Month: January 2024

The Gunk is a 3D platformer game in which you are broke scavengers who land on an uncharted planet, discover an alien civilization in decline, and massacre approximately 90% of their population by destroying their food supply. I’m extrapolating the number based on thematic parallels, but it is explicit to the text that nobody has any idea how all these people will feed themselves once you’ve destroyed their food supply. None of them seem to mind, though, so I guess all’s well that ends well.

The titular Gunk is an evil space amoeba generated as a waste product in the strip mining of the planet’s blue magic life energy, which is used to sustain the alien population in the Garden. You spend the better part of the entire game figuring this out, starting by landing and investigating the Gunk, discovering that the planet’s ecosystem recovers when you clear it out, and then that there are ancient alien ruins here, before finally encountering a survivor who can explain what details xenoarchaeology could not. Then you enter the Garden and confront the Gardener. Twice. The first time it’s a dark night of the soul thing, the second time it’s for real. Which is when he has the dialogue asking how the protagonist plans to feed his people if she shuts down the Garden. She doesn’t really have an answer.

The parallel here is, as far as I can tell, a garbled combination of the impacts of the agricultural and industrial revolutions on Earth and humanity. It’s been posited by a number of economists, political activists, and psychotic murderers that agriculture was a net loss on humanity for most of the history of civilization, that generally speaking you were better off as a hunter gatherer than as a farmer. People became farmers not because they wanted to, but because they got forced into it somehow, and once farming is the only food supply you know how to do consistently, you’re stuck with it. That’s now how you get food, and if you try to wander into the wilderness to become a hunter gatherer, you will probably die before figuring it out even if whatever force compelled your parents to become farmers has since withdrawn or collapsed.

That sounds plausible when comparing a medieval French peasant to a Celtic hunter-gatherer in pre-Roman Gaul (if you’re pre-Roman enough, at least – by the time Caesar was conquering them, they seemed pretty agricultural), but a modern French citizen is in much better shape than either of them. The Gunk (to the extent that it’s making this comparison at all – seems plausible, but it’s not explicit) seems to be aware of this, in that it says the Garden was adopted because it was a more stable and comfortable life. But also the industrial revolution caused global warming which is starting to catch up to us in a big way, and the titular Gunk is probably meant to represent this environmental collapse caused by industrialism and post-industrialism.

But then the Gunk posits no solution to the problem. You defeat the Gardener, shut down the Garden, and all the aliens seem happy about it in the credits scenes, but, like, it’s explicit in the text that there is now an unanswered question of how everyone is going to feed themselves and if we’re going anarcho-primitivist, the answer is that about 90% (if not 99%) of them are going to die. None of the real solutions to this problem have anything to do with abandoning agriculture, but rather doubling down on it with vertical farms and new power sources (well, “new” power sources – our most effective tool in fighting climate change will always be nuclear power, which is ~75 years old at this point). After all, if that doesn’t work, and huge numbers of people die from resource collapse, well, then we can go be hunter-gatherers again. Our primary environmental crisis is that in about 30-40 years we are going to have drastically reduced arable land, so a solution that involves setting all our farms on fire is a lot like incinerating a cancer patient and declaring victory because you have prevented the victim from dying specifically from cancer.

It’s pretty clear the Gunk doesn’t actually want to deal with these issues in depth. It just wants a vague pro-environmental vibe. But its main villain is not an industrialist but the Gardener and its ending thesis statement is “what’s so bad about wilderness anyway?” What’s so bad about wilderness is that the overwhelming majority of the population is going to die in it.

The game also states (admittedly, through the mouth of a character who doesn’t necessarily know, but the Gardener doesn’t deny it) that all life on the planet is going to be wiped out if the Garden persists, and in fairness to the game, this pretty much reverses the moral calculus from the real world situation. In the real world, we may as well try to make agriculture work and save everyone because if we fail, we’re going to experience the kind of drastic population reduction necessary to return to hunter-gathering anyway, and in the Gunk, they may as well shut the Garden down and try to live off the land, because whatever percentage of their population they’re going to lose it will still be less than 100%. So if I take the game as a work of fiction, then none of what I’ve just written actually matters. But the game pretty clearly wants to be a defense of actual anarcho-primitivism. It draws a decent amount of attention to its thesis statement of “what’s so bad about wilderness?” and nobody, not even the practical-minded voice with an internet connection character, brings up the massive death toll. And it is a fairly common misconception that global warming is going to be a human extinction event (it’s not – killing the first few billion humans in the least habitable areas of the planet will reverse climate change long before the last few million humans in the most habitable areas have died).

The game itself is pretty fun and I didn’t hate it, but you can tell by its ubiquity in this post that its messaging really dominated my experience of it in the end.

Two Point Campus is a university management game in the general Sims style of bearing surface resemblence to the modern world, but then also there’s some robots and vampires dropped in anywhere it would make things more interesting. You set up lecture halls, libraries, major-specific rooms like science labs, kitchens, and jousting grounds, and things to keep student needs satisfied like dorms, bathrooms, cafeterias and vending machines, and student lounges that host rock concerts.

When I picked it up I said that I was disappointed that it wasn’t a magic school manager rather than a regular one, but Two Point Campus is almost a magic school manager. You can teach wizard classes and there’s no strong incentive to expand into a wide variety of different classes rather than doubling down on just one or two, so you can, if you like, have every student at your school be a wizardry major and there’s even a campaign mission that encourages this. There’s even two separate wizard-related courses, regular Wizardry and the Dark Arts. It’s still pretty barebones compard to what I would hope for from a full-fledged wizard academy game, but much more than what I expected from a university game.

