Games I Love: Homeworld Deserts of Kharak

The Homeworld series in general has long been a favourite of mine so it won't come as any surprise to find the prequel popping up on my blog. The RTS has become something of a rarity in this day and age which is a shame as it was for a long-time my favourite genre. I will do my level best to avoid giving any story spoilers, just in case. So whilst I plan out my written let's plays I figured I'd kill two proverbial birds with one stone, tackling my backlog and making blog posts about the games I play doing so!

The cut-scenes have a fairly unique art style

Unlike the original Homeworld titles which were set and played in space and allowed full 3D movement for units, Deserts of Kharak is as you might expect a lot more grounded. The whole game was built around a single line from the opening of the original Homeworld, which is kind of impressive.

The first two things that jumped out at me when I played this game were the amazing soundtrack (not surprising for a Homeworld game) and the art style of the cut-scene's you can see above. The Homeworld games have always had a pretty suitably epic soundtrack so I was more than pleased this one follows suit.

It plays pretty much like you'd expect a real-time strategy game with a few unique aspects that make it interesting, however. The first of which is your base which is actually a fully mobile carrier only rather than sailing the oceans or flying through space this one is based firmly on the ground. The second of which has been a feature of the campaign of Homeworld games since the first one, persistent resources and units between missions.

The carrier is the heart of your campaign, responsible for unit production and research.

The carrier itself acts as your unit production and research facility as well as what you'd expect any aircraft you might possess. Losing the carrier pretty much means game over but fortunately the carrier is more than able to defend itself due to the power management system it has to shunt power between various systems. You can pump up it's armour and repair beams to make it and surrounding forces more durable or you can opt to increase power to it's missile launchers and turrets turning it into a slightly terrifying mobile weapons platform.

The persistent units and resources adds another level of thinking to the game as rather than simply throwing masses of units at the enemy til you win, preserving your units is often smarter and more well rewarded. The most obvious benefit is due to the unit veterancy system, the higher rank a unit goes the better it gets, usually things like increased armour and hit-points or even higher weapon damage and range, depending on the unit in question. The other benefit is due to the fact that resources are limited, there is only a finite amount on each map and both resources are used not only for unit production but conducting research to unlock and improve new units. So losing a lot of units throughout the campaign can come back to bite you later on.

The resource system whilst fairly basic overall, featuring a common resource and a slighter rarer resource does have it's own unique quirk likely from it's original pre-Homeworld development origins. Typically to gain more resources and other objects that provide buffs called artifacts you break apart wrecks with explosives from your salvagers to get at the materials within.

This is only a small battle but it looks far better in motion than any picture could attest to.

The battles themselves can be pretty spectacular to watch thanks to the graphics on show, lighter vehicles circling isolated units, railguns firing from ridge lines with missiles and tracer fire going all over the place. Fighters zipping overhead and gunships showering down a hail of fire from above certainly helps showcase some fairly cinematic battles.

There is an element of the rock-paper-scissor when it comes to units, lighter faster units typically take out units like railguns, railguns take out more heavily armoured units and those heavily armoured units take out the light fast moving units. Though when you throw in larger units like the cruisers and factor in aircraft it starts to get a lot more interesting if you ask me!

The game is far from flawless however and whilst I do love it, Deserts of Kharak could have been so much more than it was, though I feel a lot of that was due to it's slightly troubled development.

• Lack of terrain variety: there is definitely some variety there due to various times of day and terrain features but for the most part you will perhaps unsurprisingly be fighting in desert for most of the game. More use of things like sandstorms or other unique terrain features would have helped a lot.
• Campaign Feels Short: I do genuinely feel the campaign could have likely been six or seven missions longer than it is. Wouldn't be so bad if there were other modes to play but it only has skirmish and multiplayer.
• Not much difference between factions: The differences are certainly there but they are usually minor which I imagine is for balance reasons though this is likely more of a gripe than a genuine flaw. 

Overall, short as it is, I still love the game and it's expanding of the Homeworld universe and enjoy it for what it is. There are definitely better real-time strategy games out there but I would be lying if I said I didn't enjoy Homeworld Deserts of Kharak and the story is tells which at least fills in some of the questions raised by the first game in terms of the lore.

