly set up for it.

There's a bit of an interlude after that mission, both for a bit of death processing/weird vision having cutscenes and for that daughter Kris was talking about before being old enough after a bit of a timeskip to join up (I mean, it's a 6 month time skip, but yeah, she finished military school). After this things open way up, with a big map screen with missions all over to do in whatever order, and in addition to being pals to talk to, you can set one character as a hero to come on missions, and another to give a personalized bonus to all your stuff by doing behind the scenes logistics. You can also dump experience into stats for all the named characters, spend money you got from missions on permanent upgrades for units and turrets, check your standing with the various factions you've met (in campaign mode, rather than pick a mercenary group, units from EVERYONE you've gotten friendly with are available... but each individual merc unit slowly unlocks as you build up a relationship meter with their leader). Also, you can go into the big ol' lore dump that is checking your dozens of e-mails and reading codex entries about stuff. There is way way more deeplore than I expected in here, and also some general super nerdy stuff.

(The space cats also don't like spicy food.)

Anyway over the course of these intro missions, talking to the right people also gets the main plot rolling. The reason the Hammer Bros. attack you is because your bosses have you secretly transporting that weird giant magic space fetus around. It's a baby leviathan, that this scientist lady (who's also in the cult of weirdos who hear singing voices in space) really wants to study because who doesn't like space whales and also they're tied to getting into the whole transdimensional space the game's named after. Also they just look cool.

Anyway the Valkaru are all like 900 year old space trolls who grew up on Space Hulks and they're a little fuzzy on what happened to their once mighty space empire that they're now a bunch of barbaric space viking types who lost the knowledge of how all this stuff works, but they're pretty damn sure people shouldn't be messing with evil 40k stuff. And that's why they had to beat you with hammers. Presumably you come to an understanding with them on this later but for now, yeah screw those guys.

Instead, you get missions to potentially make friends with a whole bunch of other guys. You've got the spiritual space luchadores who are WAY into leviathans (also like... being Roman legion themed space goons "protecting" people and carrying around a baby leviathan really sets off my "oh you guys are Farscape fans" alarm), and they don't like that you kinda kidnapped one, but like, yeah gotta get them their special space food and take care of'em, sure. You've got the space cowboys who you had an awkward first meeting with, and have a way more awkward second meeting with because they're kind of in the middle of violently overthrowing the local government and you really should be against that, but again you're a decent character working for obvious villains so, sure. You've got a couple rival robot makers with a whole thing going on. You've got the funky blue space elves who are normally a lot better at not getting possessed by space demons and turning into tentacle monsters but it's really been going around lately so purging the heretics would be helpful pleasekaythanks, and oh yeah, you've also got the space cultists, who the Valkaru are really mad at because one of them is a mad scientist kidnapping a baby space whale to experiment on and try to open a portal to hell or whatever.

So yeah, big pile of missions you can do in any order here. Most of the actual missions are pretty solidly designed and varied, you get new units, you make new friends, you get to make some plot effecting decisions, and most of the bookending stuff on your ship after each are... pending for a future update. Good solid bones though. Anyway, once you've made friends with various folks, it's time to address how uh... yeah you kinda HAVE been working for a crazy cultist mad scientist who wants to experiment on a baby space whale to open a portal to hell, and maybe you should, you know... not be doing that. Particularly after she skips off with it to do the reality tearing thing, and this jerk Valkaru who killed the best character is super on the war path chasing her and also just kinda killing everyone. So after a big flashy major plotpoint cutscene whose audio isn't done yet, it's off to this here big ol' Space Station for one of those big team up missions.

It's pretty rough if you don't take it nice and slow. Very much the sort of thing you usually get as a campaign capstone in Blizzard RTS games. You have a very tiny foothold on the outer ring of this station, and you've got 4 NPC pals who will totally set up their own bases and start pushing towards the super fortified bits if you clear out spaces for them to land. And it's kinda neat by the end having your sniper cats and space wizards and cowboys and Protectorate-stuff-you-can't-realistically-afford all pushing up at the same goal with you bouncing around doing whatever. But also this is the end of act 1 of a videogame so yeah, big terrible space hole and the villains ran through it before you get there.

Pretty solid stuff.

Also like I said there is a huge lore dump section stuck in here and... I'm tired so here's the pages with actual backgrounds for the mercenary factions thus far introduced in here. I'm too tired for extra commentary.

But yeah, good stuff.

