I just came across Flotilla from BlendoGames, an Indie game dev. I have *not* played the game yet. But based on this video, I’ll definitely be giving the game a try. I know some of my friends out there are also space grognards so I figured I’d better share the link asap. Besides posting about it is the best way to be sure I remember to try it myself!

Man, it’s killing me that I don’t have the time or money to jump right into it. I really enjoyed Tilted Mill’s Hinterland and am currently really enjoying their browser-based Nile Online. Plus they’re a local developer…hard at work about a 5 minute drive from where I am right now.

Mosby’s Confederacy combines turn-based ‘base building’ with RTS tactical battles. From their website:

As John Singleton Mosby, one of the Civil War’s most interesting and dynamic leaders, you are charged not with leading vast armies into battle, but with commanding small bands of skirmishers, scouts and guerilla fighters on opportunistic missions to scout, ambush, steal supplies and harass a larger and better armed force of Union soldiers, in this game of turn based strategy and real time tactical combat for the PC.

I can’t wait to get a chance to play! If anyone does before I do, please share your thoughts.

Tilted Mill, the folks who made the rather enjoyable Hinterland that I’ve previously posted about, have a broswer-based city-building game now in beta, Nile Online.

I’ve been playing it for a week or so now. At first I thought it was really interesting. Then I got kind of bored with it since it seemed to lack depth. And then I realized there was more depth than I at first saw, so now I’m finding it really interesting again.

The basic idea of the game will be pretty familiar to strategy gamers. You start with a small settlement and need to feed your people and grow your empire via resource management. Every starting plot, as best I can figure, has wheat, clay and reed resources. Also each plot has a 4th resource that varies from area to area. I started with Kohl, used in cosmetics. Huh?

Each city has a finite number of building plots. You’ll erect bakeries, brickworks, basket shops, pottery shops, etc. Then you assign your labor pool to either gathering a resource or working in a shop. There are more products than there are building plots, so you’re not going to be able to make everything you need. Building a Market gives you access to goods that other players are selling. Curiously, the currency of the world is bread, which is also the way you feed your people. Buildings and resource plots can be continually upgraded to become more productive.

Nile Online runs in real time and is kind of low-impact gaming. As an example (I’m writing this on my lunch hour) I started upgrading my Market at the start of the hour, but its going to take about 2 hours for that upgrade to happen. So I’ll check in when I get home tonight, perhaps. Early on, level 1 buildings go up pretty quick… 10 minutes or so. Also low level buildings require pretty basic resources, so they’re easy to get going.

Soon enough things become more complicated. My next palace upgrade (which will give me a larger labor pool) is going to require Bricks, Baskets, Perfume, Pottery, and Jewelry (and 3 hours, 40 minutes of time). I can make the Bricks & Baskets, but I’ll need to buy the other items from the Market. I can grow a lot of wheat and bake a lot of bread to buy them, and I’m doing that, but I’ve also been trying to sell some extra pottery. I have a Cosmetics shop to turn my Kohl into Cosmetics, but I also need Henna, which I can’t produce, so I have to buy that. Hopefully I’ll be able to sell Cosmetics for enough to cover the costs of the Henna and still make a profit. Cosmetics are required to found additional cities, and if someone is rich enough to do that, I figure they can pay me well for my goods.

As far as I can tell, there is no player vs player combat in the game, but you can produce troops. Outside my city are “Monument plots occupied by raiders” and I assume these are what troops are for? Documentation for the game is sparse, to put it nicely (but again, this is beta) so I’m learning by doing, and I don’t have the resources (Bronze and Leather) to produce anything from my Spearmen building.

So, still a lot of questions, and ultimately it might not hold my interest. After the initial building process there’s kind of a dead spot where you’re just waiting to have enough bricks and bread to build a new building. But things get more interesting when you start playing the market and needing resources that you can’t product on your own.

It seems like anyone can join the beta. You do have to apply but getting in is really quick. If, like me, you have a lunch hour to fill every day, this is an interesting way to use up a bit of it. And I do find myself checking in before and after work. I’m looking forward to seeing what else the game holds as I grow my city.

I’m talking about the new strategy/rpg game from Tilted Mill Entertainment, Hinterland. It came out today, on Steam, for $20. I decided to check it out, partly because I enjoy both strategy and RPGs, but mostly because Tilted Mill’s offices are local, and I gotta support the local game devs, right? Plus, these guys are descended from Impressions, a company whose games I enjoyed for many a year. Anyway…

This is in no way a “review” of the game! I’ve played it for a couple of hours; not even remotely enough time to base a review on. This is just a brief description and some early thoughts.

Worst news first: the game freezes on me, and fairly often. If I’m patient enough, it’ll recover, but it can sit frozen for literally two minutes. Like, check the clock when it freezes, check it again when it starts moving again, and ~120 seconds have passed. Let’s hope for a patch for this soon.

