|
I remember playing this game as a kid. Maybe it was a demo, maybe it was a chopped apart 'less than legal' version as I don't think it had any of the cutscenes. Kid-me being stupid and not knowing what he was doing, I never got far. (Don't think I ever managed to fix up the wartorn planet before running out of money.) I spent most of my time going through the menus to look at the ships and admiring the awesome spritework on the colony-screen. It may be static and a bit lifeless with the empty roads, but I love how the buildings visually change when damaged or when they're being built. Just compare the buildings on Achilles with the ones on Naxos. Kid-me also thought the free traders were Cardassians from Star Trek. I bought this the day it came out on GOG and while I got much farther in on my last playthrough with the help of such skills as actually being able to read english, I still never actually finished. So I'll be happy to watch this series.
|
#
¿
Oct 25, 2020 19:04
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 22, 2024 05:36 |
|
|
Feeding your destroyer all the kills has lead to some close calls and I'm amazed and impressed that you haven't lost any fighters yet. I'm also not sure how much it matters in the end though. I guess it depends on if crew experience carries over when you get promoted to something bigger. Moving on to the subject of the voice-acting. It's never really bothered me which is probably due to a number of factors. First and foremost, it's an older game so I'm set to expect a less professional performance and sound quality. The second is that it isn't really in your face about it. This is not an fmv-game, but a game with fmv parts in it. The messages are kept on a small portion of the screen, so the compression isn't as noticeable and the sets, costumes and visual acting can get away with being simpler without looking too bad. Actually, I didn't even notice the lip-synching being off until I read here that the game wasn't originally in English to begin with and started looking for it. A lot of the clips do feel like it's random people at the office being dressed up, put in front of a microphone and reading the script for the first time. To their credit, some of the voice-actors do try. I'm going to look on youtube if I can find any clips of the original for comparison. The colonel for example sort of emotes though he never really seems to quite have the kind of...I dunno. Seriousness, authorativeness? Not really sure what I'm going for here. Picard rather than guy who sounds like my dad? (Sidenote, is it just me, or did he seem more upset about the loss of a trader than a whole planet?) The two traders we've seen are day and night as well. The first one was Obi-wan being too sleepy to worry about his imminent demise. The second put in more urgency and the pirate ship flying by was a good touch, but I think the complete lack of background noise kept the scene from reaching its full potential. (alarms, pew-pew lasers or an explosion with a screen-shake would have done wonders there.) And then you have the ones who are so bad they roll right back around to being funny. Like the wife who sounds like she's bored and really doesn't want to record a message, and the very smart son. Though I actually like those two's terrible performance in light of future very spoilery events.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 6, 2020 16:20
|
|
|
So I found this link to a video of someone playing the first part of the game's Hungarian (I think) version. click here What's interesting is that it has a lot more fmv than the english Gog-version seems to have. The initial briefing in my version is completely done with the 3d cg models, but in the video it cuts to a full-screen fmv with the actors. (including Dante who goes from blonde to darker-haired.) The player skips the cutscene at that point I believe, but skipping forward through the video I come across more pieces of full-screen fmv with live actors.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 7, 2020 14:45
|
|
|
Nuramor posted:The map on that computer is mislabeled. It has the bridge and the captains room switched around. It's such a small and overall unimportant detail, but for some reason that amuses me greatly. Clearly the ship dates from a more decadent time, when captains had huge luxurious penthouses (by spaceship standards) and commanded from there while the plebes were all squeezed together on a tiny bridge. Then the designers figured out that this was silly and inefficient, so they tore down the penthouse and set up a larger bridge while jamming the captain in a bunk nearby. They just forgot to update the map. I think some of the promotion-wonkiness may be a mixup with earlier versions. It wouldn't surprise me if in earlier drafts of the script/game design plan, each promotion sent you to a new 'level' entirely, instead of expanding on what you have. So sector "B2, near the Garthogs" would actually be sector B2 and be near the Garthogs. The player would lose access to Achilles etc. but in return get a new set of planets to work with. Possibly even the fleet would be swapped out entirely. (it would have made balancing easier because each new promotion would have the player start with a predetermined set of assets.) From a thematic standpoint I prefer what we ended up with, where the ranks zoom out and expand on your options, with the past mattering. There are other quirks I've noticed regarding Dante's rank. For example, He's supposed to answer to the governors of the planets but the moment he arrives he gets full authority over taxation, defense, construction and demolishing of everything he sees. And ah, the Thorin. Now there is a beauty of a ship. Much prettier than the two bricks glued together that is Dante's new flagship. It showing up is a reminder that you are still just a small fish. On the other hand, 1 antique, not even fully outfitted destroyer and a handful of fighters have no business even slowing down any fleet capable of threatening the Thorin and its escorts. Unless every ship was full of holes and on fire on the side not facing the camera. I counted at least 1 destroyer and 2 cruisers. Fortunately the Admiral overestimated the Garthog's willingness or ability to pursue in force.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 17, 2020 10:01