Oh and one last thing before I let this thread gather dust for the next month or two before a big update, here's a video from the lead dev rambling about pathfinding that I'm mostly putting in here because I want to show what this game looks like when not on a potato.

 

[Purple]

Taking some time to really get familiar with it, holy crap I undersold just how involved Galactic War mode is. Let me break all this down, if only just so I can check my own notes later.

So first, you pick a Galactic War team. Not gonna call these factions for clarity's sake. At the moment at least there is no actual lore. You've just got Green Team (Eden Accord), Blue Team (Keeper Council), or Red Team (Obsidian Order). Go off vibes or your favorite color or your friends or whatever big streamer is cheerleading I guess (or who's currently in the lead when you pick I guess). Then there's a tutorial... unless you're me because I'm just some weird edge case who has provided the devs a lot of feedback on very hard to replicate tutorial bugs.

You have your own personal ugly pancake ship on the map somewhere now. You can jump around from planet to planet spending fuel that slowly regenerates/more quickly regenerates if you stick around on that planet and play. Doesn't seem to be super restricting beyond keeping you from just constantly flitting around all willy-nilly. Other mechanics also strongly encourage you to park on a planet for a while.

Next, before you jump in, you've got (for now) 3 heroes to choose from. You can swap around between them between missions at will. At present (this is one of those real subject to change because hey early access things) here's how they break down:

Aster- The main character from campaign mode. I have a really hard time thinking of how playing as him is actually at all different from playing normal vs. mode protectorate. He's definitely locked into certain level-up choice bonuses (there are no experience towers in Galactic War, everyone has fixed stuff they start with) and I think is restricted from making a few units... but all the stuff I personally go with happens to be what he has.

Galavax- The primary hero of the Legion trio, with the most restricted kit of all of these starting options, slimmed down to the sketch of the faction when it was first made playable. You get a barracks, and the 4 things that normally makes. You get terror tanks and dreadnoughts. You get spamming monoliths with your hotbar, and you get a modified version of the Emperor Projection summon that you can just set up anywhere. So in practice, you have your cheapo absolute garbage cannon fodder, you have your real late-game powerhouses (including the one where you can throw all that cannon fodder away in exchange for a Large Man), and you've got tower spam. It's honestly kinda fun just building up this garbage bio ball while saving up for the expensive stuff, realizing you're too supply capped to deploy the good stuff, and then remembering oh right, you can just have everyone jump into the sacrifice pile.

Vynthra- The main Grell hero. Much like Aster, I know I'm missing stuff from this kit, but it's all the stuff I never pick. Unlike Aster though, she's actually kinda hard mode, because in a normal game, what I do with Grell is push out to the middle, turtle up, double-evolve all my priciest units, and then push out (again, it's a very protoss feeling faction, but with zerg creep). But most of these co-op missions expect you to be rushing way out across the map in a hurry to defend stuff, and while she does get some great top bar stuff for establishing a forward position, and it even spawns some builders out there, it's... a tricky mindset to get into to really make that work.

As you win (or lose come to think) matches with one of these heroes, they level up, pretty quickly, going from extra limited early on to their full kit by level 11, so when first breaking one in, expect even less units and hot bar stuff.

The matches are high concept co-op PvE things. You have less resources, but you have an ally. Either another human or an AI that's mostly pretty good at actually being helpful most of the time. You pick a difficulty (more risk=more rewards), you pick from one of 10 missions (or put it on random for again, more rewards), and play one of these pretty ambitiously weird scenarios. Maybe you're robbing trains, maybe you're defending stuff from things, maybe you're rushing down targets. Regardless, there's some highly randomized bonus objectives that show up in the middle as curve balls. Maybe there's a giant monster you can kill for bonuses, or a research lab to secure, or a misunderstood robot probe to defend. These have both immediate benefits if you can find the time, and again, provide more experience and whatnot. Whole lot of replay value with all this really. Especially when the enemies you fight aren't actually fixed necessarily.

But now let's talk about the planets.

Every planet has a big pie chart for how much control every faction has over it. Win, your team's control goes up. Lose, eh you just wasted some time, no penalty or anything. Also, every planet has some cool bonus everyone on your team gets if you control it. Maybe you start with bonus resources, or some kinda unit does more damage, things of this nature. These are kinda global. If my team controls North Haverbrook, I get that monorail no matter where in the galaxy I'm fighting. Nice.

