Double Strategy Review: Stellaris & Offworld Trading Company (First Half)

Double Review: Offworld Trading Company, and Stellaris (Part 1)

2016 is shaping up to be something of a renaissance for the strategy genre, with XCOM 2, Offworld Trading Company, and Stellaris already out and the king of the genre - Civilization announcing its next iteration for the end of the year. It’s delightful to see many different minds in the genre delivering unique titles that look worthy to stand the test of time.

Of the two new releases, Offworld Trading Company and Stellaris, the former is easier to explain and so I’ll begin my review with it.

A view of the commodities on sale on the left, the rivals' stocks on the right, and the black market in the bottom right corner. The tutorials do a great job explaining it all

Offworld Trading Company is easily the best capitalism simulator I’ve played till date. It captures the raw essence of competition, and is a love letter to the terrifying power of compound interest and accumulation. Through intelligent (and bloodless) competition, you work to nudge out (and ultimately buy out) your competitors through capturing and commanding the Martian economy.

Games follow a distinct rhythm, an opening land rush gambit to capture the best resource spots for yourself, a hectic building up of industry that determines what products you want to sell to succeed (while dealing with interference from the competition), and a late game frenzy to buy out the competition while fending off hostile bids on your own business. The bigger you get, the bigger you can get; having more resources means you can capture key resources ahead of your opponent, and eventually there comes a point where it’s an exercise in futility to compete with an opponent who played their cards right, where the gap between your economy and theirs cannot be bridged. That’s that hard part of capitalism. On the other hand, seeing a plan come together and being in a position to dominate the market is a unique high, this is a game that makes you feel smart when you succeed.

The rough part of capitalism comes in the form of a ‘black market’ where players can buy one-use abilities that technically involve non-price competition and give your team one time advantages, or stymie the opposition (options include inviting pirates to shoot down their transports, or perhaps inciting a strike at their factories, or better yet, a mutiny). The cost of each of these abilities increases every time any player on the map buys one, which means that as games get longer those who can’t afford to fight back commercially will not be able to afford sneaky tricks either due to inflation. Goes to prove that you can cheat to win, till you can’t afford to pay the piper. If you take the moral high road and don’t use underhanded tactics against the opposition, they’re less likely to target you, until the moment you start getting ahead. At higher difficulties, I doubt it’s practically sane to play all clean (those who disagree haven’t had their patent office mutiny just before they were about to finish patenting teleportation) (Also, this is why we need disincentives to be stringently enforced to penalize crime and promote fairness – to prevent a descent into chaos).

The campaign mode makes you think very seriously about what area to expand business to: who are your opponents, what are the unique features of the area, which country owns the site, do you have the technology you need to succeed? Everything is a tradeoff

Every action has a reaction, expanding your Base gives you more land but increases your food and water requirements, selling too much of a commodity reduces its price (hence the need to diversify), building a launch pad makes you a target of sabotage and explosives, and so on. The game succeeds in portraying every decision as part of a larger whole.

The titular off-world trading comes in the form of an end game building - the launch pad - from where you can send rockets carrying your goods to off planet colonies, where the prices for those goods are far higher, and not linked to the price on Mars. The hard earned happiness after a spike of funds from a rocket launch (think boat shipments from Tropico) is the fun part of capitalism.

A successful buyout of the competition

The post game helps understand what works and what doesn't

It's not easy to stay ahead in this market

You can make out exactly where the competition lost all chance of winning

Offworld Trading Company launched through Early Access and is the better for it - the polish shows in the smoothness of the design. The game has a very welcoming and well-paced tutorial, skirmish modes, co-op modes, and a lovely campaign mode which expands on the core dynamics through linking 7 maps with carry over progression (a good performance on one map makes the next ones easier and vice versa). The campaign’s final level, where the four strongest companies fight it out for a monopoly on Mars feels like a perfect conclusion to days of commercial rivalry, and I strongly recommend the experience.

