Matrix Games Forums

I'll be stream of consciousness posting my thoughts about Shadow Empires.

The game is a little bit clunky and rough; but what makes it succeed are the "invented" RPG/roguelike elements.

By that, I mean; it operates a lot like the old 1990s era pixel era adventure games, where your brain is forced to invent "background" due to the low resolution -- best case is the Monkey Island 1/2 games in EGA/VGA versus the SVGA Remakes in 2008.

Like for example, I waged a long war against some slavers to seize a northern territory that's a tundra/cold wasteland and it turns out to have a metal mine. [:D]; and in order to keep that region free of "Free Folk" moving around, I have pre-fall era Galactic Republic AI combat robots (Sentinels) roaming the northern wastes, shooting anyone who trespasses.

Down south, I sacked the person running my Model Design Council after I noticed they were constantly getting into fights and stuff, causing dissent and such to rise due to their constant shit-stirring in my most important region. Now I have to find a way to forcibly retire them from the reserve pool before they cause any more trouble; as well as fill the slot on the Model Design Council.

I can now start to build a small indigenously built light tank with 60mm HV gun and 25mm armor in independent light tank units, but first I have got to get all this hunger and dissent/anger under control -- I was too focused on running my war in the North to pay attention to the underlying economic/social background.

Stream of Consciousness II:

I think as it is in v1.05; you have too many "Councils", all of which have to have their budget answered individually. It becomes tiring every few turns to have to answer all these budget allocations.

The Model Design Process is neat, but rather unintuitive.

For example, for a SP Artillery piece, you go through three dialog boxes:

GUN CALIBRE
ARMOR THICKNESS
ENGINE SIZE

There's stuff like "Engine Power", weight, fuel; etc all mentioned in each dialog box, but they're independent of each other, and you can't do "trade spaces" like with more conventional 4X unit creation stuff to see what adding a heavier gun or a bigger engine does to your overall requirements before you commit to researching the design.

You basically have to "guess" and then hope that your designed model turns out decent and within what you envision.

I like the wargame boardgame approach. Moving counters over landscape to out maneuver regimes is fun. Save the graphics to add more content in game mechanics and units.