Two Point Campus also has majors like Funny Business, Archaeology, and Spy School, so in addition to a regular university and Hogwarts, you can also run a clown college, Indiana Jones’ school, and…was there ever a secret agent high school themed YA book series or TV show or something? I feel like that happened at some point, but the closest thing I can think of is Alex Rider, who is a teenage James Bond-style operative but I don’t think he ever went to a special spy school. Anyway, you unlock different majors with points you get from leveling up your campus, which you do by buying things and hiring people and generally playing the game successfully. The amount of points for unlocking majors goes up linearly, but the amount of effort required to get them goes up exponentially, so there’s no hard cap (that I’ve reached, at least) for how many different courses you can offer, but the more you have, the harder it is to get more still. Instead of getting new majors, you can instead upgrade the ones you have, increasing the number of students who attend for that major and maybe also improving their grades or something, I’m really not sure. The cost on improving majors goes up with each level of the major, so you’re encouraged to diversify at least a bit, but only in marathon mega-schools will you ever reach a point where it feels like the game is trying to drag you into a major you don’t want to support.

This is almost exactly the kind of thing I was talking about with Spacebase Startopia, although only almost because there’s still only one kind of university to run mechanically. Some of the majors do have slightly more complex room requirements than others, the simplest ones requiring only a lecture hall while the most complex require multiple different laboratories and are high enough difficulty to tax your mastery of things like libraries and private tutoring rooms, which increase a student’s grade, something which is less necessary on easier courses and more necessary on harder ones. There aren’t really different builds for different kinds of university, though, some of them are just harder than others. Still, you can at least have the appearance of different universities, and the difference in difficulty isn’t nothing.

The game also has a sense of humor that is, in stark contrast to Spacebase Startopia, present. It’s not hilarious or anything, but it’s actually doing the sardonic British wit thing that Kalypso so desperately wishes it could do. Honestly, the broad theme of Two Point Studios so far is that they’re like if Kalypso were actually good at all the things they attempt. They should make Two Point Dungeon just to really rub it in.

The Red Lantern is an indie game about a failed doctor going out into the Alaskan wilderness to try her hand at becoming a musher and starving to death within three days. I’m being flippant, but I’m not joking. You pick out four dogs from a team of eight, you start out with one medkit, one kindling, two meat, and three bullets, and you quickly discover this is not nearly enough tools and supplies to survive the trip. Awakening from what turns out to be a nightmare, you decide to add about $30 worth of additional stuff to your sled before trying again. There’s no actual money in the game, I’m just roughly estimating the cost of two extra hunks of meat, an axe, some extra kindling, and exactly one additional bullet. In fairness, the meat hunks look pretty bulky, so I might be underestimating there. Still, the most valuable resource in the game is bullets, which look like they’re probably 30-06 Springfield ammo, which you can buy in boxes of 20 for $25. In fairness, the San Francisco med school dropout I’m playing as probably would not be able to deadeye snipe caribou with the reliability that I can win the little shooting minigame.

Once you start mushing, the dogs know the way, but you do choose to go left or right at various junctures and you get various encounters based on some combination of time of day, which choices you make, and random chance. I never kept careful track of my route, so I have no idea if you get the exact same encounters if you follow the exact same route (including camping at the same times so it’s the same time of day for each encounter). I tmight be completely deterministic or it might be completely random with your left-or-right decisions having no immediate impact whatsoever. Certainly, some parts of the map are labeled as having different animals from others. There’s moose country and there’s bear country, for example.

For the most part, you are making barely-informed decisions to go left or right and to either investigate or ignore different encounters (sometimes, but not always, it’s obvious what kind of encounter you’d be investigating, and sometimes the encounter investigates you) and hoping the game delivers enough resources to you to survive until you reach the cabin with the red lantern left out front, which your friend Margot has left for you. You do have a bit of control over what happens, by choosing whether to spend a precious point of hunger on pursuing an encounter with minimal information or ignoring it, holding out hope that you’ll get one that’s obviously a rabbit or bird or shockingly vulnerable moose that you can hunt so you won’t have to gamble on an encounter whose hook is something like “what was that noise?” and could end up being anything.

Given the game is a stealth Roguelike (but a short one, so I’ll forgive it) where you’re expected to fail multiple runs before succeeding, the main takeaway here seems to be “if you go to Alaska, you will die.” Not only is that the most likely result of your first run (and in fairness, that by itself is more “if you go to Alaska and refuse to spend an extra $50 on life-saving supplies, you will die”), a lot of the encounters are abandoned resources. Sometimes it’s a not-quite-empty box of bullets that might be litter, but sometimes it’s an abandoned axe or jacket, something where you wouldn’t expect the previous owner just lost track of it.

A run is held together with vignettes with one of your good boys. For example, in my first run, one of my dogs was Barkley. Barkley is a dog with a tendency to pick fights with wild animals no matter the odds, which I instantly felt a kinship with and decided this dog must be part of my sled team. While getting to grips with the game’s time and resource management, I wound up sledding through the dead of night, and I was attacked by a wolf. Barkley jumped in and fought the wolf long enough for me to grab my rifle and take advantage of my mysterious San Francisco med school dropout sniper powers. Later there’s another vignette where Barkley jumps in to intercept a squirrel aimed at my face, and decide to take the option to teach Barkley to bark at things before attacking them. This comes around when the sled is attacked by a tank on hooves while I have no bullets left, but Barkley manages to scare the elk off.

And then I died anyway. No bullets, no food, and still only about three-quarters of the way to the cabin. The game frames this as a nightmare that prompts the protagonist to buy the aforementioned $25 in additional supplies, but after the whole run with Barkley, it didn’t feel like a dream sequence. It felt like I died and reloaded. And then I died several more times. The threat of death does give the mechanics some teeth, but you have to build up a decent mastery of the game mechanics to make a successful run, figuring out which encounters are good or bad and which options in which encounters yield precious food and bullets and which waste a hunger point for nothing, slowly assembling an arsenal of survival tools and a decent starting amount of supplies. It does a pretty good job of making me feel like someone who’s getting to grips with surviving in the Alaskan wilderness, except that diegetically I am doing this through psychic nightmare visions.