Each character has a personality which adds color to the game

Due to the nature of how losses magnify faster than gains, at times it’s just better to restart, and this is a cause for serious frustration when your gambits fail and you know there’s pretty much no way to fight back. In game terms, this means that this game will lead to rage-induced quitting. That said, the game is highly replayable and does what it sets out to do extraordinarily well – give you the feeling of being a bloodthirsty capitalist, and seeing corporate heads roll. Changing the setting from Mars to Earth in 1910 (Offworld rockets replaced with freight ships) would not change the experience one bit, and that is a testament to good, focused design.

Like Civilization V, the experience gets better and more enjoyable as you get better (and start figuring out what works and what doesn’t, hint: never be energy negative), when you challenge yourself to higher difficulties (there’s a whole spectrum), and the fights become more lively. This one’s a keeper.

>Stellaris review and wrap up in Part 2

Double Review: Offworld Trading Company, and Stellaris (Second Half)

Double Review: Offworld Trading Company, and Stellaris (Part 2)

A battle over a Ringworld

Stellaris channels the spirit of exploration and randomness, it bravely throws open the doors to a giant galaxy, with 1000 star systems and over a dozen initial space empires being a MEDIUM game map. Alien races and anomalies are procedurally generated, and each playthrough is distinctly unique from an interplay of your starting choices (species, home planet, form of government, weapon preference, space travel method, and more), and where you start (edge of galaxy vs middle, in the middle of an armada of enemies or relatively unoccupied space).

Your choice of traits defines which forms of government your people can choose from

A 1000 planet medium sized map

As a new series from Paradox Interactive, seasoned masters of the grand-strategy genre, Stellaris marries Paradox’s meticulous approach to multi-layered simulations from its flagship Europa Universalis and Crusader Kings series with real-time 4X gameplay to make the hybrid that is Stellaris. Thankfully, due to the nature of this hybrid, Stellaris is a lot more accessible to newcomers than the earlier mentioned offerings, to the extent that I felt familiar with what I was doing around six hours in (though I’m still uncovering new systems I’d overlooked 20 hours later). Believe me when I say that this accessibility is a major achievement for the studio.

How you can react to other races is dependent on your traits

As for the game’s rhythm: you start out from a single planet of sentients beginning to explore the galaxy and send out science vessels to map out nearby space, occasionally encountering a random anomaly which can be researched for growth benefits and also some exceptional writing. You expand your empire through colonizing new worlds (and spinning them off into independent territories which you do not need to manage directly), fighting wars of conquest, researching new technology, and forming uneasy alliances with your galactic neighbors. In the end game, one of three different galactic catastrophes strikes (Zerg swarms / Intergalactic Invasion / Sentient AI Rebellion), which cannot be negotiated with (only fought). This last minute throwing down the gauntlet and testing the strength of the empire you’ve built makes for a thrilling conclusion (do not take this challenge lightly, defeat is very possible). A typical game easily spans upwards of 15 hours.

Highly Militaristic nations can decide to shout down the 'Zerg'

 If there’s one thing Stellaris nails, it’s role-playing at scale. The conversation choices, science options, and responses to random events are tailored to your empire. A militaristic nation will be able to tell the Zerg to go back to whatever galaxy they came from, where all others stay quiet. You can encounter Russell’s Teapot in the game as a random event, and researching it gives Spiritual races the confidence that their beliefs are correct (there is a god), while materialistic races are unable to understand anything from examining the teapot and use the time spent examining it to understand society better (they cannot comprehend a god, so work at making society better). There’s also a good deal of sci-fi homages, with ring worlds (Halo), Hyperlanes (just waiting for a Mass Effect conversion), multiple fundamentally different travel technologies, and a look at various issues in space- slavery, sentience, genetic modification, psyonics, governments and elections, aging - all within the game’s systems.

