Gameplay

Killing people is bad

In the far flung future mankind does some kooky teleportation experiments similar to this one and end up warping a part of Earth off to an even further flung planet. A war for the limited resources of these planets happens amongst the reluctant pioneers, and the rest is history. However, due to life being so precious and at the risk of destroying themselves and their colony, the explorers use mechanized and robotic machines to fight their wars for for them, all overseen by a single human mind - yours.

Each player in Shattered Galaxy represents a squad commander, a real human who is in command of groups of combatants. As a commander your goal is to go forth and claim land with your 6-12 units. The more land you control, the better off you all are. The opposing factions are looking to do the same, and inevitably, conflict will result, and it’s gonna be a blast.

Charge!

And so ends the charge in explosions.

An incoming nuke.

Killing machines is good

You as a commander maintain four categories, Aviation, Mobile, Infantry and Organic. Each of your units in these categories also maintain levels, and it is their levels that give you experience, so when your squad of tank hunter bombers levels up, odds are your aviation will too, or at least get a notable boost. As you level up each of the four categories you will then gain trait points that you can spend on one of your four traits. Traits are the real important issue and what are defines a player, starting off at five, and maxing at 120. The four traits of Tactics, Clout, Mechanical Aptitude and Education represent how your units may be modified.

The higher your Clout you will gain access to higher mark units, which will in turn give more space to modifications, allowing for accommodation for larger computers running them, armor, weapons, and so forth. A higher mark unit will also be faster and have more hitpoints.

With Mechanical Aptitude a player will be able to put heavier items on a unit, got a Grizzly tank and you’re a few weight short of putting on that heavy steel plating? You could drop some key components, or you could pick up Mech Apt. and with ease be able to accommodate all your wishes on a unit.

Education determines a unit’s tech level. The higher your education you will gain access to better technologies earlier on a unit, with a very high Education a player can have nukes on a unit much earlier than he would theoretically be able to. In addition, unit levels only go up to 60, but tech levels go up to 120, so to access the highest tiers of weaponry and modifications a player must invest at least a bit in education. (And it’s still a very long road to 60th level, so you should get it a little early.)

The last trait is tactics, every 20 points in tactics allows the player to field one more unit in addition to his base-line six units. A player specializing in tactics can theoretically bring 12 units to a battle, and though his technological level may be a bit lower as a result, he can outnumber his opponents by more than a thin red line.

The aftermath, muhahahaha.

Chattin' it up.

Mushroom cloud.

It is this conflict amongst the traits which makes Shattered Galaxy so profoundly addicting and well balanced. A player obviously wants all of the traits maxed, except he cannot max his traits, he may only max one, and it’s a very long road to get up there. Every level you will be constantly considering which trait to pursue; Education for the better weapons and armor, Mech Apt. so that you might put said armor and weapons to use, Tactics so you can field more units, Clout so you have better chassis’…

The question remains, how to kill

Away from the stats, with so much to choose from on your units, you’ll be stuck wondering about your overall strategy in what to field as well. In each of the four categories you’ll be given a choice of more than a dozen units, some of which are native to a given faction, but players may easily switch factions and keep their units. Some units, such as the Hawk, are lightning fast aerial fighters designed to hunt bombers, or the bombers themselves designed to hunt tanks, and there are Orbus or Triage units to teleport and repair units. Some units are designed to kill air units from the ground, from the air, via long distance, short distance, or simply by ignoring the air units. Other units are equipped to call in nuclear weapons, may have cloaking technology, mindwarping, healing, mine laying, anti grav harnesses to bypass mines and much, much, more. The amount of customization you can fit on each unit is as varied as the units themselves.

Each unit has several slots that items may be equipped in, a weapon, an engine, a power source, an ammo hold, a computer, an armor port, and two miscellaneous slots. From all those inventory options, you then have the items to place in them, you might go for the long range weapon with a fast rate of fire, or the short slow weapon that deals ludicrous amounts of damage, or perhaps you prefer the one that simply consumes less ammo. Don’t neglect the ammo slots themselves, as players can slap in fire ammo, laser, ballistic, any broad range of ammunition types to optimize against a chosen armor. Armor gives hitpoint bonuses and usually protects against a specific kind of attack, at the expense of others.

So varied are these slots and what you can do with them that if you come up with a concept, and with the right amount of optimization you can probably pull it off. One of the major roles in the game is POCing, or gaining points of contention to control a map, it’s quite common that all artillery, nukers and tanks will set up around these POCs to control them to win the map. After a few bad experiences of POCing under artillery fire, we sat down to come up with the ultimate POCing unit.

We chose the heaviest ground chassis possible, the Grizzly, and with our high mech apt, we had good hopes. We slapped the heaviest engine we could find on our Grizzly to give it a few more hitpoints, we then put anti explosive armor on it, to avoid the damage from mines and artillery that we would be our main opposition. We then realized that in order to POC quickly, we’d have to be able to activate our boosters without running out of energy, so we slapped a large ammo case on it to insure it could get to its target quickly without running dry on juice. Now, with all that done, we had a problem, we were highly over our unit weight, and our complexity was way too high for our computer we had mounted. We then dropped the stock computer, and put an appropriate computer on there for the complexity level necessary. Unfortunately, it weighed the proverbial ton. So to accommodate all this, we decided to go with the ultimate commitment for our monstrous POCing tank, and dropped his weapon, he would be POCing after all. All we need to do is survive for a few seconds to as much as two minutes. We went over our adjustments one last time, and renamed the unit “REALLYBigGun” to adequately confuse dimwitted enemies, we then saved the modification, and loaded it to apply it to our remaining five Grizzlies.

Now, the only thing that remained was a field test.