But wait, there's more! Every planet also has a Mastery Bonus! If I grind out a bunch of wins on that planet, 1800 XP worth specifically, I get a personal bonus based on what planet that is. This again, applies everywhere, and it doesn't matter who controls it. So Planet McPlanetface's Mastery bonus let's say is heroes get a +3% autoattack. I grind that out, I just globally have that now. Doesn't matter if I control the planet, I just learned that from it's natives. If I grind out another 1800 XP, this jumps up to +9%. Do it again, +18%. Do it again, +30%, and that's the cap. This is rad, but also I spent like a full day grinding on this planet and ignoring the ones on the frontier so we're probably losing those control bonuses. Still pretty good though.

But there's even more! There's a chance after every win that I find a cool equipable item. There's a whole inventory screen. You can experiment with weird idiosyncratic builds.

Also, some planets have maybe game breakingly difficult mutators because they're Special. Currently, we're between seasons, but before the big reset, there's a wacky event, having to take the central planets back from ridiculously jacked up pirates, if you're the super high skil ceiling try-hard type.

And finally, there's a still in the works system to spend some kinda resource to boost various stats of a planet.

This is all A FRELLING LOT, but ultimately, you just play the fun wacky maps and level up like it's some kinda RPG where you can eventually get stupid strong.

This whole game is designed by maximalist weirdos and I just kinda love that.

 

[Purple]

Since people like lists and this game is still pretty actively in my brain, why NOT ramble about the Galactic War missions? Roughly in increasing order of how much they spike my anxiety...

Under Fire

A really nice low-stress experience, at least after you've seen it once. You start out on that nice brightly lit platform on the left, and you can't throw a rock without hitting natural expansion spots for both Hexite and Flux, and at least at lower difficulties, you can probably clear everything off both with just your starting hero while you get your first barracks up.

Past that, your primary objective is to secure and defend 5 towers of some historical/spiritual importance (you can barely make them out in the image, it's a semi-circle of 5 brown dots surrounding the starting position). Specifically, you have to defend them from Legion dreadnoughts (like terror tanks but they fly, alternatively, like star destroyers, I think I mentioned them). On the one hand, air units are rare enough in ZeroSpace that some army compositions you might be comfortable with (or forced into because I think at level 1 Vynthra has no real answer besides upgrading grass-spreaders into guard towers), but the attacks are announced a WHILE in advance, with the dreadnaughts tracked from where they spawn in on the right edge of the map, with a big lit up path to which tower they're going for, so you should always have time to get there first and set up defenses. Even when it eventually builds to assaulting all 5 at once, all the paths kinda cut right across the middle of the map, so you aren't even running all over.

The other thing that makes this one nice and low stress is there's some pretty generous breaks between bombing runs. Pretty sure any bonus objective notifications are timed to be pointed out right at the start of these breathers, so there shouldn't be much of anything else splitting your focus when someone points out there's a cool tree/radar dish/weird robot/whatever hiding in some corner. Just go get it, come back, still have a bit to build extra towers along a line.

Critical Delivery

Another that's ultimately pretty easy once you have a hang of it. Like that last one, you can't leave your base without tripping over expansion spots, letting you get your economy up to the paltry maximum for this mode of the game before the mission really starts. Past that, seeing the whole map like this without any fog makes it a lot easier to feel out the pacing.

Someone is really proud of this cool giant robot they made, despite the fact that it kinda sucks. It starts right in your bases (where I once accidentally boxed it in with starting buildings, so, that's a trick you can use to stall if you're not confident), and eventually, after doing some stretches and general procrastination, follows this winding road to four buildings that is has to... I dunno, stop and pee on or something? It takes a while to do, and you get attack waves coming from all angles while it's doing so. Eventually, the road ends at the gates of this big fortress, and out pops an Emperor Projection so they can have a big climactic kaiju battle, which is just cute. Also a fun time to bust out your own big ultimate summon and make it a tag team affair.

Defending a moving target is trickier than just camping out at the feet of some towers, but also, there's only the one. The trick to make this a particularly low stress experience is to keep out ahead of your big robot friend for the most part and set up some static defense (maybe even unit production) by the four buildings it has to... do things to. Not even because you need the extra protection, but like every map, you're probably going to get bonus objectives popping up in really inconvenient corners, and it's nice to know you can take time away from babysitting to burst those down without leaving the big robot totally defenseless or splitting your force or anything like that.

Industrial Warfare

Honestly the most stressful part of this one is just seeing the preview load in and getting flashbacks to the end of Ecco the Dolphin. It's another defense mission for the most part. You start near an allied power core, and basically the whole map is ringed with lame little robot factories pointed right at it. You need to keep the cores safe, and you need to go smash all the titular fabricators so they quit spitting robots at it. And some actual units from real factions.

