Solar War

[Huw the Poo]

DISCLAIMER: I couldn't manage any more than half an hour this evening, so these are very brief impressions from someone who does not yet fully understand the game:

Solar War bills itself as a grand strategy game in space.  The concept is that after making first contact with another civilisation, they attack Earth.  Fighting off the initial onslaught doubles as the combat tutorial.  Combat is kind of fun.  Each ship in your fleet gets to move once and fire as many shots as they have weapons per turn.  You can also scan the enemy ships if you have the equipment and resource to do so.  So you click a ship, click to move it, then select an enemy to attack.  Weapons are quite varied, ranging from autocannons through lasers to missiles (unique weapons in that they take several turns to travel to the target but are devastating).  After you've moved and fired all your ships, the enemy spends a turn doing the same.

After the first battle you're thrown into the main game without much info, although there is an extensive in-game help function which explains all of the mechanics.  Your first task is to promote all the staff who served in the first battle (more on this later) then sign treaties with all of the UN countries.  From what little I've seen of this, countries vary by resources (staff for your fleets etc) and also expectation - they all have their own agendas and judge your actions accordingly.  So one country will like you to kick arse while another will prefer that you focus efforts on research.  Each month they grade you and adjust their budgets.  It's quite similar to XCOM in this regard.

Research: there's a lot of this.  The research tree is flat and linear, but big.  It's everything you'd expect; research better technologies to build better ships and improve the ship modules etc.

Production: Each colony you control can build ships for the war effort.  If they can build anything else I haven't seen it yet, although the research tree led me to believe I'll eventually get to build orbital platforms and other things.  As far as I can tell there are really only two resources and I have no idea what affects the production of them.

Fleets: Ships range from auxilliary ships like fighters and up through the usual naval theme of frigates, destroyers, corvettes, cruisers and battlecruisers.  Anything smaller than a cruiser can't travel between planets without getting a lift on a larger ship.  At the beginning you have no ships capable of this and you can't build any.  You need to do a lot of research.

Officers: This seems to be a fairly key component of the game.  Solar War tracks every officer on every ship.  As in the Silent Hunter series of games, as officers gain experience they will earn promotions which you must manually assign.  You can also assign officers to specific ships.  One gripe I had is that promotions must be explicitly ordered.  I have no idea why you can't just have the game auto-promote officers as necessary.

So how does it actually play?  Well, the game seems to be mostly played in the solar system view.  When unpaused, the planets move slowly around the sun.  The map tracks the shadow of the sun relative to whatever planet you have selected; presumably it's impossible to scan worlds that are in shadow.  You use a series of menus to take actions, whether it's assigning crew, designing new ships, ordering construction, moving fleets etc.  Popups appear all the time, alerting you to completion of orders and asking for new orders.  For example, when a colony finishes building a ship you'll be asked whether you want to go straight to officer assignment, whether you want to queue something else to build, etc.  The game tracks deep scanning availability along with ability of the selected world to supply your own fleets and/or those of the enemy.  This leads me to believe that the meat of the game will be building fleets, positioning them carefully across the solar system always mindful of supply, and presumably eventually taking the fight to the aliens who seem to begin the game with outer planets already settled.

Pros:

Fairly intuitive, simple and clean interface
Quite deep with lots to do - I can see it being one of those games in which you always have a few things going on
Battles are simplistic in presentation but quite fun
Lots of stats and numbers for those who like that sort of thing
Big research tree, albeit flat and linear
Very enjoyable setting - the action never leaves the solar system, but the game respects the vast differences between the worlds and it doesn't seem small

Cons
No sound or music of any kind (apparently the sole developer wants to add these at some point) - stick some music on before you launch the game!
Graphics certainly do the job but are decidedly....antiquated
Early game is slow with not much to do - you aren't even able to move fleets for a while

(Again, please bear in mind my disclaimer)

I'm sorry but I really can't write any more for now.  Is it worth it, bearing in mind the soon-to-end sale?  I would say a cautious yes, at this price.  I can see myself getting my money's worth, and then some if the developer is able to add sound/music and if it turns out that a complete game is suitably epic in scope.  The normal, full asking price is a bit baffling for what the game is (although still not expensive).  I feel like a single game can keep me occupied for quite some time - I just hope it doesn't turn out to be the kind of game in which you can make your situation unwinnable a long time before it becomes apparent that you've done just that.

I'm quite forgiving of presentation issues when a game has only one developer, but Solar War suffers for not having any audio content at all.  However the next time I play I might have a nice big battle between two fleets comprised of a ton of capital ships all slinging nuclear missiles at each other!

[bbmike]

You just cost me $9.99. 

[gameleaper]

Thankyou Hue, just bought it :) its just the type of graphics I like, the gameplay seems easy to pickup, I realy like it

PS: although its pausable real time, its turn-based combat,I love this system of play, I think other space 4x could learn from this

[Huw the Poo]

You're welcome, chaps!  I'm looking forward to playing it more this evening.  I'd just reached the point where I could start building frigates, and although I know I should research supporting techs first, I'm sure I'll rush straight for destroyer tech next. :)  I wonder how long you get before the second wave of attacks.