The game is a hybrid, one part hack & slash RPG, one part “city building” sim. You start with a patch of land that is your “town” and a single house. Folks of various professions come to visit: farmers, merchants, craftsmen, etc. You can offer to build them a home, and if you do, they’ll stick around and start doing whatever they do (produce food, goods, money, or whatever). As is typical in this kind of game, you need to make sure everyone is fed, and you can spend gold to upgrade shops. Eventually you can set folks to doing research rather than manufacturing. Some folks won’t be willing to stay unless your town meets certain prerequisites.

The interface to talking to these people is that of an action adventure. You run around in a 3rd person isometric view. You do have a list of the people visiting your town at any given moment, but you still have to find and click on their avatars as they roam around. I’d really prefer that, assuming I’m in town, I could just click on their names in the list. [EDIT: See comments where J says that you can click on them in the list. I'll have to do more testing to understand what I was doing wrong.] A lot of these NPCs look alike and it can take a bit of hunting and clicking to find the one you’re looking for.

A “Map” view of my town so far. (Click for a bigger image.) Notice the “Cattle Ranch” label at the top is in red…it’s owner was slain my orc raiders, and now it sits empty.

Vengence was swift, but that didn’t do the poor rancher much good. I’m waiting for a new rancher to visit town; I want to see if he’ll occupy the old ranch or if I have to demolish it and build anew.

In between tending to the town, you can head out into the wilds to fight. This part of the game is very simple so far. You have a weapon, armor and so forth, and you click on the thing you want to fight, and hold down the mouse button until one of you is dead. Your character gains experience for this, and you can liberate facilities for the town by killing all the mobs in it. So far (my character got to level 4) there haven’t been any special skills or anything of that nature. Every time you level you get to pick a new (passive) skill, which could help you personally, or help the town.

Every so often Raiders will leave a camp somewhere and head for your town. You have to intercept them or they’ll start killing townspeople. You also only heal while in town (unless you take a special skill that lets you heal anywhere). This leads to a lot of running back and forth. Leave town to go find mobs to fight. Get hurt, run back to town to heal and talk to visitors, then run back out to where you were fighting, and suddenly get the message that Raiders are attacking town so you have to run back again. Honestly it gets a bit tedious as you ‘clear out’ the facilities nearest town and have to range farther and farther afield. [EDIT: I played some more and liberated a "Portal" which lets you essentially teleport back and forth between your town and the Portal you liberated.]

As you fight, you loot corpses. Often you’ll find gold or food, but sometimes you’ll find tools that you can give your townspeople to make them more efficient. A bag of fertilizer for a farmer, or some steel traps for a hunter. A cookbook for an inn keeper. That sort of thing.

And in the midst of all of this, from time to time the King will contact you with some task to fulfill. So far he’s asked me for food or gold. Hopefully these tasks get more interesting. If you complete the task, your Fame goes up. Higher Fame is required for some visitors to want to stay.

That’s about as far as I’ve gotten, but just as I was quitting for the night things were starting to get more interesting. A Merchant had moved in, giving me the opportunity to set up shops to sell directly to bring in more gold, or to stockpile materials for war. Some of my other townsfolk were getting upgrades that depended on other upgrades, so to upgrade my Trapper to a Hunter, I first had to upgrade my Craftsman to a Fletcher. That kind of thing.

You can take a townsperson out of their shop to go adventuring with you (after you give them a weapon and armor) but I didn’t get that far yet. It seems like the game is about to get a bit ‘meatier’ but the freezes are just robbing me of any joy, so I think I’m going to wait and hope for a patch before I play more. I’ve given Tilted Mill a copy of my DxDiag.Txt and hopefully they can shed some light on the problem. [EDIT: The folks at Tilted Mill have already contacted me to try to work out what the problem is, which says a lot for their support of the product!]

For $20, there seems to be a lot of game in here, even if it starts a bit slowly. But I’d wait before buying. See if my freezing problem is a common one, or if I’m just unlucky. [EDIT: I checked the tech support forums today at launch and so far, no one else has reported the 'freezing' problem I'm encountering. Given that I seem to just be unluckly, I retract my suggestion that you wait before buying. Jump in and have some fun!]

The site is built around a web-based version of the old “Conquer” game, which itself was basically a rip-off of Risk. The games are played either on a 5-minute/turn (more or less real-time) clock, or a 24-hour clock, which means you take a turn at most once a day. Games are further broken down as either sequential (each player goes in turn) or freestyle (everyone can play whenever they like during the 24-hour turn period). There are a ton of maps and variants, almost all of which are more complex than basic Risk; if you enjoy this kind of game the site could keep you busy for a LONG time.

Players are rated and ranked and can earn medals (sort of like Achievements). Rating is assigned by other players on aspects such as if you’re a fast player or a good sport. Ranking is more about stats and how good you are. At least that’s how I understand it works.

It’s free to play up to 4 games at a time, or for $25/year you can play as many as you like and start Private games. Be warned that the competition there is pretty darn tough and a lot of these guys have been playing for a long time, it seems. It isn’t unusual for a game to only last a few turns. I’ve been having more fun, honestly, playing Private games with friends.

My handle over there is Jaded, and I did spring for the Premium membership. If there’s any interest I could start a private game for readers of Dragonchasers and Jaded’s Pub (my gaming forum, linked to above).