I definitely think this would’ve been better as a sleddy-aroundy trading game (although not a complex one – the mechanics just don’t support more than 10-ish trips, tops, so the tertiary gameplay loop shouldn’t require more than that), though admittedly the problem there is that this is a pretty grounded story about a protagonist who feels like they’ve failed in life and are venturing into the snowswept wilderness to find themselves, and it would be weird to add into that story “just pretend that oil is shipped from the point of extraction to Anchorage in dog sleds.” But regardless, the game relies on a meta-structure of making multiple runs and slowly getting more familiar with the Alaskan wilderness as you do, and that’s good, but it does this by giving you a goal and so few starting supplies that you are basically guaranteed to die and have to restart multiple times before you succeed, and that’s bad.

The game is saved by its brevity, though. Each of the eight dogs has a different story you can play through (like Barkley’s) if you want, and that might take 4 or 5 hours, but just getting to the cabin alive only takes about 3, and that was long enough that the sense of wonder at the Alaskan wilderness the game was trying to convey hadn’t quite worn off by the time I got to the end.

In Cook Serve Delicious 3, the tower where your Cook Serve Delicious restaurant operated out of in CSD2 gets hit with a missile, something that seemed wacky and comically paradoxical in January of 2020, so you hit the road with a food truck and two robot assistants, Whisk and Cleaver. Whisk is your driver and generally nice and supportive while Cleaver rides shotgun in the original sense of the term and is more critical. This is a fun character dynamic and the line-by-line writing is good.

What I dislike is that the game is bad at seeing how well you’re doing and having Whisk and Cleaver react appropriately. Their comments seem to be based exclusively on what medal you got for the level: None if you failed completely, a bronze if you scraped by, silver for a good but imperfect run, and gold for totally flawless. Cleaver sometimes comments about how she’s really surprised if you get a gold medal, but this is informed neither by the percentage of completed levels which already have gold medals (variables that should not be hard to keep track of unless the game has severe problems with spaghetti code) nor by how many attempts this level in particular took to get a gold on (ditto, though less so). Like, the fuck do you mean you’re really surprised, Cleaver? I played CSD2, most of these recipes are carryovers, I am butchering these early levels, gold after gold on the first try. A character whose respect is difficult to earn is only compelling if they actually pay attention to and notice when you’re doing really well. It would even make sense for Cleaver to have a “don’t get cocky, this is the easy part” kind of attitude, but instead she acts like getting a perfect run is remotely surprising even though I just did fifteen of them in a row.

Whisk doesn’t escape entirely unscathed, either. Her gold medal comments make sense, she focuses a lot on how impressed she is by the achievement, but her comments on the silver medals often feel like they were supposed to be for bronze and got coded wrong or something. The Cook Serve Delicious series sets out to be the Dark Souls of food preparation games (one of the series taglines is “prepare to dine”), and I think that attitude may have leaked too much into Whisk, who is supposed to be the kind and supportive one of the duo. Particularly I’m thinking of a line she has in a silver medal that goes something like “I know you’re trying, chef, but maybe next time try a little harder?” And Cleaver adds “or a lot harder.” This dialogue makes sense for a bronze medal, but for a silver you’d expect Whisk’s answer to be more along the lines of “wow, nearly perfect, you’re almost there!”

I’m not sure what the dialogue is like on bronze medals or failed levels, because I’ve got none of either so far (the game is divided up between eleven “territories” across the post-apocalyptic United States and I’m partway through the third, so getting all golds and silvers so far isn’t a huge accomplishment), but I’m honestly not sure how Whisk could get much more critical without breaking character as the kind and supportive one completely, considering that a bronze is still a success.

I wonder if this is driven by the fact that you can get bronze and silver medals on Zen Mode, which disables the timers (you can still mess up an order by pressing the wrong button, but you have as much time as you need to prepare the recipe), but not the gold medal? The developer has discussed in a news update that Zen Mode was added to CSD2 in a bit of a panic and they were never really happy with it, so I suspect they may still think of it as a “fake” game mode that served as a band-aid solution to a problem that deserved more time than was available, and that came through in the writing. That’s a guess, but it reflects my experience of playing the game.

I mentioned at the end of my Spacebase Startopia post that you could imagine eight different station designs that should be viable based around emphasizing one of the eight alien species’ in particular. That post was already kind of long, so I’m splitting the outline of those eight station concepts off. Some of these require significantly expanded mechanics, while others require almost no expanded mechanics at all, and I’ll be tackling them in order of least to most changed.

Before we dive in, I want to note that there is only one faction in this game. Every player always has access to all eight of these species, and the stations I’m describing are specific strategies that should be viable in order to give the game more gameplay variety. So, for example, the Telgor Station is not a faction which is locked into a specific Zerg rush strategy that an enemy can hard counter just by knowing you’re playing a Telgor Station. It’s a way of building your station that focuses on telgor buildings almost exclusively, but rivals won’t know that until they get a good look at your base.

First of all, the Celebramer Station requires no changes at all because it is the one type of station that’s viable in the game as it exists. You run a biodeck to provide nature hikes and lakeside meditation while also providing natural resources, process those resources into refined resources at a factory on the sub-deck, and use those refined resources to run high-end entertainment venues in your space Las Vegas on the fun deck. Everything is oriented around maximizing the tourist trade on the fun deck. The Celebramer Station dumps lots of resources into new buildings to climb the tech tree up to the highest tier of space Las Vegas, which means they have the longest spin-up time of any station. At the end of it they get unrivaled energy income that can be used to dominate the endgame, provided they live long enough to get there.

Secondly, the Telgor Station requires only two minor tweaks. The Telgor Station is a space flophouse that focuses entirely on cheap berths and recycling stations to maintain some modicum of cleanliness. Its ratings will always be middling due to health and security issues, but that’s fine because it runs purely on low-tech buildings and high ratings are only useful for unlocking tech. The Telgor Station makes its money on scale, so the first tweak that it needs is that the cost of unlocking new sectors needs to be based on the total number of sectors unlocked on any deck, not the distance from your starting sector on the specific deck being unlocked. This means that unlocking additional sub deck sectors will always be cheaper than unlocking fun deck or bio deck sectors, which means the Telgor Station always retains the advantage of being the cheapest way to increase income right now.