I still long for the day when we actually get a Homeworld 3 but until then this and the remastered versions of the originals will have to do!

A battle in full swing!

Hearts of Iron IV: My Personal 10 Beginner Tips

Hearts of Iron 4 is an understandably intimidating game, especially for newcomers if this is their first Hearts of Iron game. It throws a lot of information at you spread across multiple screens, tabs and overlays with a bare bones tutorial being the only in-game help you get.

I am by no means an expert at the game, far from it in fact but I feel if I can help even a handful of people at least figure out enough so they can enjoy it as I do then that is a big win. There will likely be more Hearts of Iron 4 content on my blog going forward as well. I am certainly open to ideas for that content.

I realised part way through writing this 'small' set of tips that I couldn't cover everything, so anything more specific when it comes to tips or even guides will be made in separate posts in the future.This is also assuming you are playing single player, multiplayer would be an entirely different story altogether and I have not yet tried it myself.

Tip #1: Do the Tutorial

The tutorial might not cover everything but it's a good place to start.

I know I said it was bare bones and it does miss a lot of aspects of the game out and explains the ones it does look at poorly but it is at least a starting point. It does feel as if it literally teaches you how to move units around and set up some basic production of equipment but barely touches on any one thing in any depth.

However I still recommend doing the tutorial to start off, bare bones as it is as it will at least give you something to start with. Part of me hopes they do an improved tutorial at some point especially as new DLC's and patches add or change existing mechanics.

Tip #2: Starting Nation

You can play literally any nation that existed at the time.

Honestly I've seen a lot of good arguments for quite a lot of choices of nation to start you off in your Hearts of Iron 4 journey and you can pick literally any nation that existed at the time. Taking a large nation can seem tempting but it means far more to organise which may not be much fun if you are still learning the interface.

On the flip side taking a smaller nation can be a good way to learn the game relatively safely but you may quickly find yourself unable to expand without drawing the ire of larger nations.

My own personal recommendation is Italy, for several reasons the first of which being you have plenty of options with how to play them and where you could expand to. You start at war with Ethiopia and after you have won that you have a solid foothold in Africa if you feel like expanding there. In Europe itself you can also even expand East into Yugoslavia and on from there.

You also have access to a fairly solid navy and air force right off the bat without either one being so vast and spread out to make organising it a chore. Italy isn't the only possible good choice for a beginner but it is whom I started with. 

Tip #3: Spend Some Time Learning the Interface

There's a lot of info to take in and yes that is republican Spain winning the civil war.

I can't overstate this one enough, spend a while clicking every button, reading every tooltip and getting yourself comfortable with where everything is located, it will really help in the long-run. If you do this during the tutorial the game will give you some extra information

There are a lot of buttons, menu's and overlays which can be overwhelming for anyone just starting out even if you did the tutorial. It may take some time as this game throws a lot of information at you at once, so leave it paused or on the slowest speed and just take some time figuring out where everything is.

Also depending which nation you opt to play as you may have a lot of potential organising to do of things like your navies. The United Kingdom, Japan and America all have pretty extensive navies and also in a lot of cases far flung colonies.

Take it one step at a time and don't worry about it all at once.

Tip #4: Take Care of the Alerts at the Top

As in most Paradox Grand Strategies, alerts sit in the top center of the UI

Much like other Paradox grand strategy titles this is usually a good first stop and the tutorial even indicates this even if it doesn't explain much along the way.

There are some alerts you shouldn't worry about too much such as having 'Unassigned Divisions' or 'Low Manpower' at the start anyway.

Unassigned divisions are basically any division that hasn't been assigned to an army which is quite prevalent for nations with a lot of colonies like the UK and France. Low manpower is to do with conscription laws (those can be changed by spending political power and is located at the top left of the laws and government section, click on that to change conscription laws when you need it.)

Tip #5: Early Research Choices & Why

11 separate tabs of research categories can make it hard to know what to pick first.

Again the tutorial gives you some vague impression of the what to aim for but doesn't really explain too well why those are best.

In general anything that increases production efficiency cap, factory output, construction speed and research speed are best researched as early as possible. So Production, Basic Machine Tools, Mechanical Computing and the like.