The choice of FTL technology significantly changes the play experience

Unfortunately, diplomatic options are limited and this restricts most of your interactions with other nations to armed conflict. The combat engine in the game is simplistic (perhaps intentionally to allow real time management at scale), and does not allow prioritized targeting during battles, the only choice you have is to call the retreat if required. An over reliance on the violence of action is a current shortcoming with the base game, especially given that combat does not feel intuitive, and the only useful guideline is to send in stronger fleets with a variety of ship sizes. The UI also stumbles at time to carry the immense weight of the number of systems to manage (leader, colonies, sectors, species, and many, many more), though it’s much simpler and more accessible than other Paradox works. Tech trees are slightly confusing, and there’s no fleshed out overarching galactic council or spying. I wholeheartedly expect to see fixes to many of these issues over the next two years between the mods and in-house DLC. It is a great game, edging towards exceptionality, and will cross that threshold with DLC, like most Civilization games before it.

One version of how the Pyramids came to be, can happen while uplifting a less developed race to space faring status

To summarize, Stellaris brings grand-strategy to space in a meaningful way that is approachable to enthusiasts without being oversimplified for experts. Buy it now for a great platform, or later when DLC is out to get a better fleshed out experience.

Space warfare against the Zerg, I mean Protheryn

Wrap Up

Comparing Offworld and Stellaris, both are excellent strategy games but with radically different scopes. Offworld is far more approachable, where Stellaris is far more robust. Offworld does what it sets out to do exceedingly well, while Stellaris will achieve far more than its designers intentionally planned (as with Civilization IV and V before it). Stellaris demands long stretches of your time, while Offworld is highly enjoyable in bursts. If you’re on a limited budget, this article should have nudged you one way or the other, personally I’d say both are meaningful additions to a strategy gamer’s stable and both push the envelope further for the genre.

Games purchased on Steam, playtime OWTC: 10 hours, Stellaris 20 hours

XCOM 2 Hit Chance 100%

Ray the Ranger, callsign: Deadpool, introducing us to XCOM 2

XCOM 2: Hit Chance 100%

XCOM 2 is a masterpiece of modern gaming. I’ll go ahead and get that out of the way.  

XCOM 2 is the highly nuanced and brutal successor to 2012’s exceptional XCOM: Enemy Unknown by Firaxis. It ups the ante in almost every regard over the original, while remaining very faithful to what XCOM stands for – brutal gameplay, persistent challenge, constant tradeoffs, and juggling strategic and tactical concerns. XCOM 2 adds massive levels of replayability to the mix through an excellently crafted random events and customization systems, fully randomised maps in nearly every mission, and strong 3^rd party modding support. Where 2012’s Enemy Unknown would start following a predictable path after the first dozen challenging hours, XCOM 2 never gives you a minute of respite or undue familiarity, and is stronger for it.

A major change is to the pacing of the game, in Enemy Unknown enemies would attack only after you saw them, which made gamers advance across the map at a glacial pace to avoid ‘revealing’ and encountering too many aliens at a time. Given the pain of losing a character, this strategy made tactical sense but led to a repetitive experience over time. Firaxis saw this behaviour and how it took away from the experience and improvised - now most missions (over two thirds) are under a strict time limit. Miss the timer, and the mission is a failure – the target gets away, or your evac has to abort, leaving anyone left behind. Your payout from the mission is lost or much lower, and your squad has a hole in it now. However, if you run too far ahead too quickly, your troops risk being caught in the open and attacked. Advance too slowly, and you may still fail due to the timer. This constant prodding is an excellent way to keep battles tense and constantly challenging, no action can be taken for granted at any point in the game.

Firaxis also understood the connection gamers had with their squad characters, so they added a wonderful character pool feature which allows players to design and share their custom characters who can appear in the game as soldiers, NPCs, or even random civilians across maps. This time around, the range of customisations on offer is substantial, and modders continue to add more. Through all this, I ended up with a squad with Danaerys (GoT) as my Psi Op, Trinity (The Matrix) as my Hacker, Mikasa Ackerman (Attack on Titan) as my gunslinger (bad dice roll, should have been a blademaster), Captain Picard (Star Trek) as Heavy Weapons, Big Boss (MGS) as demolitions, my friend Ray as the Blademaster, and myself as the long range sniper. Oh the stories!