The second tweak is that you need to be able to hire space pirates or buy drones in a crate or something, so that the Telgor Station’s ability to get energy fast can be turned into an ability to get cheap units fast. Without cheap units that can be purchased with pure energy and no significant infrastructure, the Telgor Station is only good at making energy fast in the early game, which means it can only win in scenarios where the goal is to make a small-ish amount of energy on a time limit (including a time limit imposed by playing against other players). With cheap units, the Telgor Station also serves as the Zerg rush strategy for combat-focused scenarios, where you try to mow an enemy down before they can even get started at the cost that your tech comes in much slower, so you will steadily fall behind your opponents economically and militarily if you don’t succeed in destroying them quickly.

The Bug Station requires a significant overhaul to how the trade system works, but that won’t have any ripples to the rest of the game. In the game as it is, traders come in fairly regularly and have a small and random inventory of resources and buffs to sell, plus you can sell them stuff from your cargo hold. The traders will buy most resources but only sell a small and randomized set, so if you’re manufacturing lots of goods, you can sell them to get lots of energy (the game’s currency), but then it’s a crapshoot whether you have anything worth spending that energy on. It’s possible to summon a trader through your communication center, manned by the bugrathorians (“bugs” for short), but this costs 500 prestige, which is enough to unlock almost any of the techs in the game. The comms also give you a couple of other nifty features so you will definitely want one on every space station, but you will also want exactly one on every space station, and once you’ve got it up and running, you’ll pretty much completely ignore it while absorbing its passive benefits for the rest of the game.

In order to make a bug station playable, two tweaks are needed in addition to the tweaks that made the Telgor Station work. First, the spacedock that allows you to trade with merchants needs to be available much, much earlier in the tech tree. The current position makes it clear that you’re intended to use it mainly to sell resources that you manufacture on station. Instead, it should be available low enough down the tech tree to be a potential replacement for your bio deck, buying resources for energy instead of unlocking bio deck sectors to unlock them. The lowest tier of the tech tree is called “space trucker” and while I realize the idea is that you are a space truck stop, not a port or warehouse, it would be fine if the spacedock was unlockable right from the start of the game.

Second, and this one is a big enough change that it probably counts as more than just a tweak, there needs to be a variety of different trader types you can get at your station, each buying and selling different kinds of resources. Some deal in highly refined resources, others deal in raw materials, some might deal in a specific resource type regardless of tiers, for example, buying both regular food and the tier two sushi or molecular food. Summoning a specific type of trader is done through the communications center, and the more bugs you have working comms, the more different trader options you draw from the deck. The exact selection is randomized, but more bugs means more options.

This means a Bug Station is going to work by creating a basic berth, medbay, and recycling station infrastructure to keep conditions livable enough that your employees won’t quit, then fill in all the remaining space with spacedocks, cargo bays, and factories. Your bugs summon traders who sell cheap raw resources, you process those resources into higher-end resources at a factory, and then you summon high-tier traders to sell the resources to. A factory can be set to auto-produce a certain resource any time the prerequisite resources are available, for example, processing minerals into circuit boards as soon as enough minerals are available to make at least one circuit board, and the same should be true of spacedocks, able to auto-buy resources of a certain type within a certain price range and up to a certain number, and auto-sell within a certain price range and down to a certain number.

And that means a Bug Station can automatically buy minerals from incoming traders up to a certain amount, process them into circuit boards, then sell them to outgoing traders down to a certain amount, which means you won’t accidentally sell out your entire stock if you want to keep a minimum number of circuit boards on hand for mech construction or whatever, nor will you accidentally fill up your entire cargo hold with minerals and/or circuit boards because you’ve hit a dry spell with traders who’ll buy circuit boards or got inundated with traders who are selling minerals.

The Bug Station makes a profit by keeping itself fairly lean, creating a hive of comms activity in the starting sectors with a bit of support infrastructure (including a small, low-tech fun deck for the station’s small population of workers – a StarCats Cafe is required to unlock security stations and therefore mechs, but that’s, like, the second thing you build in a fun deck, so you don’t need any extra sectors for that), and then filling in the rest of the sub-deck with very low-maintenance cargo holds, factories, and spacedocks that do not produce trash and require infrequent repairs. Since the vast majority of the space is low-maintenance, a small number of fuzzy drone workers is required to support the station, while the energy income from trade is fairly high. The Bug Station maintains middling ratings from a small number of inhabitants and a smaller number of visitors renting out spare bunks in the berth, which means it will never be great at tech, but it has good income to buy the same mercs the Telgor Station uses plus good manufacturing so it can pump out mechs quickly once the tech for that comes online. It’s still a fairly quick station and unlike the Telgor Station it’s not completely foregoing mech production facilities. It won’t be the station with the first mech, but it will be the first station to have three mechs.

The Dryad Station doesn’t require any additional tweaks on top of the Bug Station. The Dryad Station uses a slightly larger worker population and has a slightly longer spin-up time since it uses dryads on the bio deck to produce resources on-site and then manufacture them into resources for sale while still never expanding the fun deck past its starting sector, since that’s all that’s required to keep a small staff of employees happy (and even with the dryads brought on to run the bio deck, the staff of the Dryad Station still pales in comparison to the huge number of visitors the Celebramer Station brings in). The Dryad Station ultimately has higher ratings since it can fulfill the need for nature, higher income since it’s cheaper to grow the materials yourself than to import them.

I don’t want any of these stations to feel like they play identically to one another, but I don’t think that’s a problem here, it’s just that there aren’t any new mechanics needed to set the Dryad Station apart from the Bug Station. The terraforming mechanics of the existing game’s bio deck are sufficient.