|
|
|
They say that ignorance is bliss. I never paid enough attention to the plot to pick up on wonky details like the question of what time it is. So all I knew was that Dante has a tendency to hallucinate and the doctor just shrugs it off even though she's interested enough in Dante's mental wellbeing to give him a psych eval on the bridge. Personal theory: Dante's suffering from a combination of spacecoffee addiction and never getting any decent sleep. It sure looks like he's dozing off on the bridge when it happens. Ok, the spacecoffee is a joke. But I genuinely thought Dante was suffering from a lack of rest and spent time poking around in his quarters trying to interact with the bed in the hope it would trigger more plot. Before I went to the bar. The smuggler event is one of those that throw me for a loop. You're not told which ship the smuggler is on, only that full access to the planet must be denied or bad things happen. So I go; "Ok, we don't know which ship is the target, so let's check everyone and make sure that no-one suspicious gets even close." (My guess is the smuggler shoves his cargo out the airlock while still in flight so it gets picked up by a local contact. That would explain why the governor can't just have every ship inspected at the spaceport and has to bother the player.) So that's my first instinct. My second instinct is to do the same with every ship going out just to make sure. And as I actually had radars set up on every planet out of paranoia, there were a lot of ships to check. The end result is a lot of running around which gets frustrating quick.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 30, 2020 20:33
|
|
|
I actually made heavy use of barracks at this stage. I used them to try and limit the number of sides I need to watch for and buy myself time while I mop up elsewhere. Any tank duelling a barracks is a tank not shooting my tanks or more critical buildings. Besides, being able to field more tanks never hurts. Ideally the enemy never lands of course, but at the moment it is impractical to take on a Garthog fleet in a straight up and fair fight. (I mean, just look at it. 3 flagships? That's the kind of fleet the Thorin and co would have been running away from.) So for the plot to progress the Garthogs must land but they must lose the invasion battle? (I'm assuming that the colonel still strips you of command the moment a single planet is lost.) Looking back now, the game really is very railroady.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 29, 2020 14:30
|
|
|
Torrannor posted:I do think every single trader ship will try to land on the infected planet once the event pops, which is kind of a dick move by the game. I believe the traders' thoughts go something like this. "Blockaded planet? That means no imports! That means supply is nil and demand is through the roof. First ship to get through the blockade can set its price and make all the moneys. Full speed ahead, space-capitalism ho!" (and then the whole galaxy died of the space-plague.) I thought the first "antidote" ship was a Garthog trap on account of being a different type of ship than the ones before. But then Leila right afterwards follows instructions without raising a fuss so I was wrong. And while I'm on the subject, due to being called virus carriers and needing a special sattelite to be spotted, I had expected the Garthogs to use a stealth ship of some sort, or a commandeered trader. But instead they're using unmanned missiles, which isn't something I've seen in any other sci-fi game. Missiles carried by ships, sure. The occasional unmanned warship, ditto. Interstellar missiles flying around with no controller in sight? Never.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 6, 2021 19:32
|
|
|
Gah, that power fluctuation! (add one more thing to my list of notes for things to keep track off when I play this game myself) Seriously, that doesn't just happen. Someone had to code it. But why? The first thing that comes to mind for me is that the game at one point called for having planets affect building efficiency somehow, possibly through local resources. (radioactives deposits for example) On the one hand I'm glad that's one detail that doesn't need thinking about when playing planetary tetris architect, but blegh. I like things predictable. A nuclear plant should give me X amounts of energy every time, all the time or at worst have a clearly communicated and regular modifier dependent on where you place it. No dice-rolling. This will just lead to me building and demolishing power plants over and over till I get something on the high end of the scale. I'd also forgotten just how much hurt missiles dish out. The downside is that they're an expendable ordnance you need to build and equip first but drat, they just melt things. If the admiral had rolled in with a full load of missiles instead of wasting half his racks on bombs, you may have had enough missiles to knock out all the capital ships outright. I don't think there was any defensive fire either.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 11, 2021 21:49
|
|
|
Ah, ok. So there's not much point to making separate anti-space and anti-ground fleets then.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 13, 2021 22:09
|
|
|
