The 10 Things I am Looking Forward to Seeing In X4: Foundations

Ah, sandbox space games and me go all the way back to Frontier: Elite 2 so when I heard a new X game was dropping out of warp soon it was hard for me to not look forward to it. I have played a fair amount of the X series over the years from X2: The Threat to X3: Reunion and Terran Conflict so as I learned more about X4 I got more and more hyped for it. I won't be buying it on release as my PC is too rickety right now but it will be among the first purchases I make once I upgrade my PC.

So here are ten things I am looking forward to the most in X4: Foundations gleaned from the preview videos I have seen so far:

1. Fly Any Ship: This has always been a staple feature of the X games (save for Rebirth but we don't talk about that.) The ability to fly any ship from the smaller scout fighter to massive capital ships is always a win in my book.
2. Exploration: I love exploring in most games where it is possible but I love it in sandbox space games. From what I have been able to glean from the various videos and articles I have seen there are various wrecks and stations to find out there in the void which makes me wonder what other cool things exploration in X4 will have.
3. Dynamic Economy: Another staple feature of the X games and something I have always found pretty neat. Not just a feature for traders either as any smart pirates knows finding a good trade loot means lots of loot, yarrr!
4. Living Galaxy: The X games to me have always done a good job of creating the illusion of a living galaxy, the fact that things can happen with or without out. You can fly into a sector and find a battle going on or be stiffed out of your trade profits because that other trader landed first. This time around it seems they have really gone all out with it, factions can build stations, expand, go to war which is going to make every game very different.
5. Empire Building: Start off with one tiny ship and eventually have an entire fleet, stations and shipyards, almost makes this seem like it's going to be X4: The 4X. The new modular station building looks especially interesting.
6. Map Control of Your Ships and Stations: I think this is going to be a big improvement given from what I can tell you can control your fleets and such from the map screen like an RTS. Something I always struggled with in the previous games was managing a large empire.
7. Walking on Stations and Ships: Not exactly a feature I ever consider vital but I'll always appreciate that extra level of immersion. Being able to wander around ships and stations on top of flying around in space, I just hope it's not as clunky as it was in X: Rebirth.
8. Research: This one kind of caught my eye especially when you add in all the empire management aspects, though I do wonder just how in depth it will be or whether it will just be aimed at unlocking more exotic goodies, only time will tell. If it includes things like improving any ships you build, improving your crews and captains as well I think that could be very interesting.
9. More Accessible Mining: At least that is how it seems and sounds, in most space sandbox games if you give me a choice between mining or trading I'll usually take mining. In previous X games it always seemed like you needed a massive amount of set-up to even start doing it, however it now seems to be something you can do in any ship, slap a few mining lasers on a fighter or freighter and off you go which I much prefer.
10. New Universe (Kind Of): I am genuinely looking forward to seeing how the X universe has changed, different factions compared to before the story of the universe having moved on. 

Games I Love: Middle-Earth Shadow of War

As a big fan of the original how could I not love it's sequel which seems to dial everything up to eleven. I initially avoided it due to it's use of micro-transactions, which in a game as pricey as Shadow of War was more than a little dubious to me so I waited for the so called definitive edition and got it will all it's DLC's so, patience can indeed be a virtue! I'll apologise in advance for the screenshots, not many good action shots I'm afraid nor even shots of the interface.

I will do my best to avoid any story spoilers where possible but there may be one or two that creep in that I can't avoid. So, what is Middle-Earth: Shadow of War? It's an action game with RPG elements set in Tolkien's fabled Lord of the Rings setting. You take on the role of Talion, a ranger from Gondor stuck between the world of the living and the dead, as for why well, spoilers I don't want to give for those whom haven't played the first game. Personally I love the interpretation these games have on the setting so I found the story compelling enough to keep wanting to see what happened next but no spoilers!

Obligatory epic shot!

