Well.

If you're a fan of Crusader Kings or Europa Universalis, here's your chance to fire up some Grand Strategy (as opposed to '4x') in Spaaaaaace. So far, the game is remarkably stable, and patch 1.01 (which is in beta) is supposed to offer serious performance improvements.

There's not much to choose from between _species_, the tech tree and the buildings and whatnot appear to be pretty universal, but the traits and abilities of your species look like they're going to be very important to your gameplay style.

If you aren't familiar with Crusader Kings or Europa Universalis, think of it as a "through the looking glass" Civilization - where Sid Meyer is coming from one set of principles, these folks have a completely different set. They're doing very similar things, but one's got almost nothing in common with the other.

Kinda like Ford vs. Chevy. Vastly different starting assumptions and similar goals.

Runs well, though my machine is no slouch (4.3ghz i7, 16gb ram, gtx 970 vidya, ssd) I've logged 21 hours in the ... 72 hours since launch.

And I can't stop talking about Make Space Great Again. I'm gonna build a wall, and make the Xallorxians pay for it!

I may be a horrible person.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

There are distinct touches of Delia Derbyshire in there, as well as some Jarre, and Pirates of the Caribb epic orchestra stuff...

And, the Hydras seems to be getting on well, at the moment. Of course, that could change any moment, but at the moment, three planets, three defensive fleets, and a fourth to go out and smite the pirates and other scum.

Oh, and while it IS a Paradox game, don't take that to mean it has the same 'curve' as the various "Europa Univarsalis with or without a skin" games. This one can actually be played, you don't run flat into a 89 degree wall with absolutely no help given.

...!
Gott's Leetle Feesh in Trousers!

I've been playing Stellaris lately myself. Like, a lot. My race of Science Dictators established an observation post above a world of Late Industrial Age but pre-FTL primitives, and began abducting them for study prior to infiltrating and subverting their government en route to uplift and annexation.

You know. Like you do.

Anyway, things were going well until at some point the primitives managed to figure out what the fuck was going on, expose and kill my infiltrators, locate my cloaked observation post in high orbit, and blow seven kinds of hell out of it.

I shrugged and moved on. These things happen, and I had my ongoing war against the Crystalline Entities to worry about.

Later that night I had the sudden and horrifying realization:

I have lost a game of X-Com while not playing X-Com.

-Merc
Keep Rat

Despite being an RTS, the default speed is slow enough that you never feel pushed for rapid reflexes. You cannot direct individual combat units, just fleets.

The artificial limits on empire growth (without tech you can only control 5 worlds) help prevent crushing micromanagement.

The random tech factor is both good and bad. You can never be 100% certain you will get a tech you really need when you need it, but it can also force antagonizing choices of "Do I research the really good, and expensive tech, or research something I can sooner and hope the good tech comes back later?"

The one really good thing is that it can support a truly prodigious number of players in multiplayer.

* * *

Crystalline Entities are the goddamn feral hogs of space. Damn things get into everything and don't take kindly to be shooed away. They travel in packs and are aggressive and territorial.

About the only difference is that they're real pretty, right up until they start firing pieces of their own body at you at appreciable fractions of the speed of light.

The UFP spent the better part of half a century clearing them out of the star systems to its immediate galactic west before it could even begin to map and chart said systems. It developed entire new forms of weaponry and laid down the biggest hulls that had (to that point) ever slipped out of the spaceyards at Barnard's Star for the sole purpose of blowing those spiny, crystal motherfuckers straight to hell. It took another half-century to complete their extirpation and make the spacelanes safe for law-abiding folk. The survey teams that followed the fleet in discovered a wide variety of habitable worlds... including a prespaceflight Bronze Age civilization on the planet Izar VII.

Remember that, it'll be important.