The Grey Station is minimally functional as long as you can use the comm station to bring in large crowds of medical tourists. The gresularians, greys for short, run the medbays on the space station, and you make energy any time a sick alien buys treatment. If you could guarantee a higher rate of illness amongst incoming aliens, you could make reliable income by building lots and lots of medbays. Add a feature to the comms station that allows you to advertise yourself as a destination for medical tourism and Bob’s your uncle. This still requires the tweaks from the Telgor Station, but not any of the ones from the Bug or Dryad Stations, so strictly speaking you could fit it in between Telgor and Bug.

I don’t like this idea, though, because it means we now have two stations that revolve around stamping the same room down over and over again. I don’t mind the Telgor Station being a fast build that’s boring at scale because its purpose is to win quickly, not fill up all twelve sectors of the station. Add in a Grey Station that does nearly the same thing except with lots of medbays mixed in with the berths and yeah, it works, but it feels like it’s basically the same station.

So instead I want to make a fairly significant addition to the game: The addition of a hangar. Hangars come online at the Package Travelers tier of the tech tree, not because they particularly have anything to do with package travelers (honestly, I’m not sure why package travelers are separate from tourists, the next tier up, but maybe that’s just because there’s connotations of the term past its literal meaning that I don’t know about), but because that allows it to come online one tier before mechs, which feels right off the top of my head, which is the level of scrutiny I’m giving this outline as long as it’s a free blogpost.

Hangars come with shuttles, which can do different things when staffed by different kinds of aliens. Celebramers go fetch a bunch of aliens with a significantly higher than average amount of energy to spend in your space station, perfect if your station is full of high-end fun deck buildings that take lots of energy from a visitor at once. Telgors can be sent on trash collection missions, returning with a bunch of trash to dump into your recycler for energy. Bugs can be sent out with resources to sell them at a markup by taking them someplace where they’re harder to come by than local space. Dryads can be sent to retrieve plants of a specific biome, allowing you to either quickly mulch them into resources or else quickly fill in a section of the bio deck that you’ve just terraformed to a new biome (for example, if you just unlocked a new bio deck sector and the random biomes it came with aren’t what you want) to get local production up and running quickly.

And greys abduct animals to create a space zoo in the bio deck. Animal pens can’t have their plantlife harvested (it’s important to the animal ecosystem or something), so this reduces your income of natural resources. In exchange, the zoo helps aliens fulfill a need for nature faster, making it a good addition to a Celebramer Station, and it also allows the greys to develop bioweapons. Each species of animal (one per biome) produces a resource, and that resource can be taken to a medbay for greys to develop into a special crate that, when deployed, infects about 80% of aliens who live in that biome with an illness, causing them to seek out a medbay immediately. Each biome is already associated with one alien, so for example, the greys themselves live in the savannah biome, so a savannah bioweapon will infect greys in the radius. Not only can this be used to debuff boarding parties (for example, the space pirates who periodically appear in the station), using multiple weapons to target multiple species if necessary, you can also throw one into an enemy atmosphere filter, which will travel through the ventillation system and spit out infection in a radius around every atmosphere filter in that player’s control.

Since alien species are associated with specific jobs (apparently Startopia runs on a space caste system?), throwing in a polar bioweapon will infect 80% of the leviathans within range of any atmosphere filter, causing them to get sick and head to the medbay, devastating the target’s leviathan workforce – and leviathans run security stations, which operate mechs, so that’s going to seriously gum up their defenses. You can make the problem worse by lobbing a savannah bioweapon into the enemy atmosphere filtration system, causing their own greys to fall ill, which will jam up their medbays. Ultimately, the enemy can hire more greys if necessary to get the medbays working again to get the illness cured, but while they’re sorting out the crisis, you can seize the initiative on the frontlines. They can always try to debilitate you with bioweapons of your own, but if you’re running the Grey Station, you’ll have a lot of medbays to treat the problem with, to the point where even if every grey employee is within range of an atmosphere filter when you get hit and 80% of your greys are infected, your remaining greys will get to work deinfecting the population, and while you won’t be totally uninfected, the problem will sort itself out much faster compared to your opponent. Plus, you’ll have more crates to infect with.

In fact, since the Grey Station is a midgame station that tries to paralyze and destroy enemies before they can build up drone swarms, and since that means their bioweapons need to become available very quickly after they get hangar access so that they can get them out before their opponents get one tier higher and get security stations and mechs, there should also be a limit of one bioweapon per medbay. Just like each security station can only support one mech, each medbay can only support one bioweapon. You can replace the bioweapon after expending it, but you can only have as many bioweapons at once as you have medbays. This means a Celebramer Station or whatever will only ever have one, two, or maybe three bioweapons and will have to pick and choose which biomes to target and when to use them, but a Grey Station will have eight or nine and can lob them around much more freely, especially since they get replaced fairly quickly (I’m thinking 1-2 minutes, longer than a skill cooldown, but not a once-per-game bomb), provided you still have a pen containing the correct type of animal up in the bio deck.

I’m not positive if this is a tweak or not, but an alien with a bioweapon illness that goes untreated long enough should eventually die with a 100% chance to produce a chest burster. I know this can happen occasionally, but I don’t know how common it is, and the bioweapon illness should make it frequent enough that if the Grey Station bombards an opponent’s filtration system with bioweapons for most or all biomes and thus infects their entire station, they’ll need a lot of medbays to treat all the sick or else not only will their station be slowed to a crawl, they’ll potentially be destroyed outright by the subsequent chest burster infestation.

Some bioweapons have additional effects to help balance out how relatively unhelpful it is to target the aliens native to that biome:

-Bioweapons always kill plants of the same biome, but forest bioweapons (targeting dryads) kill all plants, so you can use them to wipe out some of your enemy’s natural resource production in their bio deck.