If you have played Assassins Creed or any of the Batman games you will feel pretty at home with the combat system here. There's just a lot more to it given the extra abilities Talion has access to this time around. There is something very satisfying about the combat system when you start getting access to more abilities and evading an Olog's club only to drop into slow motion and head-shot that archer before countering the dual wielding savage with a swift knee to the gut before using chain-drain to recover all your health and turn a ten against one into a five on five brawl.

There is even a more RPG like gear system in place now giving you not only different bonuses but sets and their bonuses too. Each piece of gear can also be slotted with one of three colours of gems doing  variety of things such as increasing damage, giving you life-steal or giving orcs you recruit a bit of a level bump. It's basic but I still found it enjoyable to get a nice new sword with a fun special effect or a new piece of armour which stopped me getting stomped on so much.

This was my end game Talion.

Much like a lot of things from the first game the so called Nemesis system makes a return dialed up to eleven as well. The orc captains return as a core feature to fight against or dominate and turn to fight for you, it's this feature which so many people have their own stories to tell about including myself. They can ambush you out of no-where, cheat death and return whether due to you killing them or them dying in your service, they can betray you, they'll remember if you ran away or burned, poisoned or even cursed them. I had one orc who was I believe a tank but also a spear throwing hunter with one of the nastiest perks imagined called 'no chance'. Basically when you get dropped to zero life you get a chance to fight back if you time your counter attack right. No chance removes that meaning if they drop you to zero you are gone.

Now this orc even followed me to different regions always showing up at the worst times and jamming a cursed spear into uncomfortable places. Not only that he always seemed to cheat death and return despite burning him, poisoning him even cleaving him in half cross-ways, he just returned and returned, more of him replaced by crude orcish metal each time. Of course him killing me kept powering him up. I even sent 3 of my own captains to ambush him and helped them but he ended up killing 2 of them and then taking me out until he was basically a boss fight in his own right.

I find the sieges to be a lot of fun, so much so that I think I must've done nearly two dozen online ones.

The forts and sieges are one of the new features of the sequel which sees you forming your orc captains into assault leaders in order to take over each of the five regions forts. Each fort has an overlord and anywhere up to six warchiefs (and their bodyguards) defending it. The warchiefs maintaining so called siege upgrades making it more challenging to attack so you usually have to do a bit of preparing ahead of time. Be it outright killing the warchiefs, dominating them to your side or infiltrating your own captains and turning their own bodyguards against them. There's nothing quite so satisfying as watching your orcs leading their former warchief into an ambush and pulling his head off. I find attacking to be a little more fun than defending for the most part which is unusual for me, the forts themselves are pretty impressive and have a style based on the overlords tribe.

The overlord fight is for all intents and purposes a boss fight, all your captains save your bodyguard and any turned bodyguards of the overlords remain outside meaning you better be sure you can take him. Ologs (basically war trolls) are a personal nemesis of mine as they need a very different approach to defeat.

After taking a fort you assign warchiefs and an overlord to defend it, purchase your own siege upgrades which you also purchase on attack as well and they all have counters and uses depending on various things. Spiked walls is likely by favourite on defence as it means enemies can't climb over the walls anywhere near as easily.

The pseudo online aspect also returns in the form of vendetta's and conquests. The former is basically you avenging another player who died to a certain captain which gives both some rewards and is back from the first game. The conquests however are new and see you attacking a copy of other players forts which makes the whole capture and upgrading of forts take on a whole new meaning as these are a fantastic way to get gear for yourself and training orders to improve your captains.