I suppose if you really drag your feet, you can get overwhelmed as more and more fabricators come online, and the attacks are more of a slow steady constant thing than waves at fixed times, without the massive breathers. Also the expansions aren't literally between you and the rest of the map, they're up to the north, so you actually have to go out of your way to grab them. All that said, this is still definitely in the easy set.

 

[Purple]

Now here's the mildly spicy maps...

Time to Kill

One of the two missing form the outdated wiki I was stealing images from! There's a whole story arc to this one. You start out in the southwest corner, getting peppered with attacks right away, and having to work a little for your expansions to the east. Past that, there's a couple points of interest where some jerks who stole something from some jerks that you like more (it's valkaru and they thank you at the end by saying they'll try to remember not to raid you later), and if you don't clear out their bases fast enough, they'll skip town. "Fast enough" is like... 8 minutes for each stop, which ultimately as this game with its really abbreviated base-building goes is a pretty comfortable amount of time so long as you don't just completely space out and ignore the objectives.

So you build up, you smash a base, you regroup some, you smash a base, you gather all your forces, you assault a final base.. and from there, you're not actually done, but you're pretty close. Smashing the base in the northeast loads the thing you're stealing back into one of those big awkward protectorate crab mecha and you have to keep it safe as it slowly waddles back along this winding path. And those bronze circles all over the map are landing pads where ambush parties will pop in to try and kill it. I'll have to try this on much harder difficulties to see if they find a way to spice that up. On normal it's a pretty breezy meander on home. Especially if you littered the middle of the map with infrastructure.

Iron Shield

This would be a pretty nice straightforward simple mission if not for where you start. There's a big ol' city in the center of the map, skyscrapers and such. Your main goal is to defend it, too many buildings get toppled and you lose. It's a pretty defensible place, with chokepoints on the three sides that matter with some free defenses. Just beef each of those up a little and push out to the bases you have to take out to win.

The first complication is you don't start out IN the city. You start out off in the northwest corner, and between you and the city is one of the four things you actually have to destroy. These big warp gate things that barf out various nasty units. Dealing with the first one isn't terribly difficult if you get right on it, but it does require some focus. The problem is expanding. First, you really need to take that gate down first. Then the Flux is kinda spread around the map edges, pain to get, and the Hexite is sitting in the middle of the city. Nothing even guarding it, which is really disorienting. Depending who you're playing though, spreading over to the middle of the map real early while still one-basing can be tricky though, and it's not immediately obvious how the defense is going to go at first.

The other slightly tricky bit is that those gates gear up to puke giant piles of units on you. Much like that last mission, there's a big onscreen timer and a flashing arrow at the next one to deal with, but they're pretty solidly defended, and you've got these other attack waves coming in. It's not a HARD mission, but we're definitely past the easy stuff.

Pirating Power

I know what you're thinking around now. "Hey are you just going up purely in terms of how hard it is to immediately secure expansions?" And no! I'm only MOSTLY doing that! This mission is probably the worst of the lot on that front, and look I'm putting it right in the middle! Some grizzled old space captain decided to mash together the mission from StarCraft 2 where you have to take out the trains full of resources and the one where you're collecting scrap in a race against some jerk to bribe some mercenaries for the final push. Take out enemy buildings around the map, and you get some bonus Hexite. Take down trains as they cross from east to west, and get frankly more Flux than you'll know what to do with. Past those though, you're stuck with just your starting base, and ow, that's painful.

The strategy here is pretty obvious of course. Two of the three tracks meet up in the middle so the trains can kiss, so setting up towers and such right there practically handles the whole mission for you. In practice though, It's really quite tricky, because you just don't really have any Hexite. Usually, the challenge is finding a way to spend all this extra Hexite you have because Flux is more of a hassle, but here you need to be careful not to waste any cash as you build up a solid standing defense, which means you need to get on raiding those scattered buildings real quick. Once you get a feel for it, it's a pretty fun one, but it really takes its own unique approach.

Walkers of War

I'm not actually sure I've gotten a win on this one yet, but that's mostly because I'm playing on random and I was leveling up the hero least suited to it the times it's come up. It's a defense mission, but it's a very Star Wars defense mission. Some Marran pals have this big fancy relay where you start on that central elevated bit, and would very much like for it not to be destroyed. But a bunch of jerks in the four corners of the map got their hands on a bunch of real big stompy robots humans brought along when those two first met and had a big fight. They'll come stomping up the big obvious paths with escorts in turn, and need to be intercepted before they reach the target.