The Pledge

Ah yes, early game accuracy. It makes sense given that my solder had no training in combat up to this point

XCOM2 pulls off an interesting twist on the story till date. Firaxis mentioned that 60% of players in XCOM lost during their first playthrough, and took that to be the canon ending for the game - the Aliens winning and taking over Earth. Your victory in XCOM was retconned to have been a simulation run in your head while you were being used as a wetware computer used by the aliens to learn human tactics, after your base in XCOM was destroyed. In the present, 20 years since the fall, XCOM is a rag tag insurgent force, fighting back from the margins, always a step behind in manpower, technology and resources. The Aliens have kept humanity alive and governed under a totalitarian state for reasons explained across the game.

XCOM pledges to make you feel like humanity’s last defence from extinction, and to its credit, the game mechanics communicate this brilliantly. You are always short of strategic resources, time during missions, your people are often wounded or worse, and the aliens are merciless. For the first fifteen hours, you are thoroughly overwhelmed by how badly undermanned you are, how fragile the resistance is, and how each upgrade you gain is at the cost of another one.

Too many missions ended this way early on, with a lot of my team healing from their wounds. Side note, mission names are randomly generated and a lot of fun

The Turn

Before my team blazed through here, this building had a shortage of windows. The ability to tactically destroy the environment is excellent

Emergent storytelling is something XCOM2 does exceptionally well, by throwing up so many elements of structured randomness, every person’s playthrough will be different, and every encounter is memorable. Unlike the original wherein missions started to fuse together in my mind, I can look back at a screenshot from any of the 40 missions I completed in my 40 hour playthrough and remember exactly what went right and wrong and what I should have done better. It’s a game that doesn’t hold your hand and demands that you keep up pace. However, at the same time, it’s put in a lot of effort to not be unfair either, when enemies are dropping in you know exactly where they’ll land. In between turns, you can hear which enemies are hidden from the sound of their footsteps/treads, and hit rates / hacking success is transparently visible.

In sync with the resistance theme, your team start most missions in concealment, and until a soldier is detected or until you launch an attack, the enemy will mind their own business, patrolling the streets. The feeling of setting off a successful ambush is thrilling, and the action camera does a great job of putting you into the moment.

Dark Events: You can never stop them all, and they will change how you play the next month's missions

Mission diversity has further improved, and you usually have a choice of missions you can undertake at any given point of time – VIP rescue, supply capture, hacking an enemy terminal, shutting down a relay station, and many more. Notably, you can never counter all the activities aliens are running, and often have to make a trade-off between which mission to take - each has its own rewards, difficulty level, troop readiness, and negative outcome. Each mission you take prevents that negative outcome, however the mission that you can't prevent will go ahead and trouble you, such as by reducing your funds, spawning more enemies on missions, or other negative modifiers which materially affect your experience.

Each weapon has a fair number of customization slots. Each weapon can be named, and if the operator doesn't survive, it can be brought back to base and passed down like a legacy. Neat

The four key soldier classes have been rebalanced and tweaked, and snipers are no longer head and shoulders above other soldiers by the endgame. Specialists now have the ability to hack enemy robots, and a successful hack is a gamble - a failure means the enemy is boosted, however the risk reward most often makes it worth it. Assaults are now rangers with blades, and excel at recon while under concealment.

Maps are well designed, and the scenery is incredibly chewy - have an enemy getting a good angle on your troops from a roof? A good grenade/rocket will send them falling through the floor (and often to their swift demise). It's a good time to be a grenadier in XCOM.

Captain Picard takes the fight to our robotic overlords

Soldiers react to the world around them and likewise. Successful soldiers have wanted pictures against them put in the world, and will respond if moved next to them. Based on their attitude, soldiers react differently to your commands and to making successful or unsuccessful shots. Tragically, their final moments are also haunting, my own character’s last words were ‘Not like this.’ (It was at that moment I broke down and couldn’t continue, I had to resort to save scumming from that point on to make it through, and even then at great pain. I do regret this, and missions became more frustrating and less rewarding, but I just couldn't let him fail) After a successful mission, everyone on the flight back is overjoyed. If a few teammates didn’t make it back, the mood and the music are more sombre. If there was a sole survivor, they return traumatised, with their head in their hands. There’s only ever a hair between your team winning and losing, and the game makes you live on the edge’s knife, making every victory heady, and every loss damning.