Torrannor posted:That's no transport, that cutscene clearly showed a Flagship 1, while Admiral Benson's cutscene showed the "armed" transport, imho. I noticed the mismatch between the cutscene and the admiral's flagship, but didn't say anything because I figured they may not have had a cutscene with the right ship ready. But now that the transport gets the flagship cutscene, I also think it's been swapped by mistake. This makes me wonder where the swap is. Is it the cutscene, or the mission? Personally, I feel like the admiral's mission should come later. Both lead to game over upon failure, but escorting an admiral and fighting off a full battlefleet feels bigger and more in line with constant escalation than escorting a load of space-money. (Surprised that money is apparently still a physical thing that needs shipping, and even more surprised that the Garthogs knew this was the freighter they needed to hit) I like the scene with Kelly. It humanizes Dante by showing that when he's off the clock and amongst friends, he becomes more casual. As for the age disparity (Kelly does feel older and being balding doesn't help), I've got a theory. Dante is your typical spacejock, who went to the academy in his early twenties or so. You know the type. Dashing, bold, looks good in a tight suit and posing dramatically on a recruitment poster. Kelly is not. Either he was a civilian or he'd retired from military service. However, the situation in the empire has gotten so bad that they can no longer rely on young good-looking and most importantly, volunteer spacejocks with ambition. Kelly was either drafted in spite of his age, called back into service or maybe he volunteered because Garthogs killed his family on Achilles for example. He met Dante at the academy in any case. (if retired, then this would have been a refresher course for him). Regardless, Kelly is the McCoy to Dante's Kirk. I disagree with his opinion on the subject of spies. So far, the Garthogs seem to know exactly what targets they want to hit. Either they do have spies or they've seeded spy sattelites throughout human territory. I lean towards the latter. We've already seen that the Garthogs can build small, stealthy drones in the form of the virus carriers. A spy sattelite wouldn't be that much different. I do seem to remember spy sattelites being an important game mechanic later on, but I don't remember if the alien empires also used them.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 18, 2021 21:57
|
|
|
Is that the game where you start out having to hire advisors to handle parts of your empire? Where the top military guy is half man, half robot?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 23, 2021 10:48
|
|
|
On flagships, if I remember right, there will be a cutscene later on that explains exactly what's the difference between a Mammoth class flagship and the Thorin. But for the moment, as shown they can carry tanks which is even more important than their nature as a big stick in space combat in my opinion. Now tanks can race down the unseen and unmentioned stargates at highway speeds to reinforce colonies, but they need a different means of transport to get anywhere else and unfortunately, your average tank is a bit too big to stash under Dante's bunk. (I was going to make a joke about blow-up tanks, but then I realized they're actually a thing in the real world as decoys.) And Ninja Garthogs strike again! Observations from the Prototype fight. First of all, the fighters managed to shoot down some of the missiles. That was nice. And second, the results screen after the fight has another graphical error. Instead of being a Destroyer 2 escorted by the Garthog fleet, it shows a Destroyer 3. In a similar vein, the promotion cutscene showed off 2 fighters that shouldn't exist. They're probably prototypes. And am I the only one who thought that the lady in yellow was our psychiatrist for a second? I swear, reduce humanity to a bunch of faceless cg puppets in uniforms, and everyone starts looking the same. The purple room may be a repeat of the set used during the briefing on the Thorin but it's hard to tell. Libluini posted:If we're talking about Reunion, is there some info online I could look up? Ancient space 4x are something of an interest to me, and I never heard of this game before. The only Reunion I know is X3: Reunion, and that's obviously not a predecessor to Imperium Galactica Well, it's a dos and Amiga game, so putting in "Reunion DOS" in google could be a starting point I think.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 25, 2021 08:48
|
|
|
Naxos/Zeuson, governor rebelling only to run away before he's even rebelled...the script is definitely showing holes here. I'd like to ask if you could call up Zeuson for the next video. It would greatly amuse me if the governor who just got arrested is still in charge down there and picks up the phone. Running for the Garthogs implies to me that he's a spy who realized the gig was up and it was time to extract yesterday. (possibly that debacle with the prototype destroyer raised one question too many on exactly how the Garthogs managed to get through security like that and know how to fly the drat thing.) I'll give the Colonel the benefit of the doubt and believe that he called it a rebellion cause he didn't want Dante or anyone else listening in to realize exactly how screwed things are in regards to internal security. Need to know and all that. The fact that the leader (ignoring carte blanche fleet officers) of a planet is a deserter raises tonnes of red flags. And I'll leave with mentioning something I've been noticing all the way back to the first promotion. The names used for our ships sound like something an evil empire would use. Just listen to them Terminator Executor Chaotic Berserker Cat Killer (humanity's furry overlords do not approve of this name.) The old Excalibur is the most heroic sounding of the lot.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 7, 2021 21:55
|
|
|