Pretty standard, that, and you can cause landslides to mess up their pathing and slow them down as a nice little bonus. Here's the problem though. These robots all have forcefields making them invincible, and the forcefields are being generated by buildings in those four (five?) corner bases. So instead of just a straightforward defense, you need to sneak elite strike teams in there, take out the generators, and get home to catch the big robots that are still pretty damn chunky once they're vulnerable.

Conceptually, I really like this one. It's a cool mission. But the timing is tight, the execution is non-trivial because you don't want to go up the same paths the robots are coming down, and expanding is pretty tricky. I'm listing it as the last mid-tier difficulty mission, but there's a case to make for swapping this for one of these next ones.

 

[Purple]

Planetdeath

There's a bit of a misdirect with this one. It's presented like it's going to be a holdout situation, defending a big Koru plant a bit northeast of center while it gets ready to uh... jump real high and get off the planet or something. But you can't actually do that, because the primary threat to it is a big orbital death laser sweeping towards it from the northwest corner, and you can't kill or impede a death laser, it's just going to get there and kill your big plant pal at a fixed time.

The actual mission is to clear out bases scattered around, freeing up some somethingorothers which then go handle the actual relocation, cutting, of course, across the laser's path. This again is pretty clearly drawing on one of the wackier gimmick maps in StarCraft 2, but... yeah, same developers, spiritual successor, that's going to happen.

The confusion's mostly just a problem the first time you play it. What bumps this up to the hard tier is that you don't start anywhere near any of this. You start down in the southwest corner, practically as far from everything important as you can get. Depending who you're playing and what you're bringing in from the RPG grind aspect of Galactic War, getting stuff across the map in a hurry can be a real problem. Funnily enough, this is a particularly difficult mission for the Grell, who thematically kind of own it. I guess that's why the big tree calls in for outside help really. Aside from needing to spread grass everywhere, the Grell just sort of inherently need some time to get their act together and get out on the map. All their units really synergize nicely, so you want a variety, and the one Grell hero currently in this mode is all-in on the whole Infusion thing, so you ideally want to build some meter early on and embiggen all your stuff to get the most value out of it. Still doable as her, but you need some advance strategy, and as anyone, you're doing hit and run tactics, which is never easy.

The Frozen Watch

This is the closest any of these come to being just an absolute pure turtle up in your base mission as you get from these. There's a day/night cycle to it. By day, you can go do whatever you want. By night, we're just going to push the limits of how many units the game can support at once with absolute floods of low tier Grell, and each night ends with the big ol' cannon in your base taking out a major stucture on the map for you. All you HAVE to do is hold out for four day/night cycles.

So what's the problem? Well, it's two-fold. First, it's not JUST the grell waves you're dealing with, there's some pretty beefy stuff form other factions also coming at you, not tied to those nightly death waves. The real big problem though is your own greed. I don't think I've seen this one and not had it just immediately spawn in like 5 bonus objectives all over the map. I want those, and I think honestly the nightly death waves are tuned around the assumption you'll get at least a few and the sizable bonuses they give you. So instead of actually just turtling up, out onto the map I go taking on big defended bases and when I'm catching my breath from that, oh right, the absurd swarms of bugs!

It also doesn't help that everyone behind this game has a huge chip on their shoulder about how boring pure defense missions are and have been homebrewing hard mode overhauls for them as a hobby for years now.

Metal March

Again, don't have the full map view here, sorry. But this is it. The hardest mission in Galactic Warfare. And it's... kind of a MOBA? We've got those robot fabricators again, a whole lot for the enemy, plus some allied with you. The map's mainly three big lanes, and as you progress down each, your trash spammers spam trash faster and harder that you can ride in for victory.

So, what's the catch? The catch is it's basically a MOBA where you're reconnecting after some ungodly lag hell RIGHT as the enemy has finished totally clearing the middle lane and is literally like 5 seconds from starting the final attack on your base. You have to start defending some allied infrastructure here before you've even had time to build a single building. And from a pretty beefy, literally endless attack, at that.

I had the particular misfortune of just kinda moving towards the center of the map when I first installed the game, getting distracted by other things, and coming back in the middle of this little between seasons pirate event, where all the planets in the middle of the map have been taken over and need to be reclaimed, with nasty nasty mutators on them. So one of my first real efforts to try this mode in the current build was this mission, but with all the nonstop robot waves having extra defense buffs and I think spawning smaller enemies on death. Possibly doable with a real competent partner, mastery of your hero, this whole inventory system, and some permanent upgrades from grinding other planets, but vanilla? No, not happening.