Fast forward a couple hundred years. The area of space in question is now the New Troy Sector, home to a burgeoning multi-species population spread out across six worlds. Analysis of anomalous readings emanating out of the Izar system revealed the telltale energy signature of Crystalline Entities. That happens; we still don't understand their lifecycle, just that juveniles periodically show back up. A small task force was dispatched to deal with them before they could grow too unmanageable.

What was found in the Izar system was unexpected. The Bronze Age civilization is still there... only it has spread to another habitable planet in the system and there are indications it is gearing up for an interstellar journey. It hasn't suddenly undergone a sudden wave of technological advancement; the most sophisticated form of transportation on the ground is a wheeled cart. So how are they doing it?

They're taming and riding the Crystalline Entities is how. Fremen style, like the things are goddamn Shai-Hulud. These guys still think that fire is a form of witchcraft and that tin is a miracle metal and yet, somehow, they're calling down giant star monsters, jumping on board, and hitching rides to other planets. They might be breeding the things for all we know; the Crystalline Entities might be domesticated.

We've seen flotillas drifting through the asteroid belts that look suspiciously like military formations.

Opinions are sharply divided as to whether we should break protocol and send out a first contact/uplift team out to Izar VII to figure out how the hell they're doing it, or if we should leave the crazy people who think riding some sort of piezoelectric crystal monster out into space the hell alone.

Sales of Crystalline Entity plushies are up 40% Federation-wide. There's talk of action figures.

* * *

The Crystalline Entity riders were just weird and fun and sort of awesome.

It was in the game after that during which things took a turn for the much more sinister.

* * *

At some point, the habitable worlds just stopped.

It was subtle at first. Not every system is suitable to be turned into yet another colonial outpost, you know? Sometimes you drop out of warp and it's just a red dwarf with a bunch of gas giants. You shrug, do some stellar cartography, move on.

This was different.

They should have been Minshara-class planets. And at one time, they probably had been. Only now they were irradiated hellscapes. Different kinds of radiation, too, just to keep it interesting. Where there wasn't radiation, there were bomb craters, ruined cities, bleached bones on wide boulevards under dust-filled skies.

Four, five, six of them in a row. Tomb worlds.

That's... unusual.

"Maybe it'll stop once they're out of the Traxis Badlands," we said, reading the reports. "Weird shit happens in the Traxis Badlands, it's why we're paying the survey team extra."

It did not stop once they were out of the Traxis Badlands.

They found a satellite orbiting a debris cloud that used to be a planet. (Later analysis would show that the inhabitants deliberately induced a core implosion, and that they regarded it, by far, as the superior option to whatever the alternative was to not committing racial suicide.) The last artifice of a forgotten people, still whispering messages softly into the void.

Survey crews don't usually have a full xenolinguistics team, but the basic gist of what the satellite was beaming out was pretty clear; fly, run, retreat, relent. FLEE. A star chart rendered in mathematical formula, urging them to set course back the way they'd come.

That's not really how we do things, though.

Instead they dropped a nav buoy and continued on towards the edge of the spiral arm.

More tomb worlds. A couple pulsars whose rotational frequency was just a little bit too mathematically perfect to be natural. A weird pot was discovered in orbit around one of them. (We don't think that has anything to do with anything, it's just weird. Who puts a ceramic cooking pot into perfect orbit around a star?)

The final core dump before all contact with the survey vessel UFPS Tradewind was lost immediately after dropping out of warp is... still being analyzed. Funding for further survey vessels is embargoed until further notice.

-Merc
Keep Rat

My mind doctor recommended I pick up journalling again. It's been a few decades since I regularly kept a journal, and I don't see why not. This is President Elle Arroway, of the United Nations of Earth. The current year is 3020, and the date is December 25th by the old calendar.