The first couple of years before the war starts are usually best spent improving your industry and generally building up. You will also have to make a choice between concentrated industry or dispersed industry. The difference is basically whether you want the most bonus production from concentrated or feel you want the added resistance to damage from dispersed industry at a cost of some production.

Also never research anything ahead of time if you can help it the penalty it carries to research speed seldom makes it worthwhile.

Tip #6: National Focuses to Aim for First

That extra research slot is what I often go for first.

Most of the major nations have their own unique national focus trees so take this tip as a rough guideline.

Until you know what you are doing and have specific plans in mind for what you want to achieve with your chosen nation a good first set of focuses to aim for are the ones that lead to the extra research slot.

Along with the research slot, anything that gives free factories or building slots are also good choices as well.

Tip #7: Division Templates

This really needed it's own tutorial.

Another area the tutorial seems to lack on a little and something that is fairly complex and intimidating. It only applies to land divisions such as armour and infantry and you can only change, edit or make new ones by accruing 'Army Experience' (Seen at the top centre of the UI with a gold star.) This is typically gained by engaging in combat or training exercises.

There are likely some in-depth guides for this out there when you want to really start getting into the fine details of this. Adding support companies to your divisions is usually a good first step once you have those unlocked.

Adding artillery companies to your infantry divisions is a good way to vastly improve their offensive capabilities.

Also adding in maintenance companies to armour divisions can help deal with reliability issues and I also find adding in Anti-Air support can be beneficial as well.

Tip #8: Construction, Civilian & Military Factories

So many factories to build, so little time.

In short each province has access to a number of building slots for factories and dockyards. Civilian factories are basically what build all your other buildings as well as produce consumer goods to keep the population happy and their output can be traded for resources from other nations.

At the start of the game it is best I find to start building civilian factories, I don't generally max out every province, leaving some slots for additional military factories when the war starts. You can convert civilian factories to military ones as well if need be.

Other buildings are typically given a level of construction that doesn't affect the building slots, such as infrastructure, state anti-air, radar and the air base.

Military factories build all your military equipment from rifles and uniforms to tanks and aircraft.

Dockyards are not unsurprisingly the buildings responsible for constructing your naval units.

Tip #9: Front-Lines, Offensive Lines & Battle-Plans

A very basic battle plan.

This confused me for a while when I first started as well but I think the best way to view battle-plans is they are orders for your AI commanders.

Front-lines are set on borders of other nations and will be where the army you assign to it will move to and build up.

An offensive line is basically where you would like that particular army to attempt to move the front-line to. It's basically an attack-move to break it down to it's very basics and your divisions will attempt to take everything between the current front-line and the offensive line.

The spear-head is a more focused form of the offensive line, it will take the provinces in the order in which you painted the spearhead line. Useful if you want to push toward specific areas like ports, air-bases and victory points.

A fallback line is basically the opposite of an offensive line, it's where your units will reposition if pushed back into friendly territory. So you can use it to make use of defensive terrain like rivers or even forts.

The garrison area command is something I use a lot to make sure my armies cover all important things that need defending in my own territoryl like victory locations, ports etc

You can also issue the command to perform a training exercise to increase the experience level of your troops and to gain a little bit of army experience. It does however consume equipment (and I imagine supplies when that is added.) So make sure you have a surplus when using it.

Tip #10: Production & Trade

The screen where you build the weapons to fight with.

The production tab is basically where you assign equipment production orders to your military factories and dockyards so long as you have the material to run them for that particular order. The more factories you assign to something, the faster you will produce things.

There are some quirks to this system such as production efficiency, which basically means how well that factory line produces things and the longer they produce the same thing the more efficient they get at it.

Trade is a little strange in this game as you don't technically trade one resource for another, you trade the output of a civilian factory (essentially removing it from your use) to gain resources from someone.

There is no stockpiling of resources so trading to build up a surplus is seldom required, ensure you have enough to keep your factories running and that should be good enough.