Even with normal tuning though, yeah, it is a STRESSFUL start throwing up enough impromptu defenses to buy some time and head down the side lanes to unlock some proper backup to push back. Funnily enough, unlike the last three missions I've mentioned, I HAVE cleared this one, and with my weakest hero. It is, if nothing else, very straightforward. Those others just keep sucker punching me. But wow did it get real hairy in there. It's also uniquely satisfying to do as Vynthra, because by the end in addition to the normal canon fodder ally robots you've got these big walking laser towers like something out of the future scenes in Terminator, and they ARE valid double-infusion targets.

 

[RT-55J]

just gotta say again that I'm enjoying these dispatches from deep space

 

[Purple]

Oh, good to hear. Was worrying that I was just kinda info-dumping into the void.

... that said I'm pretty well out of info to dump, for now. I still haven't actually touched survival mode, or played anything with another human being involved (would be happy to show anyone the ropes in Galactic War at this point). Otherwise, the next big patch is like, a month off I think?

But yeah, it's still a very much unfinished game (I don't know that I've shown how much of the UI is just white text on black in inconsistent fonts... which I honestly KINDA like the look of, but figure it's placeholders), but what's here is REALLY good, and the bits that have gotten a decent amount of polish are real slick and fancy. I mean if you haven't seen this game in motion, hey here's the StarCraft-without-losing-a-unit guy, whose computer isn't a potato, running through the more finished bits of the campaign:

But yeah, it's all surprisingly well-balanced for how much random stuff there is to mix and match. Pretty excited for how the campaign shapes up when the hanging out with your space pals on the ship between missions gets fleshed out, and it is downright shocking how much love they're already showing for people who want interesting single (or double) player content instead of just an E-Sport with the whole Galactic War bit. Now that it's really started to click for me, that's been really fun to grind a few quick matches out in before bed.

And I'm also really looking forward to playing the Xol once they've had some more time in the oven, especially now that I've seen how the Comically Large Wheel I passed on when trying them out at first can just roll over things, bounce, and Trojan horse the little laser balls into bases, scattering them all over when they explode.

You know what I still hate though? Mera's character design.

Ma'am, you are a stuffy pompous British try-hard with a laser sword, in an organization of chonky space marines, with other women who manage to dress relatively sensibly. Why the hell does your armor have cut-outs for boob socks to poke through?

I guess there's hope though. They haven't been shy about completely throwing out art that wasn't working, and I DID successfully bully them into fixing Aster's original terrible nazi-looking haircut.

 

[Purple]

The 4th hero from Galactic War mode is absolutely bonkers not in game yet, and I might for some reason have a personal early preview.

There's been another patch or two recently that I haven't had time to check out. At one point there was a hilarious bug in Galactic War mode where you could build an infinite number of mercenary buildings instead of the usual hard cap of one, which is particularly fun since half of those are mobile fortresses that can attack, and one is even a troop transport, but that got hotfixed pretty quick. There's a few other tweaks, mainly to that mode, and the Xol are slowly creeping towards something you can play in every mode. Presently AI buddies can access them in Galactic War but players can't.

But also my surprise tester status here gave me some real hands-on Xol experience I hadn't really had previously, and there's some weird quirks to the faction I hadn't realized before.

First, we've got their support buildings which spread out a square of "power field" in a very creep-like fashion. Aside from needing it to build stuff, this has the pretty gnarly perk of wiring all your production buildings up to your supply buildings, which then act as alternate spawn points for everything you produce. Just set your rally points near a power core, and when you pop units out, they appear right there. That means you can just shove all your production stuff off in a corner in a big ol' clump, and if you're good at spreading out, you can reinforce instantaneously, anywhere. Pretty cool.

Next, their production structures are weird. Part of that is, again, how they have 3 of them, for their three basic tier 1 units, with everything beyond those requiring you to merge units together. But also, those unit producers work a bit like mercenary buildings. They build up charges over time, and when you queue units up, they spend those charges and just pop out instantly (possibly halfway across the map). Convenient to go from zero to your supply cap in an instant, but there's a pretty low cap on those charges, and you can't queue stuff up past where those charges come in. So next to other factions where you can just tab over now, top off your production queues and just idly re-select all units now and then as they slowly fill in the back ranks, here you get everything available RIGHT NOW but then have a wait before you can put any orders in. Which is only really a problem because...