Feel free to add your own impressions!

[gameleaper]

from the short first impression I got it was simple to learn, but had depth, and the graphics that was simple but really useable, I really like this sort of graphics. The turn-based combat was a real seller for me, its like discovering space empires 4 again, felt the same sort of programing & graphics but totally a different game. the menus all worked well and responsive. Ive got it on my todo list of games to play soon.

This is My idea of what indie is, indie to me means excelent on a low budget, with genius bits and bobs you don't see in mainstream

[Pinetree]

I got this game way back when it was alpha on Desura. There was a character generator for it at the time so you could get your name in the game and adjust your stats.

[Huw the Poo]

Ah, well your top officer has your name, but I don't know about adjusting stats or anything.

[undercovergeek]

oooo crew management and RPG elements - curse you tiny Huw

[PanzersEast]

Thanks for the feedback Huw!   O0


PE

[Barthheart]

Darn it! Thanks Huw. Bought.  >:( ;D

[BanzaiCat]

SIGH

Gonna buy it as soon as I can.

Very good first impression, Huw! Thanks for posting. I had my eye on this the moment you posted about it in the other thread.

[Huw the Poo]

No problem chaps!  I'll post more impressions after I've had another session tonight.

[Huw the Poo]

Well I played a little bit more this evening, not as much as I'd have liked.  Some more random impressions, then:

Fleets seem to follow parabolic trajectories through space.  I don't know whether this has any bearing gameplay-wise; I've still yet to achieve interplanetary travel so I don't know how interception works or if it's even possible.  It was in equal parts cool and fascinating to watch the second wave follow swooping arcs through the system, from planet to planet, as it approached and eventually attacked Earth.

We fought them off easily by the way - lost a few corvettes and fighters to the single light cruiser the enemy had sent (a probing attack, I suspect).  But I hadn't been sitting on my arse; I'd built up a huge fleet that was backed up with a very powerful starbase and dotted with some absolutely devastating missile corvettes.  These little babies are fragile as glass but pack a nasty punch.  I'm dreading the surely inevitable day I go up against fleets that are able to swat missiles out of the sky!

Forming that initial fleet was a pain in the arse, though.  Not only does every new ship need officers assigned to it, but also there seemed to be no easy way to arrange the fleets.  I hope I'm just missing something obvious here, but the only way I found to do it was to click and drag individual ships from the "new ships" fleet to my main defense fleet.  Rather tedious, unfortunately.

I'm speeding through the tech tree at present.  I assume later techs will get very expensive because right now it takes no more than a minute at maximum game speed to research something.  By the time I'd stopped playing I'd just researched outpost construction, and had ordered Earth to build a colony to send to the Moon.  The game helpfully pointed out that since I don't have interplanetary travel yet, the Moon was the only viable target for colonisation.  Presumably I'll start gathering additional resources once the colony is set up, although at this point I still have absolutely no idea how the economy works and I don't seem to be hitting any walls with regard to construction whatsoever.  Indeed, the only thing I lack right now for new ships is officers.

Hmmm.....I don't think I have any more to say right now.  I'll keep plugging away at it this week and see what else happens.

(I was chatting with Barthheart as we both played, and commented on the lack of sound - he rightly pointed out that there's no sound in space! )

[Barthheart]

There is a setting, somewhere, that you can set to auto assign officers to new ships, besides the button on the ship panel.

Still very early for me as I can't even get to the Moon yet. 

The Officer control may seem tedious to some but I'm thinking there is some great potential for RPGing the game and stories for AAR's.
Your character in the game is in control of the entire fleet but you also command a squadron of ships. But you can't command a single ship.
You can give new names to ALL the officers in the game.... so expect to see yer names show up in some of my reports.  O0
Officers get promoted and can move from lower positions to command of a ship to command of a Squadron.
If you character dies, game over. But you can get rescued from space if your command gets exploded.

There is ship design. There are fixed classes of ships. Fighters and Corvettes can't travel between planets and their moons, like Earth to the Moon.
Destroyers and Frigates can travel between planets and their local moons but can't travel to other planets, like Earth to Mars.
Light Cruisers, Cruisers, Battle Cruisers and Battleships can travel between planets AND can carry other smaller ships. The BC's and BB's are more designed to load up on weaponry though.  THeir max load is their max tonnage. CL's and CA's can carry above their max tonnage making them more useful per size for carrying smaller ships.
But there's nothing keeping you from building a BB, have few small weapons on it, some shields and loading it up with fighters to make a CV.

This kind of reminds me of the old MetaGaming Warp Wars game, with Warp ships and System ships. In fact the tech in this game to let you travel to other planets is War power.
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3466/warpwar

Oh, and for it's current price of $11 CDN. I can see myself getting my money's worth. Not sure it would be worth it at full price though.....

[Pinetree]

Ah, well your top officer has your name, but I don't know about adjusting stats or anything.

I think it was a one-time deal for early access buyers, the dev would put your character into the game as one of the officers. There's a characters.xml in the game files. Looking through it, it's funny how most people gave their character the survivor trait. "I want to live, Dammit!" I gave mine the Fearless and Inspiring traits. Go out with a bang, I say..