Games I Love: War for the Overworld

To anyone whom has read my blog up to this point likely will not be the least bit surprised to see War for the Overworld pop up on it. My love of games like Dungeon Keeper and Evil Genius make it an almost foregone conclusion I had my eye on the game since I heard about it but didn't get it until last year. In general I usually wait before purchasing a game for several reasons, usually price related but also I like to get 'complete' editions with all DLC's. That said it was worth the wait by far and certainly stands up as a very good spiritual successor to the venerable Dungeon Keeper series.

The beginnings of any Underlords domain.

Much like the Dungeon Keeper games you start off with your dungeon heart, a handful of loyal worker imps and enough gold to get you started. From there you dig out tiles to make space for rooms, those rooms not only serve functions like feeding your minions or letting them rest but also each room generally attracts certain kinds of minions. So far so Dungeon Keeper however this to me feels like it is dialed up to eleven as there are a lot of new features and additions which make it just as good as it's older inspiration if not better in some cases.

The veins of evil, the talents of dungeon management!

From there you expand your reach to find gold and artifacts, research new spells, items and traps thanks to the new talent tree style veins of evil all to bring your nefarious objectives to fruition. The veins of evil deserves a special mention I think, as you spend your sins to unlock everything from new rooms to traps, summons and more.

Usually the objective is defeating an enemy in some way for the most part but the missions have a lot of variety and some of them can be particularly challenging to pull off on your first attempt. Some missions have you commanding a limited number of minions with no dungeon or reinforcements to support you. Others see you facing off against multiple opponents keeping you constantly on your toes as you attempt to defeat multiple attacks from different directions.

You also cast spells and use constructs and rally flags to give you more control over your minions and any battles that will eventually erupt. The battles can also get quite crazy in their scale at times which is both a good and a bad point but I'll get to that later.

Battles are fun to watch but can be a little chaotic when trying to target specific units with spells at times.

The sheer variety of creatures, spells and traps on offer took me a little by surprise to begin with. As they even opted to include the more beast like minions of the original Dungeon Keeper

Also props to the developers for calling on the vocal talents of Richard Ridings to voice Mendechaus (who acts as mentor and tormentor in equal part!) Which only makes any former Dungeon Keepers feel right at home in this game or at least it did for me.

A dungeon in all it's gold filled monster guarded glory!

Some tips for anyone starting out as a fledgling underlord would be these:

• Do not rush to expand as you may make it harder to defend yourself or starve yourself of gold before you find more.
• Use the prophecy spell early and often to help you plan out your dungeon as well as find any useful shrines, secrets, neutral rooms and creatures etc.
• Don't splash out on big rooms too early (by big I mean 5x5 or bigger.)
• Some rooms don't need to be perfectly square or rectangular to function such as the lair and beast den.
• Space is a key resource, only at certain sizes do you get more usable objects in a room such as training dummies, some rooms benefit from having fortified walls as well so keep that in mind when planning.
• Try to keep your workers alive, high level workers are massively useful.
• Need to get rid of some annoying enemy trap that your minions can't seem to reach no matter where you place the rally flag. Use possession on a ranged or flying minion and take matters into your own hands (or claws/tentacles.)

The game isn't without it's flaws but in the grand scheme of things they are relatively minor:

• Large battles can be frustratingly chaotic, if you are trying to cast spells into the fray or possess that one minion it can be hard to even find them in a pile of explosions and flailing limbs.
• Some maps can feel very cramped, more of a gripe than an actual flaw but I feel some bigger maps and time to build up in certain missions would have made them less frustrating without affecting the challenge.
• Campaign pacing feels a little off at the start at least compared to Dungeon Keeper 2, just my opinion as I do love the campaign all the same the start just feels a bit 'fast' to me.

Overall this is a worthy modern version of Dungeon Keeper and has more than enough shiny new things to be a damned good game in it's own right. It has quite a selection of additional game modes if you invest in any of the DLC, everything from the return of 'My Pet Dungeon' to skirmishes and campaigns meaning you won't run out of things to do all that quickly. So this game gets a solid recommendation from me especially if you like myself loved Dungeon Keeper.

Now if you don't mind, I have an empire to conquer!