Holy crap are Xol squishy in the early game! Their basic bread and butter 0 flux cost unit, the roller, is a serious glass canon. Pretty high damage and fast movement for how cheap they are, but they need to get right in the face of what they're attacking, so a lot of them are going to die before they're in range. Painful early on. For a bit of flux, you can alternatively get a longer ranged unit that feels overpriced or a melee unit that's barely tougher. Now, you can combine those for a solid healer and a really good tank, respectively, but they're vulnerable out on the field while you do that and sucking up so much flux. And you probably went and rallied them to the front lines, too.

Plus all the other weird stuff I mentioned. But yeah, if you want to get out there early, you need some early mercs.

 

[Purple]

Oh here's that big ol' update I was waiting on so I'd have more to talk about. Let's just hhave a look at these here patch notes real quick...

Holy crap. That's not even the whole thing, that's JUST the notes for Galactic War. Which... particularly got some attention here. There was also apparently a bit of a polish pass on campaign mode, fixing some of those missing cutscenes and such, but I still want more to see before the next time I run through the whole thing from the top. Either gimme more missions or character customization or fix Mera's awful design. All of these are in the works though, and hey, I even got some eyes emojis from the artist responsible for that last bit on my big goofy post with suggestions. But again, we're here for the new Galactic War stuff.

First, of course, we have two new maps.

Heart of Conflict

Conceptually, this is VERY similar to Under Fire, which I'm on record calling the easiest map in the bunch. There, you have to defend a bunch of towers from bombing runs from Legion Dreadnoughts. Here, as you maybe guessed from all the stupidly huge skeletons everywhere, we're revisiting the concept of that one mission in the campaign where some jerks are showing up to harvest Koru hearts from a Leviathan graveyard.

This mission is SO much harder though. It's all a question of layout. Under Fire practically starts you right in he middle of a big open map, and all the threats come from the far edge, moving in real slow, and when it gets spicy towards the end with a lot to shoot down at once, it's nice enough to have basically all their flight paths cut right through the middle. Here, unless there's some random variations I haven't seen (there's a lot of that with some of these maps, it's neat), the hearts you're defending are smack dab in the middle, down in the southwest, and way up north. You start in that nice little southeast corner, and the harvesters and their big ol' escort waves? Those come from everywhere else.

That means by the end, you HAVE to split your forces up between three points and defend them all. Plus the AI is kinda fighting you a bit because the actual harvesters won't attack your units, causing their default AI to focus down all their escorts first. Pathing is pretty convoluted too, so if you're going for bonus objectives, it can be a really huge time commitment getting back after. I'd probably slot it into my difficulty curve somewhere around Planetdeath.

Shadowtide

This one has kind of a nasty learning curve to it (REALLY mitigated by looking at the whole map like this) but once you have a handle on what you need to/are able to do, I'd probably stick it between Iron Shield and Pirating Power. Give or take.

You start off on that nice northeastern high ground bit. An infinite river of Endari starts off above that, in the very northeast corner. They, left to their own devices, will sweep around to the west and hook south, blow through some settlements of... I want to say it was cultists of some kind, and take over an NPC base down in the southwest.

Your goal while this is going on is to capture and sit on these two dimensional gateway locks or some such to shut that firehose off, then go defend some big shuttle down in the southwest. At first, particularly the way there's that big dividing wall and the Endari flood goes around you for the mostpart, it's easy to assume they're just walled off acting as some fancy visual timer on you getting your main tasks done. If you try to play it that way, they're gain territory and start pumping stuff southwest even faster, and the mission eventually becomes impossible to finish (for me and my lousy computer anyway), because... well, one of the lead developer's goals with the engine was for it to be able to support 5000 units on the map or somesuch, and at a point my framerate can't take it.

The trick is, you can totally just intercept them. Get yourself over to that outer track, fortify it some, and you have a lot more time and breathing room to get stuff done. Still feels like a pretty high pressure map, but you can control a lot of the pacing of where and when fights happen, all your paths are nice and clear, and the main active enemy force does its best to leave you alone.

So what else do we have going on besides the new maps?

Particularly since I last talked about this, they've done a whole lot more with the customizable RPG power-up stuff. When you get a commander up to level 13 (this does not take long at all) you can pry all their special powers off their top bar and start mixing and matching them. There's some catches and restrictions there. Summoning the emperor when you don't have access to thralls wouldn't make sense, or airdropping when you can't produce the associated protectorate units, but this should get real neat and spicy as more commanders get thrown in.