Like even the greatest of games it is not without it's faults and some of them can be pretty trying at times. Just a few flaws and gripes I ran into whilst playing:

• The movement and targeting system: For the most part movement is more than fine but more than a few times Talion got stuck on a ledge and refused to jump off and took a bit more than an arrow to the knee for it which can be punishing on the harder difficulty settings. Also there's no sure fire way to lock a target so that execute you just saved your might for might miss that captain and just snuff out one of his grunts instead. 
• Difficulty settings are a bit out of whack: This is more a gripe than a flaw, initially I mostly played on Nemesis as I found it the most balanced overall. Gravewalker makes it far too punishing and captains far too spongy to be fun. Brutal is a nice mix of ensuring you and the orcs both do a lot of damage but the rate at which captains can level up and the 1 turn timer on nemesis missions can leave you unable to recruit orcs if you aren't careful.
• Gear system is a bit basic: Again more of a gripe but the gear system could have been fleshed out so much more as it stands you end up scrapping most gear for currency in the end.
• Hands Off Pit Fights: Personally I think it would have been more fun if you got to control your orc captains and overlords when you sent them into pitfights, as it stands its more of a dice roll and even your legendary orc can lose to a lower level regular one if their traits hard counter each other. 

If you loved Shadow of Mordor then Shadow of War is basically that ramped up to crazy levels with lots of extra stuff. Personally I think it's a good game even if the install size made me wince (some 110GB.) I found myself playing at one point just to find the best orc captains to recruit or just roaming through a camp stomping, stabbing and arrow flinging just for the spectacle.

Obligatory shot of Mount Doom.

Games I Love: Space Pirates and Zombies 2!

I was originally going to do this one first as I have put the most time into it since purchasing it last Christmas but figured I'd do them in order, because more content is good! This game was seemingly quite polarising so far as fans of the original went but personally I prefer this one to the first one for reasons of which I will go into more detail later on in this post. In short sandbox space games such as Elite and Freelancer are among my most loved type of sci-fi space game (alongside 4X strategy ones.)

This is the campaign galaxy map, there are others you can use if you go for sandbox mode!

This screen is where you will spend a lot of your time in Space Pirates and Zombies 2, the galaxy map. Here is where you will do everything from assembling your mother-ship, docking at star-bases, hunting down enemies or in a lot of cases at the start fleeing from them. The galaxy map itself actually really does bring across the more living and dynamic galaxy this game possesses, the AI captains can do almost anything that you can do, they roam the galaxy, trading, looting, fighting, upgrading their ships and cursing the void as they sail to the nearest station in an escape pod. It is not just window dressing either, you could literally sit in a corner and watch the galaxy changing around you.

The mother-ship this time around takes a more direct role in the action and is the ship you will likely spend most of your time piloting. Other ships are now called strike-craft and act as your support ships, featuring many of the hulls now rendered in full and colourful 3D, another departure that met with seemingly mixed reactions compared to the original. You issue context orders usually with the 'E' key to your strike-craft and can even fly them yourself if you choose, personally I love capital ships so I always take the helm of the mother-ship. You can fire and even aim all the weapons yourself which is useful for knocking damaged parts off enemy mother-ships or hitting various power-ups that can pop up. However my favourite mode as someone whom loves capital ships is the so called 'battle-wagon' mode, this lets the ships AI auto-target for you prioritising the ship you lock onto but enabling all your other weapons to fire at any other targets when they aren't in your targets firing arc.

It's hard to do the explosions justice in a screenshot!

The battles themselves are pretty spectacular to take part in which is one reason I enjoy the move to 3D over the 2D of the previous game even if it is just a cosmetic one. You fly your ship around on a 2D plane but everything is rendered in full 3D, the explosions in particular are pretty spectacular especially if you take out any of the larger mother-ships and bases later on. The modular nature of the mother-ships means that damaging one part of it more than another can actually break off that part, enemy getting away from you? Just hammer his engines til they fall off. That wing with the twin particle hoses tearing you a new one? Shoot it off! It is also part of what makes the explosions pretty satisfying to watch. Escape pods flying off as explosions ripple along the hull just before the entire ship blasts into three pieces, I may be a game-play over graphics person but I still appreciate a good explosion.

Things start off pretty small with you not having many parts but eventually you can build quite a monster!