-Moon bioweapons (targeting telgor) have a 20% chance of infecting non-telgors in addition to the 80% chance of infecting telgors, making them great for lobbing into densely populated stations lacking in medbays (like Telgor Stations).

-Lava bioweapons (targeting eurekers) cause corrosive damage to nearby buildings and mech units in a single randomly selected atmo filter (not all of them – otherwise the Grey Station could throw three or four into the filtration system in rapid succession and level any section of the base with decent ventilation). Bases that have a small inhabited area on their sub and fun decks surrounded by a huge manufacturing, storage, and trade infrastructure (like the Bug Station and Dryad Station) will have a small number of atmo filters close together in the one small section of the station that’s completely non-redundant, so a few lava bioweapons in rapid succession can dissolve a critical part of such a station.

-Polar bioweapons (targeting hem’netjer – this change is intentional, we’ll get there in a bit) cause the infected to go berserk, possessed by dark spirits, which is mechanically similar to dying and producing a chest burster alien but it happens instantly, causing immediate problems for your target regardless of whether or not they have medbays. Hem’netjer are the highest tier alien in the game (some aliens don’t show up until you have certain tech tiers unlocked, and hem’netjer don’t start coming to your station until one tier above mech units), so the target probably has the security drones to deal with this problem, but it will tie up those security drones for a while.

-Swamp bioweapons (targeting bugs – ditto to polar) also kill vermin, so you might lob them at your own station to help clean up an infestation. This isn’t super helpful since vermin are pretty easy to clean up anyway, but infecting bugs is probably potentially really valuable anyway since it allows you to disrupt an opponent’s ability to call up traders for resources and hire mercenaries, so this can be a ribbon.

-Meadow bioweapons (targeting celebramers), rainforest bioweapons (targeting leviathans – switched as well, we’ll get to why in the Hem’netjer Station), and savannah bioweapons (targeting greys) are all potentially critical to an enemy station without additional effects, and I couldn’t think of a ribbon for them.

Since they can create a wide variety of different debuffs, the Grey Station is dominant in the midgame, able to tailor a viral payload against whatever kind of station they’re up against. Celebramer Stations find their income suddenly choked off and their ratings plummeting as their celebramers are infected and their fun deck is paralyzed, Telgor Stations are suddenly facing a massive infection crisis with few or no medbays to handle the situation, Bug and Dryad Stations have their small inhabited station cores bombarded by lava bioweapons. The Grey Station isn’t as fast as the Telgor Station, but it’s close, using relatively low-tech medbays (medbays are on the Drifter tier of the tech tree, only one step up from the bottom) for the core of their income, then using that core income to quickly get to the mid-tier hangar tech. The Grey Station is on the clock, because once their opponents get to the mech tier of the tech tree just one tier up from the hangar, they can put a security station down outside the range of their air filtration system, and the greys don’t really have room for lots of mechs when they spend all their space on a sprawling complex of berths and medbays, nor do they have the endgame income or on-station resource production to make mechs even if they can find room for the security stations.

The Hem’netjer Station is the turtle station. Getting hem’netjer on your station at all requires the Upscale Tourist tech tier, which is the same tier that unlocks research centers, so the only station build that goes higher is the Celebramer Station that goes to the very top. The first tweak they need over having a hangar for shuttle missions is that their temples are now constructed manually, not automatically, and are unlocked at the same tier the hem’netjer show up, Upscale Tourist. These temples are built on the bio deck, and a different temple can be built in each of the nine biomes.

The hem’netjer shuttle mission seeks out various harmonizing psychic crystals to bring back to the temples they build on the bio deck, one for each temple. They can most quickly retrieve a psychic crystal for their native biome, with biomes further away on the 3×3 hot/cold wet/dry grid requiring more hem’netjer and taking longer. To emphasize this, I’m swapping some biomes around: Hem’netjer are polar (and may need a redesign to reflect this), bugs are swamp, and leviathans are rainforest (and might also need a redesign, although this one is probably fine as a palette swap).

The hem’netjer have ice blue crystals from the wet/cold polar biome that can be easily retrieved. The wet/moderate swamps of the psychic bugs and the temperate/cold taiga associated with no species in particular are moderately easy. The cold/dry moon environment of the telgors, the wet/hot rainforest of the leviathans, and the temperate/moderate meadow of the dryads are middling difficult, being neither especially psychically sensitive nor psychically repulsed. The hot/moderate savannah of the greys and the temperate/dry radioactive of the celebramer are hard, their more materialistic and worldly cultures resisting the psychic attunement of the hem’netjer. The hot/dry lava biome of the eurekers is the hardest of all.

Once a temple is built in the right biome and the correct psychic crystal has been installed in it, it is possible for an alien of that species to ascend. There is a random chance of ascension every time an alien visits a temple, which they will do more often if there are more hem’netjer employees on board, so the Hem’netjer Station will want to employ a lot of hem’netjer first to run multiple simultaneous crystal-retrieval missions from multiple different shuttle hangars, and then to increase the spirituality need of as many visitors as possible to get them to visit the temples on the bio deck until one of each alien has ascended. When this happens, a final countdown begins to summoning a Cthulhu knock-off. The final countdown is announced to all players, and if any of the nine temples are destroyed during the countdown, the ritual is aborted. The other temples’ crystals remain attuned, but the destroyed temple will have to be rebuilt, a new crystal retrieved, and a new alien will have to ascend. If the ritual is completed, the hem’netjer summon a Cthulhu knock-off, every sector of the station under their control immediately ascends, and the process of ascension tears the rest of the station apart, defeating the other players.

