Hello everyone,
I have no idea what game this might be about today ! Except for another older one.
It’s a Battle Droid today, which made me think of a few things … In the movie, these guys were pretty dumb things that would be sent in to battle in never ending waves. They didn’t have to be intelligent. They just kept on coming.
The lack of intelligence is probably what made me pick out the backing picture … Ascendancy was a game that came out in 1995 and it was a pretty ok space strategy game. Or rather, that was the intent. The AI was very broken, so it was essentially more like a space sandbox game.
I remember that it had a few nice ideas in there though, including planet development and the ships. But it came out in the era of Master of Orion, Master of Orion 2 (Moo2) and a few others, like Galactic Civilisations. With severely broken AI, it had no chance against Moo2, a game so legendary that they recently remade it. I’ll talk about Moo2 later in the month.
The other genre that the battledroids represent is Tower Defense. This is where you mastermind the defence against a never ending series of waves of enemies. (The levels do usually end). My favourite of these is probably Defense Grid 1.
The levels are usually created so that you can set up a maze of towers to shoot down the aliens as they approach their goal. The more convoluted the maze, the longer it takes them to get to the goal and the more shooting time your towers have. You’ll also add in combined arms towers to do things like Boom many aliens at once, to slow the aliens down or towers that boost the income you get from them.
The challenge of these games is usually increased by having to balance keeping a certain amount of resources in reserve against having a defense strong enough to keep the baddies out. With Defense Grid 1, the more reserve you had, the more interest you’d earn on those reserves and eventually you’d get far more resources in interest than in shooting the aliens. But you have to keep improving the defenses in order to match increasingly powerful aliens.
Defense Grid 1 had a sequel … but the sequel changed a few mechanics around and didn’t hold my interest. It did come out in 2014 though, which is probably when my outsides were at their worst and I wasn’t playing the games much.
Tower Defence is a massive genre too.
That’s Creeper World 3, where instead of fighting individual alien enemies, you’re fighting a sea. One aspect of Creeper World 3 was to balance quickly grabbing territory and therefore power generation with being able to defend the territory you grab.
It’s a great genre. Very tactical. Very frustrating at times. The levels represent puzzles and often there’s only a couple of feasible solutions to beating them.
A good challenge.
There’s actually another Creeper World game out now, Creeper World 4. I’ve been enjoying watching a playthrough of it. Not sure if I’m going to get it though, I’ve tried Creeper World 3 a few times and I always run out of steam on it.
And I have a few more of this genre too that I haven’t played enough yet !
Have fun, play what you want, be well, stay safe. See you all tomorrow.