The mother-ship is also central to the new ship design system, you construct it using a variety of different building blocks around it's central core. Sub-cores are the first of these they basically for the.. Well, core of your ship they determine the shape of your ship and what ports will be available for things such as wings, noses and engines. All of those have different affects, stat increases and possible weapons attached to them as well as coming in small, medium and large sizes (requiring 1, 2 or 3 relevant open ports in order to be attached to your ship.) You can make nice neat shapes, you can have a mother-ship wider or longer as you prefer. To begin with you generally just bolt on whatever you can salvage or scrounge up but later on you'll be able to buy and even have ship parts delivered to you via a catalogue system if you don't want to fly around to find things yourself. You can also choose the weapons of your strike-craft as well, as before your strike-craft are not just acquired from looting blueprints from wrecks but you also level them up by acquiring more of the blueprints of the same ships. You can even use the tractor beam in combat to re-attach parts of your ship that have fallen off, never really used it too often but it's a nice touch still!

As before you also level up but rather than it being a kind of research system you earn certain unlocks at every level such as more sub-cores for your mother-ship or access to another strike-craft hangar but also a randomly selected perk. These form your stat increases, more health, increased armour to stop ship parts breaking off, faster reloading etc. I will admit this is the one area I think I miss the original game on in making your own build with the research points as it were but it really is just a minor gripe for me.

The living galaxy it creates is fairly compelling.

Now I mentioned near the start there was a living dynamic galaxy so I'll go into more detail about that. Every single one of the 200 or so AI captains that roam the galaxy pretty much can do what you do (with the exception of starting a faction.) They loot resource stockpiles, sell their loot, upgrade their ships, befriend or destroy other captains not unlike you. The various factions expand, grow, wage wars all with or without your interaction. Especially at the start of the game you are a very small ship, bolting on junk-parts and just trying to gather enough resources to survive. Early on most aspiring captains will likely cut their teeth in the various arenas at each star-base to get some XP and resources which early on are hard to come by.

You can join one of the existing factions and help them in their fights and conquests or even make your own faction. It's a fairly simplistic empire building aspect to the game but I still appreciate it being there. You basically build your starbases, upgrade them, defend them and hire other captains to man them for a cut of their loot.

Resources still play a large part in the game, to begin with you'll be scrounging from various slowly regenerating resources piles scattered around the galaxy or later on extorting them from enemies or pillaging star-bases for them. Rez returns as the ever sought after resource that acts as fuel for your mother-ship to traverse the galaxy and feed your crew. The crew or goons maintain your ship, not enough and your mother-ships hull starts to deteriorate too many and your rez supplies will burn up fast. Then there is scrap, the post-apocalypse in space equivalent of money and the resource most people accept as trade. It may not be the deepest or most complex example of a living/dynamic galaxy but I found this aspect to be infinitely compelling.

The zombies of course also return to turn all that is living into twisted hunks of ship and flesh but I'll avoid too many spoilers about them. Suffice to say I found them no less challenging to fight than the first one.

In addition to the story campaign which sees the continuation of the story from the original, the return of some of it's characters and some hilarious voice acting you also have the sandbox mode. This has so many options for tweaking and changing the game and it's set-up. From faction sizes, zombie and bandit strength, several different galaxy maps if or when the zombies even appear and the like.

It is of course far from perfect as with everything:

• Lack of tooltips and mouse-overs: For the most part the UI is alright but when it comes to ship design and the shop interface some mouse-over tool-tips would be massively helpful in figuring out if part a is better than part b.
• Slow Start: At the start you won't find yourself engaging in many battles outside of the arena as even the junk flying bandits will stomp your feeble ship meaning it's a lot of scavenging and scrounging. It does add to the whole post galactic apocalypse feel but still it can be a little slow.
• Threat Level Early On: Whilst later on skill and a good mother-ship and strike-craft set-up you can defeat higher level threats or even multiple aggressors, early on though engaging higher threat level targets is usually just the end of you.

