f13.net

yeah, no, the game's actual name is 'gratuitous space battles'

http://www.positech.co.uk/gratuitousspacebattles/index.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1QYMFGEv5M&

Looks like it could be some gratuitous fun.

Interesting, keep us informed.

i will try but seriously the designers pretty much lay it all out on the table. it is hard to find any hidden angle or new info!

- there are going to be ships in space

- they are going to engage in conflicts of some kind

- these conflicts may lend themselves to the use of certain adjectives

Strategy - but no tactics..

Have I ever played a game like this? I can't recall. Are there even other games like that? ???

Any game that has an automated "battle" sequence after you place your troops? You have control on the theater/fleet level while individual battles play out automatically. If thats what the guy is talking about,the distinction between the two things can mean lots of things.

The principle that the game is built upon is predicated on the same sort of thing that makes tower defense very fun for a lot of people. You are the macro-level instigator. You design the fleet, the organization, and you prescribe the tactics for the ship commanders, feed it all into the situation, and hit 'go.'

Were this a game about controlling those fleets afterwards, it would be a game about twitch and micro, but they're sort of playing to a different level of gameplay.

Master of Orion III?

I keed. It sounds like a graphical version of the combat systems in play-by-e/mail games.

I don't get all the angst.  It's exactly the same mechanic as Tower Defense.

It's tower defense, except that you pick and design all your ships (towers) up front as well as their formation. The goal being to get the right combination of ships and formation to pass the level.

I've been watching this game for a while now.

GSB is BSG spelled backwards. And my initial thoughts were the old radar screen from BSG classic where you'd see the incoming Cylon fighters approaching the fleet from the left. Lot more detail here of course but I'm kinda stoked for this. Thanks for sharing.

Sorry for the confusion.. I wasn't expressing angst. I'm just unfamiliar with games like this. It seems interesting enough though.

It's like the best parts of MOO without the need to do the tech climb and resource gathering.  This is great!

Dominions 3 in space?

I'll have to dig out MoO2 again... God I love that game.

I'm only excited for this to release so the developer can get to patching Kudos 2 and Democracy 2 to work in Windows 7 :awesome_for_real:.

(Right now, I'm stuck booting into Ubuntu and playing them through Wine, which is part hilarious, part testament to how good both games are.)

So, if you pre-order ($20) you get to download the beta right now. As I just did. You get a download link immediately after the preorder.

So, this game is a ship builder's wet dream. I hope you like maths, though!

It's pretty much what I thought it would be, and is pretty fun but very complex due to the individual ship equipment available.

This has been released.

http://positech.co.uk/gratuitousspacebattles/

And has a playable demo. Fast frigates + pulse lasers = no more shields.

This looks very interesting. The only trap I can see it falling into is the "Mathamaticly Perfect weapon-formation combo" syndrome. How does it look on that score from those who have played it?

Godamn, I already blew through my gaming budget for the rest of the year.

They break that up by having "Anomalies" in different scenarios. One disallows fighters; one says that all your ships must move to engage (must have engines). One disables shields completely. It keeps it lively due to having to make custom designs for each scenario and you're forever struggling to balance your energy and crew besides. It's basically like EvE, if you ever did theorycrafting and ship building in that.

Though, it can be a tiny bit simplistic since you have your ship in front be a super tanked type and they all attack it first. It doesn't work completely all the time, but it definitely gets you through normal mode.

If it helps we can refer to this as a critical future-war training simulator, and you can buy it because your survival depends upon it.

EDIT: Also, on steam next week, will probably pick it up then.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/41800/

Really really enjoyed the demo drunk as fuck last night at a friend's house.  If it had been available for purchase and play I would have bought it.

The demo seems nice but having started it up 4 times I've not actually made it to starting a battle without CTD. I'm guessing this isn't a common problem but it seems not to like my machine.

Played the demo a few times and seems very samey to me after a couple of run throughs. Still will probably pick it up though.

Wow, those screenshots look like Jackson Pollock. That might be a turn on for some, but I don't think I could keep track of that stuff on screen. I had a hard enough time with Sins of a Solar Empire.

You don't need to. You design the ships, set up formations and adjust some of their behaviour (target priorities, range to engage, general behaviour, etc.) and let them go. The demo was entertaining (now that it seems to have settled down and I've played it) but limited. Using different ships and set ups massively impacts performance but I got through all the demo missions setting up a line of heavily defended cruisers with lots of lasers in front of a load of frigates that were basically just missile platforms. I'm sure that there are plenty of levels where that wouldn't work (would be pretty easily countered with a few fighter squadrons set to attack frigates) but the demo's just too limited to explore and got boring quite quickly. I imagine the whole game would keep you entertained for a week if you were playing casually, and the space battles can be fun to narrate in your head (ships get randomly assigned names). If I was BiiFing it (and if I had the whole game) I'd say it's a rental unless you really love tower defence type games.

Even one of the demo missions locks out that tactic if you play it on hard.

There is a scenario with a dedicated point defence ship in front of each enemy cruiser. Admittedly it isn't hard to spot the fix, switch out the missle frigates for plasma frigates and you're golden.

Aside from the puzzle solving aspect, I suspect there is fun to be had in meta gaming and multiplayer. I'm surprised there aren't more tournament features included in this.

Yeah I could see multiplayer being really fun in this in something of puzzle gaming way, finding the ideal setup or predicting your opponent's choices. Of course I can also see it coming down to blind luck in terms of choices made. A fleet prepared for any eventuality would probably get chewed up good by one that's all fighters or all tough cruisers.

Also I successfully used that tactic on all the missions, though the cruisers I used had roughly half lasers and half plasma weapons. I guess they took out the point defence ships quickly enough for me not to really notice.

This game has serious potential for expansion.  Right now I look at it as just a slick framework for a more robust, overarching game design....  definitely would make a great combat mechanic for a pbbg.

This is available as a pack with another game called AI war this weekend on impulse. Have bought.