The base at the start of the game, with space for facilities being cleared

Base management is slightly simpler this time round, with managing energy levels and your small crew of engineers being the main challenges. New systems this time round include hacking, making contact with rebel networks across the world, and revamped skill trees. The bonus for having all countries on a continent is random at the start of each campaign, as is the layout of your bases’ interiors, meaning that no playthrough is ever the same.

Hacking usually has a risk of failure, in this case my operative had lots of experience working in her favor

In the first game, the main challenge was preventing nations from leaving the XCOM project, which became easier with time. Here, the main challenge is preventing the aliens from finishing their top secret Avatar project, which they are constantly making progress towards. Progress is measured on a doomsday meter, and if you aren’t actively working to stop their efforts by taking down their research centers, the aliens can win at any point in the game (yes, even very close to the ending). It’s worth mentioning that the core loop of get scarce resources – slightly improve teams or base – fight off enemy missions – prevent progress on the Avatar project – is so strong, the game feels it could be played forever. The story missions add to the flavour and context of what’s happening, but it’s the core loop that sells the game.

A view of all the different things being juggled during a normal day on the Avenger. The doomsday clock is at the top of the screen

The Prestige

When you decide you’re finally up for the final missions, you better be extremely confident in your team, the final missions are a major spike in difficulty and will be more punishing than most games I’ve come across. The ending is satisfactory coming after a very hard fought battle which will challenge your tactical prowess to the hilt and make you feel amazed that you made it through. The story’s conclusion, though not cathartic, was fair, and that’s fine by me. If anything, I will say the story was overpowered by the strong systems holding up the game, and that’s alright.

Trinity vs an Archon, scary in close ranged combat

The Aftermath

After completing one campaign, you can take your newfound skills and start it all over again to see how much better you can do or try new strategies and teams, and given the excellent procedural generation systems in the game, it would be a worthy challenge. You can also share your squads online for other players to download (mine’s available if anyone’s looking) and add their roster to your own. Where the base XCOM2 is already better than it’s predecessor after that has had multiple expansion content, XCOM2’s expansion content will be joining by July or so, and I eagerly look forward to a magnificent game getting even richer in content. At the same time, user created mods are expected to further expand the variety of the game and that is another great thing. The game also has a multiplayer mode, however I’ve had a hard time connecting to servers from India, so I can only say that it’s an extra reason to play.

Danaerys vs. a Sectopod

For specific demographics:

Price sensitive: Go for it, it can easily be replayed for hundreds of hours.

Genre sensitive: Fair story, challenging but fair gameplay, an excellent addition to the Turn Based Strategy Genre

Replay enthusiasts: Go wild, the makers of the Civilization series have brought a level of replayability from there to here, and it’s wonderful.

Diversity seekers: There’s a good amount of new content here for players both within the genre and from outside

Those with older systems: Graphics intensive, however can work ~30 FPS on old systems, and this isn’t a game where FPS materially affects your turns.

Art lovers: A lot here to love, the details in the world, the new look of a number of enemies, there’s a lot of quality art direction at work here

Difficulty Seekers: Knock yourselves out

Final Verdict

A paragon of the genre, and a worthy successor to the throne, I recommend XCOM2 as a must buy to serious PC gamers

In case you haven't played XCOM: Enemy Unknown - The Complete Edition, I'd recommend you do that first, and then pick up XCOM2, by which time the technical wrinkles should also be sorted

Game: XCOM 2 (Base Edition)

Developer: Firaxis

Launch Date: 4^th February, 2016

Time for one playthrough: 35-45 hours

Time Reviewed: 41 hours

Get it on: Steam or a boxed copy (Not available on consoles, this one's a PC Exclusive)

Price: $60 or INR 3000 on Steam, INR 999 on Amazon.in

Side Note - Technical Glitches: As of launch, the game suffers from poor optimisation and is not too comfortable running at high settings. While that does not affect the quality of gameplay itself, it is still something I do not appreciate. Yes, it is an exceptional game, but I do prefer games come out well from the start. In a bit of good news, Firaxis is expected to work on improving the performance over the next few months, and I eagerly look forward to that.