I admit to being biased with this game as I love free-roaming sandbox space games but the sheer amount of ways you can configure the sandbox and the story campaign as well it's hard not to recommend this. It's fun, colourful, compelling and I've gotten a ton of enjoyment out of it myself but then I am biased, I love me my space games! Now if you don't mind I better take the mother-ship out to go stomp a rather uppity fellow whom is trying to slap my star-base around.

Even fleshy zombie ships explode quite nicely!

Old Games I Still Love: Space Pirates and Zombies

This game holds a special place in my gaming heart for a few reasons, first off it was the very first game I bought into early access for back when Kick-starter and the like were just taking off. Secondly this took me back to older games in my child-hood, top-down space shooters with a sort of simplistic thrust-momentum physics engine. I was initially just going to look at the second game but if becoming a blogger isn't a good excuse for revisiting old games I loved, then nothing ever will be! Also it's the most Halloween themed game I could find in my collection that was also a space game so, win-win!

Whilst each element of the game is fairly simple the way they all combine together makes for some surprising depth you may not expect from the screenshots. At a glance it looks like a top-down space shooter, using a basic thrust and momentum system as I mentioned before but there is a lot more to it than first appears.

The battle portion of the game is as you would expect where you will be spending the majority of your play-time. You orient your ship, aim and fire your weapons with the mouse cursor and use the keyboard for thrusting, changing which ship you control. You then typically perform a variety of missions (escorting, blowing up toxic waste, destroying satellites, destroying enemies to name a few) or just generally roam around in the sectors looking for loot, resources and enemies to blow up. The variety of ships you can eventually get and fly along with the weapons and other items you can outfit yourself with really add a lot to this and it's helped by some impressive 2D artwork and special effects, the explosions and wrecks of ships I personally find particularly impressive.

A relatively small battle but it's zoomed out and these are some of the larger ships!

All that alone would be fairly impressive but then you add in the fact there is also some fleet management and ship design. You never fly alone, you can have various other ships and can give them various behaviours and stances or even order them directly from a pause screen tactical map. Destroying a ship you don't have will give you parts of it's blueprint eventually meaning you can build it for yourself. Weapon and item blueprints can also be purchased (or looted from the smoldering wrecks) of stations eventually giving you a vast arsenal to customise your fleet with. The ships themselves have various hard-points that you can customise the weapons of depending on the ship type and the weapons you have access to. The mothership only occasionally features in certain kinds of encounters and story missions but it acts as your base of sorts, if it gets destroyed, game over.

The ship design and hangar screen, whilst you can't design the hulls, weapons and other utilities you can!

You can further customise the way you prefer to play via the research system which is basically like an RPG leveling system of sorts. Data can be accumulated mostly via destroying enemies, as mission rewards and just found in crates, get enough and you level up giving you points to spend on improving various aspects of your rag-tag fleet. In general you can improve whatever you think you will get the most use out of, for example if you prefer cannons to beam weapons you can just improve them, shields, armour, hull, cloaking and more can all be boosted in effectiveness to make for some interesting ways to play if you ask me. Especially as you find more blueprints and ships to make use of them on.

The research screen is where you spend all your hard earned level ups!

Also there is a resource management aspect to the game some have already been mentioned, REZ is the primary resource it is mined from asteroids, given from mission rewards and even from destroyed ships. You use it to build new ships, buy blueprints and given how many ships you can often lose it is arguably the most important resource. Next up is the crew or 'goons' having crew aboard your ships makes them more effective, enabling them to fight off boarding parties, repair the ships hull and the like. They are also sometimes used to trade with at stations for usually to bribe your way through a warpgate rather than fight through it.

The galaxy is randomly generated at the start of the game and you have some options for customising it too!

And also we have the exploration side of things, you move around the galaxy completing missions for each sectors self contained civilian or military factions whom may also involved a third faction and later a fourth faction) the bounty hunters. Generally as you knock over the various warp-gates to unlock access to new sectors you complete missions, level up, get ship and item blueprints until you can progress to the higher level areas whilst also following the story.