The Hem’netjer Station can flex on other players by spacing their temples out a lot, but the smart move is to take the sector in front of your energy core (which you want to defend heavily anyway), divide it up into nine sections for the nine biomes each just big enough to hold a temple, and conduct the ritual there while maintaining a perimeter with some combination of turrets and mechs. Nothing the Hem’netjer Station’s ritual does requires a lot of resources – the nine temples are fairly cheap and cost less energy than a mech between them, the hem’netjer employees to man them cost only a few hundred energy each just like employees of every species, the hangars are moderately expensive but can be repurposed for other things once the hem’netjer are done with them, and the process of ascending aliens is not only free, it actually generates energy for you, since ascended aliens give all their remaining energy to you. It takes a lot of time, but you can spend your energy and prestige on other things while you wait – like defenses.

The Hem’netjer Station is also encouraged to actually use sabotage in a way other stations are not. The game as it is has lots of sabotage options, but they require a security station, which means they’re more than halfway up the tech tree, and then you need to unlock most sabotage options with prestige and pay energy to activate them. They mostly only inconvenience an enemy. They are pretty cheap once researched, but they cost a fair amount of prestige to research, and you are better off spending that prestige on upgrading mechs, which can actually win you the game, rather than sabotage, which delays but does not prevent your opponents from destroying you. Since the Hem’netjer Station’s build revolves around doing a very long but not resource intensive multi-stage ritual, sabotage makes a lot of sense for them. The prestige cost for unlocking it could still stand to be knocked down so that you can start annoying your opponents very quickly (quickly enough to meaningfully delay them from getting mechs, which are available at the same tech tier), but it also helps that the Hem’netjer Station does not, at any point, need to march mechs into an enemy station and blow up their energy core. If sabotage is effective enough to paralyze an enemy, they can do that instead of mechs, rather than in addition. This is still only a defensible strategy if they can also get some (relatively) cheap static defenses so that they aren’t totally helpless if a mech shows up.

The Leviathan Station can’t start out as a Leviathan Station. While telgors, bugs, and dryads are available from the start, and greys and celebramers show up so low on the tech tree that most scenarios have them unlocked immediately and even the ones that don’t will give them to you while you’re putting down some basic infrastructure for berths, recycling, and air filtration, leviathans don’t show up until the Package Traveler tier, and the security station they work at is unlocked at the Tourist tier. This means that by the time leviathans are even onboard, greys are already on the final leg of bioweapon development and the telgors overran you with hired guns thirty minutes ago. The Leviathan Station needs to be the Celebramer Station until it’s unlocked some core tech, because the Celebramer Station focuses on generating prestige, which is used to unlock new tech tiers and buildings. The Celebramer Station does that for basically the whole game, racing up the tech tree to the highest possible income as fast as possible, but the Leviathan Station will get off the ride once the hangar is available.

This means that the low-tier entertainment options should be the kind of thing you might find in a space pirate den. Replace the lootbox lottery with a seedy gambling den and move the lootbox joke to the tier two casino, swap the position and function of the starcats cafe and the bar (this also means that the need for drink and the need for relaxation need to be reversed in importance, which is no big deal), change the lights on the space disco to be all red with lots of dark shadows, brightening up to more purple and well-lit as you begin operating higher-tier entertainment buildings like the flying sushi restaurant and hotel space inn, things far enough up the tech tree that the Leviathan Station will never even look at them because they will be pouring all their prestige into combat upgrades.

Leviathans can use the hangar to raid nearby planets. The raiding targets accumulate more and more valuable resources, energy, and prestige the longer you leave them, so the Leviathan Station gets a burst of resources from initial raids but then has to wait a while for them to build back up. This allows them to leap up into the mech tier of the tech tree, at which point all future prestige goes towards combat upgrades.

Leviathans can also use the hangar to board an enemy sector of the station through their airlock. Leviathan raiders can be killed, and unlike security drones, they don’t come back automatically on a cooldown, you have to hire new ones, but leviathans are available one tech tier before drones, so you can plausibly try to mob an opponent with two dozen leviathans before their defenses are online. Energy cores have a lot of health, so this isn’t a practical way to actually defeat an enemy, but it can wreak havoc on their economy so they can’t keep pace with you while you get your mechs going. Since this makes hired leviathans into armed units, this also means they can be used as an emergency defense against space pirates, chest bursters, and enemy drones or other leviathans, or as speed bumps for enemy mechs. It’s costly to use them this way compared to security drones, which are both stronger and more expendable, but if you haven’t built a security station yet and space pirates are attacking the fun deck, leviathans are better than nothing. Leviathan visitors won’t fight for you, only ones you’ve hired. I considered having visitor leviathans fight third-party threats like chest bursters and pirates, but the problem is that it’s fairly easy to get one to two dozen visitor leviathans in your station, which is enough that they can probably deal with chest bursters and pirates without you really having to worry about it, and since leviathan visitors show up automatically at about the mid-point of the tech tree without any effort on your part, this makes the defense aspect of the game a little bit too easy.

The Leviathan Station shines in the mid-late game, they beat early game stations like the Telgor Station, Bug Station, and Dryad Station by surviving them until their mechs come online and then crushing them before they can get mechs (in the Telgor Station’s case, that will be a very long time, but the Bug and Dryad Stations can make a lot of them once they catch up technologically, so the Leviathan Station must act quickly), and they beat lategame stations like the Celebramer Station by choking off research and investment in the fun deck to pour all resources into mechs as soon as they’re available, getting more numerous mechs faster to destroy the lategame station before the lategame arrives. Their midgame rivals are the Grey Station, who come online at about the same time (greys use the hangar to abduct animals to produce bioweapons, leviathans use the hangar to get resources and prestige to produce mechs). The greys don’t have a direct answer to mechs except to infect leviathans, which can be mitigated by keeping leviathan security stations outside the range of filtration systems. Leviathan employees won’t like it, but if their other needs are satisfied, they won’t quit over air quality alone. Leviathan employees still need to use berths and the space disco and so forth, which need good air quality or else visitors will leave lower ratings, slowing down research. Leviathans could always tear down their entire filtration system once they unlock mechs, since their need for prestige is greatly reduced, but that’s risky since it will drastically slow the accumulation of prestige that could be used to unlock new combat upgrades.

