Strategy
Go Forth, Young Pilot, in #EvochronMercenary
1I occasionally check out what Steam has going on, which usually results in waking up several hours later surrounded by receipts for games I have no memory of buying. I suspect at some point there will be no more games to buy, and I’ll finally be out of the woods…which is like saying that some day Charlie Sheen will kick his drug habit because there’ll be no more cocaine left, but that’s not the point of this post (sorry if you came here looking for “Charlie Sheen Coke Habit”).
The last item on Steam’s banner rotation was Evochron Mercenary, a space flight/combat/trading/mining/kitchen sink sim. I took it as a portent, since just the other day one of my friends had mentioned the need for another Freelancer. After looking over the feature set to EM, I downloaded the demo and took it for a spin.
The first thing that was set spinning was my head. As I may have mentioned here or in other places, I’m drawn to complex, in-depth strategy and simulation games, but I rarely have the time or patience to sit down and learn or to play them. EM was an exception. I stuck around through 75% of the continuous tutorial (it can be had in pieces as well) before I shut it down and figured the best learning experience is in dying on my own.
EM is a free-form sandbox space sim. You can pick up missions from the station to earn money, or you can trade goods from port to port, or mine, or tackle pirates, or customize your ship, or build space stations, or land on planets, or find hidden areas of the universe, or just drive yourself insane trying to keep all of this straight in the face of a control scheme that would make the space shuttle interface look like an iPhone. Really, to start, you just need to know how to move, how to jump, and how not to crash into things like stations…or planets. Everything else can be had in time, as time allows.
The thing that might really sell me is the multiplayer aspect. We played a heck of a lot of Freelancer back in the day, running a local server 24/7 just for our local group, getting together to run missions and goof around. There was no driving impetus pushing us forward, except to blow up pirates and make a lot of cash. But we had fun, and a certain kind of fun that we haven’t been able to find in this “advanced” age of massive multiplayer servers or tea-bagging spawn campers. EM may allow us to have that kind of fun once more, but with the feature-horsepower that a lag of several years can provide. While EM offers much of the same types of gameplay that Freelancer offered, it seems to move things along by providing Newtonian physics-based movement, ship customization, and even the ability to reap benefits from controlling a star system or building a space station.
I’m not convinced that this is the kind of game that can be enjoyed for an extended period of time alone, since it doesn’t seem to have much of a central narrative outside of “go out and do stuff”. The server is limited to 35 players (the server is downloadable and you can run a personal edition for you and your community) which is gated by the horsepower of the machine it runs on, so we’re not talking MMO-scale here, or even a greater community. You won’t be playing with strangers, unless you plan on operating a server farm on some 24/7 high end hardware. That means that the potential long term enjoyment of this game may lie in the throwback intimacy of the early days when we had to run our own servers that were limited in access and were only fun when everyone (all handful of them) were online at the same time.
That’s not a slam on EM, because this kind of private universe is just what we’ve been asking for. The real shocker is that the developer is a one man shop. This dude must be some kind of world-crushing super genius in order to keep pumping out games in this series, alone, and each with increasing depth. I think that fact alone means that EM is one indie game I can get behind, because I enjoy it, it’s my cup of tea, the price is comfortable ($25), and an update on the EM site hints at upcoming improvements that sound even better than what we have now: better visuals, the ability to move around on the planet surface, and more.
There’s a demo available on the EM site, although not through Steam, so if you have any interest in sandbox space sims, give it a shot. The demo allows you access to everything the universe has to offer for 90 minutes, which was long enough to let me blow myself up a few times, tackle several missions, upgrade my ship, and learn some of the finer points of interstellar navigation.
A Suffering Bastard–My Foray Into Strategy Gaming
1Back when I was younger (10 B.I., or roughly 10 years Before Internet), I had a lot of time on my hands. Who didn’t, right? During summer vacations, my brother and I would wake up and race to the computer, and the one who reached it first had the right to it for the rest of the day. We played games like Phantasie, anything Ultima, and the SSI Gold Box D&D series.
Since then, though, time has become more and more of a premium for the factors one would expect when one becomes a Responsible Adult™. Although gaming is still my primary hobby, and I do devote most of my personal time to it, I have no where near as much time now as I did back then. However, my mind apparently believes that I do, because it keeps pushing me to buy, and to want to play, strategy games.
I’ve bought quite a few in the past few years: Sengoku, Hearts of Iron III, Sword of the Stars, King Arthur: The Roleplaying Game, and probably more I can’t remember. Most of the time, I get through the tutorial and then realize that I have no friggin idea what the hell I’m supposed to be doing. It’s daunting to see a map with tiny indicators dotting the surface, with spreadsheets and numbers and cryptic designations that only career military personnel can appreciate. We don’t get those massive manuals anymore; now we get click-click-click tutorials that we’re expected to memorize at the end of some 30-odd hours of eye-bleeding study. Even when we do have something to reference, like a wiki or an integrated help system, the explanation is so dense that I get worn out just on the reading alone.
The sad realization, then, is that I just don’t have the time to sit down and tackle these things in any form. I want to, for those times when I do have a few hours to myself, when the family is out shopping or when I have a day off from work. I envision myself sitting at the computer, feet up on the desk with the keyboard on my lap, carefully mulling over production decisions and troop strengths along various warfronts. I like to think that given enough time, I can decipher what the grids are telling me, or that I can memorize which province is producing what unit, how many, and how long it’ll take to move them where they’re needed. The reality is that even when I do have the time, I turn into a catatonic idiot when faced with the first map of my tiny, starting kingdom. I have no idea what to do, where to start, where to go, or how to go about it. In the absence of any direction, I usually end up shutting down and uninstalling the game. At least for a few months, until I decide to give it another go.
I suppose that if I only played in this genre than it wouldn’t be so difficult for me to stick with it. There’s tropes in the strategy genre, just like there are tropes in the MMO genre (that are generally railed against), and immersing myself in those standards would reduce the ramp-up time for each successive title. But it’s the initial hump, the “learning wall” instead of the “learning curve” that is part of the actual attraction of the genre – the deep, boundless depth – that is the biggest barrier responsible for my consistent defeat.
