Review: Stars in Shadow

Stars in Shadow is a 2 man MoO2 (Master of Orion) spiritual successor with attention to the comics style graphics, economy, and races integration focus. I bought this wanting a modern game without the massive late game micro, and more streamlined over all.

The economy is vastly improved over MoO2, with the micro hell mostly eliminated. While fairly simple it takes a while to figure some things out and get a feel for how to best balance generalist v. specialist worlds, financial power v. industrial power, and Return on Investment optimization v. optimizing real estate. And the good balance of these things changes as the game progresses. All in all the economy is a neat puzzle to figure out.

It has a race and world type system that is surprisingly engaging and acquiring populations for other biomes is a significant boost to your empire. Acquiring said pops requires an opportunistic mindset, or engaging in evil actions such as war and slavery. If I have one quibble it’s that games like these are for people who enjoy optimization and there are some races who are generalists so towards the end of the game when you have all types these make for worlds that are not as good as they could be with only specialized races. The game impact is small as late game buildings matter much more than pops, but for the obsessive optimizer the urge to genocide these pops is substantial. Some ideas to fix: 1. pops get gene, consciousness, or social engineering ‘upgrades’ and they all eventually end being just as good as each other. 2. A demographic transition kicks in mid game, so worlds never get completely full, and every pop is valuable instead of the late game situation where population is maxxed, growth is high, cloning is cheap, so the population slot is valuable, but the pop in it is not particularly valuable.

The tactical minigame (turn based) is too long for how basic it is especially in the mid game when there are tons of tiny ships. Perhaps change the control interface so that instead of commanding a dozen ships, you command squadrons of: capital ships + escorts or squadrons of small fast ships or an artillery line. The general rule for tactical games is you don’t want to have more than 7 things to control, and 5 is probably a better number unless its a grognard game.

It might be interesting to integrate the planetary bombardment/invasion box into the tactical mini-game as it gives choices of bombard v. fight, shoot missiles headed for the planet v. the ship. Defend/Attack transports. And it would probably be better if the tactical minigame had a turn limit, including unresolved planetary invasions to make those choices matter.

Another problem with the combat is some things are OP. Boarding is heavily overpowered, and missile swarms is nearly as bad. The easiest fix for boarding is to make it take several turns to resolve boarding actions, and ships carry boarders and crew between turns.

The game resolves too fast. Some of the terraforming and other tech lines are things you can explore after the game is functionally over. Perhaps I play too aggresively though.

It doesn’t work as a strategy of technology game. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s a great builder game, with some cool tricks you can use to really boost your growth. As a builder game wars are predetermined well before they start. There is no manufacturing or technology strategy that you can pull off in the middle of a war that will change how it’s going (Outside of the other dimensional being tech trades). So you build, make peace at any cost, and only fight wars that fucntion as a victory lap (or a victory check in case of narrow wins). Note: the player can do some things with logistics bases, especially as the Imperials, that can stymie a superior fleet for a long time. Its a bit of a cheesy exploit as the AI is not aware of the need to defend planets that support its fleets movements. It’s cheese that improves the flavor of the game, because it gives the player time to develop counters during a war rather than just get defeated.

MoO1 worked as a strategy of technology game. It was loosely based on the strategic bombing war of World War 2 which had multiple iterations of technology radically altering the battlescape. (beams, beam bending, proximity fuse, chaff, drop pods, and the horsepower race). Production also drastically could rewrite things, as air fleets were rebuilt several times over what the combatants had at the beginning.

To get this effect strategically decisive fleets or battles are hard to come by. Defeated fleets will be redesigned to counter their victors and rebuilt quickly. Capturing planets improves your position but doesn’t mean you can take the next nth planets with ease. Enemies will not peace out after a loss.

Sword of the stars is the best Strategy of Technology game that I know. SoTS copies MoO1 and better exploits the strategy of technology situation created with its counters focused tech tree replacing the same as before but stats boosted tech of most games. The way it creates this situation is fleets are cheap and easy to build but have a significant upkeep cost. Planets are hard to capture, requiring costly and lengthy sieges. Wars are a long grind with production, research, and design able to turn a war around.

Another thing that helps the decisive fleet that can’t be stopped problem is to limit fleet sizes. MoO1 and SotS accomplish this by having the map big enough in comparison to fleet movement that several fronts (sectors?) form. Players can’t just concentrate all ships into one stack of doom. SoTS also has soft fleet limits that make it difficult to win through sheer number of ships (which favors the victor of past battles).

MoOs limitation of design types also favors the strategy of technology as you have to make tradeoffs between relying on past numbers and introducing more powerful ship types, instead of just doing both. I would prefer soft limits, something like escalating costs for every ship class with active production lines, and also the same for every ship type in service.

In the real-world concentrating fleets is the best strategy, with the exception of oceans vastly distant from each other. The counterexample of this is when the offensive power of a ship vastly outweighs the defensive such that it’s not difficult for one ship to destroy multiple of the same type, provided they strike first. In that case dispersing ships is best. The early war in the Pacific was kind of like this until air defense, and damage control caught up with the air threat. Subs were like that throughout the war.

Foraging in armies also encouraged dispersion and helped prevent battles from being decisive and I’ve considered recreating this in a space 4x. Perhaps the ships have to spread out to harvest Casimir energy and can come together for a decisive battle. This type might not be tethered to bases, so maybe it can be a unique drive of a raider faction that menaces weak and undefended worlds and sectors all over.