Games I Love: Enter the Gungeon

Now when it comes to Rogue-lites I've always had a bit of a thing for them when they are done right, things like Everspace, FTL, Binding of Isaac, Risk of Rain to name a few of my favourite ones to date. Enter the Gungeon caught my eye in large part due to it's cartoony and colourful aesthetic as well as it taking the theme of firearms and running with it in every aspect of the game from puns to enemies. Literally everything in this game is a play on that from the enemies bullets with guns and so many I wouldn't want to spoil.

The breach, where you choose your character before a run and do a lot of other things!

As you can see in the screenshot above this is usually the first thing you will see, the so called 'breach' where you select your character and do a lot of other things I won't spoil too much save for one. All four characters have their own passive ability, starting items and default infinite ammo weapon for example the marine is more accurate with all weapons and starts with a point of armour and a single use ammo call-in. The hunter starts with a very useful crossbow and a pet corgi who has a chance of digging up extra items. The convict starts with a sawn-off shotgun, a molotov cocktail and a passive of doing more damage if hit. Finally the pilot, he gets a lockpick item which can be used in place of finding keys to open chests as well as cheaper items from the in-gungeon stores.

Once you have selected your character you get dropped quite literally into the gungeon proper with the task of basically reaching the end. As with many rogue-lites however that is far easier said than done and each death is permanent. I find the combat in this game to be one of it's greatest strengths it is by and large skill based, thanks to the dodge roll mechanics (Dodge Roll is also the name of the dev's.)

The dodge roll itself provides some immunity frames for it's first half which you would know if you played the tutorial (and you should.) It is frankly essential as especially in rooms with lots of enemies it can quite literally turn into bullet hell.

Another thing which helps the game is the variety on offer in a lot of it's aspects, weapon and item variety as well as enemy variety. Enemies all have their own behaviour and AI as well as their own attacks and bullet patterns you need to learn so you don't find yourself thrown back to the breach.

Even after the time I have sunk into it I have yet to see all the weapons (I know the death screen at the end shows 15 runs total but I reset my save a while ago.) There is pretty much everything you can think of and some you likely didn't. AK-47's, UZI's, Tommy Guns, Shotguns of every flavour, bows, crossbows and many more of the 200+ that I just won't spoil. That isn't even getting into the host of passive and active items like health upgrades and molotov cocktails.

Resource management is also a key aspect, from your limited health to your better weapons which have limited ammo and can only be replenished by various ammo boxes (though if you are lucky you can buy some at shops too.)

It's harder than I thought to get good action screenshots in this!

When you get on a good run the game can be insanely fun, when you find the perfect selection of passive items and weapons and plow through the hordes of gundead with ease. The environments and the way they react to battles also keeps the gunplay pretty interesting, fighting in what looks like a library? Then expect there to be books and pages flying about as you and your enemies exchange fire. Whilst luck will always be a big part of rogue-lite games Enter the Gungeon feels genuinely more about skill.

Most all the weapons are at the very least interesting to use and vary in effectiveness from godlike to junk (I am looking at you unfinished gun!)

Boss battles are always interesting and often pretty tense experiences and I haven't seen much less beaten them all yet but as with the enemies there is quite a variety of bosses and even some secret ones as I understand it.

It's not a perfect game by any stretch and the following would best sum up the flaws I think it has:

• Somewhat punishing difficulty level: Whilst this has been improved with the latest content update (Advanced Gungeons & Draguns) it can still stomp all over you but a lot of the difficulty is now centered on the next flaw. 
• The battle against the random: If you don't get a decent weapon on the first floor even beating that first boss can be a grueling affair. Also if you get no ammo drops your better weapons will eventually run dry. Though the latest update did increase the in-run currency drops (brass) so you can sometimes alleviate the RNG with the shop on each floor.
• Wiki syndrome: This isn't the only rogue-lite to fall into this trap and Enter the Gungeon's Ammonomicon (the in game encyclopedia) does explain what most things do. Some mechanics like the way the curse stat works are never explained in game which, genuinely makes little sense to me. Meaning if you want to understand the ins and outs of the game you'll have to search for it outside of the game. 

In conclusion out of the many rogue-lite action games to emerge over the years and the fact this has had two pretty hefty free content updates make this among my favourite games of the last few years. Despite how hard the game can be and the frustration when you get a bad run it is one of the better rogue-lites out there and I see myself getting many more hours out of this.