There's also equipment, which for the longest time almost entirely meant "you have 3 slots to put mercenary faction production into" but has now been expanded with some really powerful stuff you can slot in, like giving all your units armor or regen. And now instead of just randomly tripping over these, there's this whole economy layer added in, where you collaborate with the other players in your faction to build factories and mines and such on planets to build up resources to populate shops you can then go regularly visit to get new stuff, potentially. And there's a whole deal with pledging political support to other players' plans to build this or that here or there and then needing to set up supply lines. Makes the map feel like more of a real thing.

You know what else does that though? They are going full on Legend of the Five Rings level wacky throwing narrative stuff at this thing. When it first started in war season 0, it was just a big map, three largely interchangeable factions, with the individual planets having value by granting bonuses to their controlling faction and basically permanent perks if an individual player camps out and grinds on them for a while. Which is a pretty cool baseline.

Then when the off-season started, they had an NPC pirate faction just kinda come eat out most of the middle of the map and defend them with nasty mutators (which, oh yeah, there's a new expanded difficulty system you can spice up with weighted randomization of those on top of the baked in ones). People figured this was just to give the people who really cared about the map control metagame some new captures to make/eventually reset to most of the map being open, but ha ha ha no. The devs were in full GM mode taking note of who was doing the best job of retaking their fronts and taking control of the planet the pirate leader was who's now being held captive somewhere.

And now they're doing a whole thing where in addition to building up infrastructure, there's ancient ruins with strange relics on planets people need to take over and hold and throw meta resources at and then bring home and study and apparently this is mainly unlocking some mutant Xol mercenary faction, and there's a bunch of other little story trigger stuff scattered around in their commentary. Gives it all this weird old early MMO/MUD feel or something with all this extra narrative stuff to either engage with or ignore and grind.

Oh and they also got more interesting with the planet holding/grinding rewards.

It's a lot. There is just so very much game in this game.

 

[Purple]

So I was over on the ZeroSpace discord a couple months ago, saying to the devs how the game is in a really nice place right now, but their marketing for it really really sucks. There's some old youtube videos they put out when the Kickstarter was going, trying to do some of the same spotlighting on things I'm doing in this thread with... maybe not the most appropriate narration for the subject matter, and they've also done a lot of technical talks and tournaments and such, but they really need some quick snappy trailers with some real production to them. And they were generally in agreement and talking about how they're hoping to get a bit better about that sort of thing for future updates. And hey, it's another patch day and yeah, they got better about that!

See? Just like I said way up by the top of the thread.

The Xol are actually the sweet innocent unambiguous good guys of the setting, just being all collectivist and forming Devastator, the most powerful Decepticon.

So obviously, one big thing in the current patch is the Xol being taken out of their probationary half-in-the-game status and can now be properly played in ranked vs. matches and the whole Galactic War thing, via the newest commander on the list there:

Anrubic- The main Xol hero, a sorta tentacle-y robot guy (built a lot like Swamp Thing honestly) whose main gimmick is being able to assimilate any of the tier 1 Xol units and absorb their main gimmick, Kirby style. Eat a big centaur-y thing, get more defensive. Eat a caster, get rangier. Eat a cute little rolly-poly, you now move around the map like Sonic. I need to download this patch and confirm, but at least in early test land where I've been living, in Galactic War, you get just the first two tiers of units, a more normal than usual upgrade building than the weird things Xol normally have going there (normally they get very limited choices on some global bonuses, and hot tubs that turn everything into a shiny variant with different abilities for what it's worth) and a top bar ability to just summon basically infinite havoks- Big ol' Blackhawk style War Wheels that just scoot around crushing things and are just kinda stupid fun.

Other major things that just went in include some UI changes, from white text in whatever font on a black background to stuff that looks like it's from some kinda professional videogame in various places, but mostly a big ol' overhaul to the campaign, adding in a bunch of missing conversations, apparently some news reports after finishing each mission, a new mission (making a proper trilogy out of the planet of the scrapped-prototype-build-faction robots), and, most importantly of all, proper saving and loading. For real of all the game-isn't-finished things in this game that's not finished yet, the only one that's really been bugging me was not being able to save in the not-yet-done-but-still-pretty-damn-long-and-beefy campaign mode.

I may or may not have ramblings after I get a chance to play some more later. Meanwhile, there's a decent sale going on as I type this it seems.