Well. It's been a while. Quite a long while, judging by the number of months since my last post.
Holy cow, I've been busy. I haven't touched Distant Worlds in a while, so I don't think that AAR is ever going to get done. Ah well...
Anyways, I haven't been gaming as much lately. Being a grad student and all has taken quite a toll on my free time. Thankfully, I've found some great alternatives that offers some gaming in bite-sized pieces. Neptune's Pride is one such 'snack'.
Found here, Neptune's Pride is the very essentials of 4x strategy without the crazy complications that leave theorycrafters up till the wee hours of the morning (though, there's absolutely nothing wrong with writing battle calculators, or AARs at all!) Neptune's Pride features very simple elements of play; move starships around systems to capture them, upgrade your starsystems in three fields: economy (money making), industry (ship building) and research labs (faster research) and advanced research in four different areas (weapons, range, speed and sensor range).
Neptune's Pride happens in real-time but at a very slow pace consistent with other massive online strategy games (on standard settings, you get your income from your economic development per day, every point of industry builds two ships throughout the day, and ships take many hours to fly between systems). Unlike other massive online strategy games, a single free game will usually pit 8 players in a randomly created galaxy; this makes gentlemen's agreements and trading a lot more personal and interesting as well! Note that there are no diplomatic options per say, except for the trading of cash or techs. This means there is absolutely no binding treaties that can stop you from plunging the knife (or in this case, the dozens of fleets you'll be flying around) in your would-be allies.
From realizing how important weapons research is, to discovering how important it is to scout out as many systems as possible to find cheaper places to build up. See, in Neptune's Pride, industry upgrades build ships at the location where the upgrade is, but economy and research are civilization-wide. Also, each system you find will have a number of resources on them; the more the resources, the cheaper it will be to build upgrades. At the same time, building one type of upgrade makes building that same type of upgrade on the same star system more expensive. This makes expansion a necessity to advance!
Guns, butter, or research that directly improves your ability to build better guns or indirectly improve your ships abilities to go find some creamier butter? Such are the simple, but engrossing choices in Neptune's Pride. Try out a free game before paying credits and you'll agree that this is quite the gem!
Have you also heard about this game or given it a try? Please leave a comment below!