For more on the Pledge/Turn/Prestige/Aftermath Review structure, check out: http://criticalh1t.blogspot.in/2015/06/the-prestige-and-meaningful-game-reviews.html

X COM: Enemy Unknown Complete Edition Review

X COM: Enemy Unknown (after its Enemy Within update) remains one of my favourite games to date, and I’m happy to say that it is not obsolete with the arrival of X COM 2, both games retain their individual flavours and I would strongly recommend a newcomer to first enjoy a playthrough of XCOM: Enemy Unknown: The Complete Edition before diving into its more challenging yet refined sequel. In case you don’t know about Enemy Unknown, I’ll do a quick review ahead of my X COM 2 review

In Enemy Unknown you are the commander of a multinational human resistance force, X COM, defending earth from an unexpected alien invasion. The game plays at two levels – the strategic and the tactical. When not fighting a tactical ground battle, you manage your bases’ resources, acquire and research new technology, and build the infrastructure the resistance needs to wage a rough, uphill war. You send squads of 4 to 6 soldiers of various classes (Assault, Sniper, Heavy Weapons, Support, MEC) to fighting off alien activity in turn based, tactical skirmishes around the globe. If you start losing battles, the coalition of nations paying for X Com lose faith in you and slowly withdraw funding or leave the project entirely, leading to a death spiral. Keeping panic caused by successful alien activities down is the name of the game. If too many nations think you’re not worth investing in because you can’t get the job done, it’s game over, the aliens win. It’s entirely possible to over invest in getting better equipment for your troops while letting nations panic, leading to the uncomfortable situation wherein you’re winning battles but will lose the war a few months down the line.

Your team of soldiers will most often be outgunned, and as time goes by you will encounter stronger and more versatile enemies. While at no point does the game give you a free ride, battles are hard fought victories, the first few months tend to be the hardest, where you’re up against aliens with plasma weaponry and advanced armour with mere conventional human guns and Kevlar vests and backing nations are very jittery about the attacks. As time goes by and your troops gain ranks and better abilities, and your R&D churns out research that puts you on par with the aliens, and you get better at defending the world. the tide slowly turns, and it feels wonderful to fight the underdog’s fight on your own terms. 

The soldier rank system deserves special mention, at each rank increase, soldiers can choose from one of two perks which highly mold their combat style – long range stationary sniper vs. mobile rapid sniper, explosive weaponry vs good anti-armor capabilities, and the like, adding layers of tactics to how you build and run your squad. In both XCOMs, soldiers who killed on the battlefield are permanently gone (unless you cheat and reload an old save file), and every single person lost due to a lucky enemy shot or bad tactics on your part is like a punch in the gut. Every soldier has a name, limited facial customizations, and a country of origin. Losing a single one hurts at an emotional and tactical level - you’re now one good soldier short (and it takes considerable time to raise new ones up the ranks), and the enemy is as strong as ever.

A typical playthrough can last from 25-35 hours, and lasted a month of real time for me. It was a good month, the progression inside the game always made kept me wondering about how the next day's battles would be. Right now the game is available at huge discounts during sales, and can be purchased on the PC, the XBox 360, and the PS3. The iOS and Android ports don't have the same feel as the main versions, so I do not recommend them as strongly.

While there is a good diversity in the number and types of missions and enemies, the game tends to get a bit repetitive in the mid to late game (around 20 hours in) as you are often replaying familiar maps, and by that point have a fair understanding of where the enemies are coming from and what they can and can’t do, as well as faith in your own team's skills. Nonetheless, the game does a great job of making you fear the destructive power of the aliens, and cheer every success your team makes against a vastly superior invasion force. The Complete Edition of the game includes the base game along with the exceptional Enemy Within expansion which increases enemy diversity, adds a human rebellion sub plot, and gives you access to better abilities and a new soldier class, definitely go for the Complete Edition, it’s a far better experience. 

Finishing the fight in Enemy Unknown makes the events of the sequel much more personal.