The bounty hunters, added in a post release patch usually only attack you if you annoy one of the factions in the systems they 'protect' a lot. You can pay off any bounty you have accrued if you don't feel like messing with them but the ships they fly are among the best so, acquiring the blueprints can make the risk worthwhile. Just be careful if you do, they can jam your motherships warp drive and prevent you from escaping unless you pay or fight them off.

The system map, beware the ire of the bounty hunters they can ruin your day pretty fast!

There is a final aspect but it feels a bit like a spoiler so read this section at your own peril. The zombies have their own ecology which differs massively from how you play up to that point. They typically don't use shields for their ships and generally just have rapid hull regeneration, also they 'fire' zombie clusters at your ship whom then try to beat their way inside and board them. If your crew fails to fight them off and the ships health drops to zero rather than exploding the ship gets turned into a zombie version and then starts attacking meaning you can often find your own ships attacking you. The zombies can be truly terrifying as even the largest ships can succumb if enough zombies board it which can cause a spiral of destruction, needless to say they are definitely the main antagonists and a very interesting one at that.

This was my first early access purchase and it turned into an impressive game especially given it was made by only two people. Space combat and exploration games will always pique my interest and this is just one of the many games of it's type I love. Had it just been a simplistic top-down space shooter I may have just ignored it but all the various aspects make for something with far more depth than first appears.

Sandbox space games will always hold a special place in my heard regardless of how deep they are, ever since I first stumbled an old copy of Frontier: Elite 2 as a teen. It's no EVE Online in terms of depth but there's enough complexity and general fun in this that kept me occupied for quite a while. Whether it was hunting down that last ship blueprint to make my rag-tag fleet awesome or just respeccing for a completely different play-style. Even the defeats didn't make me put it down, hard battles that tore your ships apart and depleted my resources often had me pondering how to change my fleet and approach whilst mining more resources. I distinctly remember my typical shields up and guns blazing approach not working at a certain point and I reworked my entire fleet into a cloaking, bomb launching strike force. It took a while to get the hang of those slow moving explosives at first whilst micromanaging the targets of my others ships but when it worked, I was turning even the toughest enemy ships into so much space junk, floating off into the void.

It isn't without it's flaws however:

• Difficulty Spikes: Depending on the galaxy you generate you can have some brutal difficulty spikes in smaller galaxies or find yourself grinding through dozens of trivial warp-gates just to find one blueprint. Thankfully you can customise how big you want the galaxy to be, the prevalence of blueprints and the base difficulty.
• Can Get Grindy in Regard to Resources/Blueprints: Early on it's not so bad as the ships are small and cheap to build and you don't have a massive amount of space for reserves. Later on in the game larger ships and fancy guns can deplete your resources rapidly in heavy fighting sometimes meaning you have to fly off to a mining base and farm resources for a while. It becomes a lot more of a problem later in the game due to the zombies.
• Weapon and item stats given in bars not numbers: More of a UI gripe than a genuine flaw but no numbers are given in the UI it usually gives a comparative bar on the strengths of one weapon versus the one you are replacing it with. 

All in all this is an old favourite despite it's small flaws, it has enough aspects of sand-box space games to keep it interesting and a story to nudge things along. So if you are after some enjoyable shooting, looting and explosions you can't go far wrong with this little gem! Now if you'll excuse me, there are about a hundred zombies trying to board my ship...

Games I Love: Homeworld Remastered Collection

If you read my last blog post this one will likely not be a surprise, the Homeworld games took my love of sci-fi space battles and dialed it up to eleven. I played both the original Homeworld and Homeworld 2 to death way back in the day so when a remastered collection was announced it will surprise no-one that I bought it and didn't regret it. Seeing those battles with shinier graphics was always going to be a plus and not having to spend ages tinkering with resolutions and trying to get the older versions working on modern systems ensured this was a no-brainer for me. I'll do my best to avoid any spoilers given how epic I think the Homeworld story is so without further ado, here we go!