Hah, I thought it would be the same guy. Thanks for checking. I've always found it interesting (and somewhat annoying) that while you need the sattelites to find out where on the planet to invade, you still don't get to see what the buildings are and so must guess based on shape and size. The Garthog build-set is weird. It's like they build regularly (though with a preference for more organic egg-shapes and the like), then coat their buildings with...a metal shrinkwrap? There are still some common elements in place to aid with recognizing function. The radar has a big dish, the powerplants have chimneys and the fortresses have big guns. Moving on to the PHOOD factory. Green Sludge...yumm. Even the research screen points out it's disgusting. But with enough discount stamps, happy toys, collectible stickers, celebrity endorsements and equating eating Phood with helping out the war effort etc. people will lap it right up. And dammit, if you want your fresh veggies, then stop speed-cloning people, you Malthusian demons. Finally, I'll echo the comments on the speed-running. I don't think I ever even entertained taking a planet until I could comfortably knock out that patrolling Garthog fleet and have a second, fresh fleet to deal with the planetary defenses. I tend to turtle in general in games like these. You can have all the lebensraum you want, I'll just be here watching my lovely planets grow and my research go ping.* All out galacticide can wait till I have my invisible, mass-produced, teleporting deathstars. (or local equivalent) *This usually ends in the AI finding that there is no fresh lebensraum and immediately declaring war on peaceful, harmless and stupidly fleetless, me.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 17, 2021 20:39
|
|
|
Seeing the Garthog patrol fleet right on top of yours before cutting away for the supply run made me try to imagine how that went down. "Sir, our fleet is in position to attack!" "Excellent, maintain patrol course." "We're not going to engage?" "I have my orders." "But...they're right there! I can see them out the window!" "My orders come directly from his Garthoginess himself." "They just blew up our defenses and are landing tanks!" "I'm sure it is all going according to plan. There is no need for concern." And drat, all of Dante's predecessors must be feeling pretty bad right now. At war for over 30 years, with nothing to show for it. Dante? Pretty much dismantled the Garthog empire in little more than a week. I'm not even joking. Part 14 (The invasion begins) started at 3427, October 16, 19:50pm. Part 17 (Garthog Climax) ends at 3427, October 26, 6:10am. What I'm saying is that this speed-run just got a whole lot more hilarious now that I've looked at the clock for once.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 9, 2021 20:23
|
|
|
So I was sitting down to watch what I believed to be the latest update. Then I see update 20 on the next-to-play list. Welp. So I'll begin by talking about my thoughts on the previous update for a bit. Video 19 Three interesting things I noticed in the research screen. First is that there is a listing for the Leviathan class flagship, even though it's been explicitly said that you can't build more Thorins. Second, the heavy tank makes me think of the German monster-tank that never got built. The Maus, Ratte? One of those two. Third, the Hyperdrive V2.0 mentions that it has 15% less fuel consumption. On ships that seem to have infinite fuel to begin with. Just flavor text, or another dropped mechanic? Going by the doc's uniform, I'd say he's a crash dummy. And that top-secret security code is barely more secure than the one on my luggage! Shifting to the meat of the plot. I called the twist the instant Dante got Terminator vision. That was a bit too on the nose. In contrast the later dream with "HIS ROBOT HAND!!" I could have been willing to write off if it hadn't been for that earlier dream. It's the future. Why wouldn't they have prosthetics? Hell, Dante being injured in battle against the Garthogs and brought back from the dead ala Robocop or Shepard when his escape pod got picked up a few years later would have been a great twist as well. A few questions remain. Wife and son? Probably actors yeah. Alternatively, they're also robots. The professor never said he got it perfect on his first run after all. But what's the haps with Kelly? Remember him, Dante's college buddy? Is he in on it? Or is there perhaps a real (original) Dante, who was used as the template for Robo-Dante's memories and personality? The reveal also recontextualizes a lot of things the Colonel said and did earlier. It feels to me that plan Robo-Jesus has very little support at the top. Especially because the end goal is to make Robo-Jesus emperor. I can see people being less than happy about that. So Dante getting recalled after even the slightest failure? Not enough supporters of the plan left, let's hide our tracks. And yeah, it does make all the "Get back here so I can demote you in person" scenes a lot more sinister. The Colonel going "I'm disappointed in you. You could have been a good leader" is another part where he slipped up and almost revealed too much. The shuffling of governors in the early game could be business as usual, or inserting governors who are in on and willing to cooperate with the plan. It still feels weird to me that Dante can't confront the Colonel about it but instead talks random people into giving him security codes and then phones up Reinhardt who says little beyond "Yeah, I built you. It was tough.". In any case, I think the plot pretty much ends here with a shrug. Dante realizes he's a robot, and that's that. No further hooks to develop come to mind anyway. But then I also drifted away from the game pretty early into Admiral rank. Without the story elements like the little events with the pirates, bio-attacks etc. the game just started to lose its personality and feel generic. The Garthog campaign had also made me annoyed with the clunky pathfinding (especially planetside) and so I wasn't too enthusiastic about the idea of dealing with that part of the game over and over and over again. Video 20 Could the invasion fleet have been programmed to turn around as a way of accounting for the possibility that a player would blitz the flagship(s) as a priority target before withdrawing? Without those they can't invade after all. (assuming the AI plays by the same rules and can't conjure tanks out of thin air.)
