Developer: Positech Games
ESRB Rating: Not Rated (abstracted space violence)
Genre: Simulation/Strategy
Platform: PC
Publisher: Positech Games
Release Date: 11/17/2009
What is Gratuitous Space Battles?
Gratuitous Space Battles (GSB) is a space combat simulator in which
you build a fleet of custom ships by placing ship components into
different hull types, give them orders, then press the play button and
watch your fleet face off against the enemy in a…gratuitous space
battle!
What does this game do well?
Although you can jump right into the game with the tutorial ships,
they will not be very effective against the AI past the first mission
or two. The real meat of the game is in ship design. To create a
ship you need to choose a pre-made hull from a list, with each hull
having slightly different properties. Some hulls have lots of slots
for components, while others have bonuses to shields, power output,
etc. There are three main hull types; fighters, frigates, and
cruisers. For the most part they fulfill the roles that you would
expect. Cruisers blow up other cruisers and frigates, fighters blow
up other fighters and dance around a cruiser”s heavy guns, and
frigates are somwhere in the middle.
Once you choose a hull, you have to add components to it. Components
include weapons, shields, armor, power generators, crew compartments,
and all sorts of specialist gear such as EMP weapons, camoflage
devices, fighter bays, missile jamming devices, etc. It can be very
difficult to actually determine how useful any given component is, and
the game is very much an exercise in trial and error. There are tons
of statistics such as damage, shield and armor penetration, power
usage, crew requirement, range, optimal range, minimum range, rate of
fire, etc. The only rules for building a successful design is that it
has to have enough crew to operate all the components, and enough
power to keep them all going. Building an efficient vehicle of war
can take many iterations as you try different designs and see how they
work (or don”t work) in an actual battle.
Once you have built your ships, you can choose a battle and then
deploy them on your side of the map. It”s up to the player to deploy
a skirmish line, load up one side, or deploy everything in a corner
and make the enemy give chase. Each ship has its own orders that
determine its behavior. The main orders are at what range you engage
different ship sizes and with what priority. For instance, cruisers
do not want to waste their big guns trying to swat fighters, so
setting their priority very low is a good idea. Against frigate and
cruisers, you want to engage them at your optimal range for maximum
effect. Fighters on the other hand may want to engage ships at the
minimum distance to make it harder for them to be hit and the ability
to fight within a cruiser”s own shields dealing damage straight to the
armor. Additionally you can add behavior to your ship such as
“vulture” which will target dying ships in an attempt to finish them
off or “escort” which will stay within a certain distance of another
ship.
Each battle has a pilot limit and a cost limit. The pilot limit
prevents a player from deploying 11 billion cheap fighters to swarm
the enemy, and the cost limit prevents a player from deploying an
unlimited number of cruisers to win with brute force. Usually a good
mix of ships is required to carry the day, although frigates are in
many ways on the short end of the stick in this game and many battles
can be won with as many cruisers as you can afford, then filling in
the rest with fighters. Also, some battles have special spatial
anomalies that make that combat unique. For instance, when fighting
in low orbit over a planet you may not be able to use cruisers, or if
fighting in a high radiation area fighters may not be available.
Other anomalies may prevent the use of shields or limit weapon ranges,
etc.
To add a little replay value to the battles, you gain honor points based
on how small your fleet is. Meaning that if you can win with fewer
ships, you gain more honor for doing so. Honor can be spent at Fleet
HQ on new components, ship hulls, and even new races. Races have
inherent advantages such as all their hulls having increased hit
points, or getting access to better fighter hulls, etc. In some cases
a fight is much easier when playing as a certain race, although all
the battles can be beaten with the default race if you like. Some of
the components you can unlock are unique and interesting, while others
are just minor improvements to basic components or just fill a gap
between a really expensive component and a really cheap one.
The battle itself is completely hands off. All you can do is scroll
around the screen, increase or decrease the play speed, follow
specific ships and generally watch the carnage unfold. GSB actually
has very good graphics for a simulation. The ship models look
good and take visible damage to the hull before breaking apart when
they get destroyed. The weapon effects are also well done; not too
flashy but effective. A few of the weapons have very subtle effects
that don”t look that great in a large space battle but for the most
part the presentation is solid.
After the battle is over, win or lose, you get a report where you can see how effective each ship was in combat. Although it doesn”t provide hard numbers, you can get a general sense of how your ship performed based on how many hits it landed and defensively how much damage was absorbed by shields or armor. If you won, then you can try again with fewer ships to get more honor, move
up to the same battle on a harder difficulty, or choose a new battle.
If you lost, its back to the shipyard to come up with a better
design.
What could this game have done better?
The obvious complaint for a game like this is that the actual combat
is completely passive. Once you”ve seen a couple combats, you can
just deploy your ships, start the battle, turn the speed all the way
up and go get a sandwich. Watching the fights rarely clues you in as
to why your ships did well or poorly and some of them can take 20
minutes or more to resolve. People looking for something more
interactive will be very disappointed. This is an experience for
spreadsheet gamers and armchair generals.
I”m kind of a spreadsheet gamer so this should be right up my alley, but I also have complaints about the component system. Many components are so similar that it”s really difficult to tell how effective they are. Other times you”ll look at a component that according to its statistics it is better than another in nearly every way but when you”re actually fighting it turns out to be worse. On top of that there is an appalling lack of diversity in the components, often leaving you to choose between two nearly identical items and not knowing which is better for you. This wouldn”t be that big of a deal
except the combat is totally passive; the ship design is basically the
whole game.
Also, the fighter customization leaves much to be desired. There are
only a dozen or so components for fighters and they are limited to 4
weapons (2 lasers, 2 missiles), 3 engines, a couple power generators
and some armor. You can never have 2 lasers on the same fighter
because there isn”t enough power, but bombers are so slow they get
picked off by anything and aren”t really viable in the game.
There are actually lots of ships that you see in movies and television
and want to build, but are not viable. For instance lancer frigates
from the Star Wars flight sims sound like a great idea but are pretty
terrible. They do a good job at killing fighters, but given their
cost they don”t do it fast enough and usually a swarm of fighters can
kill them before they kill their weight. Long range missile boats are
viable in theory, but their damage output is so low that you”re better
off fielding anything else, or nothing at all when there”s honor to be
won. Fast ships in general are bad, I found the best strategy was to
leave the engines off the ships and just make firing lines for the
enemy to approach. Overall the ship design was not robust enough to
allow devious or crazy strategies to work and I eventually stuck with
a few tried and true designs for the whole game.
Should I buy this game?
Gratuitous Space Battles is about a 10 hour game and is pretty cool at
first glance. But there”s not a lot of content to be honest, and
while you can spend hours designing that “perfect” ship there”s not a
lot of reward for your effort. A couple hundred points of honor
perhaps, and the self satisfaction of knowing you won the battle with
the statistically smallest amount of effort required. But really I
think the demo is good enough to quench your thirst for space
bloodlust and the full game doesn”t really have that much more to
offer.
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