The remaster makes this particular shot I first remember the game for that much more epic!

Rather than looking at each game separately I'll just look at the collection as a whole given they use the same engine (or so it appears to me at least.) Now the Homeworld games for me always sat alongside RTS giants like Total Annihilation and Age of Empires.

It was also the first space strategy game I know of to make full use of fully 3D movement, you could approach enemies from above and below, as most space games of the time even if they were 3D were often locked to a single-plane.

Rather than a base as in most RTS games, you start off with a mothership which takes on the role of a base but you aren't bogged down by having to place buildings. Anything you have unlocked via the research ship can be produced from the mothership itself, everything from the tiniest of fighter craft to massive capital ships and everything in between. The economy of the game is fairly simple, you sent out resource collectors to harvest dust clouds, asteroids or wreckage for RU's or resource units and spend those for research and construction.

Some amazing vista's really show off the improved graphics.

From there on your usual objectives are to find and defeat the enemy which is where the real meat of the game lies, in it's combat. Each ship has its role to play from bombers unleashing their payloads against larger capital ships to interceptors who shoot down those bombers, to see a huge battle in motion is a sight to behold. The improved graphics certainly help in that regard, larger capital ships slowly moving into position as shells and ion beams slice through space, fighters and corvettes buzzing all around it's hard to sell how epic it can look in some screenshots, one of those games that just looks far better in motion.

Personally I think the story of the Homeworld games is amazing and was a large reason the game stuck with me so long though I am loathe to spoil any of the games story. It is that story which keeps the campaign mode ticking along, the cut-scenes whilst short usually do enough to keep you invested in the story and wondering what might happen next.

There is no veterancy system in place for units as there is in Deserts of Kharak but you are still encouraged not to mindlessly throw away your units. Your fleet is persistent from mission to mission and the resources you gather are finite, so your ships have more value simply based on that, losing a destroyer or heavy cruiser can be crushing. You can also capture enemy ships using Salvage Corvettes in the first game or Marine Frigates in the second (not everything can be captured but it can add another element to your engagements.) This can enable you to supplement your fleet if you are skilled enough to pull off such captures or even just a way of acquiring more resources if you retire those units.

The battles can get pretty epic, this I would say is a mid sized battle in a skirmish match!

Is the remastered collection perfect? No, it certainly has it's flaws and quirks though they are few and far between and in some cases for me they are more gripes than flaws:

• Lack of statistics or information in game relating to certain things: Mainly aimed at the first Homeworld but no numbers are given on how things change or improve between the various stances. For example aggressive stance makes your ships do more damage but move more slowly though it doesn't state by how much. The behavior's such as passive, aggressive and defensive are also likewise not really clearly explained, nor are the benefits of formations.
• Removal of the fuel mechanic in the original Homeworld: This is more of a gripe for me than an actual flaw. In the original Homeworld fighters and corvettes had fuel so they would need to dock with a support ship to refuel but it does make things overall easier to get into so as I said, more of a gripe than a flaw.
• Enemy Scaling in Homeworld 1: Whilst I am fairly certain that in Homeworld 2 the numbers of enemies tended to scale based on your fleet from the get go I am pretty sure it wasn't in the original. This can lead to some tricky spots in the campaign, as I found out to my cost on two or three occasions.

In the end thanks to having both campaigns and a robust skirmish mode it's hard not to recommend this to anyone looking for a space combat RTS. It has more than enough to do in it to keep you busy for a while. Also given the current lack of many new RTS games even coming out these days much less anything like Homeworld it just makes it all the more worthwhile to check out.

There are also some good mods out there even if a few of my favourites haven't made the transition yet so far as I know (Star Wars Warlords, The Point Defence Systems mods etc.) Which is one of the big pluses of being a PC gamer!

In my opinion though this is one of the better remasters out there, now if you'll excuse me an enemy fleet decided to pop over for a spot of tea and ion cannons!

And I got lucky timing that screenshot!

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.