Christmas time is a time for remembrance, a time for quiet reflection. That wasn't always the case. I've been alive long enough to see the winter holiday pass through fads, naturally change its character and even its name. Sometimes a wave of xenophilia will put one of the nonhuman races' winter holidays at the forefront of society, often to interesting results. The Glost-Werheni Time of Dying festival, where the oldest members of their society would autothanatize (It's not suicide for them, it's a conscious choice to be done with what their society sees as a 'time of trouble' and move on to the 'next adventure') cross-pollinated with Christianity, and the Resurgence faction of that tired old empire turned their staid winter holiday into a joyous, intensely biological celebration of growth. It's one hell of a way to keep warm, especially with eight foot tall furry weasels as your dance partners.

This year's fairly quiet, at least on Earth. I'm sharing a sandwich and coffee with Chix'l'Kub, the governor of the old Hantak empire, here to serve his time in the salt mines of Government. I've sat across the negotiating table and sat across from a star system studded with the fusion fires of dying corvettes with the old roach, and I know which one I prefer.

Chix is fretting about something. I can tell by the twitching of his cerci as they grasp at the air.

"What's bothering you, old bug?" I finally ask. He quivers in his chair, the vestigial wingcases of his ancient heritage rattling on his back.

"How do you do it, Eldest?" He finally asks, his intense speech almost accusatory. He goes still then, his sandwich ignored as he focuses his multifaceted Hantak eyes on me. I'm almost lost in the rainbow glitter of them.

"Do what, Chix?"

"Live forever. On Hantak, this time of year would be the Searching, when groups of young Hantakka would visit their elders, to see who had passed in the cold night, and who would live another year. Yet you don't pass. I've fought beside you to bring peace and joy to our great Empire, and my father fought against you on the field of battle, and his father, and his father, and so on. Yet you remain. How?"

I paused to gather my thoughts. In truth, I didn't know why I appeared to be functionally immortal. I was blessed with the finest support and treatments available in this technological age, but others would pass after two hundred, two hundred fifty years. I remained strong and vital.

In truth. There was the important part.

"In truth, Chix'l'Kub, third of his name, governor of the Hantak Sector, I don't know. Sometimes, I wish I did. But usually I don't worry about it. I'm just glad I can keep on serving the peoples of the Empire." I replied eventually. The severe formality of address was a Hantak colloquialism showing respect to an elder, and if anyone deserved that, the old bug did.

"Harumph. Well, be that as it may, President Elle Arroway of Earth and The Cosmos." The only honorific I hadn't been able to avoid fell from Chix's mouth with great good humor. I smiled myself, to see my old friend turning my psychological manipulation around on me. "I have brought you a present, for this Earth 'Christmas' ritual. With ourselves at peace and the Empire behind us, I haven't had to find any of my elders gone on the Great Voyage, and you are a big part of the reason why."

Chix reached into his attache case and set a small box on the table between us. He pushed it towards me and gestured. I considered the package, brightly wrapped in shiny paper, with a silver bow on it.

"Admiral Bilal helped with the wrapping." Chix mentioned as I carefully untied the ribbon. Inside the wrapping was a plain box, elegant Hantakkan G'k wood to my eye. I opened the latch and the box itself, revealing a magnificent watch in the glossy greens and browns of Hantak chitin.

"Chix, this is amazing, I never even considered using a molt like this." I said as I gently stroked the incredibly fine texture of the band.

"It is something new, for us. We have used our molts as craft materials before, but only ever for our kings, our favored leaders. No Hantak may compel another for his molt, and no Hantak will craft from another's. This is mine."

I said nothing, amazed. The molt was certainly part of my friend, the glossy cascade of color unique to him.

"You have always been important to the Hantak people, Elle. First as enemy, then as savior, now as friend. I made this myself, to stay with you when I must go, to remind you who you were, and who you still are."

Chix extended one of his tarsal claws across the table, and I wrapped it firmly with my hand, and squeezed once as the tears came. He swiftly withdrew his limb, wiping it unobtrusively clean. I couldn't help but smile. With such people as Chix in the Empire, I could no more turn away from the duty of leading it than I could walk through space naked.