Also, while this would potentially be too complex and stretching resources too thin for multiplayer games or scenarios where you fight an AI for control of a station, I think a singleplayer mission where you have to send mechs down to a planet to fight a battle on the surface could be cool.

The Eureker Station requires only two tweaks. First, in addition to the existing ability to have unresearched crates automatically dropped off in a research center as soon as they’re available, you should also be able to set a factory to produce crates of any type that you haven’t maxed out research for and which you don’t have enough to max out research for (i.e. the factory should be smart enough to check your storage and figure out if you need more crates or if you just need to wait for the research centers to get through them all). This way you can set a factory to process resources into unresearched crates and forget about it, and it will still keep your research stations busy. This allows you to scale up to having a lot of research stations without constantly having to do busywork.

The second tweak is that the Aurora and Star Hydra mech classes can only be unlocked at a research center. The Raptor class mech is already a trap option whose only advantages are speed, but only compared to other mechs so it’s still really slow, and crowd control, but security drones are so weak compared to mechs that any class can mulch through them no problem. I think giving its cone attack the ability to destroy plants and also allowing it to penetrate one bulkhead deep into enemy territory without paying to unlock the bulkhead for a proper invasion could make it useful as a bio deck raider, destroying a bunch of enemy plants to cut off their supply of minerals, medicine, or fibers (all three of which are required for the production of any mech class) could help make the Raptor less useless, but also it can be the starter mech whose main use is that you can get it as soon as you have a security station, while the Aurora and Star Hydra require going one tech tier higher to get a research center.

A third tweak is unnecessary but helps with the station’s vibe. The Eureker Station, like the Leviathan Station, starts out racing up the tech tree to get to its middlingly-lategame buildings that define its strategy, which means it wants a good earlygame fun deck to get prestige fast. For the Leviathan Station, I made this work with the vibe by making the earlygame fun deck a sort of space pirate den that gets phased into a more space Las Vegas vibe as mid-to-high tier buildings come online.

For the Eureker Station, I want a different look, so I’m going to add something to the communications center: Distress signals. Distress signals can be sent from colonies, ships, whatever, and allow you to exchange a bunch of resources or plants for prestige. The resources or plants required are random, and just like traders, you get more draws from the deck with more communication centers. Since half the distress signals ask for plants, that means the Dryad Station is the best positioned to answer them, but the Bug Station can answer half of them. This gives a new dynamic to the three earlygame stations that I like: The Telgor Station is the most aggressive of the earlygame stations, but has no access to prestige except the trickle that comes from positive ratings left by aliens who just want a bed to sleep in. The Dryad Station is the slowest of the earlygame stations to set up since it requires expanding both the sub deck and bio deck, but it has the best prestige income from both a minimalist fun deck (better than none at all, like the Telgor Station) and being able to answer distress signals. The Bug Station is in the middle – it spins up faster than the Dryad Station but slower than the Telgor Station, and its prestige income is in between the two as well. This means the Dryad Station is better at pivoting to a different build in the event that they aren’t able to secure victory in the earlygame.

This also means the Eureker Station can build itself on a Bug Station or a Dryad Station. You lose a little bit of speed racing up the tech tree, but you have an established production base to start producing crates for research the second your research centers come online.

Eurekers can use the hangar to attend a research conference and come back with one random research upgrade for anything you’ve unlocked. It takes longer and it keeps your eureker employees occupied just like they were working at a research center, but it doesn’t cost resources and it’s available much earlier, although not as soon as the hangar is unlocked, because eurekers don’t even show up at your station until you’ve unlocked the Tourist tech tier, which is when you get security stations and mechs, one tier up from the Package Traveler tier that gets you a hangar. Hangars and eureker employees only cost energy, though, not prestige, so you can use eureker shuttle expeditions to get your research going while you’re still accumulating prestige to unlock research centers.

The Eureker Station also really benefits from the same static defenses as the Hem’netjer Station. Once it gets its research centers stamped down, the Eureker Station is basically done constructing new buildings, focusing instead on improving what they already have. Since they’re not expanding, they can wall themselves in with turrets to create a nearly impenetrable defensive barrier for any Raptor or Aurora class mechs (although Star Hydras, being long range missile artillery who are specifically good at attacking buildings, can bombard the turrets from outside their effective range).

The Eureker Station is a compact lategame build that focuses on building tall, not wide. In the early game it focuses on racing up the tech tree, in the midgame it focuses on maximizing research, which is going to require some amount of sprawl as they make four or five different research centers, but then in the lategame they focus on having better buildings instead of more buildings. They don’t need additional medbays because their existing ones are so efficient, they don’t need to expand the fun deck because their entertainment buildings generate more energy per minute, they don’t need an extra factory because their first factory works twice as fast, and so on. The impact of the upgrades might need to be buffed to make this viable, I haven’t done the math, but the Eureker Station wins by slowly getting better at everything without spending any energy or prestige on it, then using the spare energy and prestige to build mechs that are slightly better than everyone else’s.

So in total you can have a telgor space flophouse, a bugrathorian trade hub, a dryad manufacturing center, a grey bioweapons lab, a eureker conventional weapons lab, a leviathan pirate port, a celebramer space Las Vegas, and a hem’netjer psychic space ritual to summon Cthulhu.

A lot of the space station builds sound similar to the premise of some of the game’s scenarios, but you end up building nearly the same station for each one. Sure, there’s a scenario about trade that requires you to buy and sell goods at a spacedock, but the game doesn’t give you the tools needed to build a trade-focused station. Using the spacedock requires a lot of micromanagement, so you either ignore it in any scenario that doesn’t require it or else you build one and interact with it sporadically, hoping to catch a trader who has something you actually want when they’re around, or use it purely to offload toxic waste (cleansed or not). Designing around the idea that it should be possible to build an entire space station around trade (or spirituality, or research, or whatever), not just have one trade building in your omni-station, significantly increases the depth of the game.