|
|
#
¿
Mar 27, 2021 20:21
|
|
|
Admit it, Colonel. You just made that rank up to make Dante sound more imposing during negotiations, didn't you? And I've never played Distant Worlds so I've got no idea what it's like. But clumsy Death Star navigators sounds promising.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 14, 2021 18:45
|
|
|
Don't underestimate the pioneering-spirit. That virgin soil will be colonized, no matter the distance, or the fire, or the dysentery, or the starvation, or the...you get the idea. Frankly, I'm amazed they've put a gun on that ship. Though the sight of a colonizer bravely charging at a warship was hilarious. Randalor posted:After seeing the newest video, and that the top of the line Flagship, the Kraken taking a "massive" 30-odd days to research... they're literally just reverse engineering and figuring out how to set up the factories to make the proper parts for these ships, aren't they? There is some evidence for that theory, I believe. At least for the early to midgame stuff. The cruiser 1 was also noted to be a low-tech left-over from the old empire, but still needed to be researched before it could be produced, even though Dante was already rolling around in one. The Destroyer 2 is first seen as a prototype before it can be researched, and is described as more of an extensive refit ala the Constitution class from Star Trek between the series and films, rather than a completely new design. (same thing with the cruiser 2 if I remember right) So that project is almost definitely more based around working out the kinks and streamlining the production plans. The flagships...well the Thorin never does return to production but it can't be completely lostech. The empire has no problems with refitting, repairing, maintaining etc. It's just building new ones that never happens. Building the "keel" of a beast that size must be one hell of a project, and it's probably more efficient to work on new smaller flagships instead though they do trend back upwards in size. Personally I think that given the trend, ships the size of the Thorin (but of a more modern design) will be built again at some point in the future, but that's beyond the timespan portrayed by the game. The cutscenes also play with the timeline. I believe I noted earlier in the thread that a cutscene showed some fighters that shouldn't exist in mass production at that point. And I think someone else pointed out that the station Dante goes to for his final promotions also technically doesn't exist at that point. But I don't think it goes for the high end stuff. The Destroyer 3 and Cruiser 3 are very different aesthetically from their predecessors. And while Strategic Sage has been ignoring fighters for the most part, if my memory serves me right, the last 2 fighters are described as having stealth technology. (Whether that's just flavor text or an actual effect in gameplay I really can't tell) And speaking in general, it feels weird to have 'how to set up production' plans for one thing, while simultaneously having plans ready to go for its immediate replacement and the replacement for the replacement etc. Then again, it wouldn't be the craziest thing these people do. As for the timeframe. It's crazy compressed as has been observed a few times. In a similar short timespan the galaxy has gone from empty to half-colonized, with some colonies in the magellanic clouds and even a peekaboo in the Andromeda galaxy for good measure. Population-growth is insane to the point it makes me wonder if the real truth is that plan robo-Jesus went Skynet long ago and everyone is actually an android being spat out by the
|
|
#
¿
Apr 24, 2021 20:06
|
|
|
Those multi-head missiles look "fun". I wonder if they still explode if they get popped by defensive fire.
|
|
#
¿
May 1, 2021 11:20
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 22, 2024 05:36 |
|
|
Oh, joy. The one thing that's better/worse than pong with nukes. Pong with bigger nukes. But now I'm curious if ECM is a fleet-wide stat, or if it's every ship for themselves.
|
|
#
¿
May 2, 2021 11:13
|
|